"We Work the Black Seam" is a protest song recorded by British musician Sting for his 1985 debut solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles, on which it is the longest track. Its lyrics express the position of the British coal miners who had been on strike during the year prior to the album's release, addressed to the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They tell of the miners' deep attachment to their work and its importance to the country's economy and culture, alluding to William Blake's poem "And did those feet in ancient time", while criticising Thatcher's economic policies, particularly the effort to shift from coal to nuclear power as Britain's primary source of energy.
Sting was moved to write the song by his own youth in Northumberland, outside Newcastle, where many communities depended economically on mining. He felt no one during the strike had made the case for continued coal use and the dangers posed by nuclear power. His father had worked in shipbuilding, another industry that had once dominated the British economy but had been diminishing in importance in the later 20th century. He drew the melody line from a song he had co-written and recorded as a member of the mid-1970s British jazz band Last Exit. It was released as a single in Germany, Australia and New Zealand; a live version was filmed the following year for Bring on the Night and its soundtrack album. Sting re-recorded it with a different arrangement in 1993 for Ten Summoner's Tales and then adapted it for symphony orchestra on 2010's Symphonicities.
Critics generally liked the song, at least musically. They have noted in particular how its insistent, repetitive synthesizer figure and unchanging backing percussion rhythm suggest a contrast between machinery and the humanity represented by Sting's vocal and Branford Marsalis's soprano saxophone fills. It also has been seen as an evolution in Sting's protest music, the first time he devoted a song to environmental issues. The lyrics drew a mixed reaction; scientists have criticised the song for its inaccurate statement that carbon-14 is dangerously radioactive, when in fact it is a widespread product of natural decay that is harmless in those quantities and instead used for carbon dating. Three decades after its release, Sting said he had revised his opinion of nuclear energy in response to climate change and now saw it more favourably.
Economic, political and social context
When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the victory of her Conservative Party in the 1979 elections, one of her goals was to add to Britain's nuclear power generating capacity. She had been impressed by France's Messmer plan, enacted in response to the 1973 oil crisis. It had led to the construction of 58 new reactors in the late 1970s, making France less dependent on foreign oil imports and eliminating the use of coal, a result also achieved in neighbouring Belgium. Britain, by contrast, had pioneered the use of commercial nuclear power in the 1950s but since then had lagged behind, with its useful reactors ageing into obsolescence while newer projects like Dungeness B became national embarrassments as construction costs and delays escalated. A second oil shock later that year underscored the urgency. In October of that year, Secretary of State for Energy David Howell announced to Parliament the government's plan to add 15 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity by building roughly one new reactor every year for 10 years. Thatcher echoed this announcement two months later with firmer details of a program.
The Tories also had a political reason to embrace nuclear power. Their previous government had been defeated in an election held during a wintertime strike by coal miners, who worked at the nationalised mines run by the National Coal Board (NCB). Two years earlier, Prime Minister Edward Heath's government had increased miners' pay after another miners' strike, and this time the government was less willing to negotiate, making the election a referendum on the strike under the slogan "Who governs Britain?". The electorate answered that challenge by returning the opposition Labour Party, more closely allied with the National Union of Miners (NUM), to power.
Many of the Conservatives who entered the party's leadership, including Thatcher, never forgot what they considered a humiliating defeat by NUM and Arthur Scargill, a regional union leader in Yorkshire where the largest group of miners were concentrated, whose use of mobile flying pickets had secured the union's victory. They credited public discontent with British unions fostered by the Winter of Discontent, several weeks of strikes by unions representing hauliers, garbage workers, gravediggers and other government workers aggravated by severe winter weather that combined to nearly paralyze the country, with their electoral victory. As a result, they broke with previous Conservative governments in embracing more explicitly libertarian free-market economic theories that became known as Thatcherism. One element was that unions could not be allowed to exercise such control over the British economy as they had been, or had been perceived as doing, under governments of both parties since World War II.
British coal mining, which had once powered the Industrial Revolution and made mine owners and operators wealthy at the expense of the miners who risked their lives doing dirty and dangerous work that had led to unionisation and widespread labour unrest earlier in the 20th century, had declined considerably by the early 1980s. The total number of miners had declined by 80 per cent from those earlier eras, many of the richer and more accessible coal seams had been depleted and only government subsidies kept mining profitable. Many pits remained open as Scargill and NUM had vowed to fight any closures for any reasons but safety.
