If you’re reading this you probably know me as a musician, but my day job involves working for a social mobility charity (yes, I work for a charity. That means I’m better than you. Morally and spiritually better). So unsurprisingly I have an interest in the juxtaposition of social class and music.
For quite a while now I’ve been meaning to start a blog scrap book of music/class related things that I’ve seen, heard or thought about recently. Our theme in this first post is three Welsh things on the theme of class and/or music.
A Design For Life
I loved the Manic Street Preachers. I was a teenager when they were at the height of their powers. The Holy Bible took me a while to get into, but became one of my favourite albums and a big influence on my music. The much more accessible, redemptive singles from Everything Must Go were glorious and while the earlier Manics songs were full of Americana and escapism, Everything Must Go seemed to be where they finally came home. In early interviews they talk about wanting to escape their home town of Blackwood, but only a few years later they were seeing in the new millennium in Cardiff stadium.
A Design For Life is probably my favourite Manics song. No, I don’t care that it’s not one of the cooler, more obscure ‘proper fan’ choices I could have made. It’s the big hit single and it is glorious. It also has a few features that to me sound like a homecoming – hints of brass bands and church hymns. The 12/8 beat reminds me every so slightly of a military quick march rhythm, of the sort you’d maybe find in a colliery band. The chord progressions too have a lot more going on in them than you’d expect from a rock song: C major in the verses, but with a couple of chords borrowed from C minor and a transition to A minor for the chorus. Almost hymnal ( and very similar to Cohen’s Hallelujah).
The lyrics talk about ideas of the working class, juxtaposing the uplifting truth that ‘libraries gave us power’ with the stereotype ‘we don’t talk about love, we only want to get drunk’. The music video does the same, showing us visions of working and upper class Britain where ‘Various slogans promoting compliance and domesticity clash with scenes of fox hunting, Royal Ascot, a polo match and the Last Night of the Proms’ (and yeah, that’s a quote from wikipedia. What of it?)
It’s a glorious song.
Cardiff and The Valleys
I’ve been to Cardiff a few times. I’ve always liked the place, ever since first visiting 20 years ago when my other half and I took ourselves round a self guided tour of all the places they’d filmed Doctor Who scenes, like the shameless scifi nerds we are.
One of the highlights of my most recent visit (apart from being pleased to see the shrine to Doctor Who/Torchwood character Ianto Jones is still up on the wall of the bay) was a visit to the National Museum, in particular an exhibition about the valleys. There were some fantastic photos and artwork, but for me the most arresting piece was a recorded speech by David Garner. The text was emblazoned on one wall too, so you could read along while a sonorous voice – a preacher perhaps, or Nye Bevan himself – stirred us with an apparently meaningless speech, as if Waiting for Godot had a soliloquy for a Welsh politician. Despite the lack of literal meaning in the text, it was actually peppered with anagrams of the phrase ‘universal basic income’.
I’m not sure if my description of the piece does it justice, but it worked for me!
The exhibition also included a video about pro wrestler Adrian Street, which gives me an excuse to share one of my favourite photographs ever. Adrian Street in full glam-rock mode, next to his dad and colleagues as they leave the coal mine Street was determined not to work in. For the Manics, music was the escape, for Street pro wrestling.
Go West
A few days after that little trip to Cardiff, someone happened to share this live recording of the Pet Shop Boys performing Go West at an awards ceremony in 1994, accompanied by a load of Welsh miners. LGBT support of the Miner’s strike is well documented so no need to repeat it here. But isn’t this performance wonderful?
I don’t have a big point to make yet about music and class. Maybe one will come to me. For now we’re just scrap booking.