It’s 1980. The UK is in its first year of a Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher who is using this time to see who will be with her and who will be against her as she seeks to reshape Britain for a new decade. The UK music scene will use Thatcher’s government as an inspiration for possibly the most sustained burst of political songwriting over the last 60 years in Britain*. Through the 1981 England riots, The Falklands War, The Greenham Common Campaigns and the 1984/85 Miners Strike, it all provided grist to the songwriting mill. It’s an era of protest, benefit concerts and Red Wedge. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie/Out! Out! Out!” and all that.
But any age of protest needs a contrarian - social media and Fox News/GB News means we’re swamped with the bastards now - and in 1980, that role was inevitably filled by Mark E. Smith, who kicked off The Fall’s album, Grotesque (After the Gramme) with Pay Your Rates, a non-ironic demand to pay your water and council rates. I feel that Smith was broadly sympathetic to Thatcherism and as a compulsive workaholic himself, may have found Norman Tebbitt a like-minded individual, at least in terms of sharing a pulling yourself up by the bootstraps philosophy to get through hard times. Smith’s politics were generally unsentimental. He acknowledged himself as both an artist and a businessman. The Fall was both his artistic outlet and a means not just of supporting himself but his band mates. Although he was not stingy in apportioning credits for songs and as a result, spreading the royalties, he was also a boss. Bills had to be paid and The Fall had to work both in terms of getting records out and playing live in order to ensure that they could meet the commitments that we all have to meet. Smith never lost sight of the fact that The Fall was his job. It had perks that other jobs don’t have for sure, but it was still work and woe betide anyone who worked with him that forgot that.
There was though, a smidgin of altruism in Smith’s worldview on Pay Your Rates. He refers throughout to being sent to Debtor’s retreat estates which reflects his loathing of both the idea and execution of council estates. The extract from the interview below, conducted in the mid-1980s highlights this further. As far as he was concerned, to be evicted from your home and to wind up on an estate was a fate worse than death and he had nothing but contempt for the way the estates had been implemented. Reading it, his thinking appears confused because it seems to suggest that the tenants who moved from the slums into the estates were suckered in by mod-cons like refrigerators and central-heating (I mean who wants them, right?) but he laments the loss of privacy, the concentration of crime and the conformity of the flats all looking the same, with people unable to impose their own personality on them. This isn’t capitalist thinking, but utopian, even vaguely hippyish.
In a sense, releasing a song which advocates following the law, especially in an art-form which lionises outlaw behaviour, is a pretty balls-out move. Tie it in to the dismissal which Smith had for a fundamentally socialist policy, and you have a style of song which isn’t immediately associated with The Fall’s oeuvre: an aspirational, motivational song. Had Tory H.Q. been listening closer, I wonder if they would have dared make overtures to entice Smith to form Blue Wedge. What chaos it could have been…
Given the theme of the song, I did check to see whether John Peel gave it a cheeky airing in his first show after the Poll Tax riots of 31 March 1990, but he didn’t. Though he did play it a week after the 1997 General Election.
Mark E.Smith on council estates. Taken from The Annotated Fall
*I use “political” here to mean songs about the actions of government rather than in its wider, social terms.
Lyrics are copyright of their authors.
Video courtesy of The Fall - Topic
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