How Thatcher created one of London's best buskers (part 1)

Hi everyone,

Two quick details before we get into it. We’ve now synced premium accounts between Beehiiv (this newsletter) and our website, busk.co. If you pay on one you’ll get all the benefits/content of the other. You can upgrade your newsletter subscription here.

Also! If you’re in Berlin, Germany, on August 27th, come see this documentary about Berlin’s street musicians (The Berlin Symphony of Rhythm), which I’ll be attending myself. It’s having its Berlin premiere. See the trailer below, and get your tickets here.

Okay, this newsletter is going to be a little different this week. It’s an excerpt of an interview I did with London-based street performer Mat Boden on his canal boat in November 2019. It charts a neat path from how Thatcher’s closing of the mines in the 1980s led to his first day busking (with all the stops in between).

It’s a two-part email and it deserves that much attention, because I’m sure you’ll love reading it as much as I did recording it.

[Trigger warning for our younger readers: the interview contains swearing, drug use, racism and mention of buying a house for three thousand pounds.]

Finally: I have done some editing on the piece, cutting it down and shuffling bits around, but I haven’t put words in Mat’s mouth. I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s an incredible storyteller. I only took a couple of photos while I was there, including this blurry one of Mat with his dog, telling me it’s not going to make a great photo:

Now strap in and enjoy the interview!

Armitage was a village literally built around a toilet factory called Armitage Shanks, which fed most of the people around. Armitage was a little tumour on the side of a larger town, Rugeley, which had the other predominant feeder: a coal mine.

My grandfather was a coal miner. My dad was a miner too, fixing machines. They had showers there, so he wouldn’t come home covered in black, just dirty overalls and a bit of muck around his ears. He didn't have a cough, he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he was a very healthy person, which is ironic because my mother drank like a fish and smoked and she's still here and he's not, so that's genetics for you. They argued all the time, but loved each other literally to the end.

We were very much a working class family that managed to maintain a good life thanks to the mine. My parents aspired to be middle class, a ‘2.4 kid’ family, so they bought a house for three grand and, not being able to have children themselves, adopted me.

I was given a small piece of paper when I was sixteen that said my biological mum had been very young, and my biological father had trouble with the police. He’d failed to gain custody of me through a short court battle and I was put up for adoption as a baby.

Occasionally, I flutter with the idea of finding my birth parents. But, one time in the car when I was young I asked my father, “Do you know who my natural parents are?” His face got full of emotion and he turned and screamed “Are we not good enough for you?” I didn't engage with that idea again for a long, long time.

My father used to talk about the values of socialism. Why do we work? The answer isn’t something shallow like ‘for money’, it's because everyone needs fuel, everyone needs heat, we are mining to help the entire country.

People talk about how terrible the socialist times were, but I remember it being great as a kid. We'd go to the local factory and there'd be a pantomime by all the factory workers. They were given an afternoon off every week to practice. These were proper-geezer-working-men, mining men, coming on stage dressed in these big, daft, silly-billy dresses with all the local families watching.

The pantomimes weren’t political. I mean, there was always jokes about the wealthy and that kind of thing, but I didn't understand it. I just saw they were having a lot of fun. They were just people. It didn't matter whether it was shit or not. There was a great sense of community. There was something really pleasant and earthy about being there.

Then Thatcher shattered the industrial towns. I remember my father going out of the house, talking about strikes and taking me to the protests. The first memories I have of chatting to him about anything of importance was after the closing of the mines.

He went to the Job Centre every day for three months. He was trained in all the equipment they used in the mine, in first aid—he had a very broad...he was a very intelligent man. The thing he and his brothers were renowned for—and I'm not genetically linked to them but I feel a pride for carrying on that name—was they were given the nickname 'Lap', the Lap Brothers, because they were always a lap ahead of the rest.

But, having a lot of skills worked against him when he went back into the labour market to do menial work. A lot of places wouldn't take him, because he’d worked his way up to being a foreman and the managers didn't want to hire a person, especially at that time, who might take their job.

He tried to be a bricklayer, a construction worker, even a policeman, but the police said, “we think you're too old”. It was bullshit. I think the reason they didn't take him was because he'd been involved with the labour movement and union strikes.

Before, if people got in a fight they'd pick each other up after and go and have a drink. Now, my father felt like people he’d been working with his whole life would stab him in the eye with a pencil if it meant they could get a bit ahead. Factories had kept them together, but now they no longer had a sense of security or a shared goal. Left-wing working class families became ideologically broken. That's why you find that there's no left-wing ideals left in those communities now.

I went back home to bury my dad last year and I asked everybody how the town was doing. I heard a lot of, “I’m not racist but there's too many of them”, and I'd be like, “Where”? Rugeley is a predominantly white, English place. There's maybe an Asian guy who owns a shop, there's a couple of black people about, but that's it.

People are only saying this stuff because when socialism was destroyed they lost their identity—what it is to be British, that sense of us British working together for the betterment of all. Competing in a marketplace put them on uncertain ground. When we say, “Come, we will show you our ways”, what are our fucking ways now?

So now we’re putting up walls. Only when we know who the fuck we are can we look over this fucking wall and welcome people to the country.