That is a song which displays its anger at war, what it stands for, and the commercial gains some make at the expense of the ultimate sacrifice from others. Don’t be taken in by the catchy chorus: this is a powerful indictment of those who take us into wars. Peace In Our Time was the title track of an album by the Scottish rock band Big Country, which was released in September 1988 and got to #9 in the UK and #160 in the US, being awarded Silver Disc status in the UK. This was the third song taken from it as a single, in January 1989, reaching a fairly lowly #39 in the UK, though it did make #16 in Ireland. Big Country never set the charts alight here, though they did have a #1 album and two more in the top three, and all but one of the twenty seven singles they released made the UK charts. They disbanded in 2001 after the suicide – at the age of 43 – of Stuart Adamson, their leader, lead guitarist and main songwriter – another sad loss of those who succumbed to the pressure of the music business.

 

Wikipedia quotes Stuart from a 1990 interview with Melody Maker magazine, in which he  described the song as a “very Sixties feel protest song, naive but I did it anyway.” In another interview, with Sounds magazine, he said “I do feel music can be more than a three-minute adrenaline rush, but there’s a great danger in viewing a song with too much weight. Peace in Our Time was written with irony, but you can be too smart-assed for your own good. It was called a plea for peace when it was really much smaller than that.” I think he was being too hard on himself, and the lyrics, together with the video, support the more generous interpretation I give the song. 

 

As the theme for today is songs of war or peace I thought I’d do a little research, as the phrase ‘peace in our time’ is well known over here, thanks to a frequent misquoting of the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, from his 30 September 1938 remarks in London concerning the Munich Agreement and the subsequent Anglo-German Declaration – he actually said “peace for our time,”  which has gone down in history for its bitter ironic value: less than a year after the agreement, Hitler’s invasion of Poland began World War II. The words were already familiar to the British public, anyway, from their appearance in the Book of Common Prayer. The phrase is a popular song title, too: I came across at least three other completely different ones, by Elvis Costello, Eddie Money, and Cliff Richard, but none of them come remotely close to this one for me.

 

I think Stuart was on the right path, though. Who wouldn’t want peace? With the current events in Ukraine and Gaza and elsewhere in the world, it might feel naïve to wish for peace, but that has to be right, doesn’t it? Politicians on massive ego trips and large companies making armaments shouldn’t be allowed to dictate to us in the way they do.

 

I was going to give you a second song today – Al Stewart’s amazing Roads To Moscow – but have decided to concentrate on just the one. But I’ll leave you with an acoustic performance by Big Country – in stripping the song down to its basics they really bring out the hurt and the power behind it:

 

 

See you again on Tuesday.