No surprise that Margaret Thatcher is proving to be as controversial and divisive in death as in life. Amid the stushie about the recall of Parliament, the lengthy tributes and the expensive funeral, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is riding high in the charts.
When the BBC airs a clip of the track on Sunday during the official chart show, it’s likely to be preceded by a Newsbeat reporter explaining to the teens and 20s audience why a 74-year-old song is suddenly charting. While they’re at it, they should probably explain who Margaret Thatcher is.
Since her death was announced, many of us have been recalling the huge number of songs that Thatcherism inspired during the 1980s. The Beat’s Stand Down Margaret, Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding and Tramp the Dirt Down, Morrissey’s Margaret on the Guillotine, Hue & Cry’s Labour of Love, The Proclaimers’ Letter From America are just a few. Three decades on, Glasgow boy, Bobby Gillespie, is singing about ‘Thatcher’s children’ in Primal Scream’s latest single, 2013.
The Facebook campaign to have Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead charting may seem puerile, but I’m sure the original songwriter would have approved. The lyrics to this and all the songs in The Wizard of Oz, were written by Yip Harburg.
Born into a Russian Jewish family in New York’s Lower East Side, his real name was Isidore, but he was known as Yipsel (shortened to Yip), because that’s how people pronounced YPSL - the Young People’s Socialist League, of which he was a member.
A success on Broadway as well as in Hollywood, he wrote musicals with a strong seam of political satire and social messages, including Finian’s Rainbow and another about women’s rights. A lefty all his life, he was a victim of the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s, which ended his career in the movies, although he continued to write for Broadway.
So, if you hear Ding Dong The Witch is Dead on the radio this weekend, you may want to raise a glass to the writer rather than the witch.
Edwyn Collins was a hero of many pop fans during the 1980s, and is an even bigger hero now, still going strong, having recovered from a stroke a few years ago. He’s back with a new album, Understated, a brilliant single, Dilemma, and he’s on the road again, playing Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree on Monday, Strathpeffer Pavilion on Wednesday and Glasgow’s O2 ABC on Thursday. Some of the English dates have sold out already, so book those tickets soon.
This week I met another inspiring performer who is recovering from a stroke, New Yorker, Peggy Shaw, who explored what had happened to her brain in her show, Ruff, at the Behaviour Festival in Glasgow. Her show is over, but the festival of cutting-edge, live performance continues at the Arches and in unexpected places all over the city until the 29th of April.
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