Hugh Hodges has written extensively on African and West Indian music, poetry, and fiction, including essays on Fela Kuti, Lord Kitchener, and Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson praised his book Soon Come as “extremely engaging and an important, original scholarly work.” He currently teaches at Trent University, Ontario, where his research focuses on cultural resistance in its many forms, and his band the Red Finks remains hopelessly obscure.
The Fascist Groove Thing: A History of Thatcher’s Britain in 21 Mixtapes
SKU: 9781629638843
Author: Hugh Hodges • Preface: Dick Lucas • Foreword: Boff Whalley
Series: PM Press
ISBN: 9781629638843
Published: 2/21/23
Format: Paperback
Size: 6×9
Pages: 384
Subjects: MUSIC / Philosophy & Social Aspects • HISTORY / Great Britain
Praise
“It’s not often that reading history books works best with a soundtrack playing simultaneously, but Hugh Hodges has succeeded in evoking both the noises and the feel of a tumultuous 1980s. Proving that pop music is the historian’s friend, he has here recovered those who help us best make sense of a scary, precarious, and exciting world.”
—Matthew Worley, author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984
“Those who think the 1980s were camp and fun clearly didn’t live them. The Thatcher/Reagan era was grim as fuck. This tells the real story from the underground.”
—Ian Brennan, author of Muse-Sick and Silenced by Sound
“Written with verve, humour, and great passion for music, history and politics, The Fascist Groove Thing is a fast-paced, absorbing read. It will jog memories, entertain, and creatively engage those who survived the Thatcher years and those who weren’t yet around. Hodges not only reminds us how music can offer hope, express outrage, inspire action, or provide moments of escape in bleak, frightening times but also that some ’80s music was abysmal! Yet music can help bring people together, broaden horizons of the imagination and build solidarity and connection. And forty years later, the lyrics of Sheffield’s Heaven 17, with ‘evil men with racist views, spreading all across the land,’ seem just as relevant to ongoing struggles against today’s fascism and racism.”
—Aziz Choudry, McGill University
“Very interesting and timely indeed.”
—Anne Clark, spoken-word poet, The Smallest Act of Kindness
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- The Fascist Groove Thing
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