What can I say? The CD about which I am about to write is likely to be, at the very best, obscure to most people. At worst it will be totally unknown, which is a real shame in my view.

The Artist
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Mike Harding was born in 1944 in Manchester. He was brought up in an Irish catholic household, and many of his experiences have formed the basis of his comedy routines. Throughout his life he has had many jobs – bus conductor, boiler scaler, teacher, and dustman. He always had a healthy disdain for those in power who were inclined to abuse their power, and consequently was always in favour of the underdog. This is particularly apt as, for quite some time, he was one himself.

I first encountered Mike Harding in the early 1980s, when I watched his comedy show on BBC2 (repeat it or release it on DVD BBC, okay?). I thought he was hilarious. He would tell tales of life in Australia with its lethal wildlife, the battles with English in the USA, and sing songs about posh people, men dancing with no trousers on, and nightclub Lotharios. You had to be there to understand it, but it was funny and I laughed until I cried. I had the privilege to see the man himself in concert in Brighton in 1987, and I wish he was still treading the boards.

Mike Harding is also now an acclaimed writer, and his books about walking in the Dales, the Peaks, and in the Himalayas have led him to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He is also a past Chairman of the Ramblers’ Association. There is a lot of other stuff that he has done, but I don’t have the time, space or knowledge to write about it all. I am forgetting some major things, though.

I have also forgotten what he does at the moment. If you listen to Radio 2 at 8 o’clock on a Wednesday evening, you will hear Mike’s folk music programme, which is a must in my household. He features the best in folk, acoustic and roots music, and I just adore listening to the show when my girls have gone to bed. You can also catch up on what you have missed on the Internet via the Radio 2 website. By the way, Mike’s own website is http://www.mikeharding.co.uk

Not everybody is aware that Mike Harding is also an accomplished writer of folk and acoustic songs himself. He has released albums like ‘Plutonium Alley’ and the one I am going to review here, ‘Bombers’ Moon’.

The Background
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‘Bombers’ Moon was originally released on vinyl in 1986, but was released in digital form in 2000. You can find it on the internet from Townsend Records, and it is on the Moonraker Records label. Its catalogue number is CDM 003.

Before I am going to review each track in order, I would like to quote Mike Harding’s notes from the back of the booklet in the case:

“Most of these songs are about people, ordinary people, working, making love, going to war. I don’t write about Queens or Princes or Lords or millionaire oil men because I don’t know any and, in any case, they have more than enough written about them as it is.

“Three of these songs are written by other people and I’m proud to sing them; the rest of them, for good or bad, are my own.”

That strikes me straight away as what I would call ‘anti-hype’. This is very much a CD that you will choose to own, not one you would pick up in your local HMV on the off-chance that you might like it which, in my view, is a real shame.

Well, I really had better get on and review the songs, hadn’t I?

The Songs
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Track One – God Help the Poor

“You never was one to shirk a fight
You knew what was wrong
And you knew what was right
Now you’re in the dark and they’ve turned
out the light
God Help the Poor!”

The basis for the arrangement of this song is Cajun and Tex Mex music. It is rousing and gets your attention from the very start. You can probably imagine, as well, what the tone of the lyrics is. Mike’s sleeve notes show that he is very passionate about what he believes in. He writes that he is not poor now, but he has been – penniless, unemployed and with mouths to feed at home. I have no idea of what it would have been like, and I don’t regard myself as well off. I do, however, remember the mid eighties. My dad was made redundant from the building company he worked for and my mum’s work put her on a three day week. I was only in my early teens, but I knew we were going to have a lean time of it. I totally agree with the later part of the sleeve notes:

“During the seventies it looked as thought things were getting better for everybody, then Thatcher flew in on the three o’clock broom and cardboard cities and beggars started appearing on the streets.”

It was the injustices of the 1980s, coupled with the privileges I enjoyed with a tradition grammar school education that made me an ardent socialist and devoted to comprehensive education. But enough about me. This song evokes a longing that I hadn’t had for 20 years – a longing to do my bit to throw the Conservatives out of power . Well, they have gone and I hope they never get back, but now we have to get rid of Maggie’s natural heir, Tony Blair.

Track Two – The January Man

This song was written by Dave Goulder. It is a beautiful song about the passing of the seasons, and the continuation of year after year:

And the January Man comes round again in woollen coat
and boots of leather.
To take another turn to walk along
the icy road
he knows so well.
The January Man is here
The start of each and every year
Along the road forever.

Mike Harding considers this to be one of the most perfect songs ever written. It also, in addition to describing weather through the different months, personifies each month with the attitude of people to the varying weather. I like it, I have done ever since I first heard the song in 1982.

Track Three – And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

When I was a young man
I carried a pack
And lived the free life of a rover
From the Murray’s green basin
To the dusty Outback
I waltzed my Matilda all over
And in 1915
My country said ‘Son,
‘Your roving days are over
there’s a job to be done’.
They gave me a tin hat
and they gave me a gun
And sent me away to the war.

This song was written by a Scots Australian called Eric Bogle. I have had the good fortune to see him in concert around Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, where I used to live. Even though it deals with one of Australian history’s darkest moments, the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli, it is not sung as a dirge. It is a beautiful song which deals with the horror that a young man encounters. He does his utmost to stay alive while his fellow countrymen are being blown apart around him. He does not escape unscathed, and encounters the revulsion of the people who so happily waved him off. War used to be glamorous. Some people still think it is. The ones who leave and come back damaged in some way don’t necessarily think so.