In 1981, the government proposed closing 20 pits but backed down after union opposition and the threat of another strike. The following year, Scargill was elected NUM's president on the strength of his promise to oppose any closures unless the pit was unsafe or exhausted. The government responded in 1983 by appointing Sir Ian McGregor to head the NCB following his tenure at British Steel, where he had made redundant 95,000 jobs in the course of making it profitable enough to be privatised. He proposed closing the same 20 pits, which Scargill attacked as intended more to break the union than improve the NCB's books.
Despite having dropped its planned closures in 1981 in the face of a strike threat, the government was actively preparing for the eventuality of another. Following the Ridley Plan, drawn up by Nicholas Ridley, another Conservative MP convinced that a Tory government had to win a national strike to control unions for the benefit of the economy, it had stockpiled coal at power stations and prepared to bring closed oil-fired plants back online. Nuclear power, though limited at the time, was part of the plan. Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, another strong Thatcherite, saw it as "the means of emancipation from Arthur Scargill."
In March 1984 miners at a South Yorkshire pit walked off the job over closures and called for a national strike, a call echoed by Scargill but not fully implemented by all regions due to the lack of a unionwide vote. Coal use declined by a third during the strike; nuclear power helped make up the difference. Almost a year later, the strike ended with the miners having gained nothing. Pit closures began soon afterwards.
Composition
Sting combined a melody line from a song he had recorded a decade earlier with lyrics about the miners' strike, which was ongoing as he wrote, recorded and mixed the song for The Dream of the Blue Turtles sessions at Blue Wave, Eddy Grant's studio in Barbados, and Le Studio in Quebec north of Montreal.
In a New Musical Express (NME) interview at the time of The Dream of the Blue Turtles was released, Sting discussed the background of the song. In his native Wallsend, outside the city of Newcastle in North East England, boys who did not finish grammar school had the choice of working at the Swan Hunter shipyard where his father had worked, or in the Rising Sun coal pit outside town, if they wanted to remain in the area and earn a living wage. Before his musical career, Sting taught in a Northumberland village where "all the children's fathers were miners. The area I was brought up in was literally built on coal."
By then, both the pit and the shipyard had been closed. "There are 300 years of coal supplies left, and they're closing all these pits", he lamented. "And I frankly think the government has got its head up its arse. They're destroying communities that are culturally very rich [and] offering them no alternative, saying you're completely useless."
Sting was also critical of the government's plan to replace coal with nuclear power, pointing to the Hartlepool nuclear plant outside Middlesbrough, south of Wallsend, which required uranium imports from South Africa to function. He had once supported nuclear power himself, but then said that he changed his mind when he learned more about it. "Those machines were turned on 20 years ago and they don't know how to turn them off. Now they're falling to bits and they don't know how to repair them. It's frightening." Sting also said friends who work in the nuclear industry "telephone me occasionally with horror stories about how dangerous and inept the whole system is."
"Also I felt that during the miners' strike", Sting continued, "the case for coal was never put to the nation. Kinnock didn't explain it, Arthur Scargill didn't even address it, it was complete personality rhetoric with Thatcher. And the case for coal is really strong." Ultimately, he said:
Music
"We Work the Black Seam" is in at a tempo of 120 beats per minute, opening in the key of A minor. Initially it follows a chord progression of Am-C-Em7, a i-III-v progression that alternates with Am-F-Dm7 (i-VI-iv), throughout the verse. At the chorus, the synthesizer changes to playing just the background chords as the song modulates to the key of F, with the progression F-C-D-a, repeated three times in full. On the fourth, the progression stops at D on the words "carbon fourteen", after which the bass and synthesizer play a scale descending from F to A, facilitating the return to A minor for the song's title to be sung twice before the next verse.
The song fades in with a repeating six-note keyboard figure in a vibraphone-like voice in open fourths and fifths, played on the downbeats, that critic Jon Pareles likened to "the clang of picks". Christopher Gable, author of The Words and Music of Sting, traces the use of the open fourths and fifths to English folk music. Behind it is a percussion track consisting of three eighth notes on a bass drum surrounding beat two and a snare hit on beat four, both of which remain consistent throughout the entire song. Gable sees this as, along with the song's fading in and then out and the end, suggesting a factory in continuous production, creating tension between the humanity of the melody and the rigid backing track that accentuates the theme of the lyrics. Paul Carr similarly notes this "appears to be deliberately 'industrial', automated, with a mechanised avoidance of feeling." He finds it complemented by the horns during the choruses, evoking the colliery bands in most British mining communities.