Songs Inspired by the First World War

This feature first appeared in an abbreviated form in The Independent (12/7/14)

Previewing the 1964 Proms, which included a short programme of compositions marking the 50th anniversary of the First World War, The Times observed that “the actual quantity of music inspired by the 1914–18 War is small, and its language has little meaning for us today.” Survivors were understandably only too keen to forget the abject horror of the conflict. No one wanted to remember it with music.

The turning point was the stage show Oh, What a Lovely War, which had premiered the previous year. The idea of transforming a 1961 radio documentary into a musical was initially unpopular with the radical producer Joan Littlewood, who detested anything to do with the military. Nevertheless her production, and the 1969 film adaptation, chimed with a younger, more critically-inclined generation, ready to review what they knew about the war their grandparents had fought in. Books and TV documentaries soon followed and inevitably the First World War – “the stupidest event in history”, as Randy Newman put it – seeped into popular culture.

The Zombies’ nerve-jangling Butchers Tale (Western Front 1914), recorded in 1967, was ostensibly the first rock song about the Great War. The most experimental outing from the group who hit big with “She’s Not There”, in an ill-advised move it was selected as the first single from the band’s Odessey & Oracle. “Nobody could make out what the words were,” said band member and songwriter, Chris White. “They’re all place names on the Western Front: Gommecourt, Thiepval, Mametz Wood.

What must be pop’s highest-grossing song about the war was released in the early Nineties. All Together Now, by the Farm, took its cue from an event that occurred early in the Great War and was quickly mythologised. That first Christmas, soldiers on both sides of the Western Front lay down their weapons and scrambled over no man’s land, shook hands and swapped addresses – before returning to their respective trenches to resume the shelling and slaughter. “I had been fascinated by the spontaneous unofficial truce during Christmas 1914,” says the Farm’s Peter Hooton. “But it wasn’t until Michael Foot was criticised for his attire at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday in the 1980s that I wrote the lyrics, mainly out of anger at his treatment by elements of the media.”

The result was No Man’s Land, in which Hooton referenced “Lord Kitchener addressing Parliament about the lack of fighting on the Western Front after the truce”. It was good, but it was too long and lacked a hook. “Our producer, Suggs, decided three verses were better for a single, so three verses were cut from the song without it losing its central theme of unity,” Hooton says. Co-writer Steve Grimes brought in the “all together now” chorus that became the song’s final title. “It was during the Ibiza ’90 period so it seemed like a perfect fit,” says Hooton. 

The Christmas truce also inspired the video to Paul McCartney’s single Pipes of Peace – although lyrically Macca’s hit is a tenuous comment on the First World War. It’s really just about, well, peace.

It has arguably been folk’s radical edge that’s provided the most moving and critical musical comment on the First World War. When folk singer June Tabor wandered into a Somerset pub and heard Jane Herivel singing Eric Bogle’s 1971 ballad about Gallipoli, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, it was an epiphanic moment. Herivel had learned the song from Bogle himself but Tabor made it her own. Its heartrending refrain has been widely covered, notably by the Pogues.

In the early Seventies the folk songwriter Bill Caddick, echoing The Times music critic from 1963, commented that “the First World War marked an end of an era because no end of songs and dances died out during the war and the years leading up to it. However, few songs have been written about that era.” Gradually, that has changed. Now, as part of the centenary of the war, the Imperial War Museum has been collaborating on The Ballads of the Great War, five hour-long radio programmes which will comprise “hard-hitting but lyrical accounts of life and death on the Western Front in words and music” and feature specially commissioned songs by folk luminaries such as Seth Lakeman, Billy Bragg and Julie Matthews. Each ballad will tell the story of the war in the words of the people who fought it. It’s due to be broadcast by BBC Radio 2 annually over five years, one each November.

Eight more great songs about the First World War

Paschendale

Iron Maiden (2003)

Prog-metal cruncher by guitarist Adrian Smith about drowning in the mud at the Third Battle of Ypres, otherwise known as Passchendaele.

Some Mother’s Son

The Kinks (1969)

From Arthur, Or the Rise and Fall of the British Empire, the soundtrack to an abandoned Granada TV drama.

Poppy Day

Siouxsie and the Banshees (1979)

Siouxsie’s shattered, spectral reading of John McCrae’s 1919 poem In Flanders Fields reverberates through the solid air like the voices of the dead themselves.

Harry Patch (in Memory of)

Radiohead (2009)

Written by Thom Yorke after hearing an interview with the last surviving soldier to have fought in the First World War trenches. “The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me,” Yorke reported.

The Green Fields of France

Eric Bogle (1976)

Covered by many, including the Men They Couldn't Hang.

On Battleship Hill

P.J. Harvey (2011)

From the beautiful and brutal Let England Shake. "One of the Conflicts that affected me a great deal was the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War," said Harvey.

1916

Motorhead (1991)

Lemmy’s moving funereal march, recounts the fate of a teenage soldier who added two years to his age and went off to fight at the Somme. 

Going Home

Randy Newman (1999)

Poignant waltz about a WWI soldier, first demoed in the late Seventies as “Going Home (1918)”.