Part of the Union

Sunday musical excursion #30

This week’s excursion is dedicated to Mr Hamilton Nolan, and:

The Mafia State

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Number 30. Thirty pieces of music that mean something quite special to me. The initial aim of Sunday Musical Excursions was to give me a day off, to provide an easy subject matter that I could just plonk onto a text post and stick up here and leave you to enjoy or hate, as the turn took you.

There have been weeks when I was too exhausted even to do that. And there have been weeks when I wrote six-page essays about the music I wanted you to listen to, thus negating the whole purpose of a day off. I couldn’t recommend a piece of music to you that I didn’t feel passionate about (with the possible exception of Mouldy Old Dough). How can anyone post a post on their blog without passion?

This is the 30th excursion and I suppose it should be a bit special because of that. They’re all a bit special, but this one is a bit more special: it’s really quite poignant, given how it’s a song whose obvious meaning has changed in hue over the decades. Written in the years dominated by socialism in Britain, the song became an anthem for the trades union movement. However, by 1979, trade-unionism had become a dirty word, and in came the Thatcher years, which we endured until 1990, then the Major years, by which time unions were a thing of the past. They never made any great resurgence in the time Tony Blair was prime minister and now, in 2025, on both sides of the Atlantic, unions are at an all-time low point. Trade-unionists are feeling a sense of bitter abandonment, the overarching sentiment being that the political parties they helped found and which they supported in attaining power have slowly forsaken the causes of the very people to whom they owe what and who they are.

Well, there is one way to counter the influences that have seen the demise of the trade union. In many ways, as Hedges and Nolan make plain, organised labour is the only movement that can really put some kind of an opposition up to the radical government of that union which is the United States, or the lackadaisical lap-dog of a British government in the union that is their kingdom; and that, ironically, is to be a part of the union.

Strawbs started out as The Strawberry Boys in 1964. For my money, their best album was Dragonfly, which came along in 1969, on which Rick Wakeman played piano with them for the first time, on the 10’44”-long The Vision of the Lady of the Lake.

I know if I were to have made that today’s excursion, many of you might not have the patience to hear it through to the end. It’s a tale, a saga, for which devotion and patience are prerequisites. The devoted and the patient can hear it themselves via the link, but I advise you, as my brother advised me on my first hearing of it, to prepare for the experience: darken the room, listen through earphones, and take the telephone off the hook. Then hit start and close your eyes. And, when it finishes, reflect, on what it means:

She bared her breasts before his eyes;
The boatman still was stricken dumb;
He flung the sword back into the water,
Back to the depths from which it had come;
The water around him began to boil,
The maiden began to wither away,
His boat was swamped as the creatures arose,
And evil lived for another day.

As well as what the coda (Close Your Eyes) means:

Close your eyes and go to sleep, the night will soon be gone; there’ll be nothing here when the light goes out that wasn’t here when the light was on.

Reassured? Just remember and check what’s there, before the light goes out.

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But now, listen to Strawbs’ 1973 hit.¹ And, if you’re not singing along by the third chorus, you’re an incorrigible neoliberal through and through, and there is little hope for your salvation.

This song has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s got a regular 2/4 march rhythm, making it a good sing- (and chant-) along number, giving it a powerful onward impulse, expressing a simple, forceful message, which avoids tricks with foul language; it varies the choruses according to the number of oh’s (tending to a sense of climax), and listen carefully to the first lines of each of the verses: they’re all different in their notation, and the third verse is inspired, starting as it does before the end of the piano solo, lending it extra groove.

Every movement needs an anthem.

Well, I dug this one out: an anthem that needs a movement.

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Part of the Union

Written by Richard Hudson and John Ford

Performed by Strawbs (Hudson’s on drums and Ford sings lead)

From their 1973 album Bursting at the Seams

1. This clip is taken from a broadcast on Dutch television, which was in turn syndicated from the BBC, from their programme Top Of The Pops. I have spared you the toe-curling introduction to the song, by Jimmy Savile.

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