Frankie is a master of verse and his words can snap your heart like a twig. The new album is beautiful and so is his voice.
Leatherface - ‘I Want the Moon’ from Mush (1991)
“When I say I want the moon, I expect the moon”
- Conrad ‘Connie’ Hilton, Mad Men
“And I want the moon, I don’t expect too much from honeymoons”
- Frankie Stubbs, Leatherface
“What do you want… you want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down”
- Jimmy Stewart, It’s A Wonderful Life
I was reminded of the second quote by the first, and I’m guessing that one or other of them might have been inspired by the third. However, there’s a lot more to the Leatherface song than naked ambition. I’ve posted it before, saying “Reading George Orwell [specifically The Lion and the Unicorn] and listening to Leatherface. A perfect self-hating bourgeois Sunday afternoon in the British Isles [which I feel now I should change to the Celtic Archipelago, except nobody uses that and it’s offensive to both Angles and Saxons].”
I’ve always had a problem interpreting Leatherface lyrics. Not only are they inherently vague, but Stubbs’ delivery is characteristically hoarse and the lyrics are written in tiny handwriting. There is the staccatto rush of scattered phrases - “Mass chant vigilante bad taste rat race” - and the repeated anthemic phrases - “And I want the moon”. But at the end, “We don’t make bargains and don’t deal with markets” seems a pretty clear statement of leftist politics. It could be that “I want the moon” is Leatherface’s equivalent of Crass’s “Do they owe us a living? ‘Course they fucking do!” - defiance in the face of capitalism and its imposed morality. Elsewhere, on ‘Winning’, they say “Roundabouts and swings aren’t my favourite things”.
Coming from Sunderland in the industrial north of England, and writing their best songs at the start of the 1990s, I tend to view Leatherface as dealing with at least the legacies of Thatcherism in British society. Which was as much a focus for early 80s punk in the UK as Reaganism was for punk in the US, although for hardcore the latter probably had a greater specific influence. Before that, at the start of punk rock, Labour and Democratic governments were in control - something Nicholas Rombes highlights in A Cultural Dictionary of Punk in an entry on ‘Callaghan, James, Prime Minister of Great Britain’, beginning with a quote from a New York Times article and a subsequent correction pointing out that, contrary to the article’s description of ‘the social climate’ of Thatcher’s Britain and the Sex Pistols’ cry of “No Future”, Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979 and the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978.
Rombes’ take on this is not just that the mistake perhaps reflects “the broader tendency of many (certainly not all) rock critics and historians to interpret, reflexively, punk’s nihilism as a street-level reaction against conservatism” - something which, in cruder terms, leads to an automatic and, to a degree, unthinking association of punk with the left - but also that the pessimism of the economic climate, eventually leading to the ‘79 Winter of Discontent, and of Callaghan himself informed the said nihilism of punk bands; and similarly in the US with the economic situation, particularly of New York, and the political messages of Carter. To an extent, this also leads to an apolitical punk rock - the Ramones’ ‘I’m Against It’ comes to mind - and to one that’s reactionary against traditional left politics and trade unionism.
In the last week, I watched a couple of interesting political BBC documentaries - one on the recently deceased former Labour leader Michael Foot, essentially an opposite number of Walter Mondale in that he ran against Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election on a relatively far-left platform and lost dismally, but who had also first became an MP in 1945 and consistently espoused democratic socialism, and another on the Grunwick dispute over trade union recognition in a London film processing laboratory between 1976 and 1978, which the documentary concluded, from at least one side, was instrumental in breaking the trade unions’ power pre-Thatcher (one of the contributors I recognised from the previous documentary as Michael Foot’s revolutionary socialist, and outside the Labour party nephew).
Now more than ever, it’s important to connect with punk’s real roots in economic and political disarray, and even in its ironic “we don’t make bargains and don’t deal with markets”, because humane, democratic socialism needs an intelligent response to capitalism and the pressure of defining ambitions in material terms, of asserting the primacy of the market and the economic individual over the right to social provision and the right to collective workers’ action. Watch this heart-warming live video, but read the lyrics too.
