The Slow Train - Flanders and Swann
I have started discussing sad train songs so I can't escape the link. I realise when looking for sad songs, one may not seek the works of a comedy duo though despite their more light-hearted song writing and relatively small discography, they have a few heavier hitting songs.
Twenty Tons of TNT is a track about nuclear disarmament, specifically concerning how there were estimates that for every person on earth at the time there were 20 tonnes of TNT worth of explosives held in nuclear weapons.
This was back in the mid-1960s, roughly the time of the Cuban missile crisis so was very much in the era of nuclear warfare but it always posed a question in my mind, how many tonnes of TNT are there now in nuclear weapons? Obviously there are plenty of nations who have scaled back their weapon numbers but also more countries have them now and nuclear weapons are more powerful than they used to be. I am not the most proficient researcher but I never was able to come up with an answer because of how unknown figures are which I'd argue is another more terrifying concept.
The song has a vaguely militaristic chant sound to it, with a call and response of "Twenty tons of TNT", though by the forth verse, they just play through the line without saying the line, emphasising the repetitiveness of the problem and how it is the root of the issue. While this song did not win being the saddest Flanders and Swann song, I would highly recommend the song on its own.
Misalliance is a song about plants, which goes against the typical animal songs that they wrote. It is harder to find people's views on Flanders and Swann tracks as there is generally not as much discourse about them online, so I find that the song basically is a shortened version of Romeo and Juliet. However, I feel like there is an analogy for people’s objections to homosexuality in the 1960s, with them describing how they would not be able to have any offshoots. Maybe I am reading too much into it but the attitudes the bee has seem to be similar to homophobic attitudes which adds another tragedy to the Shakespearean tale.
Finally, there is the Slow Train, which is a song about the closure of railways of stations within Great Britain under the Beeching Axe. There is too much to go into Beeching for a short song analysis (if you want a rant about it, let me know) but for those who don't know, Beeching was tasked with making the British Railways more "efficient" which was really a task of cutting the railways back. The first of these reports resulted in 30% of the track mileage and 55% of the stations in Britain to be closed.
This led to many communities to be negatively impacted by a lack of decent connections to other places as well as a loss of so many places ingrained in a part of British culture. These stations weren't typically the large stations and often small, quaint, rural stations. The song misses the regular ongoings of people's lives and the life which these stations brought would be taken away, such as "no churns, no porter, no cat on a seat". The song misses an image of the railways which is often romanticised to this day.
