The Men Below

Steve Skaith / Mike Jones

Lyrics

Album, tour, albumen – you’re still picking at the shell
And you know you should be glad of the living
But it seems like a living hell sometimes
And on this playing stage you play so hard
But so much harder still – is the life beneath, down deep in the seams
Where your hotel nights are the stuff of the dreams
Of the men below

Imagine, having to fight
To work two miles down from the air and the light
And imagine, having to plead
That a job that can kill, is a job that you need

Darker blue this darkness, than a pale young miner’s eyes
Who has to see the convoy lights come shining
And can’t close off his surprise
With his one poor piece of paving, pressing hard against his palm
Knowing it might be the only way he’d ever get to spend another day
With the men below

A bingo king is calling
It must be morning time again
And every gaudy ball that gets blown out
It seems it’s numbered ‘number ten’
While on an empty bus they tried so very hard to fill up every seat
There was a method in this mad alarm
Who do you think would ever do such harm to the men below?

And who knows what we all owe
To the boys in the dust – to the men below?

Song Description

To record an album and then go on tour – that’s what keeps a band together and lets them grow. A tour is the nourishment for them, like the egg white is for a chick, before it hatches. The work on stage is hard, but much harder is the lot of the men below, the miners. They dream of the life that musicians lead. And yet the miners have to plead and fight for their jobs – like in the big strike of 1984/85, when the police gave the few, who wanted to return to their work, a police convoy to protect them.

In front of the gates the strikers stood with paving stones in their hands, knowing that force might be the only way that they could preserve their jobs. At the same time, the big newspaper proprietors were having bitter circulation wars. To that end, they all featured bingo games. But it seemed as if every gaudy ball had the number ten on it, like 10 Downing Street, official residence of Margaret Thatcher. Because all the big newspapers at the time supported the Government against the miners. There was a method in the virulent articles – who would want to do the miners such harm? And who knows, how much we all owe them?