I've been blown away by The Good, the Bad and the Queen's new album Merrie-Land: it took a long time for successful, respected artists to start writing about this stuff but wow this is good.
Damon Albarn has always had an unerring knack for a beautiful melody and now he seems to be writing the sort of things that I've been writing about for years, hopefully people will listen to what he is saying. Of course I'm not that talented, and I'm not famous, so my music was never going to change the world and was never going to influence others to start writing about politics, austerity, of division in society, of racism, of xenophobia etc.
The realities of brexit seem to have inspired The Good, the Bad and the Queen and this album is broadly about what England has become, the mindsets of those who voted to leave and urges people not to side with the rich and powerful. It is melancholy, it is desperate, it is lost for words to describe what has happened to this country. It talks about an imaginary place that never existed which people seem to hark back to, to whom the idea of leaving the European Union seems to have appealed.
In a recent Guardian article Albarn talked about his family's working class roots and his knowledge of the sort of lives working class people live. I may be a little less removed than Mr Albarn. When most of the media and all of my middle class friends were predicting a comfortable victory for remain I was the only one urging caution and suggesting that leave may surprise us.
For a long time in my adolescence and young adult life, I did not look kindly on where I had come from. I wanted out. I didn't fit in. I didn't feel I had much in common with the people I went to school with or worked with, or drank with in the local pub. And I didn't. When I moved to Manchester and met middle-class people I found myself at home amongst friends with much more open ideas of the world and that totally changed my life for the better.
However, as I became older and started to understand politics more, I was able to understand why people from working class areas were so disillusioned with mainstream politicians whose beliefs all sat within a narrow part of the political spectrum. New Labour may have temporarily improved the lives of many by investing in our schools and hospitals and may have started schemes to benefit some of the most vulnerable in our society, but they didn't do anything to fundamentally change the problems we see in large sections of our society, especially in post industrial areas.
So when I saw reporters stopping people on the street and asking them about politicians, I understood why they might say "politicians are all the same: they don't care about people like me." I would say that was probably true at the time and mostly still is now.
So when the media were almost all saying that remain would win easily, and my middle class friends all believed that there was no way people would vote to leave the EU, I was fearful that leave might win. And this is why, when most people dismissed Jeremy Corbyn and the minority left of the Labour party, I really felt that this was a big opportunity to give people some hope and something different that they could believe in, a party that might stand for them.
I'm not suggesting that I'm some sort of genius of political forecasting, just that the working class people in this country are a huge section of our society that have been left behind and with my background I could understand why they may vote a certain way and the certain things that may inspire them.
Damon Albarn may have been on the same page. He may have seen the same things that I've seen happening in society and may have made similar predictions to the ones I've made. But I've been surprised for many years now that more musicians in the public eye have not been writing songs with these political messages. It's been an outlet for me since 2008 when I was made redundant and spent a lot of my time while searching for work watching the news as another high street retailer failed, or another large corporation announced more redundancies. I was aware enough of what was going on to know that political ideology, not necessity, was behind austerity policies. I also saw first hand that in a lot of cases, employers would take advantage of the perceived problems in the economy to shrink their workforce and make people work harder because they would be happy that at least they still had a job, and those employers would make bigger profits in the process. That landscape and how politicians chose to deal with it (or not), was the fertiliser in the soil around the seeds of political disillusionment that brought us Brexit.
I was angry. I suddenly felt that the largest section in society had nobody standing up for them. And therefore it wasn't all that surprising to me when immigration and people on benefits were made scapegoats and it wasn't all that surprising when the brexit vote came in. In the US the same things were happening, and trump won. And when Jeremy Corbyn managed to get on the ballot paper, I knew he had a good chance of winning.
Anyway, finally, prominent musicians are writing about this and Merrie-Land is too strong an album to ignore. It will interest me to see the sort of coverage it receives in the media and whether it is swept under the carpet because the mainstream broadcasters don't want to address the issues it raises.
