Soho are twin sisters Jacqui and Pauline Cuff and myself, Timothy London. We formed in 1986 in Hackney, London.

Do songs change anything? Yes, they create mood and impart information. They help you feel brave in sticky situations and bring you together with others when you listen or sing along. There’s a reason hymns are sung in church, a reason for chants on the terraces. But do protest songs with a specific subject change anything? It’s hard to judge. But I think songs need to be seen as part of the general fabric of change.

From when we were formed I wrote songs for Soho that dealt with overtly political matters. We tackled racism head on: the street fascists of the British Movement/National Front, the Nation of Islam, taxi drivers. ‘Burning Houses’ on our first album described racist arson. ‘More Of A Man’ dealt with male violence against women. ‘Blonde on Black’ talked about how ex-Londoners complained about their manor’s ‘changing colour’. We played benefit shows for a multitude of progressive causes, from anti-apartheid to fund raisers for more local campaigns. As a multicultural group (two Black women, two white men) we were, whether we wanted to be or not, a political statement.

The pop industry largely didn’t notice or care. From the mid to late 1980s pop music was increasingly hedonistic in its content. Hiphop, at that time, was an underground movement based in the USA. Political-ish rock bands, such as The Levellers, tended to have their own, sympathetic groups of fans. Subversive music, then, was cultural. We would celebrate if a house track with a tough rhythm got into the charts. Soul II Soul seemed to represent something more than ‘just’ Black aspiration, even if the lyrics of their hits stayed quite generalised. The challenge to the mainstream pop industry from indie labels, a thriving live scene and the new record distribution channels (‘men with vans’) was about as political as the late-’80s music scene got.

When the house music raves began, this introduced a new element of militancy. Despite the best efforts of the various left-wing groups who tried to involve themselves in the free parties ‘movement’, this militancy stayed rooted in lifestyle, and responded to challenges from the police and politicians from that position. It was only when the [1994] Criminal Justice Act came into force that there was a wider realisation that more was needed, even just to continue living ‘outside’ normal society. If there is talk of culture wars now, back then, from the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 to the huge demonstration against the Criminal Justice Act in London in 1994, we witnessed a Tory government determined to physically bash the natural rebellion of thousands of young people into submission. They largely succeeded and the 1990s, fuelled by bad E, cocaine, alcopops and a thoroughly tamed music scene, proceeded towards the consumerist paradise in which we now live.

Soho’s one big hit, ‘Hippychick’, is a simple song married to what became known as the ‘Soul II Soul rhythm’ and a sample of the opening guitar riff from The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’. The lyrics tell the story of a young woman, arrested at a demonstration by her ex-boyfriend, now a cop. An instrumental dub was, first of all, a dance hit in 1989, becoming popular on the dance floors of Cyprus and Ibiza as E’d up Brits took the ‘second summer of love’ to the sunshine. We were living in a squat in Hackney at the time. The following year, I took a call from a programmer at a big Texan radio station. We didn’t have management at this point. He told us Soho was having a hit in Texas. The enthusiasm for the vocal version of ‘Hippychick’ spread throughout the USA, where The Smiths were hardly known and the ‘incident room’ and ‘miners' strike’ mentioned in the lyrics puzzled those who paid attention. ‘Hippychick’, it seemed, was a companion to the vaguely trippy, dippy, hippie chic of Deee-lite’s ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ and the Daisy Age hiphop of De La Soul & co. released around the same time.

Re-released in the UK, ‘Hippychick’ became a hit here, too. If America didn’t get the cultural connections (at that time house music and rave culture were very underground in the States) in the UK it became part of the cross-pollinated rock/dance thing, loosely termed ‘Baggy’ (due to the voluminous flares worn by northern E-heads) and which embraced previous goths Stone Roses, garage rockers Primal Scream and jangly scenesters Blur, as they all nailed a dance beat to their alt-rock. We were notably the only ‘mixed’, multicultural band included, out playing the same venues at the same time.

Our first visit to Top Of The Pops to promote ‘Hippychick’ took place as the first Gulf War kicked off in 1991. The BBC made a list of song and artist names that were either banned or had to be altered to be given air time. Massive Attack had to lose the Attack. Lulu’s ‘Boom Bang A Bang’ briefly joined Paul McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ on the proscribed list. We were told by the TOTP producer to remove Jacqui and Pauline’s dresses with sown-on huge CND symbols (in sequins!) and the tiny sticker on my guitar that said ‘Stop the War’ if we wanted to appear. We held out until the last minute and they relented. An apparently sympathetic camera operator focussed in on the sticker at one point during our miming performance and we were blessed with some outraged complaints to the BBC, of which I am almost as proud as I am of writing the song. Strangely, we were invited back on the following week, providing we left the dresses and stickers off. We performed this time with ‘censored’ written all over our clothing and, once again, the airwaves rang with indifference.

Goddess, the album that featured ‘Hippychick’, was loosely themed around the concept of ‘strong women’ and anti-sexism. Thug, the album that followed, also featured plenty of directly political songs, including ‘Claire’s Kitchen’, named after the caterer for 10 Downing Street, who [allegedly] had an affair with then Prime Minister, John Major. We broke this story a good year before print media. Unfortunately, Thug was never released in the UK (we were never given a reason). When the story did get coverage in various publications and the writs started flying we found our studio phone was tapped (confirmed by an unconcerned telephone engineer), but we weren’t challenged legally, presumably because the song was never ‘officially’ available in the UK.

Also on Thug were songs that delved more deeply into the anti-semitism and racism of the Nation of Islam (‘Hawk’), that attacked arms dealers (‘Deadbeat Party’), alongside a version of Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, practically an alternative national anthem for some French people, which I renamed ‘Hamed and Jacques’. With the permission of Gainsbourg’s daughter, Charlotte, I rewrote the lyrics to tell the story of a gay couple, one of whom was Algerian-French, in an attempt to wind up the ascending fascist Front National. Apparently, my French pronunciation on the version specially recorded was so atrocious that it was ‘unreleasable’ in France.

Further albums have seen us tackle Israel/Palestine, more racism, the commodification of youth culture, and more sexism until, I think finally, we no longer have anything to say politically that hasn’t already been said. Some of these songs have not worn well. ‘1/2 Caste Estate’ and ‘Corpse On Your Tongue’ both use language that would be self-defeating now, or unacceptable, even if the motivations were right-on.

So, did any of our songs change anything in any direction? Individually, directly, no. Yet there were fans who found us through songs they loved and became influenced by our public stance, perhaps to think more carefully about the world or to feel more empowered in their own politics. The song that could have had the most effect, ‘Claire’s Kitchen’, lacked the necessary publicity (a half page plus photo in the Independent on page 3 was the only coverage outside the music press). And the hypocrisy of John Major and co. who were busily promoting ‘family values’ at the time was given the same pass as Boris Johnson’s twenty-first century version by a public and press now, who get more upset about a footballer kicking a cat.

Major was voted in for a second term. The 1990s continued as they began, with the mainly young, white pop audience following a hedonistic path and a mainly Black audience, particularly in the USA, creating their own, separated route, fuelled with rage inspired by the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the need for survival on their own terms.

In later years I have co-produced, co-written and managed Scotland’s Young Fathers (Mercury and SAY award winners) who have at times been seen as ‘political’, even though their lyrics tend to be hard to decipher. My experience with Soho helped me to understand that any serious-minded multicultural band will be considered ‘political’ by their very nature and that is something to be proud of, a living embodiment of communal anti-racism. In Young Fathers' case, their songs take on the politics of their existence.