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The Underworld

We talk about Knopfler’s song, Lewis’s book, and Hodges’s film and say that all of them expose the underworld of England. Underworld, underbelly, underground – we have long feared and detested what is “under” – mines, sewers, coffins, lowlife. In a 1963 interview with Studs Terkel, Alan Lomax talked about Lucania, the great dark territory south of Naples. He mentioned Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir by Carl Levi, in which, Lomax said, Levi wrote about that “black, demon ridden, starvation haunted country.” Lomax called it the most terrifying area in western Europe.” As if to prove this, he summarized that terror by telling Terkel, “people live in holes in the ground.”

When Knopfler sings about mining, he’s part of a long tradition. His song, “5:15 a.m.,” has many musical antecedents, as does the album on which it appears. In interviews about the album, Knopfler acknowledged some of those antecedents, citing the range of characters – fishermen, conmen, showmen, musicians, thieves – and crediting his early influences, The Shadows and Lonnie Donegan. Some of the song’s musical forebears are gambling songs, including (likely) Donegan’s “Gamblin’ Man” and old versions of “Stagolee,” but surely more are mining songs – songs by Hazel Dickens, Kate Rusby, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Jean Ritchie and others.

Image Courtesy Wikimedia

I’m not sure what significance 1867 carries in Knopfler’s song, except that it marks one precise century away from 1967, the year of Sibbet’s murder. Certainly someone, somewhere, died in a mine in 1867, but it isn’t (I don’t think) a year associated with a major disaster in England. In 1866, nearly 400 men and boys died in the Oaks Colliery near Barnsley. In 1867, 178 men and boys died in an explosion in Wales. Knopfler’s song, though, isn’t about a single mass tragedy. It’s about one man’s death. Maybe the proper historical comparison is to another man’s death, even an imagined one.

Sibbet’s murder became the inspiration for a book, a film, and a song – social documents that record, in various ways, a city of discontent. Of the three, Knopfler’s song is the only one I would call beautiful. Short as it is, it does fine work of addressing an uncomfortable history with something that soothes the ear. There’s nothing soothing about Hodges’s Get Carter – not even Roy Budd’s simple theme music.

With “5:15 a.m.” Knopfler tackles a double braid of tragedy. He distinguishes between two kinds of victims, and in that distinction he identifies a difference between two centuries. When nightclubs moved into Newcastle, they exploited those already exploited and recruited new people to exploit in new ways – people who had escaped the mines but not the soot. Knopfler’s song offers a core sample from two wastelands that share the same soil. Angus Sibbet – playboy, bandit man – had something in common with the hewers and crutters and hod boys and rolleywaymen of 1867. They were all defined by some kind of social deprivation. They all tunneled into some heart of darkness – the necropolis of Newcastle. That Knopfler can turn all of this into something tender and gentle is a tribute not just to him but also to music.