“It was outrageous”: the political anthem Paul Weller wrote for South Yorkshire
Art is, and always has been, inherently political, and few songwriters in the modern age have typified that fact better than Paul Weller, whose extensive and illustrious discography has covered everything from impending nuclear war to class inequality and trade unionism. Back in 1985, for instance, Weller and The Style Council turned their attention to the class war occurring in the industrial landscape of South Yorkshire.
Although Weller’s output has always boasted something of a universal appeal, the roots of The Jam, along with the early days of the Style Council, were unshakably rooted in London. It was during the heady heights of The Roxy Club’s punk revolution, after all, that The Jam first emerged from the obscurity of their Woking beginnings. By the time that Thatcherite socio-economic policy had taken root, though, the socially conscious songwriting of Weller couldn’t ignore the North any longer.
Namely, The Style Council’s magnum opus album Our Favourite Shop aimed to capture the industrial action of the North, and the Conservative-proposed deindustrialisation which would – and did – have devastating effects across vast swathes of the nation. In fact, Weller wrote the song ‘A Stone’s Throw Away’ specifically for the striking miners in South Yorkshire.
Yorkshire became the focal point of the 1984-85 miners’ strike thanks to the infamous Battle of Orgreave, during which striking mine workers from across the United Kingdom congregated to protest against pit closures.
Soon, though, the South Yorkshire police, along with the Met Police forces, turned the protest into a riot, beating striking workers from horseback and arresting hundreds on bogus charges. Inevitably, that day at Orgreave became the defining moment of the entire miners’ strike.
Like many people at the time, Weller was disgusted by the images that came from Orgreave, and so ‘A Stone’s Throw Away’ was written in response. “It was just what was going on, really,” the songwriter once told Mojo. “These people who’d been working down the pits and keeping the country going… all of a sudden being fucking hit around the head by the Met Police.” Adding, “I just thought it was outrageous, fucking outrageous.”
In his typical fashion, Weller transformed his outrage into a musical masterpiece, namedropping South Yorkshire in the pulchritudinous, orchestral track from Our Favourite Shop, which still stands out among the most emotive efforts The Style Council ever recorded during their 1980s tenure.
Alongside Yorkshire, the song was also inspired by political action in Johannesburg and Chile during that same time, linking the injustice of those faraway places with the horrors occurring on Britain’s doorstep.
The entire album, in fact, was adept at exemplifying the devastating, unjust consequences of the Thatcher years, but ‘A Stone’s Throw Away’ boasts a more enduring legacy than other tracks, partly due to the fact that certain areas in the region are still struggling to recover from that period of strike action all these decades later.
