BILLY BRAGG For many of us, our first experience of mainstream politics was the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5. Suddenly, we were involved on the front line, side by side, playing on the picket lines. I was pretty politicized by punk and Rock Against Racism but the Miners’ Strike was how I got my degree in politics. When the National Coal Board announced the decision to shut down twenty uneconomic coal mines with a loss of 20,000 jobs in March 1984, the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, claimed there was a long-term strategy to close over seventy pits. As a result, more than half the country’s 187,000 mineworkers were soon out on strike. This was exactly what the Tories planned, their revenge for when the miners went on strike and knocked Ted Heath out of office a decade before. It was ideological and personal. Thatcher was going to cash in on the kudos that she’d gained from the Falklands War and use it to smash the vanguard of the Labour movement. This was class war.
TINY FENNIMORE Thatcher had changed a law prior to the strike to stop miners’ families getting any benefits if the main breadwinner went on strike. She was enormously vindictive. Closing the mines was political and not just economic. It had been on the right’s agenda for a long time. I had moved to London at about the same time Thatcher arrived. I didn’t fit in, in Buckinghamshire where it was very affluent: sit back and relax because we are already very rich. I was political but it wasn’t personal at that point. But in London I met lots of people whose lives were really being affected by Thatcher and who were really angry about it. She politicized us all. And then the Miners’ Strike made us think about our politics a bit more seriously. It wasn’t single-issue groups any more. It was about changing the political status quo. There was a benefit gig at the Wag Club in Soho and I met Pete Jenner who was really gobby. He was telling it like it was and then I noticed this really quiet person next to him. And that was Billy. I thought, ‘I want to work with them.’
PETER JENNER Billy ended up with me as his manager through a series of connections. He knew someone in Barking who used to paint the backdrops for the Clash who said, ‘You should go and see Pete Jenner.’ Billy pulled a stroke, posing as a TV repairman to get past the receptionist, and managed to get in and see me. I remember to this day listening to his tape, and the lyric of ‘The Busy Girl Buys Beauty’ got me. The company was broke so I persuaded the publishers to pay for two demo sessions. We were all in desperate straits. I was skint. Billy was skint. It was all just done on tap. We had to find a way of making money for something which was against the standard drift of the pop market. Billy’s first album, Life’s A Riot, was political with a small ‘p’. It was all very Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran and people in silly glamour clothes and on yachts. Billy was the opposite of that. He wasn’t fashionable. He sang songs about real people. It was quite clearly an anti thing in the spirit of the Clash and punk and folk music. It was about the people’s music.
TINY FENNIMORE The first time I saw Billy was at the Dominion on Tottenham Court Road when he was supporting the Style Council. I remember thinking, ‘My God, this is a whole room full of people who think exactly like me.’ It was like my community and a natural home. And Billy was so powerful on stage; just one man and his guitar. That was the first time I thought anything might be achievable. That pop and politics had combined with somebody that was popular; and quite hot, actually. It was the force of his personality. He was very charismatic and sugared the pill of politics with wit. People wanted to listen and the entertainment value was driving the politics forward.
BILLY BRAGG The electric guitar was an ideological statement against both the synthesizer and the folk club. I still felt the burning fire of punk rock. It had left the front of the NME but it hadn’t left me. At the Rock Against Racism Carnival in Victoria Park when Patrik Fitzgerald came out and played with an acoustic guitar and they bottled him off, I remember thinking, ‘You fucking idiot. All that solo singer-songwriter stuff is dumb.’ If he had come out with a Telecaster and cranked it out he would have gone down a storm, whereas it was the Clash who sealed their fate as rock’s greatest rebels that day. It was their greatest moment and I naively believed the Clash were going to change the world. Later, I realized you don’t change the world by simply just singing songs and doing gigs.
PETER JENNER The key difference between Billy and the Clash was that he walked it as he talked it. There was coherence with Billy and he was writing socially aware songs. I wasn’t pushing the agenda of his songwriting but I was pushing the agenda of the environment in which he performed. I certainly had a conscious view that in some senses he was Bob Dylan for his times. I always thought with the Clash there was an element of bullshit. I had taken them on as they were recording London Calling and I never felt that Joe Strummer had an articulated position. He was unbelievably inconsistent. There was no political coherence and a contradiction between what the Clash said and what they did. The Clash didn’t talk it like they walked it. And they were really hurt by the fact that they were dependent on CBS Records. They wanted to do the people’s show but on the other hand they wanted to be rock stars and do the big show and stay in big hotels. I remember having a discussion with them and saying, ‘Really all the punters want is to see you; everything else is not what they’re paying for.’
