JOE SOLO was 14 and a punk rocker at the time of the 1984-85 miners’ strike and it was his first taste of how much bad politics hurts ordinary people.

“It was my political awakening. It made me think,” he says. “There was a poisonous agenda in the media at the time that didn’t quite make sense. 

“When you’re a kid you tend to see things in black and white and I couldn’t see how on one hand the telly could criticise some people for not having a job and then criticise others for fighting to save the one they had.

“They couldn’t have it both ways. And yet they did. It naturally made me think that the miners were the good guys, the press were just the government in print and anyone who fell for it was an idiot. I’ve never really recovered from that.”

No surprise then that his recently released album Never Be Defeated about that era has to be one of the most achingly heartfelt and moving albums around.

An aural history and tribute, it recounts the events of the strike through the eyes of the men and women of Stainforth and Dunscroft in south Yorkshire — the Hatfield Brigade. Melding working-class culture, pride, solidarity, anger, passion and hope it’s a work that will surely stand the test of time.

Many artists have written a song about the strike but Solo has penned 13 and they follow its course from the initial ballot and success picketing Nottinghamshire pits to Thatcher mobilising the police and the bitter yet proud return to work at its conclusion.

There are songs about the brutality of Orgreave, the riots in Stainforth and the black humour which held the mining communities together when winter started to bite. There are numbers too about the horror at being called back by the union before a deal had been struck to reinstate those who had been sacked along with songs which, even at 30 years’ distance, celebrate the sense of unbowed defiance at the strike’s conclusion.

“I knew what stories I wanted to tell and wrote those first and when I saw a gap in the narrative I wrote songs to fill them in,” Solo tells me. There are two songs about the women fighting first on the home front and then becoming empowered and taking to the picket lines.

“Both are sung by the brilliant Rebekah Findlay, who absolutely nails them and we finish with the true story of the Picketing Gnome of Hatfield Main, a light-hearted morality tale of kidnap and liberation,” says Solo.

“With any luck, by the end of it you get some feel for what it was like to be on the receiving end of Thatcher’s cosh and have your entire way of life stolen from you by the malice of the spreadsheet and a government intent on destroying their industry.”

It is truly a musical tour de force and its genesis is in a chance meeting at a Stainforth Pit Club gig commemorating the 30th anniversary of the strike with the Hatfield Brigade. “After that I was never quite the same again,” Solo says passionately. “I was hooked on their stories from the word go.”

He kept in touch with Mick Lanaghan and the brigade and they asked him to sing at a commemoration marking the end of the strike. This he did but “the more we talked the more ideas kept coming and I knew there was an whole album waiting to be told. From writing that first song to finishing the record took six months.”

It was a process of “watching and listening,” via phone calls, emails, social media and newspaper and film archives. But two speeches, by Sheena Moore and Carol McCardle, really hit home. “They helped me put together the two songs from the point of view of the women which I am really proud of,” Solo says. “I knew the set pieces of the strike and that they would form the backbone of the record.

“The rest was getting the details right and telling their real stories as best I could. They are amazing and I didn’t need to do much apart from make them fit the music. I really loved writing it and I hope that shows.”

Solo, even though not of mining stock, “wanted to give them something back.” His family have mended washing machines for three generations, so “I know about trades being passed father to son and the pride that comes with it.

“Sadly you don’t get that much anymore. I think it helped bind communities together and the loss of those industries and trades are a huge part of our problems today. I’m proud to walk in my father’s and his father’s footsteps and if you understand how much that means to people, then you understand their anger when it is taken away.”

But Never Be Defeated has its bitter-sweet moments too. Solo grins as he tells me why the song Last Man Standing (The Ballad of Tony Clegg) is such a fitting post-script. Clegg, a man who suffered more than most during the strike, got the last laugh because Thatcher died on his birthday and the the final lines of the song Solo wrote for him are: “The Devil? Well, I’ve seen her off./She played me for my soul./But you never bet against a man/Who come from mining coal.”

Interview over, Solo’s off to his day job, endless gigs and selfless activism. Passionate and inspirational, if you see no-one else this year play live, make sure it’s him. You will not be disappointed.

As he goes, he says: “I’m proud at being granted honorary membership of the Hatfield Brigade. Those comrades and friends are all still an inspiration and they’d do it all again tomorrow because they know they were right.”

• Never be defeated by Joe Solo is available from the website joesolomusic.com