New Labour Folk Music

I wrote here a week ago about Frank Turner, and what I felt was being falsified in his music; identity. I had a particular problem with his expression of Englishness, and that he was trying to be something he wasn't.

So where is the antidote to this? Traditionally, it's come from the music that is 'of the people'. This has meant 'folk' music, but could also easily encompass certain strands of country, blues, punk, hip-hop, grime, and many other genres. What I find bewildering and sad is that for the majority of those working, as I do, roughly within the 'folk' genre, politics seems to have been all but removed. The 'protest song' movement so expansive in the 1960s is lost. Duties for commenting on the effect of the policies of Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron have been handed over to others to sing and play about.

That this has happened is a deep shame and a loss for the music that I love. I believe it has an inherent duty to agitate. It has always done this. Ballads often deal with class prejudice, albeit not explicit - the lord and the servant girl, the mistress and the maid. This music is subversive, coming as it did from those at the bottom of society. It often ridicules the upper classes, or speaks directly to social problems of the time. Take 'Hard Times of Old England' for example:

Provisions you buy at the shop it is true,
But if you've no money there's none there for you.
So what's a poor man and his family to do?
And it's O, the hard times of old England,
In old England very hard times.

This hardly needs updating for today's recession. It is truly relevant and aggressive in it's aim. It shares something with that other most famous of political folk songs, 'The Blackleg Miner':

Divvn't gan near the Seghill mine
Across the way they stretch a line
To catch the throat an break the spine
Of the dirty blackleg miner

My problem is the lack of young folk artists willing to take on this mantle, and part of this problem is that Folk music has become inherently middle class. Folk clubs, festivals, and arts centres, three places where they young folk musician will ply their trade, are hardly crucibles for reactionary opinion. It's hard enough to get work as a professional performing musician in this genre, without adding to it the possible pitfalls of saying something an audience might not like.

I should say at this stage, incidentally, that whilst this problem is not exclusively about the young, this is where it seems to manifest itself most intently. There are mainstays of the genre who will sing songs, whether subtle or explicit, about political intent. Chris Wood has written about Jean Charles De Menezes, the London 'second home in the country' crowd, and a beautiful Atheist hymn, 'Come down Jehovah'. The 'Imagined Village' have reworked 'Hard Times' into a modern anthem, and they include Martin Carthy, who many times has expressed how inherently political folk songs are. Steve Knightley writes almost Bruce Springsteen style songs about local issues - 'Country Life' and 'Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed'. But look around for artists from my generation (I'm 27) who are actively promoting and finding the politics in this music, and the search becomes much harder.

This is the generation bought up largely under New Labour, who proclaimed that class no longer existed. They were also born under the rule of Maggie Thatcher, for whom the working class were not to be helped: they were the enemy. I'd hate to believe that these successive governments have seeped into our consciousness, and somehow disconnected our belief in fighting for a cause, but sometimes it does feel like that. I'm not trying to make any secret, by the way, that most of the young musicians, singers and songwriters I'm talking about are middle class themselves, myself included. I'm certainly not trying to dress myself up as someone who came from mining stock, with an inalienable right to speak for working class communities. We don't have to all be Billy Bragg.

What we can, and should do, however, is take on those issues that are relevant, and take them to the performing stage. Tuition fees are an obvious place to start, one which a largely middle class audience will at least have some knowledge of, and one which many of us can speak about from experience. Pensions, job loss, recession - these things will affect many of us. They should be aired, debated, argued over. Audiences should sometimes get angry - sometimes a performer will have to deal with that ultimate of nerve shaking factors - someone may leave. That's OK with me. I've seen this happen, twice. Most people in the room, if the argument is held intelligently, and presented through genuinely good music and song, will appreciate what the performer is doing. If they don't like it, the artist in these venues is usually hanging around at the end anyway, and should be ready for a good natured debate about these issues.

I'm not saying that this must happen at every gig, at every show. Nor should is necessarily make up the entirety of the performance, and it must be done with humour - which is hard. Not every artist will want to do it.. But we need a balance, and audiences (some of them young, particularly at a folk festival) must be challenged at some time. I passionately don't wish folk music to turn into the music of New Labour, of the coalition: music which is 'nice' but doesn't express anything, doesn't make anyone angry, doesn't make anyone joyful. Even if the effect is negligible, we should try. As a 9 year old I remember hearing Lindisfarne sing 'Bring Down the Government' and loving it, even if I didn't know exactly what it meant. Hearing Martin Simpson sing Dylan's 'Masters of War'. We must keep this up - there is always a need, and that need could not be more important at this moment. I suppose some of this sentiment comes from a sense of jealously, as well. I don't want the genre of music in which I spent most of my time to be utterly de-politicised. I hate seeing it next to 'Easy Listening' in the racks in HMV. This should not be easy to listen to - it should be challenging - just like rap, hip-hop, and grime is. We should not aim to be all things to everyone, a New Labour folk music. Instead I want to question, revolt, and disagree, and I want that to happen on folk festival, folk club and concert stages now.