Special Guest: Hugh Hodges, Author of The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher's Britain in 21 Mixtapes

The transcript below is unedited output from OpenAI Whisper.

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Hi, I’m Len Epp from LeanPub, and in this episode of the Front Matter podcast, I’ll be interviewing special guest Hugh Hodgis. Based in Peterborough, Ontario, Hugh is chair of cultural studies at Trent University. Hugh has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, with his research focusing on cultural resistance in its many forms. He was the author of The Fascist Groove Thing, A History of Thatcher’s Britain in 21 Mixtapes. In the book, Hugh explains the late 70s and 80s Thatcher era in the UK through the urgent and still relevant songs of The Clash, The Specials, The Au Pairs, The Style Council, The Pet Shop Boys, and nearly 400 other bands and solo artists. In this interview, we’re going to talk about Hugh’s background and career, his book, and his experience as an author working with an independent publisher. So, thank you very much, Hugh, for being on the Front Matter podcast. Oh, thanks for the invitation, Len. One thing I should say right off the top here is that Hugh and I actually know each other. I don’t remember for how long it’s been. I started hanging around in Peterborough about 20 years ago when my brother started working at Trent there. So, it will be 20 years. Yeah, yeah. And you don’t look a day older, Len. Well, I guess, thank you. And yeah, and so you’re actually the first kind of, I think you’re the first guest we’ve had on the podcast in like 250 episodes that I actually sort of know personally. So, I’ll try and stay as professional as I can, as I usually do, but we might sort of slide over into in jokes once or twice. Fair enough. So, I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up and how the circuitous route you had to being a professor and writing books. I was thinking about this because it becomes clear in the book, there isn’t much to my personal story. I’ve always been a bit of an onlooker, which is where my writing comes from. But yes, I grew up in the UK until the 80s when my family started splitting its time between the UK and Canada. So, a lot of the stuff I’m writing about is stuff that I knew about, that I was hearing about, but very often wasn’t experiencing firsthand. And the music was part of how I heard about it. It was literally a time in the very early 80s when everything I knew about the Spanish Civil War was because of the clash. And then for a long time after that, everything I learned about the Spanish Civil War was because the clash had made me go and look it up. So, it’s always been my connection, not just to UK history, but in some cases, political history in general. I wound up in academia more or less by accident, which is something I rarely tell my students. But several failed careers in cartooning and playwriting and acting, and a failed attempt to get into the advertising industry, all led me inexorably into academia. And here I am, second book after a prolific career of two books with the fascist groove thing. And where did you specifically, it might become relevant, but where specifically did you grow up in the UK? So, I grew up in the south of England, Sussex specifically, which is another thing that sets me up as a bit of an outsider or as an observer. As far as the 80s went, Sussex was a comfortable place to be. The real damage was done in the north, of course. So, in many ways, I am taking a position, or I’ve come to a position, or I’ve always felt most comfortable in a position, criticizing the very people I grew up with, the Thatcher supporters in the south of England. Yeah, we’ll get to that, and particularly the kind of regional distinctions and also the idea that one can talk about Thatcher’s Britain, but there were many different experiences of that, which is something you write about. And in fact, part of what your book is about is addressing this sort of story or element of a very important dimension of that time that is, in a sense, maybe being lost to the memory that people have of it, basically because of what dominated pop culture throughout that period. But just before we go into that, just one more thing about you. Where did you do your PhD, and what was it about? So, yes, my doctoral work I did at the University of Toronto. My work at that point was on post-colonial literature, specifically Jamaican literature. My doctoral thesis, which I then turned into a book, was about Jamaican spirituality and Jamaican poetics, which led me to write about Bob Marley, which led me to pay more attention to West African musicians like Fela Kuti. So there is a sort of continuity from that work to my current work, but there is definitely a disjuncture at some point. At some point, I realized I couldn’t continue writing about West African fiction comfortably and traded it in for a new research field. And speaking of your research, so it’s sort of interesting, I mean, particularly to me, but I think there might be a lot of people who are like, what does a cultural studies professor do? What is cultural studies? And how is it that people have carved out a space where you can do academic work on punk music and reggae and stuff like that? No one answer to this one, of course. The short answer is it grows out of literary studies. In the first instance, cultural studies grows out of a decision to apply the same kind of critical analytical techniques to other forms of culture that had already been applied to English literature. So in Britain, particularly, you get people studying and critiquing television and film, even sports and other cultural products using the same techniques that had been developed to talk and write about fiction and drama and poetry. In the United States, cultural studies has taken on a sort of celebratory form, a celebration of popular culture, particularly. In Canada, I think we lean more towards the British model of cultural critique rather than cultural celebration. I think what I’m doing in this book falls somewhere between the two. It’s not an uncritical approach to popular music, but it isn’t, in the first instance, a critical analysis of popular music. And one of the big figures of that in the UK would have been someone like Stuart Hall, for example, if I recall correctly. Yes, absolutely. You’re going to need to pause because names are not going to come to me. Oh, that’s OK. OK, I know there are names I need to insert here. I am going to give an in-joke that we have between us and my brother, which is whenever we sort of do that older person thing where you sort of are telling an interesting story and you get hung up on the name of someone you can’t remember when the name is absolutely irrelevant to what you’re saying. And we always just say Doug Duggerson. So in this interview, if we get hung up, we’ll just say Doug Duggerson. And so, yeah, so now we’ve talked a little about you and your origin story. And I was wondering if you could talk about the origin of