US &
THEM

1. Know Your Place

I always think it's pretty significant that in 1945 we voted Churchill out and the Welfare State in.

Obviously, since then, right-wing revisionists have been trying to persuade us this was a mistake.

It wasn't.

2. Who Was That Man?

There have always been disasters in history, and most of them have probably had some unqualified, ignorant and spiteful little man involved in making clearly the wrong decision.

I wrote this song in 2013, when my union, the NUT, was taking strike action against legislation being imposed on our children and schools by Michael Gove.

3. Banks of England

I wrote this at the start of 2013 when The Bandana Collective — where me and Arv played bass and drums — were doing a benefit for Fareshare, our local food bank.

I was angry that in Britain, one of the richest countries on the planet, we had food banks for people who could not otherwise feed themselves and their families.

And nobody in Parliament or the media seemed to find that absolutely shameful.

4. Terry French

This is a true story.

I got the details from Mike, the Sussex IWW organiser, in 2011, and wrote the song. It never seemed to fit on any album.

Terry was an inspirational organising figure among the Kent Miners during the 1984–85 strike, as was Liz, his wife.

I met Liz briefly at the Deal Miners' Welfare during the Seafarers' Strike in 1987. They ended the evening with everybody singing The Internationale, and it was brilliant.

When I wrote the song, I searched for traces of Terry online and could find little more than an image of a badge showing him in his tartan cap.

Then in 2014 I met Liz again in Brighton at a commemoration of the strike. I asked her if it was OK to sing the song. She not only said yes, but told me lots more stories about their lives.

Meanwhile, this song remembers Terry French.

5. When I Bring You Roses

A love song, of sorts.

With so much crap and insincerity about, when I bring you roses, those roses will be red.

I wrote it in Ilmenau at Easter 2014, tried a much longer version once at a gig in Arnstadt, then slimmed it down and added a slide-guitar part.

6. The Last Good War

This was another song that didn't seem to fit anywhere. I wrote it in Normandy in 2012.

The first-person narrator was invented, but the details came from Tim Saunders' book Dieppe, about Operation Jubilee.

The song reflected my sense of the cynicism with which ordinary soldiers were repeatedly sent into disastrous assaults.

7. The Losing Side

At Easter 2014 I was heading for Thüringen and taking copies of the new recording of Gentle Men.

I wondered how relevant that record might be for a German audience, particularly as there wasn't the same governmental urge to “celebrate” the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

I thought about the German cemetery at Langemark near Ypres, and how its sorrow felt different from the pomp and circumstance that often characterised British cemeteries.

8. Goodnight & Goodbye

This is really for my dad, but I missed him so much that I didn't think I could write a song directly about him.

I wrote it when it became clear my dad was not coming out of hospital again.

At the same time, I had read about attempts in Madrid to remove the monument to the International Brigades at Madrid University.

I remembered La Pasionaria telling the Brigades as they were evacuated from Madrid: “You are history. You are legend.”

I also thought about the evacuation of PLO fighters from Beirut in 1982.

So partly it became a song about how we are defeated by time and how achievements are forgotten.

My dad would have been furious at the way the Welfare State his generation built was being dismantled.

But at Tolpuddle I also saw that, despite those defeats, the children of those events remained undefeated by them.

Goodnight and goodbye. No pasarán.

9. The Spawn of Tony Blair

I would add to the long list of things you could lay at Blair's door the creation of the selfishly affluent Cool Britannians who feature in this true story of me, Arv and Graham Larkbey deciding not to have a much-needed drink in the Hove gastropub that used to be The Jamaica Inn.

10. St Gove's Academy

You don't really need to write a song satirising Gove's understanding of education.

You simply list the utterances and declarations and the song more or less writes itself.

The bit about the headteacher travelling first class was also, sadly, a true story. The children went second class.

And the PTS qualification was, of course, Post-Traumatic Stress.

