For those of you in the UK the event which inspired Mark to pen the song Iron Hand is featuring strongly in the press at the moment due to the Government refusal to open a Public Inquiry into the event.
Read more here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37826507No matter where you stand on the event, the song is undoubtedly Mark's most overtly political song in which he compares the clash between Police and Miners to a battle of ancient times. Here is what MK said on the song in an interview around the time of the release of On Every Street album which the song can be found on:
MK: But it was a kind of riot, I suppose, that was a few years ago, during the miners' strike. I just happened to come home one night, and saw it on television; and I just got, er... I was shocked. And the BBC said that night that the Queen was said to be 'shocked by today's scenes', and I thought 'well I'm shocked as well'. And the cavalry...it was the cavalry, it just seemed like an old-fashioned, an ancient battle scene. And it just seemed to me that that's not the way to resolve confrontations or disputes that, er... in Britain we have a tradition of resolving those kind of things in another way. And I hope that we haven't had five hundred years of democracy for nothing. And it seemed to me to be a terrible shame to see men being damaged that way in such an ancient fashion - I mean it was medaeval. I'm not taking a left or a right view on it at all. Maybe there were some people there who wanted to 'overturn democracy', but there would have been no chance of doing that. But most of those men were miners, just ordinary coal-miners, and miners have got one of the best industrial records going - they've only been on strike two or three times in their entire history. I'm not blaming individual policemen, because if you're a policeman you do what you're told - but it just seemed to me to be a shameful situation, to charge a bunch of coal-miners like that with horses; and it was such a military, militaristic operation, these foot-soldiers with shields, and parting in the middle and these horses just coming right through the gap. There's really got to be no place in our society, it seems to me, for anything like that - end of speech
Interesting stuff and a very powerful song.