your book, The Fascist Groove Thing. When did the idea first occur to you to write a book about Thatcher’s Britain through the sort of lens of all the sort of narrowed down kind of punk songs written about Thatcher and that time? So like many things, this is hugely overdetermined. In the first instance, I think this is the music I grew up with. This is the music I loved at the time. A lot of it, at any rate, and a lot of it I still love. And the idea of going back and spending time with this music was just intrinsically gratifying. In some ways, I suspect it’s the academic equivalent of sort of midlife crisis, the academic equivalent of buying the car you were fetishized and couldn’t afford when you were 15. And in fact, I have wound up accumulating a record collection that I could not possibly have sourced or afforded as a teenager. So I think that is a big part of why I started the project. The other part of it, the other really significant part of it was also in a fit of nostalgia. I started reading histories of the 70s and 80s as they started to come out. About a decade ago now, they started to appear on bookshelves. And one of the things that became immediately apparent was a general inclination to rehabilitate Thatcher, to forgive her worst excesses and take a kind of position that as damaging in some ways, or as harsh as her policies were in some ways, it was all necessary and worked out in the end. And repainting Thatcher as a strong and ultimately proven right historical figure. If you’ve seen The Crown, I don’t know if this is something you’ve descended to. There’s an episode of The Crown focusing on the 80s and Margaret Thatcher figures in that played by Julian Anderson very, very well, by the way. But it’s a pretty good example of the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s a very, very good example of the kind of thing I’m talking about in that Thatcher is portrayed as a strong, misunderstood, scrappy, some sort of middle class feminist up against a snooty upper class who did what she believed was right and stuck by her guns and we’re all better off for it. And that’s not what I remember. That’s not what a lot of us remember. Just to jump in there for a moment. So this is awesome. You sort of did the great podcast guest sort of did the segue for me into sort of like, you know, who was Thatcher and what was Thatcher’s Britain, which I’d like to ask you about in a moment. But very specifically, when you talk about this sort of rehabilitation of Thatcher’s memory, there’s two things I’d like to say about that. First, I moved to the UK in 1999 from Saskatchewan. So I knew Britain from books and TV. And it was 1999. And like, you could give people were divided by their opinions of Margaret Thatcher at the time. And I’d never experienced that kind of stark division in my own life before. And this is also a country where like, you know, what paper you read, at least at the time, like you people not only did you you sort of knew what someone was all about by the paper they read, because that’s why they chose that paper in order to show you who they were to some extent. But the whole Thatcher thing was just like, very bracing to me to sort of experience just through other people’s claims about it. And when you talk about this rehabilitation, I just want to, there’s a couple of things I could pick out from your book. But when there’s one striking passage for people, and so for people who maybe they’ve never heard of Margaret Thatcher, maybe never heard much about the UK or anything like that, let alone the 70s and 80s. But like here’s a line from Hugh’s book, addressing the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. She meaning Margaret Thatcher argued that, quote, the biblical precept to love our neighbors as ourselves is also an imperative to despise them if they fall below the standards and beliefs we have accepted. The thing I love about that episode is she’s actually lecturing clergy of the Church of England. Yeah, well, there’s that element to it as well. But like, is also an imperative to despise them, like to speak openly in this way about despising your fellow citizens. I mean, we’re picking an example here. And this was from sort of late, late Thatcher after lots of enmity had been built up and things like that and resentment. But, you know, imagine if, you know, you were one of the 50 percent of unemployed people in Scotland, because partly, at least from your perspective, because the the one employer in your town was closed down by this government, and then being told that by the prime minister of your country, that you should be despised by other people because the Bible says so. I mean, this is this is this is quite a quite a time to live through. So with that, with that, I guess, again, you could talk about it for hours. Your whole book is a treatment of this. But basically, can you set the stage for us a little bit about what was life like generally in the UK in the late 1970s? Who was Margaret Thatcher and what happened around the time she was elected? So there’s a general perception and this is, again, a sort of history being rewritten. There’s a general perception that things were falling apart in Britain in the mid 70s. And it did at times feel a bit like that. Strikes were common. Inflation was significant. We recently have been talking about the rise in inflation as a return to the late 70s, early 80s, but it’s nothing like it was in that period. Unemployment in Britain hit the million mark for the first time in the early 1970s. So there was a sort of sense of things not going right. But objectively, economically and socially, Britain was really doing pretty well in the mid 70s, even into 75, 76, when the punk kids started complaining about the opportunities open to them. There were opportunities. The Clash famously complained that they had this long list of jobs that were available to them that they didn’t want. Those jobs had all vanished 10 years later. So in 79, there was famously a very, very bad winter politically for the Labour Party. It was the winter of discontent. There were strikes of all kinds. And when the election was held the next year, Thatcher swept into power. It was a proper crushing defeat for a Labour Party in disarray. And the Labour Party remained in disarray for the next 15 years, frankly. It’s one of the main things that kept Thatcher in power was it wasn’t her doing, it wasn’t her policies, it was the utter failure of the Labour Party to be useful. So her agenda included radically reforming or radically disassembling what came to be called the welfare state. At the social level, she famously had this dictum that there’s no such thing as society. She firmly believed that people really need to take responsibility for themselves and if they couldn’t pull up their socks, that was their problem. But at the national and industrial level, this also involved pulling the plug on all kinds of nationalized industries. The coal industry, the steel industry, aerospace, British Leyland, all of these companies that had for at least a