Track Four – Bombers Moon

I encountered this song for the first time on the vinyl record. I also heard Mike Harding perform it live, along with a slideshow in 1987. In 1999 I moved with my wife and unborn child to Lincolnshire, which during World War II, due to its flatness and the plethora of airbases located in the vicinity of the city of Lincoln, became known as ‘Bomber County’. We did, in fact, settle in a village located 3 miles west of RAF Scampton, which was the base of the Dam Busters Squadron.

The booklet inside the CD case features a picture that I instantly recognised – that of a Lancaster bomber over Lincoln Cathedral.

The song is on three levels, I feel. It deals with the camaraderie that existed between bomber crews on the planes. It also mentions the cynicism of the commanding officers, saying that the night will be a ‘Bombers’ Moon’, which is a night where the moon gives plenty of light to aid targeting, and which unfortunately makes the bombers easier to spot. The one thing which, to the songwriter’s credit, is also featured, is the suffering of the people who were bombed and whose lives were destroyed by the bombing. War has victims on all sides. The idea that war is just and justifiable to combat evil is, in my view, flawed, as you cannot execute a war that only damaged the evil you are fighting – the innocent will suffer.

Mike Harding’s father was a navigator on a Lancaster, and he was killed returning from a bombing raid. In the sleeve notes Mike writes that his mother became wife, widow and mother within the space of one year – that is the cost of war that some people would rather not be concentrated on.

Track Five – Good Morning, Morning

Morning breaks to the smell of bread
from bakehouse window panes
The sound of traffic growling through the towns
The rattling of the trains

Have you ever been up really early to go out and walk through a town at daybreak? I have and this song evokes the seemingly unnatural clarity that exists as everything appears to be accentuated through your senses.

After the heavy nature of the early songs, this is light and happy – just what is needed.

Track Six – A Small High Window

There’s a small high window
where the sun comes in
it falls and makes a rainbow in the
puddle on the floor

This is a song about being ‘trapped’ in a job where you are confined and restricted in your work. In the case of this song it is a steel foundry. Being locked into a prison-like job, purely because you need the wages is something that I hope I never have ot encounter. The fact that you wish you were like the bird you see, and are able to escape the hell you experience is, to my mind, something I do not want to go through.

Track Seven – Factory

Through mountains of fear
Through the mansions of pain
See my daddy walking through
The factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing
Factory takes his pride

This song was penned by Bruce Springsteen. When you hear the song, you imagine driving rain and men trudging unendingly towards their work and their eventual demise.

Track Eight – The Accrington Pals

We’re back to World War One here. In 1916 the British Army tried to encourage more and more poor souls to enlist and be sent off to be blown apart in the trenches. They set up ‘Pals’ regiments – young men who knew each other from individual towns. Accrington was the smallest town to field a full battalion of 1000 men. In the Accrington Pals, 375 were killed and 286 wounded. It was said, and I am reading from the album notes here, that there wasn’t a family in the town that hadn’t lost a father, a son or a brother.

This is a beautiful and eerie song – it starts as an evocation of freedom, of young men with not one single care in the world, lazing in fields and relaxing, then called up and sent to meet their doom. We later think of the men dying in the trenches, and later of the people who wake up in the home town to realise that their young men are not, after all, coming home.

Track Nine – Thirty Nights

I’m just sitting here in the dark
Stranger in this city
As the walls get darker
Even the whores begin to look pretty

This is pleasant and interesting song. I have been away on courses, longing to come home to my wife and daughters. You eventually become convinced that they will have changed, even if you have only been away a few weeks. This song is about being away on tour, being stuck in a place you don’t know, just desperate to go home.

The dobro playing adds a haunting aspect to the song, which I think is great.

Track Ten – These Poor Hands

I was never involved with miners. My family were builders from Kent. My wife’s Grandpa was a miner and an old soldier, having been at Monte Cassino. I also worked with a teacher who was the same age as me, thirty five, but who had worked as a miner. He had been in a pit collapse, and his dad had been in the rescue party. He also knew that, even though he was healthy now, he had got the beginnings of pneumoconiosis.

This song is for people like that. The metonymy of ‘hands’ meaning workers, and here implying that the image is just because in the eyes of the employers the hands were the useful bit. It is a horrible thing to think of. People as a commodity and raw material. I listen to this song and this idea comes to mind.

Track Eleven – Back of the Back of the Moon

Deliberately upbeat for the final track. A footpath round the back of a nightclub. Two penniless teenagers who, while having not money, are deeply in love and want to be together. Shame it isn’t really like that any more.

Conclusions
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Even though quite a few of the songs strike me as a little sombre, this is a very good CD. It is music that makes you think, even if it is a product of Thatcher’s Britain. In my view she should never be forgiven for changing the face of society the way she did. The whole north south divide and homelessness accelerated during this time.

Some of the songs are beautiful – like Bombers Moon and The January Man. Some make you think, others are happy songs about welcoming the new day. Listen to it and see what you think. You can hear snippets via Mike Harding’s website. I certainly think I have written a review that does this CD justice.

Love and Peace
Neil