ROBERT HOWARD Pete Jenner was my manager for many years. He used to say, ‘Joe Strummer was all over the place, and just used to write slogans.’ What were the Clash meant to deliver, politically? Were they meant to ascend to Parliament and become our representatives? No. What they delivered was Billy Bragg. But what is politics if it’s not sloganeering? You have to chuck these things out there in order to capture people’s attention and stimulate their imagination and hopefully lead them into some form of self-knowledge. The Clash were fucking brilliant in terms of dropping little pieces in the ointment that would expand and lead you to amazing places. I hadn’t heard of Sandinistas before the Clash and I went searching and that led me on to all sorts of stuff. Joe Strummer is going to be a far more pivotal, inspirational figure to you as a teenager than some politician. But in the end it has to come from within. You can’t create with the weight of responsibility. You write it and you put it out in the universe and let it take care of itself. And if it’s true, it transmits. You can’t manufacture that.
DAVE WAKELING It was worrying for me with Joe Strummer – and Jerry Dammers – coming not just from a higher class than me, but from the political nomenklatura. If you’re born in an embassy and you’ve got a family seat in Hertfordshire, is it all right to want a riot of your own? I knew from the riots in Handsworth that the next thing is there’s no buses and you have to walk two miles to get a bottle of milk and the shops don’t come back. I couldn’t agree with Kevin Rowland that the only way to change things is to shoot men who arrange things. I said to Jerry and Joe that we should be very careful [about] abusing the goodwill and the big hearts of the working class and we shouldn’t say, ‘We’re doing it in their name.’ Jerry got it but Joe didn’t talk to me for a bit.
NEIL SPENCER It wasn’t Joe Strummer’s job to have a coherent political credo. His job was to be a creator. We ask too much of musicians. It’s not their job. But Billy did it. He modelled himself as Woody Guthrie plus electricity.
TINY FENNIMORE Billy definitely walked it like he talked it. There are always going to be people that are going to have a pop at you when you try and do good things. Billy was a prime target. Touring with him opened my eyes and I went to a lot of places where people were poor and disenfranchised: a lot of love but awful poverty, no money. He was just cutting his political teeth and I was writing about politics in Jamming and other magazines, but he caught up very quickly. I’m not saying I wasn’t influential but Peter is key to Billy’s politics. He was a Cambridge graduate of politics, philosophy and economics and a teacher at the London School of Economics at twenty-one. If you went on tour with Peter you went to all the political landmarks: Martin Luther King’s church; Trotsky’s house. He was always pushing books Billy’s way.
PETER JENNER I had a lot to do with tuning Billy’s mindset. He hadn’t been particularly political or even voted in ’79, but there was a strong Labour Party tradition where he came from. Barking was trade union territory. I came from an academic background so in a sense he was the pupil and I was the professor.
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PETER JENNER Then there was the Miners’ Strike: Billy would have his guitar and amp and would do any gig anywhere if they would pay his fare, put him up and give him a meal. It gave him this incredible personal link with the various unions and miners and support groups. A lot of people said, ‘No, no, don’t do that, it will be really bad for you. You’ll never get on radio.’ But I was saying, ‘No, go for it.’ I’d been through the Sixties and I realized if you do something which is anti that is moving with a social movement, it’s a good move. Billy’s music was providing a place for people to meet and express their solidarity and have a bit of fun. It was a demonstration of political solidarity and he was always very good at never laying down the party line. What the solution was and where do we go and how do we politically organize wasn’t our job. My father was a vicar in working-class parishes. They were always doing things to raise money for the church – whist drives, socials – and in some sense it was going back to that. It was the process of having money raised that was as important as the money that you raised.
BILLY BRAGG Tiny and Peter played their part. But they didn’t come and sleep on the sofas in miners’ houses, which made me start to think and write and talk ideologically. I could travel lightly with a little amp, guitar, and bag on my back and I would think nothing of jumping on a train with my punk sensibility and Clash covers to tell them how it was. The first one I got to there was some really old geezer called Jock Purdon singing a cappella. He’d got his hand over his ear, and his songs are so much more radical than mine. I’m thinking, ‘Shit. I’m going to have rethink how I’m going to do this. It’s not quite how I expected it.’ I talked to them and they said, ‘This is not something that just happened this week. Jock represents a tradition of political radical songs and by coming up here and standing with the miners you’re joining that tradition, son.’ I thought, ‘Flippin’ heck. You’re right.’ I knew enough about Bob Dylan to know some of the old English folk songs that had inspired him and which I had borrowed from Barking Library as a teenager, so I wrote ‘Between The Wars’; a hymn to socialism and Thatcher dragging us towards a 1984 situation.
