Going Underground??

The Jam’s “Going Underground” came out in 1980, in April the St.Pauls riot in Bristol was a harbinger of things to come, the following year it would be Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth, Moss Side and Chapeltown.  Margaret Thatcher had come to power the previous year, I was in the first year of my A-levels. I still remember the feeling, walking home from school the day after the election, knowing somehow that the world was changing irrevocably as the Iron Lady came to power; even through that teenage fog of confusion and ignorance I could sense the seismic shift. Though I suppose it’s easy to look back and impart significance retrospectively, over the ensuing years I’ve come to recognise that shift as being what I glibly call “ the legitimisation of greed”.  It seems that Thatcher’s beloved “Victorian values” were really nothing but a masquerade of moral propriety, what the shopkeeper’s daughter really represented was the get ahead at any cost politics of the free market, she sacrificed the last vestiges of paternalism and fair play that had always been been a part of the Conservatives, and replaced it with bloody minded acquisitiveness. She may have been a libertarian in some ways, but mainly she was a moral authoritarian and her vengeance towards the working-class, the unions, immigrant cultures and the left in general was unmitigated. We could be free to contribute to the market, but not to resist it or challenge its authority. So the riots were testimony to the fact that as far as vast swathes of the population were concerned, we were at war. 

So “Going Undergorund” heralded the dawn of the eighties and it’s funny seeing today’s youth reviving stylistic tropes in fashion and music from that decade and seemingly reducing it to a melange of batwing sleeves and electro-pop. “I love the eighties”. Why? Because of Madonna, George Michael, and Duran Duran? Indeed,the pop culture of the early eighties seemed to get in step with the change in the political climate, it was the golden age of MTV, there was a new “flash” kind of cool, designer clothes and fast cars were the emblems of those reaping material gain from a Britain emerging from economic depression. “Her name is Rio” sang Simon Lebon as a tribe of young estate agents in Armani jackets piled out of wine bars into their XR3s and GTis; that was the mainstream of the eighties, a scene played out in every provincial town across Britain and there was nothing remotely cool about it, it was intensely ordinary, the culture of the unquestioning majority being swept along by the tide. The flipside to all of this was the eighties I knew and lived, a magical, rebellious, and creative era, the last gasp of counterculture, the last chance to go underground before we became one nation under cctv.

Like any great song, I’m sure the lyric of “Going Underground” means many things to many people, especially as despite it’s sniping at obvious targets there is an ambiguity about it. Whatever Weller’s intended meaning the essence is obvious, it’s a bitter outpouring of defiance that, as angry as it is, remains an uplifting ride from start to finish. Perhaps that’s one of Weller’s greatest gifts, he’s always been good at the sugar coated pill, some sweet harmonic twists behind a vitriolic lyric; he pulled off the same trick with “That’s Entertainment”. Of course there was nothing unusual in such politically engaged pop music back then, writers like Weller and Elvis Costello had emerged from sloganeering of punk as fully fledged poets of resistance. The point being that whatever Weller was really saying, those words, that notion, “Going Underground” actually meant something then. Although Thatcher was doing her utmost to impose the clampdown, in society’s margins, radicalism, protest, alternative lifestyles, creativity, experimentation, were all alive and kicking, and there were still ideological battle lines to stand behind, before it all got consumed by the new consumer age. We had that idealism, we still thought it was still possible to fight for a better, fairer more peaceful future and those that wanted to “go underground” could; full student grants, housing benefit, signing on, squatting, the possibilities were endless for the young rebel. If you didn’t "want what this society’s got", you could build your own, or at least survive in it’s margins and dream of a better one. 

By 1983 half-way through my thoroughly lefty humanities degree (it’s actually in History Of Ideas, but that means even less to most people), I was a squatter myself, ensconced in the unbridled bleak bohemia of SW8, and it struck me then in the enclave of terraces that had become home to a disparate bunch of “alternative” people, that we were like a lost tribe in exile, condemned to an uncertain future. In those days the mean streets of South London were awash with heroin, and for many looking at the growing gloom of Thatcherite Britain, the opiated escape route was a strong pull. London was still a pretty bleak place back then, nobody wanted to live in Shoreditch, and Notting Hill was still a bohemian village, but everywhere was kind of scuzzy! However there was a certain glory to those days, and the spirit of the London warehouse parties of the early and mid eighties represented a kind of “utopian” underground scene for many of us, “one nation under a groove”, social and racial divisions dissolving with the sweat of the (usually concrete) dance-floor. Many parties came off in the semi-abandoned industrial sites around what is now London’s trendiest hub, Old St and Shoreditch, but I also remember parties in Shelton St in the heart of Covent Garden, pretty unimaginable now. - Rose tinted spectacles on maybe, but there was a sense of excitement that went beyond the usual joys of hedonistic youth. A sense that we were a part of something unique, a sense of the changing times and what it all meant. Even though our sense of doom in the eighties was more concerned with the danger of nuclear annihilation, there was also a sense of how the politics and policies of the Reagan-Thatcher axis were set to destroy much of what we cherished. The counter culture as such, and all the various subcultural streams that fed into it was going to put up a fight, a fight that would eventually be lost, but not without some victories along the way. Thatcher was an imperialist xenophobe who appealed to the concerns of middle England, but the world was changing and for the younger generations it was time to unify and embrace our different cultural roots to create new identities. We were just emerging from some of the most racially tense times in British history, the riots of ‘81 and ‘82 had proved that much, and the extreme right wing was still very much in evidence,however resistance was active and vocal. Punk had spawned the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, in racial politics at least it was time to turn a corner. As the inner cities burned in ’81, The Specials “Ghost Town” was at number 1 in the pop chart, it felt like there was hope when a mixed race band could have a hit with a savage critique of Thatcher’s Britain.  However it was the warehouse parties where Hackney really did meet Hampstead, black and white alike getting down just for the funk of it, it was the prequel to the much bigger revolution that would mark the end of the decade when House music and ecstasy took raving to another level. 