decade been a form of social safety net, economic safety net, providing unemployment in parts of Britain that would otherwise have been devastated and were, in fact, economically devastated in Thatcher’s Britain. So she moved pretty decisively after the first couple of years of her tenure as Prime Minister to start disassembling Britain’s economy and Britain’s society. And as I say, much of this has become background to a kind of triumphalist history in which what she did was she saved the economy and she rescued Britain from the malaise of the 1970s welfare state. And to go back to that episode of The Crown, in that episode of The Crown, the miners’ strike that happened in 1984-1985 is completely absent. It’s just written out of the story. It’s irrelevant as this minor footnote to the Thatcher story. But for millions of people, that strike in 1984-85, it was a long strike. It was eight months long across the entire winter, is axiomatically and symbolically the entirety of the 1980s in one episode. The miners were fighting not just for their jobs, not just to protect their income, but for a way of life, for their communities, for their kids, for an entire working class way of life that was being obliterated by Thatcher’s policies. And Thatcher’s defeat of the miners, and it really was a defeat, a military defeat of the miners, was the point at which Thatcher’s Britain really set in. At that point, it became Thatcher’s Britain. Yeah, there’s a lot to talk about there. First of all, no, I haven’t watched The Crown. I was shaking my head earlier, but it is fascinating to have a representation of that time not make a big story out of the miners’ strike. It’s something that I heard about when I moved there a couple decades later, you know what I mean? For anyone listening, those kinds of moves, whether they were explicitly deliberate or not, ought to be treated as deliberate cultural moves when you encounter them. That’s part of what the world of cultural studies, at least in the Canadian and British forms, are kind of due to say. The way stories are told is extremely important, particularly stories that we tell about ourselves in our own past. Just two things I want to mention. First thing is, you mentioned it was kind of like wartime action, that Thatcher government, and this was before they were elected. You talk about this in your books, in the section where you talk about the strike, started building up their coal reserves in advance of pushing. The strike was self-initiated, but as you talk about, also perhaps mistimed and things like that. But the government was actually preparing for this battle by stockpiling coal. When we talk about war, you’ve got to think about when you read books about ancient Rome and the decisions that people were making at a high level about grain or what have you, the coal ran British industry. Probably a good analogy would be the panic in Germany over the loss of natural gas from Russia or something like that. If Germany had wanted to go to war with Russia, they would have stockpiled natural gas in advance. In a similar way, the Thatcher government stockpiled coal to prepare for this. But also with respect to that sort of like revisionist history and stuff like that, when you talk, and they know the sort of idea that, and these are all very complicated things, that during the Thatcher era, she saved Britain from itself, as it were. You have this rather stark statistic in the book where you say the number of those living in poverty in the UK increased from 5 million in 1979 to 14.1 million in 1992. As a former London investment banker, I know there are stories one can tell about the prices that need to be paid for getting out of the way things were. But the idea that this was some kind of great success, that during her tenure poverty tripled, is a complicating factor. Yeah. To take the miners’ strike, let’s take 84-85 as symbolic of the decade and of the way it is remembered. The mood in the UK in the summer of 85 was frigid. It was a really unpleasant, tense place to be. The miners’ strike had affected everyone and divided the country. Late in the summer of 85, you get the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium. It’s that that gets remembered as axiomatically Britain in 1985. Live Aid was the thing everyone wants to remember. It really was a moment that gave people permission to forget the miners’ strike. We’re moving on. That’s done. Now we’re going to save the world somehow by flying Phil Collins back and forth across the Atlantic. The reality of what Thatcher was doing displaced by this fantasy of saving the world. I quote Doug Duggerson, why is it not coming to me? Because I need it. That’s why. I might have it in my notes if you tell me what the quote is. The singer for Everything But the Girl. It’s not Ben Watt. It’s the other half of Everything But the Girl. Tracy Thorne. That’s a relief. Tracy Thorne writes about how Live Aid and the Royal Wedding and the Sloan Rangers and all that luck has become the shorthand that media use to talk about Britain in the 1980s. Another term that’s often used is loads of money, loads of money 80s. And Tracy Thorne says that’s just not what I remember. I was never part of any of that. I don’t recognize that. What I remember is the miners’ strike and the resistance to the Falklands War and the misery of economic collapse in the North. That is what I wanted to recall in this history of Britain in the 80s. Speaking about music, I’ve asked you to set the stage politically and socially, but now I need you to do more work and set the stage musically. What was the music scene like in the late 70s and early 80s? There’s all sorts of amazing details about the many different music scenes in the UK in your book, which are just fascinating. We can go from everywhere from, yes, Phil Collins starting a concert in one time zone and ending it in another, but then you’ve also got bands in the late 70s who are advertised in a magazine and say, send us a blank tape and we’ll record our music on it for you. And this is an actual story that you tell and then we’ll send it back to you. But the UK had this, one might think, oh, there’s Johnny Rotten on the one hand and Duran Duran on the other. But the UK had this just amazing, amazing, diverse music scene, particularly in ways that would actually be quite unusual in the North American scene, I think, particularly with comedy songs and the phenomenon of top of the pops and things like that. So I know this is asking you a book length question, but imagine you’re talking to someone born in the 1990s, or actually that’s getting a little bit long enough, born in the early 2000s in North America, who’s like, what was the UK music scene like in the late 70s and early 80s? I think I could approach this. And I think I can approach it as the evolution of the book in some ways. When I first started writing it, I started writing it because popular music in the UK from about 76 to 86, particularly, but right up until the end of the 80s, engaged with politics in a completely unprecedented way. Up