The Ghosts of Cable Street, a song about the 1936 confrontation between the fascist blackshirts of the British Union Party and a coalition of the Jewish community, Trade Unionists, and decent, extraordinary people, was written in Hornsey Library, North London over about 3 days at the back end of 1985. I can’t be more precise but I’d guess November/December as I remember well the pale condensation streaked over the large reading room windows and the bare branches of the trees in the grey garden out front.

In those days I used to hang out in Collets socialist bookshop in Charing Cross Road a couple of afternoons a week. It was an energising place to browse; they had a great selection of folk records and they would let you sit and read for hours. It was in there that I started to research the story of the Battle of Cable Street. I was always on the lookout for stories from history that chimed with modern times; episodes that offered a different version of social history. I was incredulous that nowhere in the folk catalogue was there a song about such an immense event; at least not that I could find. So I set out to write one.

Its fair to say that in recent years the right wing have gotten more than competent at weaponising nationalist memes such as D Day, Flanders, 1966 World Cup; anything that reinforces their tribal loyalties. In the US, it’s things like Frontier Values. It always seemed to me that all those things had more to do with our values of community solidarity than theirs of national superiority. I’ve always thought that Left culture should be quicker and smarter about deploying its history. Mythology has great power and songs have always been a great street level method of spreading left values. I like to think that Cable Street is a good example of that.

The song’s recording history is chequered. We had three attempts at getting it down, with different levels of success. The version that most people know is from the album How Green Was the Valley, recorded in 1986 with producer Mick Glossop for MCA Records. It’s a good, solid, dogged version, thunderous, with a heavy glove to the gut, quite Soviet in its intensity.

But I prefer the first version, which was recorded as a B side soon after it was written. In fact, I know the exact date of the recording. It was 15^th February 1986 and the Wapping print unions blockade of Rupert Murdoch’s News International printing plant was just about to come to a head 200 or so yards from Elephant Studios where myself and my comrades in The Men They Couldn’t Hang had assembled to record this new song. We started recording at around 2 pm and made good progress. By 4.30 pm it was dark outside and time for a liquid dinner at that fine old pub The Prospect of Whitby. Returning we heard the sound of hooves on cobbles. A lot of hooves on cobbles. Guess who were sneaking round the backstreets? Riot police; mounted on horseback, black visors, truncheons glimmering. Quickly back in the basement studio, we stuck a mike up to the street level skylight and recorded the hooves going past. They went straight into the mix. While we carried on recording the track, the battle erupted at the site gates with 58 arrests and countless injuries among the 5000 pickets. The sirens and floodlights and the sound of hooves are my main memories of the Battle of Wapping. But it was the right night to record Ghosts of Cable Street.

The third version was the most curious. After the song had featured on the album to good reception the powers at MCA Records decided they would release the track as an A side. Only they wanted to re record it with Blondie’s producer, Craig Leon. I love Blondie as much as anyone but none of us, Craig Leon included, really believed that he was the right man for the job. As predicted, it felt rushed and limp. In one final twist, the cassette tape we took to play to the record company played a couple of beats fast on the office stereo. Unfortunately, the man from MCA had already decided he liked it that way. So there it still sits, two beats too fast, two vocal notches too high, all treble, no bass…

In my view the best version is always the live version, when band and audience sing together. That’s when the power is created.

It’s now 35 years since the song was written and it is satisfying to see how it has endured. Fascism is always either in ebb or flow. It grows like a weed in the garden, watered by poverty and propaganda. It takes an atom of human nature and drip feeds hate, fear and fantasy straight in. It never tells a joke that is not mired in cruelty. It proclaims strength but is built entirely on fear; fear of the other, fear of self, fear of change and fear of love.

Fascists attempt to project a twisted moral purity but their actions are always that of the coward, the bully and the creep. They specialize in poison pen letters, anonymous threats, social media pile ons; a drunken patriotism that substitutes for family love. They attack like jackals in a pack. I suppose the point of Ghosts of Cable Street is to say there may not be a final victory over fascism; it may always be with us just like that weed in the garden. But every generation has to take the baton. You can’t compromise or negotiate. Fascism has to be opposed; culturally, physically, socially, legally and artistically. It’s just like weeding the garden. Or cleaning the toilet. It’s not the most pleasant job but it’s got to be done.