Reading and Listening Again - Portishead and Crip Times for Liz Crow's Figures project

I haven't been keeping at it, but the original reason for this blog was to find a permanent place for posts I used to make on Facebook about strange juxtapositions between books and music that came to me while I was simultaneously reading and listening to music. Since then, it's become mostly a place to blog about reading challenges and readathons, though I try to give my posts some musical accompaniment.

Today, I'm reading Robert McRuer's intellectually stimulating and politically motivating book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization and Resistance for one of the categories in the 2018 academic reading challenge. On p. 208, he makes the connection between the band Portishead and their namesake, Portishead in North Somerset where Liz Crow completed sculpture/performance project, Figures in 2015. For the project, Crow spent 11 days at the river, using the mud to make small clay figures. She then toured with the figures for five days, along with stories of 650 disabled people affected by austerity policies. On the project's final day, she burned the figures in a cairn, and then crushed them into dust, while reading the stories of individuals aloud, a process that lasted six hours. Finally, she scattered the ashes off the coast of Portishead.

McRuer argues that the first lines of Portishead's song "Cowboys" could be a comment on the Blaire/Cameron (Blameron) govt. policies of austerity against which Crow's art was a protest:

Did you feel us tales of deceit
Conceal the tongues who need to speak
Subtle lies and a soiled coin
The truth is told, the deal is done. 

I could add, after reading just a few of the the devastating stories that make up Crow's Figures series, that they also resonate strongly with Portishead's song "Roads" which was playing on my computer when I began reading these narratives of lives "at the sharp end of austerity"

How can it feel this wrong?

This is just one of the stories behind the figures:

48-year old Paul was part of a wave of young Scottish authors who rose to international prominence in the 1990s. After he killed himself, his publisher wrote to Chancellor George Osborne, “I thought I would let you know that Paul took his own life. He didn’t leave a note but he laid out two letters on his table. One was notifying him that his Housing Benefit had been stopped. The other was notifying him that his Incapacity Benefit had been stopped. The reason I’m writing is just so you know the human cost of attacking those on benefits.