complicated.

Do we know what Peter Bellamy's politics were? We all know of his father's allegiances - or are they just rumours too? I guess we'll have to wait for the biography, which in any case would make as fascinating a read as Ewan MacColl's I'm sure, even though his life was tragically cut short at the tender age of 46. In the songs he sang - be they traditional, Kipling or from his own pen - Pete Bellamy bore testimony to a persuasive sort of humanism perhaps best summed up in Kipling's A Pilgrim's Way. I've heard that song described a by some as a Socialist Hymn - probably the same ones who invariably assume The Land is a call to the English peasantry to rise up against their oppressors and take back what is rightfully theirs! It is, of course, no such thing, but, like Gungadin, would acknowledge an essential individual humanity in the midst of what might be otherwise considered a circumstance of functional inevitability - be it the historical continuity of feudalism - or yet of war. In other words, like Kipling, I think Peter Bellamy's politics were painted with a very small brush indeed, using a vast palette of subtle shades - unlike the broad paint-roller strokes of Ewan MacColl for whom the world was red or blue and the individual was of lesser consequence than the cause of righteous ideology. How else might we account for so divisive a work as Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike? which even at this distance puts shivers down my spine. Complicated? Well, certainly not in Ewan's view of things, who might reduce the struggles & sufferings of human lives to so simplistic, and potentially lethal, a polemical equation.