till the mid 70s, 76, 77, say, the idea that popular music would write about unemployment and tenements and the Conservative Party, fiscal policy, the educational system, so on and so forth, about miners’ strikes, about the Falklands War, about the Falklands War, it was pretty alien. Popular music was then, as it still is, 99% about boys and girls and the things they want to do to each other, which is fair enough. But it really did strike me that popular music in general in the 1980s in Britain engaged with politics, both lyrically and activistically. Is activistically a word? I talk about the anarcho-punk scene particularly, where the band was conceived as an activist unit, very often an anarchist activist unit. So the first draft of the book was I was pretty determined to see this as a universal phenomenon in British popular music that, for some unanalyzed reason, British pop reacted to Thatcher’s Britain musically. My editor, Ramsay Canaan, pointed out that, OK, all of the stuff you’re writing about is at least at least in some ways connected to punk, and that the punk end of the musical spectrum was far more dedicatedly political than anywhere else. So I think in the final published version of the book, you can see how all of these threads in British popular music emerge in one way or another from punk in the 76, 77, 78. Do you want me to say a little bit about some of those threads? Oh, yes. Just to pause you there for a second, though, for people listening, if you didn’t know that there were songs about unemployment in the UK, for example, this band, UB40, is named after an unemployment benefits application form. It’s very deep in all sorts of things that you might actually know. Again, if you’ve heard of the band UB40, you know the name of an early 80s unemployment benefits form in the UK. That’s how wide this stuff goes. But anyway, yes, please pull up the threads. Okay, so you may at some point have to cut me off because I can literally go for hours on this. At the risk of making the Sex Pistols sound like some kind of phenomenon, there is built into the Sex Pistols the two main threads in popular music in Britain in the late 70s and through the 80s. On the one hand, they were influenced by commerce. They were in the first place put together by a shop owner. Malcolm McLaren had a clothing store called Sex and he had the idea of putting together a band to promote his shop. So in the first instance, they were a kind of boy band, a bit of a perverse one, but they were put together for commercial reasons. So you’ve got that strand and built into that is also a kind of art school stream of music. Through the 60s and into the 70s, art school was a popular destination for kids who didn’t really want to get a job yet and certainly didn’t want to go into the army. And going free education at art school was a viable alternative. So Britain had a very lively art scene because of these thousands of kids who went to art school and then had to do something with it or did something with it, very often started bands. So the kids who followed the Sex Pistols around were interested in the Sex Pistols, not so much for the music, although that was part of it, but because of the opportunity to explore new fashion statements. Punk in its first flash was very much about fashion, anti-fashion in some senses, but very rapidly fashion. You can see how this stream of popular music of what was always part of punk flows into the new romantic scene and the futurist scene and synth pop. You think about Culture Club and Visage and Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet, all of these bands who are very much about really dressing up, really looking good, really dancing. That’s actually and really selling records. Band as business venture, band as business enterprise. The band Heaven 17, who actually give the book its title, The Fascist Groove Fang, was one of their songs. Their first album, the cover, depicted the band as businessmen. They’re all dressed in business suits, they’re on the phone, they’re making deals, they’re composing their music in a way that looks a lot like doing office work, they are selling product, they’re taking on the music industry with their own British Electric foundation and going to beat the music business at its own business. So that’s one thread. The other thread picks up on some of the undertones, perhaps, in The Sex Pistols, some of the implications of what they’re doing. The fact that they were singing in their own voices, very distinctly working class voices. The fact that their graphic sensibilities with ransom notes, ransom note lettering, highly subversive imagery, suggested a kind of music as political commentary, music as commentary. And The Clash, of course, picked up on this immediately and expanded on it massively. For them, the band was a gang, the last gang in town for The Clash, the only band that matters. And making music became as much about saying something important, representing the kids as about entertaining or dancing or enjoyment. Joe Stroma rather famously said, you know, as long as he’s getting the point across and people are are hearing, that’s more important than whether they’re having fun or not. So that strand leads to all kinds of varieties of punk and post-punk. Oi and street punk pick up on the working class character of some of what The Sex Pistols are doing. That leads into all kinds of strange corners in the British psyche, or strange political corners of the British psyche. Yeah, just to jump in there. So there are two things that I kind of want to try and pick up on. One is, you know, what punk started out as and what it turned into is sort of a bit of a big sort of narrative arc in your book and in the time. And you’ve got a quote from someone I didn’t actually note down the name of who said it, but you mentioned, like, you know, as long as the point was getting across, you know, who cares if it was fun, right? And so you’ve got, you know, songs about unemployment or like jobs I don’t want and what have you. And but this quote is, punk started out as a movement born out of no fun and ended up as a product whose existence was no threat. Which is, which is an interesting thing to think about, too, like, and that evokes a sort of a big theme of the book that you’re explicit about at certain points, which is like, what is the point of all this, this anti-establishmentarian music? Right? Do people really who sing it really believe that it’s going to have an effect? Actually, many of them explicitly said, you know, this is just a part of a big greater thing. And, you know, don’t sort of go to the concert and think you’ve carried out a revolution thereby. But the other thing I wanted to bring up with that, that sort of duality is there also in when you said dark corners of the British psyche, it’s there in Thatcher, the figure herself and what you call the Thatcher simulacrum. And I’m just looking at my notes here. But you know, what got me thinking about this is when you talk about the British psyche is the British psyche and accents. And