We Work the Black Seam

When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the victory of her Conservative Party in the 1979 elections, one of her goals was to add to Britain's nuclear power generating capacity. She had been impressed by France's Messmer plan, enacted in response to the 1973 oil crisis. It had led to the construction of 58 new reactors in the late 1970s, making France less dependent on foreign oil imports and eliminating the use of coal, a result also achieved in neighbouring Belgium. Britain, by contrast, had pioneered the use of commercial nuclear power in the 1950s but since then had lagged behind, with its useful reactors ageing into obsolescence while newer projects like Dungeness B became national embarrassments as construction costs and delays escalated. A second oil shock later that year underscored the urgency. In October of that year, Secretary of State for Energy David Howell announced to Parliament the government's plan to add 15 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity by building roughly one new reactor every year for 10 years. The Tories also had a political reason to embrace nuclear power. Their previous government had been defeated in an election held during a wintertime strike by coal miners, who worked at the nationalised mines run by the National Coal Board (NCB). Two years earlier, Prime Minister Edward Heath's government had increased miners' pay after another miners' strike, and this time the government was less willing to negotiate, making the election a referendum on the strike under the slogan "Who governs Britain?". The electorate answered that challenge by returning the opposition Labour Party, more closely allied with the National Union of Miners (NUM), to power. Many of the Conservatives who entered the party's leadership, including Thatcher, never forgot what they considered a humiliating defeat by NUM and Arthur Scargill, a regional union leader in Yorkshire where the largest group of miners were concentrated, whose use of mobile flying pickets had secured the union's victory. They credited public discontent with British unions fostered by the Winter of Discontent, several weeks of strikes by unions representing hauliers, garbage workers, gravediggers and other government workers aggravated by severe winter weather that combined to nearly paralyze the country, with their electoral victory. As a result, they broke with previous Conservative governments in embracing more explicitly libertarian free-market economic theories that became known as Thatcherism. One element was that unions could not be allowed to exercise such control over the British economy as they had been, or had been perceived as doing, under governments of both parties since World War II. and made mine owners and operators wealthy at the expense of the miners who risked their lives doing dirty and dangerous work that had led to unionisation and widespread labour unrest earlier in the 20th century, had declined considerably by the early 1980s. The total number of miners had declined by 80 per cent from those earlier eras, many of the richer and more accessible coal seams had been depleted and only government subsidies kept mining profitable. Many pits remained open as Scargill and NUM had vowed to fight any closures for any reasons but safety. In March 1984 miners at a South Yorkshire pit walked off the job over closures and called for a national strike, a call echoed by Scargill but not fully implemented by all regions due to the lack of a unionwide vote. Almost a year later, the strike ended with the miners having gained nothing. Pit closures began soon afterwards. ==Composition==

Sting combined a melody line from a song he had recorded a decade earlier with lyrics about the miners' strike, which was ongoing as he wrote, recorded and mixed the song for The Dream of the Blue Turtles sessions at Blue Wave, Eddy Grant's studio in Barbados, and Le Studio in Quebec north of Montreal. In a New Musical Express (NME) interview at the time of The Dream of the Blue Turtles was released, Sting discussed the background of the song. In his native Wallsend, outside the city of Newcastle in North East England, boys who did not finish grammar school had the choice of working at the Swan Hunter shipyard or in the Rising Sun coal pit outside town, if they wanted to remain in the area and earn a living wage. Before his musical career, Sting taught in a Northumberland village where "all the children's fathers were miners. The area I was brought up in was literally built on coal." Initially it follows a chord progression of Am-C-Em7, a i-III-v progression that alternates with Am-F-Dm7 (i-VI-iv), throughout the verse. At the chorus, the synthesizer changes to playing just the background chords as the song modulates to the key of F, played on the downbeats, Christopher Gable, author of The Words and Music of Sting, traces the use of the open fourths and fifths to English folk music. Behind it is a percussion track consisting of three eighth notes on a bass drum surrounding beat two and a snare hit on beat four, both of which remain consistent throughout the entire song. Gable sees this as, along with the song's fading in and then out and the end, suggesting a factory in continuous production, creating tension between the humanity of the melody and the rigid backing track that accentuates the theme of the lyrics. When the music reaches full volume, guitar, soprano saxophone and synthesizer fills enter. In the chorus, which makes its first appearance after the second verse, the song raises the nuclear issue; Paul Carr notes a change in tone that suggests the chorus is addressed to the miners alone. The singer hopes that in a future "nuclear age / They may understand our rage". He alludes to the maintenance difficulties Sting told the NME of having heard about from his friends, and then the government's reasons for phasing out coal in favour of nuclear energy: The next verse alludes to "And did those feet in ancient time", an early 19th-century poem by William Blake that a young Sting would likely have studied in grammar school, later adapted into the Anglican hymn, "Jerusalem", in describing the nuclear plants as "dark satanic mills [that] have made redundant all our mining skills". It concludes with a warning that "all the poisoned streams in Cumberland" are too high a price to pay for abandoning coal. Recording "We Work the Black Seam" was one of the last tracks on the album to be recorded at Eddy Grant's Blue Wave Studios in Barbados before those sessions concluded in March 1985. Afterwards he took the master tapes to New York to share with executives at A&M Records, his label, and then went to Le Studio, in Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada, north of Montreal, to mix the album. Sting produced the track himself along with Pete Smith. ==Releases==

"We Work the Black Seam" was the first track on the second side of the vinyl and cassette release of The Dream of the Blue Turtles, released in June 1985, and the sixth out of 10 tracks overall, between "Shadows in the Rain" and "Consider Me Gone". At 5 minutes and 42 seconds long, it is the album's longest track. It was released as a single in Australia, Germany and New Zealand a year after the album, the sixth single from it in those countries. "The Dream of the Blue Turtles", the album's title track and its shortest track, was the B-side. Other versions In late 1985, Sting and the jazz musicians he had recorded The Dream of the Blue Turtles with gathered in Paris to rehearse for a short European tour. They performed at several venues in the French capital; filmmaker Michael Apted made a documentary, Bring on the Night of the rehearsals and shows. Sting and backing vocalists Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald are shown rehearsing their parts on "We Work the Black Seam" in which they sing the title lines, accompanied by a drum machine and synthesizer playing all the musical parts. The scene segues into a performance of the song with the band at Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy with an arrangement similar to the recorded version save for the backing vocals; saxophonist Branford Marsalis is applauded after playing the melody line as a solo. The performance shown in the film is also included on the soundtrack album, where it runs to nearly 7 minutes. Eight years later, in 1993, Sting re-recorded "We Work the Black Seam", with Hugh Padgham co-producing, during sessions for his album ''Ten Summoner's Tales''. He chose not to include it on the album, and it was instead released on two different singles: as "We Work the Black Seam (1993)" and as the B-side to the UK 7-inch release of "Fields of Gold". The latter release omitted the parenthetical from the title. ==Music video==

A video was filmed to accompany the song's release in Germany. In it, Sting stands in a mansion's ballroom amid furniture and mannequins, covered in plastic wrap, singing the song. ==Reception==

Upon release Critics reviewing the album took note of "We Work the Black Seam". Most found the music praiseworthy. "The sounds of delicately malletted percussion, organ and light saxophone licks lend [it] a hymnlike ethereality", wrote Stephen Holden in The New York Times. "The arrangement also illuminates the song's deeper contemplation of power hidden in the earth and its comparisons between the irresponsible exploitation of human labor and of natural resources." In Rolling Stone, Pareles singled out the song's "transparency". The Miami Heralds Tom Moon called the song's "shrill, almost panicked chorus" one of the album's "moments of ecstatic music". Contrarily, Richard Williams in The Times complained that the song "lacks the mysterious dimension that turns propaganda into art." Pareles found the "neat denunciations of Thatcherism" in the first verse offset by the "goofy stuff about the universe" in the later lyrics, and advised listeners to "dump the lyric sheet". He also implied that Sting's concern about the long-term effects of carbon-14 in the chorus resulted from it rhyming where plutonium does not. while allowing for his broader point that nuclear waste remains radioactive and hazardous for very long periods of time. While nuclear accounts for 20 per cent of British power, only one of the ten reactors Thatcher called for was ever built, and all the other reactors will have to be retired by 2030. The difference has been made up for by the "dash for gas" from the North Sea following the privatisation of Britain's electric grid in the years after the miners' strike; gas turned out to be cheaper and cleaner than coal. ==Cover versions==

The British folk group Swan Arcade has recorded an a cappella cover version, under the name "Black Seam".{{cite AV media |people=Swan Arcade|date=29 September 2016|title=Black Seam|type=Audio trac|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Hfe7TF7eU == Personnel ==

• Sting – vocals, guitars • Darryl Jones – bass guitar • Kenny Kirkland – keyboards • Branford Marsalis – soprano saxophone • Omar Hakim – drums ==See also==