‘Between The Wars’ meant between the last war and the next one. It was me saying, ‘I am not of the tradition but I am part of it now.’ It’s almost like a broadside ballad; when an event would happen and somebody would write a song and they’d sell them for a penny on the street.
ANNAJOY DAVID ‘Between The Wars’ was such a beautiful song. It was a call to Britain to say, ‘Don’t forget who you are.’
ROBERT ELMS Sweet moderation, heart of this nation is one of the great lines of any piece of British political pop music. What Billy so cleverly did was turn the tables by portraying the right as the aggressors and the warmongers. And the left as those that like peace and are the moderates and don’t want to divide people by class or race.
TRACEY THORN I remember Billy doing it live on Top of the Pops and being introduced by Steve Wright, ‘This really is an evocative song . . .’ Billy is someone who’s very positive about political action and a believer in people; sweet moderation, heart of this nation is his politics in a nutshell. Political songwriters are often characterized as negative and constantly slagging things off and criticizing, but I do think of Billy as one of life’s great positive thinkers. He is the standard-bearer for it all.
TINY FENNIMORE It felt like victory when we got ‘Between The Wars’ on Top of the Pops. Billy’s father had been in the tank regiment and at the Go! Discs office I had a letter stuck on the wall from a soldier who had heard the record and had bought himself out of the army and was now a political activist. Whenever I made tea the letter would galvanize me. I would say to Billy, ‘We’re changing hearts and minds one by one.’
BILLY BRAGG The gigs during the strike were incredibly powerful. I had been on the cover of NME so to the audiences I was quite well known, but for the miners and their families who tended to be a little bit older they weren’t really listening to this kind of stuff. Their response was more, ‘Why is a pop star from London coming to do this?’ It was in trying to explain to them why that I learnt to speak the ideological language of Marxism. And I was defining myself politically as a socialist, which I hadn’t done before. There was a gig at the Sunderland Bunker that really stands out because it was the first time I saw the Miners’ Support Groups in action. These would be working-class women who had never spoken in public before, and that really impressed me. I dedicated the Between The Wars EP to them. Being there wasn’t just a show of solidarity: it was a means by which you allowed other people to show their solidarity. In political terms it allowed you to feel that you were not alone. It was exactly the same experience I had at Rock Against Racism.
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STEVE WHITE From the Style Council’s point of view the Miners’ Strike was pivotal. The industrial strike was dividing Britain north and south and we were doing a lot of benefits for the miners’ families, raising money for kids’ toys for Christmas. Those families were being treated appallingly. The miners’ wives galvanized themselves amazingly and held themselves with real dignity. They were very gracious and were very happy to accept the help in the spirit of what we were giving.
PAUL WELLER If you travelled up north you could see how hard the Thatcher Gang’s economics had hit it. By the end of her tenure, there weren’t any vital industries left. And all this was done whilst still flying the flag. Incredibly, she got away with it for eighteen years.51
JUNIOR GISCOMBE I’d go up with Paul and you’d see areas where there was nothing, just weeds; people still living but nobody working. The clothes were dowdy. We talked to miners’ wives who’d bring their little kids and you’d hear how they’d been treated. They told us that the police would come and knock on their doors and take their husbands and beat them outside their house. We went to a school where families lived in the main hall and had no food and they were scared to go back to their houses. This was England. This wasn’t political, this was now about food. You were seeing injustices and talking with people who were completely different to you and hearing how they saw things and how they lived. I was angry.
PAUL HEATON I had first-hand experience of the strike on the picket line, at Hatfield Main and Thorn, and Armthorpe. Nobody had heard of the Housemartins, so I’d just say I was from the Hull Musicians’ Collective, which was me just making it up but it was another name they could read out on the list. We tried to get to Orgreave but we got turned back on the road out of Hull. The policing was outrageous but the coverage of the strike was unbelievably biased against the miners. Arthur Scargill was on the BBC News one time. It was supposed to be impartial but the venom towards him was unbelievable and totally reactionary.