you talk about how Thatcher had, you know, and you talk about how Thatcher had reinvented herself repeatedly first at Oxford, where she shed her Midlands accent and her past and then as junior minister, changing her voice again, but rediscovering a useful version of her past. And, you know, you go on, but talk about how, like a lot of the things about the hair and presumably the dress and the handbag and all that, like this was thought through, like this was like, I mean, you mentioned your own foray into advertising. This was literally advertising companies, like or a company advising her on what to do. And this was all, I gather, like, as you said, no one, you say in your book, no one wrote too many books about Edward Heath or Wilson, Jim Callahan, but then this Thatcher figure appears and all of a sudden, you know, all these punk musicians and everyone else wants to write songs about her. And it’s partly because there was this, the whole thing was a performance. And that was very, in my view, like very, there was something very un-British about that. Un-British and unprecedented. Nobody in politics had considered image that way before. And I don’t really pursue this in the book, but there is an implication here that part of the reason the popular music managed to write about politics, managed to speak is because Thatcher made it easy. You didn’t have to address something complicated because Thatcher was so big and so obvious that she just made a really easy target, a shorthand that even the simplest, most repetitive pop song could pick up on. Once Thatcher stopped being interesting, pop music lost interest. It’s a fairly dramatic drop off after about 85, 86 when Thatcher’s attention turned to things that the kids didn’t really care about so much. And Thatcher ceased to be a shorthand for the things that were troubling them. They just stopped writing about it. That actually reminded me, this is a slight kind of digression or sideways move just for a moment, but just before we started talking today, one thing I was sort of thinking about, like the memories of what the 80s were like that we have now and what it actually was like to live in the 80s and dating ourselves, obviously. But one of the features of being a sort of young person in North America in the 80s was the drug thing. If you went to the arcade to play a video game, which was an innovation at the time, the first thing you might be presented with is an ad, don’t do drugs. And you might be like, well, now I didn’t know what drugs were, but now I guess I have to find out. Those sure sound interesting. And if the powers that be are telling me not to do it, that might be something I really ought to look into. But anyway, again, that’s sorry for the maybe a digression, but was there an anti-drugs craze in the UK in the 80s? An anti-drugs craze? I’m going to sort of back off from the question a little bit and put it in a bigger context because what you’re reminding me of is the fact that Thatcher was, again, all kinds of things that she managed to promote. She had this perverse ability to increase the kinds of behavior she found most abhorrent, particularly things like pornography. As you can imagine, as a properly Victorian minded person, had no time for pornography, but everything she did economically created this flow of European pornography into Britain. And then the introduction of satellite television, another flood of pornography. And just all the way down the line, this is part of the rewriting of Thatcher as some kind of highly effective, determined person. She was stunningly ineffectual at achieving the social goals she wanted to achieve, making Britons more responsible, making them fiscally responsible. The credit card boom in the 80s was a direct result of her policies and had exactly the opposite effect of her rhetoric. You can imagine that drugs and alcohol were similarly responsive to Thatcher’s ministrations. Yeah, that reminds me of something else you write about a bit later in the book. I think one thing Thatcher did at a certain point was articulate the concept of an enemy within. And again, when you think of that quote I had earlier about despising, this was all internally directed, not criticism, but just outright attack. And so what was from Thatcher’s perspective the enemy within and how did that whole thing work out? So Thatcher’s career, the successes in her career were largely built on identifying enemies that were as large as life as she was, larger than life as she was. She was the Iron Lady, so she needed enemies that were as easily defined, as easy to pick out of a crowd and as easy to characterize as her. So the enemies within statement came after the Falklands War when she had just battled Galtieri. And he was a wonderful foil for Margaret Thatcher because he was the tinpot general, right? He was a big baddie. And fortunately for Thatcher, a mostly drunk and completely incompetent one. Having dealt with that baddie, she now needed a new enemy to direct her policies at. And she found a few. The miners were a particularly good foil for her because they represented everything she was trying to destroy. Once she had effectively destroyed the miners, she went looking for other enemies within. The labor city councils were identified as enemies within. The Irish in general were identified as enemies within, particularly, of course, the Northern Irish. So she just kept finding enemies to fight. The other problem she ran into in the late 80s was she kind of ran out of really good enemies. I write in the book about how in the late 80s, after the 1987 election, she decided the next enemy was the gay community. And she just never managed to get any real traction on that one, mercifully. Yeah. And when we’re talking about enemies within, of course, there were enemies within in a very real sense of bombings, both related to Northern Ireland and the gay community. There’s just so much going on there. I bring that up in particular because you also have a chapter where you talk about the police a lot and the relationship that people in particular communities might have had with the police. And in particular, you’re really good about talking about how one of the reasons there might have been a kind of reactionary panic about the police wanting the police to keep order was not guilt slash awareness of what British policing was doing in Northern Ireland at the time. And you didn’t want that to happen to you. That’s interesting. You’re articulating something that may be implicit in the book, but I don’t think I put as clearly as you do. Certainly, what did happen in the 1980s was policing techniques. And I want to put all kinds of quotation marks around policing techniques that had been experimented with in Northern Ireland, the use of tear gas, heavily militarized policing, and so on and so forth, stop and search procedures, things like that. These techniques that have been perfected, or at least developed in Northern Ireland, were imported back into the mainland UK to deal specifically in the first instance with the miners, and