‘Heartland’: how The The captured working class life in one song
Following the Conservative Party’s landslide 1983 UK general election win, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was afforded an even bigger mandate to oversee her neoliberal project for the next four years. Upending the nation’s social fabric and working-class communities, a frenzy of deregulated capital and worship of market force whims steamrolled over any vestiges of the former social contract which had brought about the greatest living standards in modern history.
The National Union of Miners would be resoundingly smashed, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council bulwark dismantled, and the wholesale flog of the nation’s utilities ensured the public realm would always work for the business class.
By 1986, Thatcher had won the class war and was looking set to comfortably enter a third term the following year. Communal solidarity gave way to ruthless competition for the scant resources left in the country’s deindustrialised wastelands, and the seeds of contemporary social atomisation and bitter divisions were sown. The era’s music community made a gallant effort to challenge the government’s economic bludgeon—Billy Bragg’s Red Wedge formed an uneasy semi-official relationship with Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party that boasted some of the day’s biggest names yet received critique from The Housemartins and Redskins for legitimising a party that was too interested in liberal placation of the Right.
The politically charged pop gems of the day were at their best when adopting the lyrical lens of the British everyman wandering the new Tory uplands. Robert Wyatt’s fierce anti-war critique behind ‘Shipbuilding’s gentle domesticity, the skint revelry at the heart of Soft Cell’s ‘Bedsitter’, or the eternal isolation exorcised on The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ all memorable slices of anti-Thatcher pop that scored the national malaise while the Yuppies and City Boys were showered with extracted wealth.
None of the 1980s’ working-class pop vignettes snarls with such prescient sting as The The’s ‘Heartland’. Leading 1986’s Infected after Soul Mining‘s lyrical self-dissection, frontman Matt Johnson cast his eye on London’s urban ruin and Uncle Sam’s global NeoCon pull the UK was only too happy to coddle with deeper rage than had yet been heard from The The’s synthpop output. Now beefed up with the punchy Fairlight CMI digital synthesizer, Johnson conjured Some Bizzare labelmates’ post-punk abrasion with his stirring existential blues for a big, bold, soulful sound surging with belligerent punch.
“Past the Saturday morning cinema that lies crumbling to the ground / And the piss stinking shopping centre in the new side of town,” Johnson growls under his breath as if skulking through his old neighbourhood, long-lost to social neglect and American-style eyesores. Seething, broiling rage between the day-to-day disconnect of navigating the managed decline wrought by the political class and their neoliberal custodians is as much Keir Starmer’s failure as it was Thatcher’s ideological wreckage—Johnson’s traipse through a corroded former ‘heartland’ a sullen commute we’re all forced to endure with leaden alienation. “Let the poor drink the milk, while the rich eat the honey / Let the bums count their blessings, while they count their money…”
‘Heartland’ illustrates with poetic savagery the greedy tearing apart of the post-war consensus and the class betrayal of a Labour party who cheerleaded it on. Striking like the awful pang that seizes any working-class person with the simmering bewilderment of witnessing their suburban street or small town left-to-ruin, The The captures the contemporary rage and its urgent need for class articulation with deep empathy and frank caution: “So many people, can’t express what’s on their minds / Nobody knows them and nobody ever will / Until their backs are broken and their dreams are stolen / And they can’t get what they want, then they’re gonna get angry!”
