Somme 100 Brexit

Today is the 100th anniversary of the commencement of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, and I've been listening to an album that has a tenuous link to the horrors of the trenches.

In 1980 The Clash released my favourite triple album of all time, "Sandinista!" I bought it at the Hillbrow Record Centre soon after it was released, while on pass from operational service in the army. I recorded it and the tape accompanied me to Ruacana and M'pacha (in Namibia), where I served out the final year of my national service in South Africa. I played it till my ears bled! Musically it's one of the challenging variations on the Sandinista! album, with The Clash experimenting with Music Hall, one of British music's oldest genres that stretches back to Victorian and Edwardian times. The campy vaudeville elements sound an odd contrast to The Clash's intelegent, reggae-infused Punk Rock. One of the standout song came at the end of side A of album 1/3 and is called "Something About England." I know every word and nuance of the song (which has frequently brought a tear to my eye), and it's particularly relevant today, in post-referendum, low-road Britain.



Take, for example, the opening four lines of the track:

They say immigrants steal the hubcaps

Of respected gentlemen
They say it would be wine an' roses
If England were for Englishmen again

Sounds all too familiar. Structurally, the lyric is a conversation between the narrator (guitarist Mick Jones) and a wistful old tramp (singer Joe Strummer). The first verse cited above is a putdown of lazy racism - higher social classes blaming immigration for a society's ills, which all sounds eerily familiar 36 years on. Because of the musical complexity of the track, and the worry that the first verse may be misinterpreted by right-wing xenophobes in the audience, the song was never performed live.

The tramp's lyrics in "Something About England" are some of the most political and social commentary in The Clash's back catalogue, bemoaning how two World Wars and mass industrialisation still couldn't break down the class system which is at the root of so much disharmony in England. The final verse drags us from the World Wars and the Cold War into the stark reality of Britain in 2016:

The streets were by now deserted
The gangs had trudged off home
The lights clicked off in the bedsits
An' old England was all alone

Damn - I miss music like this. In under four minutes, the eloquent lyric takes you through a century of British history, protests against social ills, sticks one up at the establishment and brings into focus what's happening on the streets around us today. Here's the full lyric for your reading pleasure. Why am I not posting the customary YouTube link? Interesting that. There used to be at least a dozen iterations of the track available on YouTube till recently. But take a look today - the links are there but the message one gets back is that the content is "now blocked in your country". Too incendiary? Too close to the bone? The truth has always hurt, and it still does.

In the absence of a video, here's an audio stream from Vietnam...



Here's the full lyric...

The Clash - "Something About England" (Sandinista! 1980) 

They say immigrants steal the hubcaps
Of respected gentlemen
They say it would be wine an' roses
If England were for Englishmen again

Well I saw a dirty overcoat
At the foot of the pillar of the road
Propped inside was an old man
Whom time would not erode
When the night was snapped by sirens
Those blue lights circled fast
The dance hall called for an' ambulance
The bars all closed up fast

My silence gazing at the ceiling
While roaming the single room
I thought the old man could help me
If he could explain the gloom
You really think it's all new
You really think about it too
The old man coffed as he spoke to me
I'll tell you a thing or two

I missed the fourteen-eighteen war
But not the sorrow afterwards
With my father dead and my mother ran off
My brothers took the pay of hoods
The twenties turned the north was dead
The hunger strike came marching south
At the garden party not a word was said
The ladies lifted cake to their mouths

The next war began and my ship sailed
With battle orders writ'n in red
In five long years of bullets and shells
We left ten million dead
The few returned to old Piccadilly
We limped around Leicester Square
The world was busy rebuilding itself
The architects could not care

But how could we know when I was young
All the changes that were to come?
All the photos in the wallets on the battlefield
And now the terror of the scientific sun
There was masters an' servants an' servants an' dogs
They taught you how to touch your cap
But through strikes an' famine an' war an' peace
England never closed this gap

So leave me now the moon is up
But remember all the tales I tell
The memories that you have dragged up
Are on letters forwarded from hell

The streets were by now deserted
The gangs had trudged off home
The lights clicked off in the bedsits
An' old England was all alone

Cheers, MAlfaRK ©

** Also see Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros **