“Ha’way man, they’re liars and they’re cheats.”
As a starting point, it’s pretty uncompromising. The Pitmen Poets’ latest tour, 15 years after it kicked off as a temporary collaboration, leaves nobody in doubt about their political leanings from the off.
The refrain, taken from Jez Lowe’s song The Coal Town Days, sets the scene for a couple of hours of pointed folk music with a political refrain. Don’t expect much fol-de-rol here.
Except do. Playing with expectations is another part of the Poets’ patter, and Stanley Market, a traditional tale of traveling snake-oil merchants parting pitmen with their pay on Durham’s Pennine ridges, is old enough to carry a rustic edge and a chorus full of fol-de-rol. It’s not quite Scarborough Fair, but it’s a reminder of how quickly the region industrialised.
Much of the show reflects on how quickly the region deindustrialised a century later. Lowe, and colleagues Bob Fox and Billy Mitchell, all come from mining families and were the first generation not to work underground. A fourth member of the team, Benny Graham, isn’t on this tour due to health concerns. Not that his absence greatly harms the chemistry. At times, it feels less like a concert and more like sitting with some old friends swapping songs and telling stories.
But beneath the convivial surface, subtle punches land. Mitchell, once of Lindisfarne, tells a familiar tale of sharing a tin bath in front of the fire at his granny’s. But jolly nostalgia is the lead into a scalpel-sharp dissection of the life of a pit village matriarch – The Collier Laddie’s Wife, “trapped inside her cage while he goes down in his to hell.”
Another stand-out, Judas Bus, interweaves 1980s strike-breakers with their counterparts a century earlier; Biblical references blend with rough justice in a tale of betrayal over generations. The humour gets darker, a police car ordered to mow down snowmen on a wintry picket line come a cropper when the miners build one around a concrete bollard. “Never buy a second-hand police car. Especially with a carrot stuck in its bonnet,” Fox concludes.
Visiting Barnard Castle, one of the few towns in County Durham without significant coal-mining heritage, attracts banter about visiting the posh end of the region. But coal has deep roots in these parts; interval chatter has people sharing stories of earlier generations who worked in Birtley to the north or the Yorkshire coalfields to the south.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that by the end of a two-hour set, a near-capacity crowd joins a rousing singalong of Union Miners Stand Together. Forty years after the strike, 30 years after the last northeast pits closed, that underground spirit endures. To quote another of Lowe’s songs: “These things I know, for the Pitmen Poets told me.”
Reviewed on 26th June 2026. On tour.
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