then also with black communities in London, in Birmingham, elsewhere. One of those songs I quote at some length is a rap by Ranking Anne, a London Jamaican emcee. It’s an extraordinary piece because it is a lengthy and quite complicated argument about the introduction of the police bill in the mid-80s. That was what allowed a lot of these techniques to be used in mainland UK. And she points out, once the police are allowed to use CS gas on British civilians, you’re on the verge of rebellion. You’re reminding me of something I noticed when I was reading your book. I got the PDF version of it, so I’ve got that up on my screen here. There’s a line break after police when you’re quoting the title of the book, so it says, kill the police, new line, bill. A peak coincidence, yes. Yeah, but no, that’s actually an old kind of revolutionary technique for getting past censors. So people will do this, I believe to this day in newspapers where you’ll have a broken headline where the top part is saying your actual message, but then you kind of get away with it because the dumb sensor doesn’t notice what you’re doing. But this is an example of why book formatting basically actually can have all kinds of significance and the kind of thing we could probably both get really excited about. But anyway, calling songs, kill the police, bill, there’s a lot of messaging going on in things like that. But the thing is that to people who are within a community that isn’t policed and people who are in a community that is policed, things look very different. And you do, quote, MC ranking and at length here, but great lines like, damn have the power to set up roadblock. So you better watch out if you poor or you black, you drive your car, you bound to get stopped. And this is, we talk about music and things like that, but these are just descriptions of not just, these are very pointed descriptions of day-to-day life and what this things like this police bill actually mean for you and the people you know. Yeah, exactly. Before we go on to talk about the structure of a book a little bit, and we could talk about this book for hours, but instead I would recommend people go out and read the fascist roof thing, including to find out the reason that you chose that title and that song, which is a great story that he tells near the beginning and goes back to throughout. But I can’t let you go with talking about something I think I alluded to a little bit earlier, which is there’s just this, what to me was just this really interesting and unusual element of kind of self-aware fun in the British music scene. And I was reading your book on my flight back from Peterborough. I was visiting my brother this holiday season. And I’m just going to quote this whole paragraph because you have to hear the whole thing to kind of get it if you’re not from there. But into this mix, we can add a number of comedy songs that found their way onto the charts in the early 1980s. Kenny Everett got into the top 10 with Snot Rap, performing simultaneously as two of the characters he had created for the Kenny Everett video show, inept leather-clad rocker Sid Snot and bearded cross-dressing Cupid Stunt. It’s musically pretty dubious, but done to borrow Cupid Stunt’s catch phrase, in the best possible taste. And I almost caused a disturbance when an hour later I finally got the joke about Cupid Stunt. No one in Canada would ever do that. And yet this was a kind of like everyone knew what was going on with that. And it was part of pop culture and like even hit songs, which I just love that part of that culture. Yeah. And there’s a long tradition of it in Britain too, of the pun that lets you just get away with it. Monty Python did a lot of that. And it’s all there through British pop as well, partly because British comedy and British pop never diverged in Britain quite the way they did in North America. British popular music’s music hall roots, working class music halls where the entertainment was part comedy, part music, never really went away. The chapter you’re quoting from, I write a bit about novelty songs. Those comedy songs are part of that broader genre of novelty songs. And I’ve been thinking a lot about it since I finished the book and starting to realize that the distance between something like snot rap and never mind the bollocks or anarchy in the UK is nowhere near as great as one might think. The Sex Pistols, I’m not the first person to point this out, the Sex Pistols are a lot to British music hall. Johnny Rotten’s persona is very much built on a kind of music hall personification. But more than that, there’s the working class connection. And on top of that, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately that I kind of wish I’d come to as I was writing this book is the aggression involved in novelty songs. One doesn’t think necessarily of novelty songs as being aggressive. They’re usually funny, silly. But you think of something like Black Lace’s Agadu. If you haven’t heard it, don’t. It is a truly abysmal piece of music. The BBC, this may be apocryphal, but the BBC are understood to have effectively banned it, not officially, but to have banned it for being not credible, which really is to say that the DJs just couldn’t believe it existed. The thing is, this utterly dismal, dreadful, horrible song was on the charts for the better part of a year and it was at the top of the charts for weeks and weeks and weeks. And one of my friends tells the story of his wedding and their DJ copped out on them at the last minute. They got a DJ they didn’t know in and it was disastrous. He played Agadu and actually reduced the bride to tears by doing so. It was because the song was just so loathsome. And you just have to wonder why a song that hurts people is on the charts for that long. There is something there about- Forrest Johnson? Well, okay, so that’s a whole other story. The novelty song remains a feature on the British charts in a way completely incomprehensible in North America. Some of it has to do with the Christmas number one and getting something ludicrous to number one at Christmas. The unnamable band with the unnamable song that was almost number one a couple of years ago. There’s something there in the novelty song that is a kind of- There’s something aggressive about forcing something unpleasant into the charts over the objections of the BBC. The BBC famously called Auntie, right? It’s a great British institution and a pillar of the establishment. And if you can force it to play Agadu for several weeks, you’ve really, really given the finger to the ruling class. I was just going to say there’s something about that to this sort of comedy song. Because again, when these songs get to the top of the charts and stay, that’s because people are doing it. It’s not top down, that’s bottom up. And it might even be presented by those on the up that this is happening. But yeah, part of the reason I brought up Forrest Johnson there, I mean, you talked about how incomprehensible that something could be at the top. But I guess the last thing