You Only Get What You Give, David? Really?

Why the rubbish music played at party conferences matters.

“Dealers keep dealin’, thieves keep thievin’, whores keep whorin’, junkies keep scorin’.” Not exactly the musical accompaniment you’d expect Home Secretary Theresa May to choose to soundtrack her speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

And it wasn’t.

As much as Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie, allegedly a card-carrying member of the Socialist Workers Party, might want to give the Tories a kicking, it was actually Dandy Warhols’ Bohemian Like You that sounded out as May left the stage.

That isn’t really any better, however. The song featured on a Vodafone TV advert for years, and I’m pretty sure the Tories wouldn’t want to remind everyone about the £6billion-tax-bill-sized ball they dropped with that one.

David Cameron didn’t exactly lead by example either, walking on to the sounds of You Get What You Give by The New Radicals.

If our ruddy-faced premier had anything to do with the song choice at all — and let’s hope he spent all available time perfecting his speech rather than poring over his iPod — it suggests no more than a cursory glance at the tracklisting of whichever Now That’s What I Call Music compilation that particular chart-bothering one-hit wonder came from.

“You get what you give? I like the sound of that idea, Samantha, it’s like my Big Society. And the band are called The New Radicals. How jolly! That’s what they used to call Boris and me when we were at Eton.”

If Call Me Dave had delved deeper into the lyrical content of the song, of course, he would have discovered lines about “trashing Mercedes-Benz” and chasing the rich back to their mansions, plus an honourable, topical mention for lying “big bankers buying”.

His exit music, meanwhile, was The Lovecats by The Cure which, on the surface seems rather lovely with its melodic double bass and kooky piano-led chorus, but it’s all too easy to imagine Cameron and his cabinet “slipping through the streets while everyone sleeps, getting bigger and sleeker and wider and brighter”. The slippery buggers.

Ed Miliband is no better. Choosing Florence + The Machine’s cover of You Got The Love is as lame a grab for the zeitgeist as there ever was. I’m actually surprised, given the ubiquity of Flo’s appearances at UK festivals over the past couple of years, that she didn’t float out onto the stage and demand to perform it as a duet.

Now, I may have been giving the music used at the various party conferences too much thought lately, but that’s only because I wish the parties cared as much. I’m not stupid; with 80,000 more unemployed people on the streets in the last six months and Mervyn King warning of the most serious financial crisis in decades, I realise there are more important things to fret about than which Killers song to play as the PM takes the lectern.

But I think it does point at something far more worrying – that they Just. Don’t. Get. It. On any level. Politicians have long battled to appear connected with the voters, and an easy way of doing this is with shared cultural influences. Gordon Brown saying he loved Arctic Monkeys in 2006 was a pathetic, last-ditch attempt of grabbing some young voters. And he got found out, which is even more embarrassing than lying in the first place, although perhaps not quite as desperate-looking as Mr Tony Blair carrying his Fender Stratocaster everywhere with him. He was in a band at uni, you know…

David Cameron learned nothing from the Brown debacle and keeps on insisting he’s a fan of The Smiths. Music is in the public domain once it’s released, and no matter how much Johnny Marr forbids Dave from listening to The Queen Is Dead, he can’t stop him.

Cameron, however, should know better than to endorse a band born during Thatcher’s formative years. How can he seriously enjoy songs such as Miserable Lie, I Don’t Owe You Anything and Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now? And an album title that rejoices in the fact his boss has carked it.

Dismiss the Tories’ musical faux pas as unimportant if you will, but for me, their lack of research into the matter is symptomatic of a government not only obsessed with the superficial, but worryingly slack with the details too.