Like a lot of things, it started with Harold Wilson. This deceptively homely politician was the Queen’s first Labour leader and not reckoned to be quite her speed. Yet she developed a relationship with him which was notable for its warmth, to the extent that they had been known to natter while sharing the washing up after Balmoral barbecues.
But it was Wilson’s lust for taxing the highest earning – ‘squeeze them until the pips squeak’ gloated his chancellor Denis Healey – which brought him into conflict with The Beatles. Up until then they’d been a mutually beneficial association, with the band lending him youth cred (he was a Liverpool MP and liked to mention this, remarking in 1966 that they ‘have helped fill our coffers with world currencies’ – cheeky, considering his subsequent raiding of the Fab Four’s own piggybanks) and him recommending them for MBEs in 1965. Again, this didn’t go down too well with everyone. One man, the brave and rebellious Colonel Frederick Wagg, sent back the whopping 12 medals he had earned fighting in both world wars, resigned from the Labour party and canceled a bequest to it: ‘Decorating The Beatles has made a mockery of everything this country stands for. I’ve heard them sing and play, and I think they’re terrible.’ John Lennon said one of the very few sensible things he ever uttered: ‘I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE.’ (No – but that’s how it should be!) He also later claimed that they’d smoked dope in the Buckingham Palace toilets.
But, except for the bit of business with the pips squeaking (George Harrison, in typically dour mode, wrote a song entitled ‘Taxman’ in response), pop stars and the politico had a good thing going. Until then, no politician had sought to hitch their wagon to popular music. You wouldn’t have seen Winston Churchill walking on at the Conservative party conference to a Victor Silvester foxtrot before the big speech (Tony Blair notoriously had D:Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ while Kemi Badenoch tells me that if she had one, it would be the brilliant ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’ by Michael Jackson).
After Wilson, for a time, pop stars knew better than to identify with party politics; no one was interested in being bezzies with Edward Heath or Jim Callaghan. But, never the sharpest tool in the shed, Neil Kinnock blithely disregarded the old saw that ‘politics is showbusiness for ugly people’ and ‘never the twain shall meet’, capering around with characteristic lack of shame in Tracey Ullman’s 1984 video for ‘My Guy’. Never mind – ‘Red Wedge’ was just around the corner, when we could look forward to being lectured by the likes of Billy Bragg, Bananarama and the Blow Monkeys on the evils of ‘Fatcher’ while they took full advantage of Mrs T’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
For a time, pop stars knew better than to identify with party politics; no one was interested in being bezzies with Edward Heath or Jim Callaghan
Red Wedge slunk off with its tale between its legs, having dramatically failed to persuade the electorate against delivering another Thatcher victory in 1987. But it succeeded in setting the political template of pop singers herding to the left. One amusing side-effect of this lack of independent thought was the knee-jerk way the crooning community sought to ban anyone to the right associating with their music. Yes, you can send a cease-and-desist letter to a politician who uses a song of yours at rallies without asking: see Abba vs John McCain and ‘Take a Chance On Me’ in 2008. You can even sue them, as Jackson Browne did to McCain during that same campaign over ‘Running On Empty’. That’s all legal stuff and has a serious point.
But the laughs come when pop stars think they can stop politicians from liking their songs. Who can forget Johnny Marr tweeting in 2010: ‘David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it’ after the then prime minister chose ‘This Charming Man’ on Desert Island Discs? It just seemed tremendously camp, especially after Cameron retorted that he’d ruddy well carry on listening to them.
And now we have Andy Burnham, dancing to The Smiths, posing outside the Salford Lads Club – so iconically (there, used it properly) linked to the band. Even though social media users approved (‘If he loves The Smiths, you know he’s gonna be pretty much what the working class of the country needs!!’) Morrissey himself is on record as not being very keen at all on Our Andeh. He wondered in 2016 why they could not ‘find somebody from Manchester’ for mayor rather than a scouser and the following year mocked Burnham for not naming the exact nature of the Islamist bombing at Manchester Arena which killed 22 people: ‘An extremist? An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?’
Additionally, it was very nice of Mayor Burnham to participate in the online tribute to the Joy Division singer and youthful suicide Ian Curtis in 2020, ‘Moving Through The Silence’, which raised funds for the Manchester Mind charity. But the singer would have despised Burnham. In her memoir, his ex-wife Deborah describes him as a lifelong Conservative who not only voted for Mrs Thatcher but insisted that she did too, arguing that if she did not, his vote would be ‘cancelled out’. If this isn’t funny enough, he once tricked the local Liberal candidate into giving him a lift to the polling station, only to cast his vote for the Tories.
So it’s quite funny to watch Our Andeh bopping about to New Order, the band that Joy Division became after the death of Curtis. Meanwhile, over on TikTok, 19-year-old Ellen Stewart reports that she is having ‘a Harold Wilson summer’ with footage of the great man kicking back on the Isle of Man to a soundtrack of Lady Gaga’s ‘Summerboy’. ‘But Stewart is operating to a higher purpose,’ writes Dan Hodges in the Mail. ‘Scattered among her content are slickly edited images of our new Prime Minister…’
Whether the 21st century’s first Pop Prime Minister will have the staying power of Wilson – four elections won out of five contested – remains to be seen. But if he manages to win even one, what’s the betting the Gallagher lads – all too happy to provide the Mancunian soundtrack for his winning by-election campaign – get the MBE PDQ? Still, at least we can rest assured that they won’t be taking drugs in the Buck Pal lavs.
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