11. Barefoot in January

Even more sadly, another true story.

January 2014 never seemed to stop raining. I was walking down Portland Road towards the ATM. It was after 8pm, dark, wet and bitterly cold.

A battered car parked and a battered family got out. Dad opened the boot and hauled out a couple of black bin bags.

When I came back from the ATM, the child — perhaps nine years old, wearing a white polo shirt and grey trousers that were both too small for him — was barefoot in the rain, pulling the family suitcase towards a doorway leading to one of the flats above the shops.

Then we went to Windsor, where people were begging in shop doorways along the road beside the castle wall.

Again, I wondered why nobody in Parliament or the media seemed outraged by sights like these.

12. Bob Crow

When Bob died, someone commented that someone should write a song about him.

Yeah, I thought. That's what folk songs are supposed to do: write songs about the people's heroes.

But I also thought Bob probably wouldn't have regarded himself as a hero.

I knew from Tolpuddle about his fondness for having the RMT brass band play loudly whenever they felt like it, regardless of whatever else was going on, so that helped determine how the song started.

I checked some of the details by reading my friend Guy Smallman's obituary of Bob.

Every time I heard Bob speak I felt inspired and energised, and the last time, just before he died, he was magnificent.

Thanks Bob. Maximum respect.

There wouldn't be another Bob Crow, just as there wasn't another Alice Wheeldon, Tom Mann or Terry French. But as Bob carried on their work, someone would surely carry on his.

Later that same week Tony Benn died. I thought it might simply be too much to write another song so soon for the loss of somebody else so inspirational.

So I found myself playing Winter Turns to Spring a lot, as this was apparently Tony Benn's favourite song.

13. That's Just Your Cigarette

Nearly a true story — at least the first and last verses.

I was waiting for a train to Erfurt on a deserted Arnstadt railway station, listening to Springsteen's Wrecking Ball on my phone.

First a middle-aged drunk tottered into sight and sat behind me with his beer bottles.

Two minutes later a teenage drunk arrived with a beer bottle in one hand and a small bottle of something extremely green in the other. He decided to sit next to me and engage me in conversation.

There was quite a bit of fascist graffiti on the wall across the tracks, although it had been painted over.

Eventually, when I got to Erfurt, I saw a punkette covered in Antifa patches stop and give an elderly man who was begging all the change she had.

The song initially turned out too dark, despite the cheery ending, so I rewrote the middle verses as comedy rather than tragedy.

Ironically, the next time I was in Erfurt, I saw the same punkette outside asking passers-by for money, with a plastic bin liner of belongings at her feet.

14. Win, Lose or Draw

Charlie Waygood, Irregulars drummer and diamond geezer, said when the coalition government came to power in 2010 that what people needed was A Song.

So I wrote this.

We recorded it with the band, and it was probably the last studio recording of our dear mate Roger Watson, the Jimi Hendrix of the melodeon.

It never featured on an album, although as time went on it seemed to become more popular rather than less.

So Us & Them seemed like the right place for it.

15. Win, Lose or Draw Reprise

Liz French and Bob Crow — unbeaten.

16. Sunny Afternoon in Ilmenau

The bonus track.

It originally appeared in a rather ramshackle form on All That Way For This, and I soon more or less stopped playing it — except when friends requested it, or when I happened to be in Ilmenau or thereabouts, where it proved particularly popular.

It's one of a series of songs I've written about places that popular music usually avoids.

I played it again in Thüringen at Easter, and comrades from Die Linke standing for election in Ilmenau thought it would make a good campaign song, so they asked me for a copy.

As the album version always seemed a little ramshackle to me, I recorded an acoustic version at the end of the sessions for this album.

It seemed a shame just to send it off to Ilmenau, so I thought: let's stick it on the album as well.

It fitted the general theme and provided a good way to go out — a cheery acoustic three-chord knees-up with a singalong chorus.

Pretty much sums up my musical career too.