In London at least, it felt like Thatcher really had some opposition, with "Red Ken" taking the reins at the GLC and sponsoring music festivals with eclectic line-ups of post-punk, reggae and African bands. In '83 there was a series of Peace festivals, Paul Weller’s Style Council played at least one of those I seem to recall, Weller had always been prepared to stand up and be counted, even getting involved with the Labour party’s somewhat ill-fated Red Wedge initiative Those were the days when culture was something that you generally consumed collectively, for instance if you wanted to see cult movies you’d probably be at one of London’s all-night cinemas like the Scala in King’s Cross, these shared experience’s fed into a sense both of belonging and empowerment. Yet as time passed it increasingly seemed like the broadly left politics of the counter culture were fighting a losing battle, perhaps by the middle of the decade there was a sense that the battle had been lost. Whatever one thought of the so-called New Age Travellers who were increasingly hounded by the Police, the Battle Of The Beanfield in 1985 was symbolic of Thatcher’s attitude to any “alternative” society. It was a crusade against dissent and resistance that wrapped itself in a dubious moral rhetoric and exercised it’s power with an authoritarian frenzy. As had been the case with the Miner’s strike and the Wapping printers dispute the state’s use of physical control and aggression as wielded by the Police was forewarning of the imminent lockdown. There’s no dispute about this, our civil liberties have been eroded on an unprecedented scale since Thatcher came to power, a project that was taken to even greater extremes by the Blair government. “Things can only get better”, yeah right!

So “Going Underground” has always stayed with me, even as my tastes crystallised around Soul, Jazz and Latin musics, I’m of the generation that was touched by the spirit of punk and the political engagement of the counter culture, and “Going Underground” embodies so much of that zeitgeist. However by the the early nineties my love affair with Brazilian music was in full throe, and one day whilst listening to Olodum  I suddenly started to hear how “Going Underground” could work on that kind of samba-reggae groove. It became an idea I would often jokingly suggest to my collaborator in chief Chris Franck though it took twenty years for him to take it seriously!

At the end of 2012, to announce our comeback, and as a kind of statement of intent, myself and Chris aka Da Lata released our take on Paul Weller’s classic, with the street savvy South London soul of Floetic Lara handling the vocals. Did it make any sense to cover “Going Underground”? As much as it was personal to me, I also thought it was timely. Although the lyrics reference things that were going on back then, (the nuclear issue etc. not that it’s gone away), the general sense of outrage, “the I don’t want what this society’s got” still had so much resonance, though with a large dose of irony. Nobody writes protest pop anymore, perhaps the targets are too big, and the sense of futility too great as the world lurches ever onwards towards economic meltdown and environmental catastrophe.  We’re all suffering from outrage fatigue if we care at all. So it felt entirely relevant to invoke the spirit of a time when it was still cool to give a damn. For those of us who misspent our youth in the eighties the situation today looks bleak, the economic and societal conditions that gave lease to our counter culture have disappeared. Gone are the days when a boy from Woking can form a band with his mates and take the world to task with songs that speak to ordinary lives about the reality of the world we’re trying to share. The current crop of public school bands wouldn’t even know how to begin writing those kind of songs, and the X- Factor generation aren’t even vaguely interested in “going underground”, the mainstream is their destination. Today success, celebrity and rampant materialism are seen as far more worthy goals than resisting the status quo. How much more austerity will it take to turn that around?

I remember watching the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012, trying to engage with the story that Danny Boyle was seeming to tell, the story of a “people’s Britain”,  but I couldn’t help thinking about the twisted irony of it all. This was the most corporate commercially driven Olympics in history, and it felt to me like the whole Boyle show was a massive subterfuge, creating the illusion of a people’s games, getting everyone on board and blinding us to the darker side of what was really going on. Hearing “Going Underground” in a medley celebrating the glorious legacy of our pop culture was a bitter pill to swallow. Here we were in 2012 after successive governments have eroded our civil liberties, clamped down on the margins of society and got us all under surveillance and we’re listening to “I’m going underground”, wherever Weller thought he was headed, it’s not on the map anymore.