KEITH HARRIS I was president of Dundee Students’ Union during the miners’ strike of 1974, but I don’t think I’d ever seen the forces of the establishment so totally aligned before as they were a decade later. It was the first time that I was seeing the police force being used as a tool of the government; almost as a quasi-paramilitary organization. The role of the police is to keep peace and order, not to take sides in a political dispute. And what bothered me more was, the media seemed to reinforce that position. There didn’t seem to be any balance.
STEVE WHITE I had a friend who was a police officer and he’d wind me up: ‘You all right, Trotsky?’ And I’d say, ‘How you enjoying being one of Thatcher’s bootboys?’ ‘Bloody overtime, yeah, I’m lovin’ it. I’m off to South Yorkshire, gonna give a few a crack.’ Years later, I said to him, ‘What did you think about all that?’ And he said, ‘We were being used, weren’t we?’ He said, ‘It was the politicization of the police. The job has never been the same since.’ During the strike, they would move a police force around; a tactic employed to ensure that police had minimal sympathy or commonality with the protestors, so you’d get the Met going to South Yorkshire or the Cumbrians going to the fields in Kent. It was very clever, very decisive, very calculated and very disheartening.
CATHAL SMYTH I felt the police had been duped by the machine. They’d lost sight of their purpose to protect and defend society.
NEIL SPENCER It all started to get very sinister. The BBC reversed the clip of the Battle of Orgreave, showing the miners throwing stones at the police on horseback first. Everything was being manipulated. Thatcher had an iron grip on the police and the media. It was scary. It wasn’t politics as anybody in post-war Britain had experienced it.
KAREN WALTER I remember seeing Orgreave on television and just not believing it. It was so atrocious: police and miners in pitched battles. NME was involved and we had miners coming down to the office. We had a benefit at the Wag Club with the Redskins and Julian Clary, who performed with Fanny the Wonder Dog. At one point he got really angry with the dog because it wouldn’t do as it was told, and, as animal lovers, we were disgusted.
COLIN BYRNE I was walking down the Holloway Road with a member of the National Union of Students executive and saying, ‘Isn’t it cool that Wham! are on Top of the Pops and also backing the miners?’ Now, that would be like One Direction suddenly backing Labour in the next election. It was pretty momentous stuff.
STEVE WHITE Wham! played with the Style Council at a miners’ benefit at the Royal Festival Hall and somebody had a go at George Michael because he was miming. I remember biting their head off: ‘At least they’re fucking here.’
PAUL HEATON The strike began to motivate my lyrics and we started doing political gigs in favour of the miners. I had a point to prove and I had a lot of anger in me. On Wide Awake Club Tommy Boyd asked me, ‘Who’s your hero?’ and I said, ‘Arthur Scargill.’ There was a stony silence. My dad was a believer that people on the far left are important to stretch the Labour Party. Ask for Utopia and you might get a decent lifestyle, which is why bands like the Redskins were important even though they didn’t sell the records. Chris Dean made my position look more plausible for a start, as my position made Billy Bragg look good; everybody out there on the left made it easier for one another. Alone, you were very open to attack.
RICHARD COLES The Miners’ Strike got very brutal, especially after David Wilkie got killed when two miners dropped a concrete block on his taxi in South Wales which was carrying a strike-breaker. I remember Paul [Weller] condemned the action, but as a class warrior – I’m ashamed to say it now – I thought it was collateral damage of a just war. Paul quite rightly said, ‘This is not acceptable.’ He had a broader conscience.
PAUL WELLER It seemed whenever you turned on the news there was a policeman smashing someone on the head with a stick somewhere in the world. And then it was happening in Britain as well. One minute the miners were the nation’s heroes, bravely digging our coal, the backbone of the nation; the next they were the filthy red scum.52
I always regarded the class division as the real rot in our society, especially growing up in Woking, where affluence and financial struggle were very apparent.53
ANNAJOY DAVID The Miners’ Strike was very brutal, not just physically but emotionally on families. You’re telling people that everything that they stand for is valueless. That was wrong. They needed a voice. How Thatcher did it was not just inhumane but inexcusable. The whole Jam / Style Council scene became really politicized through the strike. It was a big stand for that generation of working-class kids. There was a lot at stake: the impact of this huge moment of de-industrialization of Britain. It was incredibly important to stand up collectively. That’s why you got the ‘Soul Deep’ record; the notion of the collective, the responsible, coming together to change things. It was a way of saying Britain is a collective society; it does have other voices. We’re going to stand by those.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE I got a phone call from Paul saying, ‘I’ve got this track but the whole thing is not to make a Style Council record. I’ve got Dee C. Lee, Jimmy Ruffin, Leonardo Chignoli, Vaughn Toulouse and Dizzy Hites’. I went down to the studio and did my vocal on the same day as Jimmy Ruffin.
