Tag Archive: Elvis Costello


NO TEARS FOR THATCHER

The horror that was  Thatcher as depicted by Steve Bell.

‘You should not speak ill of the dead’ is what every good boy is taught but today I will make an exception.

Tributes will be made and a funeral pageant will follow but we should not forget that Margaret Thatcher was one of the most hateful politicians of modern times.

Her destructive, divisive policies left a mark on Britain that is still there now – praising greed and selfishness with contempt rather than compassion for the weak in society.

“Don’t be too nasty”, said my wife when she knew I was writing this post.

Ok –  I’ll just let the following two quotes and a song from 1989 speak for themselves.

“Whatever side of the political debate you stand on, no one can deny that as prime minister she left a unique and lasting imprint on the country she served” – Nick Cleggg, on hearing of the Iron Lady”s demise.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever” – George Orwell’s prophetic words from 1984

A DEMENTED THATCHER

THE IRON LADY directed by Phyllida Lloyd (UK, 2011)

The Iron Lady  is a film about one of the most significant (and hated) political figures of the 20th century but is practically devoid on any political content.  It tells you more about the state of dementia than it does about the state of Britain in the 1990s.

That the movie should end up as little more than a vehicle for Meryl Streep is perhaps only fitting since , for Margaret Thatcher, character is all.

Thatcher stands as the epitome of conviction politics but there is no excuse for ignoring the human consequences of her regime as though they were incidental details.  We see scenes of the coalminers’ strike, the Falklands war, the hunger strikers in Northern Ireland and finally the poll tax riots but you never get any understanding of what really drove her  to stick so unwavering to her cynical beliefs on any of these issues. Continue reading

Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)

ROBERT WYATT – Shipbuilding b/w Memories Of You (Rough Trade, 1982)

“Somebody said that someone got filled in
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding.”

ShipbuildingThis is the best looking single in my collection with its handsome gatefold colour sleeve that opens to a colour reproduction of a detail from Stanley Spencer’s painting from the 1940s – ‘Shipbuilding On The Clyde : Riveters’.

Apparently it  was released with four different editions; mine shows a worker with a brazier on the cover, others show  workers with ropes , with tarpaulins or hammering.

The words are by Elvis Costello, the music by Clive Langer and the inimitable voice is by Robert Wyatt’s which draws out the beautifully judged mix of the vernacular and the poetic.

Shipbuilding  is rated number 9 in the New Statesman’s Top 20 Political Songs and that magazine stiffly describes the song as a “Complex examination of the futility of war combined with empathy for soldiers in the Falklands conflict”. Continue reading