since we’re talking about British culture and politics and things like that, just before we go on to talk about the interesting structure of your book, and then your work with the publisher and all that in the last part of the interview. Was there lots of music written about Boris Johnson? I alluded to it, but I don’t know how well your podcast tolerates obscenity. Oh yeah, we’ve got an e-mail. A couple of years ago. So yes, I think it was two Christmases ago. Oh, and again, this last Christmas, perhaps a band called The Cunts, spelled with a K, just to distance themselves, nearly made it to number one with a song called Boris Johnson is a fucking cunt. And so this is something that the British public or a significant portion of the British public conspired to inflict on the rest of the British public. It’s sort of characteristic. Maybe if they call it Boris Johnson is a Cupid stunt, they might have gotten away with it. They might have got all the way to number one. Exactly. But yeah, but seriously, was there lots of stuff written about Boris Johnson or not at all? No, that’s not much. I can only speculate about why not, except that he really wasn’t around anywhere near as long as Thatcher. The Commoners Choir, a project featuring Both Wally, formerly of Chumbawamba. The Commoners Choir, they sing choral music, not your boring old monks singing choral music. This is political choral music. They had a song about Boris Johnson’s head on a stick, punning on the mop of his hair, mopping with Boris Johnson’s head on a stick. But no, I really don’t think anyone is ever going to have the sheer number of songs written about them that Margaret Thatcher had written about her. Much to Liz Truss’s chagrin. That’s what she was aiming for. That actually is a great probably place to end it on, particularly this part of the discussion, because you talk about backwards looking nostalgia. That’s how we started this interview. But Liz Truss’s complete petard of a policy that she announced shortly after becoming Prime Minister was explicitly based more or less on being the new Prime Minister. If there are people who think there’s a chance of going back to that, not openly, not in British politics, it appears. To move on to the last part of the interview, where we talk about your experience writing and as an author and finding a publisher and things like that. I wanted to ask you first, how did you come up with, do you remember the first part of the interview? I think it was in the last part of the interview. I think it was in the last part of the interview. I wanted to ask you first, how did you come up with, do you remember coming up with the idea for having mixtapes? Throughout the book and in the table of contents, you’ll see it. It’s amazing. The book is structured around these mixtapes, which are lists of songs related to the content of that chapter. It’s super interesting as an approach to history, because if you actually listen to those songs, you’d learn a lot about that time and that topic. Did you come up with the idea for the mixtapes and then say, that would be a great idea for writing a book around, or were you writing the book when you came up with that idea? Again, an evolution. The first iteration of the book, before I ever started writing it, the idea was to focus on maybe a dozen songs and write a history around those songs. I very quickly realized that what was at stake here wasn’t a dozen or even maybe 20 key songs, but the very fact that there were hundreds of them, literally hundreds of songs. I think there are 500 songs referenced in the book, something like that. Then it became necessary to sort of organize the chaos of 500 voices. The mixtape suggested itself as a notional way of organizing it, simply because the mixtape was a very distinctly early 80s invention. The cassette as a format came into its own in the very early 80s. For a while there, the mixtape was how we communicated with one another. If you wanted to tell someone you liked them, you made them a mixtape. If you wanted people to know who you were at the moment, you made them a mixtape that really showed your creds. There was that element to it. Again, the nostalgia of the mixtape. Fundamentally, it was a way of asserting that what matters here is not the individual song, the individual artist, but the sheer volume of voices raised against Thatcher and Thatcherism. You were speaking earlier about how many of these artists, even at the time, were a little skeptical about whether they were doing any good at all, let alone changing the world. But part of the thesis of the book is you don’t change the world overnight with one song, and that the real value of these songs perhaps isn’t what they accomplished at the time, which objectively probably wasn’t much, but the fact that they are a record. In this most straightforward way, a record is a record of a time and place, and we can refer to it, and we can refer back to it as an alternative to the kinds of revisionist histories that are emerging, in which Thatcher gets reinvented as some kind of strong, almost messianic figure in British politics and history. It’s interesting, one thing in addition to these mixtapes, one thing you have, you have a 57-page section in your book of a discography. Again, it’s both a historical record, but also this is like history. It’s not sort of learning history through music, or history as music. It’s like, no, no, this was the music people, living, breathing people, were making at the time, listening to at the time. And so a discography is much more than just a list of songs and bands, but actually a kind of, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what to call it either. I have to thank my editor, Ramsey, for the discography. He insisted on it. And it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things to write. It’s surprisingly difficult to say something cogent about a band in two sentences. So finding ways of, in two sentences, suggesting where this band fits into the great flow of these voices was a really interesting exercise. And fun, I gather. So you mentioned the song you were talking about before that was awful. You’re actually quite explicit in the book, that this book, the sort of main content of it is not about assessing the value of songs, or the quality, like whether they’re good or bad. Although you do have opinions about those things, you know, that’s obviously, that’s not what it’s about. But just to give people a sense of the flavor. So there’s like this 57-page thing where, I mean, there’s a couple hundred sort of bands, I think, that Hugh sort of takes the opportunity to actually tell you his opinion about in a funny way. And I’m just going to pick a couple, not at, well, the first one is not at random, but like, you know, your section on Morrissey goes like this. Before he became a right-wing knob, Stephen Morrissey was the lead singer for the Smiths. He was a knob then too, but he was our knob. His first solo album, Viva Hate, which included Bengali and platforms, was the first sign that something was horribly