PAUL WELLER We put ‘Soul Deep’ out as the Council Collective because there was equal involvement from everybody, and also as a way of putting the song first. We didn’t want who it was by to matter; we wanted people to listen to what it was saying. I think it was important to have records in the charts which [showed] a more realistic side of life. There [were] all these bands making videos in exotic places and singing about what a great time they were having and how marvellous the world [was]. But everything isn’t marvellous for everyone.54 We raised £10,000, which we sent to Women Against Pit Closures just before Christmas: that was one of the main objectives of the record. The other one – which was a bit naive – was that maybe we could get across the miners’ point of view and why people should have supported them.55
JUNIOR GISCOMBE After we finished recording the record I went on tour in America and then came back to find London Records had tried to take my voice off it; one of the promotions guys in a drunken stupor started telling me what was going on. I’d go into a meeting with three white guys in a record company and they were amazed. They’d sit back and say, ‘Junior, you’re the first black guy I’ve ever met who’s articulate.’ You’d sit there and think, ‘You stupid bastard. I’m sitting in front of three hood rats and you’re dealing with a street rat that knows how to manoeuvre.’
KEITH HARRIS I was managing Junior at the time and the record company saw him as a lightweight, lovable pop artist. And they were probably rightly aware that being involved with ‘Soul Deep’ would damage his chances of going on to be a much-loved pop artist, given that he was black. Lots of British black performers would have one hit and then disappear. In order to have more than one hit you needed to get support from radio and press, but there was a one-at-a-time policy. I’d been aware of the issues when I had been head of promotions at Motown Records. I remember taking a Commodores record to Radio 1 and being told, ‘Well, we’re already playing Earth, Wind and Fire: that’s enough of that kind of music.’ So the record company were not supportive of Junior being involved in such an overtly political record. It was OK for Paul Weller, because that was hip, but for Junior it was, ‘Know your place; you’re not meant to have that insight.’ A black pop performer wasn’t perceived as being capable of talking on these issues; where would he get the intelligence from? I could write a book on why black artists never got airplay.
JUNIOR GISCOMBE The B-side of ‘Soul Deep’ was an idea Paul and myself had spoken about. We said, ‘Kids should be able to turn the record over and listen to the miners’ plight.’
PHILL JUPITUS ‘A Miners’ Point’ was a conversation between two striking miners and was tangible evidence of what Thatcherism was doing to the country. This was an age when you could look at a group of MPs and physically tell them apart: ‘Labour, Labour, Tory, Labour, Tory, Labour’; just literally quality of clothes.
NEIL SPENCER In a speech to the 1922 Committee at the House of Commons, the Prime Minister compared mining communities with the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri and talked of her own citizens as ‘the enemy within’. That could have come from a talk by Adolf.
RICHARD COLES I remember the iron in my soul when she described the striking miners as ‘the enemy within’. I thought, ‘They’re the people you were elected to serve, actually.’ I remember vowing one day I would dance on her grave and, irony of ironies, years later, I walked into my church and there was Margaret Thatcher at the back. She was a frail old lady who wasn’t sure what was going on. There she was, a real person, confused and frail and vulnerable. I said, ‘Hello.’ It told me something about the distance I’d travelled. In retrospect, there was always a vicar in me trying to get out; back then pop music was my hymns.
BILLY BRAGG I woke up on tour in Salford on 12 October 1984 to discover the IRA had bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton – killing five people and injuring thirty-five – in an attempt to assassinate the Prime Minister. Everything But The Girl were staying above me in the hotel and they had complained about us staying up all night making a noise; Ben and Tracey were like your mum and dad on tour. I remember saying to them when none of the cabinet had been killed, ‘Well, thank fuck for that, because in the middle of the Miners’ Strike if the IRA had killed the government, who do you think would have been in charge tomorrow morning?’ It would have been someone with a peaked cap and a uniform; martial law would have been declared, and the miners’ leaders would have been rounded up.
TINY FENNIMORE Margaret Thatcher’s personal papers reveal that at the Conservative Party conference the day after her assassination attempt she had intended to talk of ‘an insurrection’ and declare that ‘our country is not to be torn apart by an extension of the calculated chaos planned for the mining industry by a handful of trained Marxists and their fellow travellers’. But most incredibly, having previously called supporters of the Miners’ Strike ‘the enemy within’, she intended to accuse them now of being ‘enemies of freedom and democracy itself’.
