We Are the Battery HumanStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

A protest song about industrial farming and modern work, sung in three-part harmony. The gentleness is the delivery mechanism, not the content.

The argument

The battery hen is the image, and the song does not labour the comparison — it simply applies it to how people live and work, and lets the listener finish the thought. Cages, artificial light, productivity, the absence of sky.

This is the track that answers everybody who filed this band under pleasant. The tune is warm and the harmony is beautiful and the content is a flat criticism of how industrialised life treats living things. Stornoway rarely raise their voice; that is not the same as having nothing to say.

The music

Four minutes exactly, sixth on the album. The arrangement is one of the record’s most propulsive — a rhythmic guitar figure with the drums pushing instead of sitting back, which is unusual for this band and entirely appropriate here.

The harmony writing does something clever: the more the lyric describes confinement, the fuller and more open the vocal arrangement becomes. The contrast is the point.

Live, and on the seven-inch

It is the A-side of the live 7-inch that came with early copies of the album through independent record shops, recorded at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on 30 October 2009 — the night Stornoway became the first non-classical act to play the building.

That recording is worth seeking out. In a room built for orchestral music, with an audience sitting down, the song’s argument comes across harder than it does on the record.

Where it sits in the protest tradition

British protest songwriting has two registers: the shout and the understatement. This is firmly in the second. Nobody raises their voice, no slogan is offered, and the argument is made by handing the listener an image and trusting them with it.

That approach dates the song less than the alternative would have. Fifteen years on, its subject — industrial farming, the shape of modern work, the distance between people and anything living — has not become less current.

It also set the terms for what the band did later with the same material: the conservation partnerships, the recycled packaging, the Christmas single about ash dieback, the songs written for a soundscape of Britain’s rarest habitats. The politics were never bolted on afterwards.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, thought this one fell flat. Socking it to the office-bound with a plunking banjo, he wrote, gave it the air of Little Boxes — the 1962 folk song Tom Lehrer called the most sanctimonious song ever written.

He allowed that it is not as bad as that, but he used it to argue a real limitation: that the band are better at the telling detail than at the broad brushstroke, and that a protest song asks for the brushstroke.

The song has outlived the review. It is the one people still name when they talk about the band having something to say, and it was the track chosen for side A of the live 7-inch.

In the sequence

On the record it follows Boats and Trains and leads into Here Comes the Blackout...!. That puts it sixth of eleven, at 4:01.

It reached listeners only as part of the album; Beachcomber's Windowsill has the dates and the chart placing.