Did you kiss the foot that kicked you?
Ruth Ewan
8 - 12 October 2007

"Give me the making of the songs of the nation, and I care not who makes its laws." (Andrew Fletcher, 1703)

Busking is about something other than just being an able musician or a street entertainer; it is a raw performance, an autonomous act.

Ruth Ewan's Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? involved the co-ordination of over one hundred buskers around London. Performing both under and above ground, the buskers incorporated Ewan MacColl's Ballad of Accounting into their usual repertoire. Their individual acts shared a collective purpose. The week-long series of performances slipped quietly into the rush-hour routine, as the scattered recitals filtered into the subconscious of those passing by.

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In the final decade of his life, Salford-born Marxist polymath Ewan MacColl (1915 - 1989) succumbed to feelings of failure, and began to wonder whether radical political transformation was possible, and whether his own brand of cultural agitation had made any real difference. His bulging dossier at MI5 might have given him heart. Though fading health and the dark days of Thatcherism caused him to doubt himself, Britain's secret services were long convinced that he was a dangerously creative activist.

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