exactly. That is why you can see in the work of Tommy Armstrong the spectrum which runs from songs of tragedy to the dark humour of evictions to nan and her spree.....
You get angry with the bosses and the beurocrats but you leave those having a good time in their own way alone.
That is not what we see today. This is largely due to the empowerment of the middle class. The middle class looks down on all tradational forms of exuberance from life in the exuberant pubs to football suporter culture to bonfire. They are too busy trying to become bosses! And masters!
The geordies are the cowboys of the region. The ones now targeted as causing all that is wrong where in reality their lifeway is all that we have to keep us going despite the wrongs of the world.
In Baltimore you get rid of the cowboys by charging $5.00 for a beer and not selling it in pitchers. Because you can no longer discriminate against race or ethnicity you discriminate against cultural tendencies.
This is why at the school where I worked for most of the past year no one socializes after work. Because....If anyone knew of your exuberant side or that you drink you would not have a job.
We must keep in mind however that our terms such as Geordie are not much more than ice tongs grabbing into the big block of the culture writ large. Just pincers that can only do so much for us.
The songs are best when preserved and sung- their use is in creative re-use the activities they describe help us to give value to the activities we see around us and to give them glory and tolerance as they add to life the same color they are given in the song. Even if they may have never existed they are damn good ideas.....
Point as some would at the negative aspects of an exuberant lifestyle on the edge one can find just as many faults in the conservative lifeway of cultural issolation and discrimination found within the lives of our newly empowered middle class cultureless sterile cultures of suburbias.