Memory of the Month: 'Hard Times' in Thatcher's Britain

In the September 1982 issue of The Face, THE UK style magazine of the '80s, journalist Robert Elms wrote a feature entitled "Hard Times: The New Young Soul Rebels". You can find it in NightFever, an anthology (published in 1997) of The Face's pieces on the 'club scene' (a term the magazine if not coined, made into common currency). Beyond a few music journalists, musicians, and music obsessives with long memories, the 'Hard Times' article and the short-lived, but surprisingly influential 'Hard Times' movement Elms championed are long forgotten. So, what's the skinny?

In a nutshell, 'Hard Times' was about listening to Soul music from the late '60s/early '70s with a political edge (Curtis Mayfield, Gil Scott-Heron), as well as early '80s black music with similar sentiments (the original version of 'Money's Too Tight to Mention' by the Valentine Brothers, 'Cash Money' by Prince Charles & The City Beat Band and 'Drop the Bomb' by Trouble Funk being prime examples, along with, a little later, 'Ain't no rockin' in a Police State' by Black Britain). You would listen to this music while out enjoying yourself clubbing in Soho, however, to express your solidarity with the 3 million unemployed elsewhere in Thatcher's Britain, you would wear stylised versions of workwear, ripped Levi's 501s and sleeveless leather jackets.

It sounds laughable, and it was. The excellent website, My Cassette's Just like a Bazooka?, which gathers details of all the cassettes given away free by the NME in the 1980s, includes some choice analysis of 'Hard Times' and its malign influence. Music critic Simon Reynolds devoted about a quarter of his first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, to shooting down the theories of Soul as the music of resistance, propagated by the likes of Elms and Paolo Hewitt in the early-mid '80s. 'Hard Times' was one aspect of this wider trend (which Reynolds dubbed 'Soulcialism') and its influence could be seen everywhere from Simply Red's cover of 'Money's Too Tight..' (their first hit) to Bros's ripped jeans. Thankfully, the rave scene and the alternative rock revival of the late '80s/early '90s killed all that stuff stone dead. But, it did have its moments, as this live version of 'Cash Money', complete with Princess Di lookalike, illustrates. Dance before they drop the Bomb!