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ANGELA EAGLE During the Miners’ Strike the Sun headline was ‘PERVERTS SUPPORT THE PITS!’
TOM ROBINSON Working on Gay Switchboard in the early seventies we’d had calls from miners saying they’d dared not come out and how terrifyingly macho that whole culture was. A group formed called Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners and they went with collecting tins, putting on gigs and marching in solidarity with the miners to raise money for their families. Then at Gay Pride, a Welsh miner’s wife from the valleys came on to thank all the lesbians and gays for their fantastic support and how deeply it was appreciated. She said, ‘I would be proud for any child of mine to be gay.’
CLARE SHORT I did lots of meetings and collecting tins of beans. The miners and the miners’ wives were heroic. But the National Union of Mineworkers not having a ballot and allowing the division; Arthur Scargill led that really badly. He would have won it. The miners would have been completely united instead of divided. Scargill’s ego was out of control so the strike-break back to work on 3 March 1985 was a tragedy. But again, you knew whose side you were on. And political resistance had to go on to not allow forces of reaction to be victorious. You might have lost the battle but not lost the war.
TINY FENNIMORE Arthur Scargill said, ‘We face not an employer but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media.’ He later accused Neil Kinnock of ‘betraying the miners’ for not fully supporting the miners’ strike action.
JOHN BAINE Kinnock betrayed the miners and yet I thought, ‘We’re trying to get this fucker elected.’
NEIL SPENCER Neil would have hit the roof at being accused of selling out the miners. He was quite inflammable. It was also completely untrue. Thatcher played her hand well. They starved the miners into submission and there was the tactic of Spencerism where you bribe people to go back and be scabs. That was articulated in Billy Elliot when his old man goes back to work and he’s on the coach and all the rocks are coming down.
ANDY MCSMITH It was unfair to say Neil Kinnock wasn’t backing the miners. He was saying that the miners should have called a ballot.
LARRY WHITTY Neil was not sufficiently supportive but his supposed lack of empathy with Scargill may have been right. Neil was right to be suspicious. But the Labour Party weren’t there, and that was a deficiency and a disaster for all sorts of reasons. If you went to a concert or you were walking down the high street and there were people collecting for the miners, ‘Why is the Labour Party not behind it?’ It was a real disillusionment factor, but life is more complicated than that.
NEIL KINNOCK The miners saw what I did. They saw what I was. They knew where I came from. But the strike was bloody devastating. It inflicted serious damage on the Labour movement because of our association – of which I was very proud – with the coal miners, and with Arthur Scargill and his leadership, which I despised. There was a difference between coal-mining communities, the case for coal – of which I made forty speeches at the time – and Scargill. The miners’ defeat in my view was an avoidable defeat or one that could have been substantially mitigated. The strike inflicted appalling misery on the coal-mining communities, of which one, Islwyn, I represented. But besides all that was an amazing solidarity. There was a common struggle and all kinds of barriers of distance, class, taste and custom just came bloody crashing down as people helped each other; and part of that was music.
SARAH JANE MORRIS I did over 150 benefits for the miners with the Happy End, a twenty-one-piece political band. We recorded ‘Coal Not Dole’ and the lyrics were written by a Kent miner’s wife called Kay Sutcliffe. It was an anthem of the strike and we performed the song at the Bush Theatre knowing the miners had basically lost. All of us were crying. It was a terrible feeling. All the way through the strike we had felt so much we were part of something.
PAUL HEATON On the last day of the strike there were hundreds and hundreds of miners in tears singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. It was incredibly moving and their strength gave me strength and inspired the way I work to this day.
BILLY BRAGG I was at RAF Molesworth being chained to a fence at an antinuclear demo when word came through on the radio that the miners had decided to go back. For those of us who had been active it was like, ‘Well, is that it? Do we all go back to our stupid fucking jobs, turning up in Smash Hits?’ I spoke to a few people and said, ‘The next viable opportunity we’re going to get rid of the Tories is the next election.’
ANNAJOY DAVID The turning point to move into a party political sphere definitely came during the strike. My lasting memory was when I saw a bunch of women in Wales in a mining community literally fighting for their families’ future and their whole social identity. I thought that was criminal. It wasn’t only about jobs: it was about a way of life, about people’s cultural references, about who they were and where they’d come from and what Britain was. I felt it was time for us to take our cultural politics into that world and stand beside it and say, ‘This is wrong.’
