Camden Fringe: Steve North on Something About England

Steve North talks punk, politics and family ahead of his new solo show’s Camden Fringe debut

Steve North is an actor with a long list of screen and stage credits behind him, including London’s Burning, War Horse and Meeting Joe Strummer. His new solo show Something About England brings together spoken word, punk music and his own family history to ask what’s happened to the country since 2016. He told Red Bus Londinium more ahead of its debut in Camden.

Red Bus: What was the moment, or the accumulation of moments, that told you this decade-long reckoning with Brexit needed to become a show?

Camden Fringe: Steve North on Something About England

Picture of Steve North

Steve North: That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about doing a show about Brexit for a long time, probably the last five years. There’s a number of reasons. The first is that the impact on the younger generation isn’t really discussed. There’s also a kind of denial among people who did vote for Brexit about what’s happened since. And the left-wing argument against the EU, known as Lexit, which was quite vocal before the referendum, has almost entirely disappeared. Partly that’s down to the right driving the whole narrative of Brexit, framing it around immigration and “getting our country back“, and partly it’s because the people on the left who were in favour of Leave are now very quiet about how that’s gone.

There’s also a question that Remainers often seem to miss, which they should always be asking. It’s not “why did people vote for something that would clearly make them worse off“, but rather “why didn’t people vote for something that would make them better off?” Why did so many people feel that voting Leave was going to improve their lives? Until we at least try to understand that, the left is going nowhere. That’s the failure of progressives, in terms of how easily it lets the right claim the narrative. So many people have a justified grievance about the inequality and unfairness we see in so much of our society. Those grievances are then hijacked by the right and framed around immigration, people on benefits, anything that stops people seeing the root causes of that inequality.

Marx and Engels talked about the working class, not the “white working class”. The key is in the words “working” and “class“; the word “white” is irrelevant. Yet a party like Reform would say the problem is that the left don’t care about the white working class any more, that we’re just middle-class elites looking down on them while helping everyone else. The left need to be talking about class again.

As someone who’s been on the left for most of my life, and who did think briefly about voting Leave as a Lexiteer, I always remember speaking to my daughter the day after the referendum. She’d have been twenty-four at the time, and her visceral reaction to the result that morning, how she felt it directly affected her plans and how she saw her life, made it feel like a very generational thing. I voted Remain but it made me think: God, how would I have felt if I’d voted Leave, having that conversation with her that morning? In a way, the whole show comes from that moment.

Red Bus: How did you go about turning the punk songs that shaped you into spoken word for the stage, and what changes when a song becomes a piece of theatre?

Steve North: This actually comes from a previous play I did twelve years ago called Meeting Joe Strummer, in which one of the characters was a young actor auditioning for drama school. Inspired by The Clash, he did the song “Clampdown” as his audition speech, spoken word, and got in. The lyrics came out extraordinarily strongly done that way.

So I’ve taken that idea, and the first half of this show is set at a spoken word gig with a punk poet called Johnny Commune, who’s done this for a long time. He’s doing a kind of tribute album to the songs that inspired him to write his own, a bit like a band doing a covers album of their influences, Bowie’s Pinups, say. He’s gone back to the source: The Clash, Paul Weller and The Jam, but also X-Ray Spex, The Tom Robinson Band, and he’s taking these political punk songs and giving them a first-person character narrative. That might sound self-indulgent, but having done it in scratch nights, it seems to work particularly well for these kinds of songs.

There are five or six songs, done as different characters speaking the lyrics as short monologues. What I like is that people like Joe Strummer, Paul Weller and Tom Robinson were writing extraordinary lyrics that often got a bit lost in music that was so visceral and intense.

Revisit them in this context and they almost sound like new songs, or at least you hear them completely differently. The other slightly depressing thing is how much more relevant they feel now than they did then. Songs like “Something About England” or “Town Called Malice” feel like they could have been written yesterday.

Red Bus: You’ve worked extensively across television, film and the stage. What draws you back to a solo fringe show, and how does performing something this personal differ from other roles you’ve taken on?

Steve North: I’ve done one other solo show, back in 1994/95: a solo adaptation of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, adapted by Paul Hodson, which went to the Edinburgh Festival at the Assembly Rooms, got picked up and ended up at the Arts Theatre for three months after a long tour.

What I really liked was the sense of being in control of the show all the way through. I love theatre, I love live performance, playing in bands, but when it’s just you on stage there’s a great freedom, because you know you’re the one in control. It’s the purest form of storytelling for an actor.

I remember waiting in the wings just before Fever Pitch started, thinking, “I’ve got seventy minutes to tell a story,” and that’s hopefully what this will be too. Ultimately theatre is storytelling, and this show is no different. I’m really looking forward to going out and performing a piece of storytelling theatre.

I’m hoping people will come who might be expecting it to be all about punk songs, which is great, but they’ll get something more than they’re expecting. And conversely, for people who aren’t so into the punk side of things but are more into theatre: I’d really love them to come too. This is a theatre show, and I don’t want people to stay away just because of how it’s being marketed.

Red Bus: The press release mentions a daughter who never forgave. Without giving too much away, how does that relationship sit alongside the wider political story you’re telling?

Steve North: I’ve alluded to this already: the show is inspired by a conversation I had with my daughter the day after the referendum result, and that’s very strongly present in the show, which begins as one thing and then starts to turn into something else. All I’ll say is that the relationship between the character I play and his daughter is the driving force behind the play.

My favourite kind of theatre is theatre that’s very personal, something you can watch and relate to on a personal level, but which also has wider themes and ideas that resonate from that. Whether I get there or not I’ll only know once it’s in front of an audience, but there’s a really strong element of my own relationship with my daughter, and my own journey through the referendum and its fallout, seen through another person’s eyes.

Red Bus: Why Camden, and why now, for this show’s debut?

Steve North: It had to be Camden. Johnny Commune, the character who kicks off the show, is very much inspired by The Clash, and this venue is a stone’s throw from the old Camden Market, where The Clash had their original rehearsal rooms, actually called “Rehearsal Rehearsals”. Go into the market just past the bridge and there are the famous Clash steps, opposite the Dr Martens warehouse. Go on any day and you’re guaranteed to see people around my age posing on those steps, because that’s where the cover of the very first Clash album, The Clash, was shot: the famous image of the three of them standing there. So this show, in the very wonderful Libra Theatre Cafe, couldn’t be nearer to those steps. When I saw the location, and realised it was also perfect for the spoken word element of the show, it was a no-brainer. It’s small, but it’s got a great feel, it reminds me of the venues we used to get in the eighties, the great old-school fringe venues, and yes, it’s got a bit of a punk feel too.

There’s a lovely synergy to it for me, in the sense that it feels like I’m in Clash heartlands. That’s very apt for this show: Joe Strummer, for me, was a complex character, definitely on the left, but also someone who could contradict himself quite a lot. I find that really interesting, and it’s something I wanted to explore. We live in a time with a lot of binary thinking, and I like it when people are contradictory, when they say or do things that don’t quite match up. That’s much more interesting to me, that’s where you get inspiration and change and ideas. This show is very much in that spirit: looking at Brexit through the idea that there aren’t just two points of view, Leave and Remain, but a far more interesting middle area that needs to be talked about and discussed. A long-winded way of saying that doing this show for the first time in Camden Town, at the Camden Fringe, couldn’t be more right.

Something about England runs at the Libra Theatre Cafe from 27 to 29 August as part of Camden Fringe 2026.

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