Why coal and steel still?

I like to write songs about Uz (as the great Leeds poet Tony Harrison has expressed it) by which I think I mean my sense of living in an ever-changing dynamic set of communities and criss-crossing identities labelled for the moment ‘South Yorkshire.’ I am aware how loose and tenuous such a thing can sound, and how subjective my own experience has been. I wouldn’t want to be seen as so arrogant as to be spouting opinions on behalf of anyone other than myself, but we in this part of the world have over the decades of my lifetime shared at least a few common experiences, and what I try to do is simply what I invite everyone else to do – make the best song you can out of it. As an individual I am completely commonplace and uninteresting but when I see myself as a member of some community or other, buffeted, bruised, shaped and re-shaped by historical events and knaveries, I get a better glimpse of the way I think it has been, and the way I think it feels, and ways in which I might be able to deploy my limited musical resources to make a few snapshots. These communities have been threaded through by coal and steel beyond all living memory. That needs singing about. Even now as we are moving away from the past which has defined us towards a future that will inevitably re-define us, at a time when coal and steel mean little to our young, I still feel an urgency to celebrate the hugeness of what it all meant, and of the contributions made to the common good by so many unsung people. Individuals need to come to terms with their pasts in order to move on healthily. I might be wrong but I think it’s the same with communities.