‘Blaydon Races’: The pivotal importance of an old, local folk song in ’28 Years Later’
As somebody from the proud shithole of Blaydon, regionally renowned as The Asylum on the Hill, it was a startling moment to hear the local folk song, ‘Blaydon Races’, performed in Danny Boyle‘s blockbuster 28 Years Later. Unless you’re from New York City, Los Angeles or some other ubiquitously filmed spot, it is always a trifling thrill to see or hear somewhere you know well pop up on screen. It seems as genetically ingrained as dropping a hot pan that you call out, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been there’, no matter how reserved a viewer you were a few moments earlier.
So, for a while, I sat in the cinema believing that it was this simple genetic quirk that imbued the scene during which ‘Blaydon Races’ is sung by a drunken mob with a sense of layered profundity. After all, it’s a pastime that I have partaken in plenty of times myself, albeit after seven pints and a 2-1 win over Wolves as opposed to a zombie-slaying expedition – not that the two are overly dissimilar. But upon further reflection, I came to the conclusion that this old folk song reveals more about the message of 28 Years Later than perhaps any other moment in the franchise so far.
To understand why it is so pivotal, you must first understand the strange role of the song in modern society. The Blaydon Race is an unremarkable run that has occurred (nearly) every year on “the 9th of June”, as the old song says, since “eighteen-hundred-and-sixty-two on a summer’s afternoon”. At first, it began as a horse-drawn race, but now the 5.9 mile (9.5km) dash from Newcastle City Centre to Blaydon along Scotswood Road is an annual athletics event.
While it is a cute and quaint part of local culture, tethering the region to its past, and establishing a sense of local identity, I have often looked around St James Park and found it strange that 53,000 football fans are passionately belting out a dusty folk song about a short jog that is currently capped at 4,700 participants that gathers more column inches about road closures on the day than anything else.
Of course, it is understandable that the lore of old traditions persists in any local culture. But folks hardly line the streets to cheer on the runners these days, and the winner is lucky if they get a two-minute segment on the local news. In fact, the event is now dwarfed more than tenfold by The Great North Run that occurs annually just a few months later.
But there is no song about the Great North Run. In fact, there are no new folk songs of that nature at all anywhere in the Western world. Our folklore has become unstuck in time; we’ve ceased generating new fractions of culture that chronicle our collective local stories. We doggedly stick to the old songs, chanting them while their relevance steadily becomes lost to us: Why do we continue to sing the ‘Blaydon Race’? We don’t know, we just do. Why don’t we write a new folk song about the Great North Run? We don’t know, that’s just not something we do.
While you could perhaps explain that away by saying, ‘We already have a folk song about a local run, why would we need another?’ It’s a lot harder to apply that same logic in a post-zombie-apocalypse existence. In the world of 28 Years Later, the greatest flesh-eating rupture imaginable has been visited upon the nation, and yet the traditionalism of ‘Blaydon Races’ still seemingly feels more apt than anything new.
If the questionable relevance of ‘Blaydon Races’ is curious in the context of a football stadium in the present reality, it’s a hell of a lot more curious to sing about an old, small town running event from 1862 the day after a local 12-year-old killed a couple of zombies and the town was nearly attacked by a nine foot superhuman mutant with a penis the size of Parthenon pillar. Surely, there would be some modern boozy chant about the boy who butchered a horde of zombies or some drunken shanty called something like ‘The Day Jimmy Was Caught Interfereing With an Undead Corpse’? But no, there is still no sign of any alternative to the status quo, despite the greatest upheaval to society that you could ever imagine.
In fact, if you look around at the scene, there is a remarkable amount of dated paraphernalia that seems to be completely incongruous to the present situation that the survivors find themselves in. A poster of the late Queen is inexplicably pinned on the wall. What on earth does a dead monarch have to do with the fucking hellfire of the rage virus apocalypse? The village’s banner and mantra remain tethered to its Catholic days of yore, seemingly without any revisions, despite, to re-fucking-iterate, a bloody zombie apocalypse.
In fact, as the continual interspersed clips from Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V prove, the island community has simply seen a resource-driven regression to an earlier period of history, rather than being in the grips of thinking up an alternate future.
This seems deeply indicative of the present sense of capitalist realism that has unfurled since the Industrial Revolution in our own society. We have run out of alternative futures, all we can do is simply keep calm and carry on. This is a mentality that has plagued society for some time. With the existential threats of climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, and increasing wealth inequality all mounting, we are trapped in the same inertia of plodding along and readying for war as the village.
This allegorical mirroring of reality is played out in the politics of the island. At no point is there any talk of a grand plan to spring a bright new future from the depths of this despair. The eerily familiar inference of this is far more terrifying than the zombies. It is even stated by the powers that be on the island that you can leave, and you can return, but if you venture away from the stable home comforts of the knowable village, you’re on your own. The mentality of the village is survival of the status quo. They doggedly stick to what they know, right down to remarkably out-of-place songs.
This doctrine of traditionalism is perfectly epitomised by ‘Blaydon Races’, but there’s also a sense of ‘us and them’ about it, too. All folk songs have an element of that. That’s perhaps why it resonated with me so much as someone who grew up in Blaydon. There is no doubt a clan-like nature to singing this old song in a pub that keeps the island strong and together, but the inverse of this boon is that they perhaps shut off outsiders or anything viewed as new and radical at the expense of genuine hope and progress.
We see this in the way that Dr Ian Kelson is viewed as “insane”. He’s essentially portrayed as a woke lefty looney despite the fact that he seems to be thriving, have a greater understanding of the virus and situation than just about anyone, and, quite literally, possesses cures to the ails of society. But because he is outside the norm, he is dismissed by the status quo. The notion of what is normal, knowable and tactile holding sway and persisting is a motif that occurs throughout the film.
For instance, Dr Kelson’s monument of bones is one that he accepts will erode. It is a memento mori that will, itself, die. However, the rust, steel and concrete of the Angel of the North will persist. As is stated in the previous scene, it will be around for as long as the pyramids. This seems to mirror the fact that presently, alternative ideas are viewed, even to some extent by those who hold them, as spiritual ideals, rather than something that can realistically be expected to make a mark on the world.
‘Blaydon Race’ is also not the only song that hints at the ‘stilted society’ sentiments of 28 Years Later, and the eerie “boots moving up and down again” sense that the arc of human history marches towards more doom and misery, either. The Young Fathers soundtrack is often futuristic, novel and a wild alternative to the norm, in moments when all hell is breaking loose. It’s in the moments of hope when electronic futurism is dropped in favour of a traditional orchestra, a move that Danny Boyle insisted on. In these moments, the soundtrack turns to gospel overtures, indicating our hope for salvation is biblical, tethered to miraculous virgin births and pious ceremony. Risky human endeavours to seek out an alternative are met with much more angular, troubling, dissonant music.
Even amid the unimaginable, it is still harder to think of an alternative future beyond the futile persistence of the norm. Even if it is apparent to the village that it is an unsustainable sitting duck rather than a stronghold, with the only alternatives being presented by iodine-covered oddballs or anti-Christ cults so evil that they come across as cartoonish to the point that you can’t even reconcile them as real, then the most manageable mantra seems to be ‘better the beast you know’, right down to the songs you sing in the pub.
Even the nations beyond this crippled, infected land seem to agree that a vague, drifting sense of containment rather than cure and positive intervention seems to be the best policy. We are stuck. The best we can do is kill a few zombies, brag about our inflated conquests, get drunk in a pub, and sing a song about an old running event without really being too sure why.
