“Thatcher Fucked the Kids,” Frank Turner (2006)
The novel tracks the intimate, complicated friendship of bezzy mates Rach, Kel, and Shaz, who happen to share a birth place (Doncaster, South Yorkshire) and time (late eighties) with me, the author. Imagine that. Born into Thatcher’s Britain, we were too young to remember her time in office but raised on the legacy of the mid-eighties miners’ strikes, grew up in the aftermath of the Tory government’s pit closures, which created enduring poverty and unemployment in areas like ours. As Shaz says, we were raised to hate Thatcher, “every cell of her.” Shaz talks of men who still have “anger in every follicle, every fleck of skin.” A desultory malevolence seemed to permeate my childhood. I tried to get that feeling into the book. This song draws that causal link, in broad strokes, between Thatcherite ideology—“there’s no such thing as society”—and the post-Thatcher youth becoming “a violent bunch of bastard little shits.”
“Things Can Only Get Better,” D:Ream (1993)
Labour’s campaign song for the 1997 election. Landslide victory after eighteen years of Tory rule. Back then it sounded naff, but hopeful. It possibly, to my ten-year-old ears, sounded true.
“Dancing in the Moonlight,” Toploader (2000)
Shaz has her first snog to this song at the Doncaster Dome’s ice-skating disco.
“From the Ritz to the Rubble,” Arctic Monkeys (2006)
I didn’t rate the Arctic Monkeys during their initial rise to fame: an album about going out drinking in South Yorkshire, when I spent most of my energies going out drinking in South Yorkshire, didn’t seem particularly revelatory. So what if Alex Turner sang in a Yorkshire accent, used dialect in his lyrics? Everyone I knew spoke that way. I didn’t understand that fans across the world were learning terms like “mardy bum” from this record. I didn’t appreciate the brilliance of rhyming “scary un” with “totalitarian,” as Turner does in this song. This album is the musical, male-perspective counterpart of the moments in the novel when the girls encounter all the essentials of a good old South Yorkshire night out: recalcitrant bouncers, greasy takeaways, lads on the pull, lasses in the scantiest clobber no matter the weather, and the inevitable two a.m. taxi-queue punch up.
“Children of the Night,” Nakatomi (1996)
Of all the gloriously cheesy ’90s Euro-dance that scored my childhood, “Children of the Night” is first among equals. Rach, Shaz, and Kel bop to it at a birthday party, dancing sassily and vigorously to prove to a bigger lass that they’re not scared of her. Googling during copy edits, I learned of a unique relationship between this Dutch happy hardcore track and my chilly northern English town: according to the local press, “the song failed to chart nationally on its initial release—but ravers in Doncaster lapped the song up, filling dancefloors at local clubs as DJs struggled to cope with the demand.” So, there was I, jumping feverishly in the community centre disco with all the other Doncaster children, earnestly pledging to live my life “like a rave machine,” no idea that the rest of England were oblivious to the delights of this absolute tune.
“Spice up Your Life,” Spice Girls (1997)
Rach tells us: “Like every nineties lass, we all had a designated Spice Girl. Shaz wa always Baby, Kel wa always Sporty, and I wa always Posh.”
“Donny Hardcore,” The Uninvited (c. 2005)
Only available on a handful of Google drives, MySpace if it still functions, and a dozen CDs currently languishing in a storage unit in Austin, Texas, this was the signature song of a band I used to play bass in. They wrote it before I joined, so I take no credit. It’s about the blokes in “Donny” Doncaster who liked to aggress gothy weirdos like us, and anyone they deemed an easy target. The song reminds me of Denby, a cocksure vigilante who assaults a vulnerable woman midway through the novel: “We are the foul abusive pissed-up scum / We are the menace, the disease that rules your streets … We are everlasting / We can’t be stopped, we can’t be fucking stopped.” You’ll have to take my word for it, but it’s a banger, even now.
“Europe is Lost,” Kae Tempest (2016)
A lost, deflated, defeated generation trying to forget themselves in hedonistic pursuits while the systems around them crumble. Tempest covered everything I’d want to convey in the novel’s post-Brexit sections, but with far greater precision, nearly a decade ago, and in under six minutes.
“Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum),” The Cheeky Girls (2003)
While Kel attempts to connect with her family by committing minor criminal damage, her fella’s wanky mate Cleggy, who wasn’t even invited, by the way, won’t stop whistling this song.
“Beasley Street,” John Cooper Clarke (1980)
“People turn to poison / Quick as lager turns to piss / Sweethearts are physically sick / Every time they kiss.” Kel remembers these lines every time she smells the streets.
“She Likes a Boy,” Nxdia (2024)
Young queer independent Northern artist. Poppy, angsty teenage sapphic longing for the novel’s undercurrent—and brief overcurrent—of angsty teenage sapphic longing.
“Pretty Piece of Flesh,” One Inch Punch (1996)
Nine Inch Nails-style industrial rock and a braggadocio rap that directly quotes Shakespeare? A combination only the nineties could produce. In the opening scene of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the Montague “boys” pull up at a gas station in their yellow convertible, their unbuttoned bold-print shirts flapping. This track thumps from the stereo; the boys sing the lyrics suggestively at a van of nuns—“I am, a pretty piece of flesh, I am”—a provocation that culminates in the pink-haired Montague licking his own nipple. This film inspires the girls to take part in their school’s drama showcase (this and the threat of after-school detention). I struggled with the novel’s title for years; everything I tried seemed voiced by someone else, and I wanted the girls to introduce themselves. Eventually I thought of this song, the way Shakespeare’s words seemed to belong to Luhrmann’s miscreant punk youths. In the play, this brag of Sampson’s is the final flourish in a boast about his intentions for the Capulet women: “I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads … or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.” The casual violence of it, a rape threat thrown in as a piece of saucy innuendo, told me this was the place to dig for a title. I played around until I landed on the “We” that made the line feel like it belonged to Kel, Shaz, and Rach.
“Troubles (acoustic),” Ren (2024)
Ren’s music captures the cycles of rage, despair, grief, and hope endemic to the experience of living with a misunderstood, under-funded, under-treated, stigmatised chronic illness. In “Troubles” he narrates the bed-bound years of his illness, the psychological toll of trying to exist in a body gripped by overwhelming, unrelenting, annihilating fatigue. Whenever I need a good cry, I watch the acoustic version on YouTube for the raw emotion of his performance. In the novel, the character who falls ill is only at the beginning of this experience; she’s unaware just how much destruction is to come. I still feel guilty for giving her my disease.
“More than a Friend,” Girli (2021)
For the novel’s brief sapphic overcurrent: Is she my best friend or do I love her? I don’t know, but let’s get shit faced and take off all our clothes…
“Common People – Full Length Version,” Pulp (1995)
“If any song wa South Yorkshire’s national anthem, it wa thissun,” Shaz tells us in the last chapter, as the whole pub throngs onto the dancefloor at the sound of the opening notes. Jarvis Cocker is explaining to a rich girl he meets down south how to act common: “Rent a flat above a shop / Cut your hair and get a job / Smoke some fags and play some pool / Pretend you never went to school.” While it’s not explicitly about South Yorkshire, Pulp are from Sheffield, and the northernness of Cocker’s voice is unmistakable, as is the implicit north/south divide so often lying latent in conversations about class in Britain. The rich girl doesn’t get it; she’s too protected by her money. Cocker tells her: “You’ll never fail like common people / Never watch your life slide out of view / And then dance, and drink, and screw / Because there’s nothing else to do.” It’s the third verse that always gets me, cut from the radio edit and thus slightly lesser known: “You will never understand / What it means to live your life / With no meaning or control / And with nowhere left to go / You are amazed that they exist / And they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why.”
“Bedshaped,” Keane (2004)
An early noughties zine dedicated to the Doncaster music scene, printed on pale blue A4, hand stapled and stacked in the beer-sticky nooks of pub venues, had a regular segment called “Keane Korner,” which chronicled the exploits of the band Keane, who are—I can’t stress this enough—not from Doncaster. I used to put “Bedshaped” on the jukebox when I played pool in the Red Bear with my mate Squiff. I returned to it when working on the novel’s final scene. A sweet, soaring melody, an enduring bitterness: it’s nostalgic and cynical, resentful and hopeful, apt for two old friends talking after a major rupture, trying to figure out if they have a future, or if they need to leave each other in the past.
“Axel F,” Crazy Frog (2005)