![]() If you’ve got any kind of compassion at all and you see other people suffering, unless you’re a complete nonce then I can’t see how you can feel, not exactly how these people feel, but you must be able to see that it’s wrong and this whole situation is wrong." "There was a phoney pretence that we could suddenly all be middle-class because we were allowed to buy our own houses, get a mortgage, and be in debt for the rest of our lives. "Thatcher and the Tories were trying to dismantle the communities of the working classes: attacks on the trade unions, small businesses disappearing, and so many aspects of English life being closed down to people," says Weller in the book. Later in 1985, Weller - along with Billy Bragg, The Communards, Tom Robinson and others - formed the loose collective of musicians known as Red Wedge which had, says Rachel, "a simple remit: to oust Margaret Thatcher from office, and by default to return the Labour Party to power, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock." We, the working class, are doomed to spend our lives "down in the dirt", says Weller, unless we realise "the class war's real and not mythologized / And like Jericho, you see walls can come tumbling down". The lyrics to Walls Come Tumbling Down, with Weller's rant toned down by the melodic contribution of former Wham! backing singer (and later Mrs Paul Weller) Dee C Lee, are an outraged dissection of the capitalist system, warning the British public to beware of the "donkey's carrot" of jobs that will turn you into a wage slave forever paying off debts for home electronics they can scarcely afford. "I went through a period of political awakening," says Weller, quoted in Rachel's book, "a realisation of how the system worked." Weller had as younger man been linked to the Right, but in the 1980s as The Jam neared the end of a hugely successful ten-year career, he began regularly appearing at socialist benefit gigs in support of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, striking miners and other causes supported by the Left in general and the Labour Party in particular. Rachel's book is an easy read told in soundbites transcribed from interviews with the many musicians, politicians, journalists and activists involved, including of course, Paul Weller. The book tells the story of a vibrant period in British music history in which musicians worked together with the intention of making lasting social change and obstructing the rampant rise of Thatcherism in the last 1970s and through the 1980s. The song recently gave its title to the 2016 book Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge by Daniel Rachel. Former Jam frontman and "Modfather" Paul Weller was determined that The Style Council's 1985 UK Top Ten hit Walls Come Tumbling Down should be a "balls-out soul tune" from the Motown mould and so you could be forgiven for failing to notice at first that this hip-swaying Eighties pop hit is a red-blooded, revolutionary protest song with the very positive and provocative refrain of "Governments crack and systems fall / 'Cause unity is powerful / Lights go out, walls come tumbling down".
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