Labour & Pop Culture: Back on the Chain Gang

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Back on the Chain Gang” by the Pretenders. 

The title of the song, the images in the video, and a cursory reading of the lyrics suggests it is about forced labour (whether is be prisoners labouring in factories or factory workers labouring in prisons). For example:

Put us back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang 

The powers that be
That force us to live like we do
Bring me to my knees
When I see what they've done to you

However, the title is more metaphorical. The song is actually about the Pretenders guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott. He died of a drug overdose in 1982, about a month before the band recorded this song. That context suggest the lyrics casts the song in a different light. For example, the opening verse speaks to the band’s shock but resolve to continue playing;

I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh
What hijacked my world that night
To a place in the past
We've been cast out of? Oh oh oh oh
Now we're back in the fight
We're back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

Framing music as working on a “chain gang” suggests that perhaps the nature of the work is at least partly responsible for Honeyman-Scott’s death:

The powers that be
That force us to live like we do
Bring me to my knees
When I see what they've done to you

Certainly many workers will easily relate to this sentiment, as they sacrifice their happiness or health in order to learn a living, often against their will. This verse also suggests that there will be a reckoning at some point:

But I'll die as I stand here today
Knowing that deep in my heart
They'll fall to ruin one day
For making us part

While the notion of judgment (or karma or some other mechanism) that evens things out in the end is a popular one, there is troublingly little evidence that the powerful ever pay for their exploitation of others. Which is, of course, one of the reasons they continue to act this way.



I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh
What hijacked my world that night
To a place in the past
We've been cast out of? Oh oh oh oh
Now we're back in the fight
We're back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

A circumstance beyond our control, oh oh oh oh
The phone, the TV and the news of the world
Got in the house like a pigeon from hell, oh oh oh oh
Threw sand in our eyes and descended like flies
Put us back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

The powers that be
That force us to live like we do
Bring me to my knees
When I see what they've done to you
But I'll die as I stand here today
Knowing that deep in my heart
They'll fall to ruin one day
For making us part

I found a picture of you, oh oh oh oh
Those were the happiest days of my life
Like a break in the battle was your part, oh oh oh oh
In the wretched life of a lonely heart
Now we're back on the train
Oh, back on the chain gang

-- Bob Barnetson