C90: Margaret Thatcher

"Margaret on the guillotine" - Morrissey
"The day that Thatcher dies" - Hefner

(Mind you, the songs don't necessarily need to be hate songs, though I have a feeling it might be hard to find Thatcher tributes.)

BTW If you want to find a tribute to Thatcher, then I seem to remember that upon the Iron Lady getting the order of the boot from her own party, Jonathan King rushed out a really terrible cover of that "I can't Let Maggie Go" tune that appeared on all those "Nimble" ads in the 1970s!!!! I also remember some documentary in the 80s about the Conservative PR tactics, and dropped in on some of their "showbiz" dos, which included a godawful tune called "Maggie's For Me!!!" done by one of those sort of vocalists that turned up as a guest on Val Doonican shows and suchlike!!!!!!

"We'll all have a party when youre gone, desecrate your grave and sing this song..."

Belle & Sebastian - Shoot The Sexual Athlete ("Even the sods trampled underfoot by Thatcher could appreciate their love")

Extraordinarily enough it was actually called "Stand Down Margaret"

Extraordinarily enough it was actually called "Stand Down Margaret"

Also, didn't U2 do some live "cover" of Dylan's "Maggie's Farm", with bits of Thatcher tapes in the background?!?!?

if you're allowing songs about her policies / actions / values, you couldn't leave out "Shopping" by the Pet Shop Boys, surely?

No they were in their schoolboy aesthete phase then, the red-faced ideologue phase followed later

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah for homework questions.

A tinny, 'jaunty' old cabaret piano strikes up and:
"Who do we want?
Who do we neeeed?
Who is the leader who really can lead?
Maggie Thatcher...
It's Maggie for me [...]
THATCHER THATCHER THATCHER NOT A MAN AROUND TO MATCH HER!"

Need I really add anything?

Oh, and Bragg: "Ideology" very much implicitly mentions her - "When one voice rules the nation/Just because they're top of the pile..."

Roy Harper: well, more of a Blair song actually, but his fairly recent "The Monster" draws the Blair/Thatcher link with the choice line: "same old hand... bag at the helm".

Pink Floyd (well Waters frankly): "The Post War Dream" is the main one from "The Final Cut", with an explicit criticism of Thatcher. I must admit I like that album - I know it is maudlin and a trifle agitprop at times, but it does strike me as heartfelt.

songs that can be / have been mistakenly interpreted to be about Thatcher - arch example: The Dream Academy's "Life In A Northern Town", supposedly actually about Nick Drake and a Warwickshire village, but inevitably taking on another meaning in the political context of spring 1985, after Scargill's defeat and before Kinnock's "change or die" speech (and they were asking for it with the "all the work shut down" line, surely).

songs which sounded good in the context of her downfall - PSB's "So Hard" and "Jealousy", the flipside of "Actually".

songs that inadvertently fitted with her and specifically her relationship to an earlier generation in the Tory party: Erasure's "Sometimes" and Alison Moyet's "Is This Love", the two songs by people from Basildon - Thatcher's heartland, and all that - which were in the Top 10 the week Harold Macmillan died, and Genesis' "Land of Confusion", also charting that week at the end of 1986 - lapsed public schoolboys with a title which summed up the position that Tories of Macmillan's ilk found themselves in at the height of Thatcherism.

of course McCartney's knighthood came in the last Tory honours list (New Year 1997), which I remain convinced was a spoiler - Major knew that Blair would be taking over from him, and he'd probably got wind that Blair intended to reinforce the sense of a continuum with the Wilson government, and the MBEs it gave the Beatles in 1965, by knighting McCartney. thankfully the 1995 rumours that the Major government would give knighthoods to *all* the surviving Beatles (Sir Ringo would have been ridiculous, IMHO), doubtless another doomed attempt at Blair-spoiling, never came to anything.

I'd recommend "The Game", which has a Thatcher impersonator bitching about how raucous Tackhead is, if the song itself wasn't so incredibly embarrassing compared to the other stuff they did around the time.

"Are 'Friends' Electric?" was a couple of months later.

and everything else they recorded in the 1980s, obliquely at least.