Soul mining
Docu-rock garden shed crafts-men go deep underground. By Ian Harrison.
SOUTH LONDONER J. Willgoose, Esq. dresses like Robin Day, loves University Challenge and has quoted online haters describing his ruminant, concept-minded group as what happens “when the kids from chess club in school don’t get their heads flushed down the bog enough.” Yet he’s also drawn to the epic and heroic. Blending vintage voice samples with strippedback rock and electronics, Public Service Broadcasting’s 2013 debut Inform-EducateEntertain featured salutes to wartime spirit, while 2015’s Number 11-charting The Race For Space depicted the dramas of the US/USSR’s off-planet rivalry from ’57 to ’72. Every Valley – a chronological, socio-political account of coal mining in South Wales – is a more complicated sell. Recorded in a former workers’ institute in Ebbw Vale, once home to Europe’s largest steel mill, its consideration of the life and death of a once-vital industry is necessarily more ambivalent than it is simply optimistic or spirited. Even so, the opening title song is awe-inspiring, a modern orchestral levitation with heraldic brass and the high-tar voice of Richard Burton talking about miners as “the lords of the underworld” on Dick Cavett’s show in 1980 (suitably on the US Public Broadcasting Service TV network). Evocations of the coalfields as places of proud but hard labour – with horns sounding and lifts descending, The Pit takes us deep into the worked coal seams – soon give way to encroaching crisis. Disco-powered dancer People Will Always Need Coal slyly promises manly jobs for another 400 years, though the presence of Hindi strings points to cheaper alternatives abroad. It’s not far to the industrial action over pay that followed in the ’70s, or the cataclysmic strike of 1984 and the Thatcher government’s union-smashing: the searing, punkoid All Out unleashes picket line rage, with an unidentified voice dolefully reflecting, “If you look at the benefits of ordinary working people, all the things they’ve achieved in life is through conflicts and strikes.” Yet the story is more complicated than anger or despair. The incensed Turn No More, where James Dean Bradfield reflects on industrial extinction and the “vandals out of Hell” who ransacked the landscape, also vows that “the things my boyhood cherished stand firm and shall remain.” From here on there are reminders of decency and mutual aid such as the Women Against Pit Closures movement: on the jazzy Welsh/English language You + Me, J. Willgoose duets with Lisa Jen Brown from 9Bach. Featuring the Beaufort Male Choir, Take Me Home is an emotive closer to leave the most hard-hearted reeling. It’s a reminder that the root of this story is the communities who survived such an abrupt end to their way of life: in these days of political confusion and wilting job security, Every Valley is timely, and useful.