wrong. Knob is the perfect word for Morrissey. It’s the only available word for what Morrissey has become. Did I ever tell you about when I saw him perform in Paris one time? I don’t think so. I remember him doing two things. One was interacting with the crowd. One was, people would try and talk in the front row, would try and talk to him in French and he would go, what was that? What was that? But the other thing he did was he gave us like, he came up in real time with like a perfect Morrissey song title. So there was someone in front waving a sort of poster at him and he goes, he reaches down and he picks it up and he goes, what’s this? What’s this? Is this a poster for your band? You’ll never make it, but thank you. Which was just like, wow. It’s not just for the songs that he can come up with, things like that. Let me see if I can find another funny one here though. Well, anyway, I won’t ruin it for everybody, but there’s more humor, but a lot of great details in there too. Probably things that would actually, I would imagine be really hard to find about bands called The Mob or Modern English and Momis and things like that. I’m just looking at the M’s here, but there’s just, if you’re into music, like popular music, basically, you should definitely get this book almost just for that discography and just reading through it because it’s just amazing. But on that note, so there’s a couple of really interesting things that you’ve done in the book, not just in terms of content, but in terms of form with these mixtapes, with this long discography and things like that. How did you go about looking for a publisher when you decided you had this book idea? At what stage were you at when you said I’m going to approach publishers? At a fairly late stage, I did send a couple of prospectuses out to academic presses early in the process and got very little interest. I think understandably, it’s a difficult book to explain in abstract. And as I was going along, I realized that I probably wasn’t looking for an academic publisher at all. If I was looking for an academic press, I was going to have to write about this stuff in a straightforwardly academic way and realize I didn’t want to, that there wasn’t a good academic way to do what I wanted to do here. So I wound up looking for publishers, not academic publishers, but publishers who do have a book list that features scholarly work. PM turned out to be an ideal fit. They operate as an anarchist collective, which appealed to me for fairly obvious thematic reasons. They publish history, politics, theory, philosophy. They publish on punk studies, particularly. They’ve got a strong line in punk studies. So it became a kind of natural home for the project. And a happy coincidence that Ramsay Canan, my editor, happened to be in that scene in Scotland in the 80s. He was the lead singer for a band called Political Asylum out of Stirling. So there was a natural affinity there as well. For me, part of the big appeal of publishing outside of academia was the opportunity to write in a way accessible to a broader audience. My first book, almost all academic publications, went into a thousand university libraries and has been checked out once. I really wanted to write something that would take the fruits of my employment and redistribute it a little, add to the commonwealth of knowledge rather than sit on dusty bookshelves. So the fact that PM Press are a trade publisher rather than an academic press was very appealing to me. And for anyone out there with a book idea who’s never gone through that process before, I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about that. You obviously did your homework about them before you approached them, but how did you approach them? Did you look up how to write a query letter and how to pitch a book and all that kind of stuff? Or did you just email them with a book idea? How did you get in touch? I kind of wish I remembered. I’m fairly certain I just followed the advice on their page, on their webpage. I don’t think I did anything dramatic to get anyone’s attention. They were just on my list of really interesting publishers. I’d love to claim I did something clever, but I just happened to send the manuscript to the one editor in North America who would be interested. In retrospect, it’s a miracle that the thing got published. But I’m very glad it did and very grateful to PM Press. They have a really strong record of publishing urgently important stuff. Another reason I went looking for non-academic publishers is the turnaround in academic publishing is so damn slow. Ironically, the book got delayed a number of times, but for the best possible reason, precisely because PM Press is nimble enough to publish stuff that is really, really timely. And during the Trump administration, particularly, PM Press constantly had things that urgently needed addressing. So this book about Thatcher’s Britain, which really wasn’t going to go stale or at least not more stale. It just kept getting put back a few months. I was very happy about that. I took the opportunity to keep adding to that discography. It’s the kind of project that never really ends. Even this morning, I thought of another Billy Bragg song. I really should have stuck in there somewhere. Yeah, that reminds me actually just before I let you go finally after our feature length interview almost here. You actually do mention towards the end of the book that the original title for the book was, This Is Not Enough. There’s a term for this in rhetoric, but you talk about the things you didn’t get to talk about. That’s one of my favorite chapters. But just to give people a sense of there’s this wide breadth of things that you talked about not getting to talk about, like fox hunting and animal rights, for example. They were a big deal when I moved to the UK. The very particular sense in which fox hunting resonates in a society where it’s very hierarchical, not just in a money sense, but in more historical senses. The idea of the fox hunt, which is this very performative thing that only very wealthy people can do, but is abusive of helpless creatures is more than a metaphor. It’s one of the reasons it resonates so much in British society. But again, just leaving aside that part of it, the animal rights is the big deal during this period. Of course, it’s still a big deal now, but something that there was a lot of music written about. There’s things you write about sort of gender and sexuality and things like that, which were other things that you wish you could have written more about. So there’s lots of room for a sequel, Hugh, if you can convince PM Press to do another one. I’ll do my best. Well, Hugh, thanks very much for taking time out of your evening to talk to our audience. And thank you very much for the great book. Thank you, Len. It’s been a pleasure. And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Front Matter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it. And if you’d like to be a Leanpub author yourself, please check out our website at leanpub.com. Thanks.