Winter of 89
Recorded live during the Tom Robinson Band reunion, 1990
Released on Winter of 89 [Castle Communications CHC7031], 1992
Reissued on substandard bootlegs under various names. ‘Motorway – Live in Concert’ [Music De Luxe MSCD6] at least makes clear it’s a live album. Not so with ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ [K-Point Gold 1621.1006-2] and the jaw-droppingly cheeky title of ‘Power In The Darkness’ [K-Point 1821.1006-2]
[Lyrics new to this version are marked in bold]
Since writing this I turned 40 this year and become a father but the message of the song remains the same which is; be yourself, be proud of who you are, don’t let anybody tell you how to live your life.
The British Police are the best in the world
I don’t believe one of these stories I’ve heard
About pretty policemen in leather and jeans
Showing their leg through a split in the seams
Leering at people and leading them on
Then running them in when they start to respond
The press all ignore it, they don’t want to see
Except when the case is a Scottish QC
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
The liars of Wapping are really the pits
With pages of trivia, bingo and tits
With Soviets starving and nuclear rain
You get the Queen-Mother and donkeys in Spain
When someone’s in trouble they stick in the knife
They hounded Boy George to an inch of his life
If it’s ‘Poofs in the Pulpit’ or ‘Lesbian Scum’
If it’s filth and it’s fiction it’s there in The Sun
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
And now there’s a nightmare they blame on the gays
It’s brutal and lethal and slowly invades
The medical facts are ignored or forgot
By the bigots who think it’s the Judgement of God
Wankers like Anderton calling us names
The gutterpress dailies still fanning the flames
The message is simple and obvious, please
Just lay off the patients and let’s fight the disease
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy that way
Sing if you’re glad to be gay
Sing if you’re happy this way
Explanatory notes:
“The liars of Wapping are really the pits”
Despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s original takeover of the Sun promised to keep its Labour party and trade union allegiance, the paper went Tory in 1979 and then, in 1986, relocated the paper from the traditional Fleet Street offices to a new de-unionised purpose-built site in Wapping.
The resulting year-long printers strike echoed the Miners Strike that had finished less than a year earlier. There were ferocious battles at Wapping between cops and pickets, and – as with the miners strike – the police acted with impunity to assault people in defence of Thatcher’s war on trade unionism.
“With pages of trivia, bingo and tits”
The Page Three girl is a daily picture of a young topless ‘model’, running since the early 70s (the feature, not the model). In 1981 they added bingo to their cornucopia of cack and it increased their sales substantially.
“With Soviets starving and nuclear rain”
The Chernobyl disaster meant farmers all across Europe had to ditch produce and pour milk down the drain for fear of contamination.
“You get the Queen-Mother”
The royal family are a dependable tabloid page-filler now, but back then the coverage was far greater. Before the end of Charles and Diana’s marriage, it tended to be nauseatingly sycophantic too.
“and donkeys in Spain”
In the late 80s there was tabloid outrage at the cruel practice of a Spanish carnival that chased and crushed a donkey to death. Whilst it was unquestionably barbaric and unnecessary, it was no more so than the death of any one of the millions of animals in slaughterhouses and bloodsports in the UK or elsewhere in the world, and if a solitary dairy cow doesn’t get a front page there’s no reason why a donkey should. Except that the British don’t kill donkeys, so we can feel smug and be xenophobic about those who do.
“When someone’s in trouble they stick in the knife
They hounded Boy George to an inch of his life”
In 1986, Boy George was at a very low ebb, wrestling with an addiction to heroin. The Sun saw fit to support him by sticking a camera in his face as often as possible and ran the headline ‘Junkie George has Only Eight Weeks to Live’.
“If it’s ‘Poofs in the Pulpit’ or ‘Lesbian Scum’
If it’s filth and it’s fiction it’s there in the Sun”
From the mid 80s, the Sun ran an ongoing campaign of notable homophobia. Whilst the high-profile campaigns against Elton John and Boy George are singled out by Tom, they were built on a foundation of attacking those less able to defend themselves with decent lawyers.
In November 1987 the Sun ran an article about gay Church of England clergymen with a headline describing them as ‘Pulpit Poofs’. The pop music columnist of the time, Piers Morgan, remembers the editor demanding pieces about the ‘poofs of pop’, prompting speculation and phone calls to managers whose denials would be framed in a way that made them look like they doth protest too much.
In 1998, in the wake of Peter Mandelson being outed, The Sun said Britain was being governed by the ‘gay mafia’ from ‘a closed world of men with a mutual self-interest’.
Whilst government is certainly run by a closed world of men with mutual self-interest, it’s nothing to do with sexual attraction. If that were an issue, you’d have thought it would’ve come up in the 80 years of heterosexual male and female Cabinet ministers working together. Remember, if someone’s gay then that’s all they are and all they ever think about.
“Wankers like Anderton calling us names
The gutterpress dailies still fanning the flames”
James Anderton, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester 1975-1991, alarmed many when he said he was aware that in his work he was ‘used as an instrument of God’. Worse, he was that kind of over-confident believer who attacked others. He advocated the recriminalisation of homosexuality and declared that people with Aids were ‘swirling in a cesspit of their own making’.
At this time, as Aids awareness went from zero to panic about catching it from toilet seats, there were tabloid columns a-plenty demanding, for example, the indefinite segregation of homosexual people as a public health measure.
Talking to Tom:
The Tory MP becomes a Scottish QC
It was just a topical case. I don’t remember the details.
The Sun verse is substantially rewritten:
‘The liars of Wapping are really the pits
With pages of trivia, bingo and tits’
I was pleased with that, ‘the liars of Wapping’ – whopping great lies!
The Wapping thing is also a reference to the attacks on trade unionism. Again, it feels like its pulling in these other issues that aren’t gay-related, just about The Sun.
I finally got to the ‘Pulpit Poofs Can Stay’ headline, which had really annoyed me. I did hate The Sun. A year after John Lennon died, front page headline: ‘Sex Mad Ex-Beatle’s Secret Life of Shame: Yoko Hired Vice Girls For John’.
We also get:
‘Wankers like Anderton calling us names
The gutterpress dailies still fanning the flames
The message is simple and obvious, please
Just lay off the patients and let’s fight the disease’
Well of course, over Section 28 we’d had Anderton wading in with his religious views. [Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, a law prohibiting councils from funding ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. For more info see the Explanatory Notes for GTBG 2004]. And there was still this business of fanning the flames, with Aids he was pitching in saying it was the judgement of God. I think here the ideas of the 87 version got refined and focused down through nightly gigging and trying different lines.
You’d been out on the road again with the TRB reunion.
Exactly. So it had just honed down into ‘what I really meant to say was…’. That’s a lyric I can look back and say yes, that nailed it, where the 87 one caught me on the hop when I was halfway towards formulating it.
