Lorne Jackson talks to an author who captures the heady days of 70s strikes and punk in his latest play.

Job losses. Economic instability. Workers marching on the street and garbage festering in the gutter.

There’s no need to travel far to see such entropy in action.

Just flick through the pages of a local newspaper. Or, if flicking proves too troublesome, open the window a crack.

You’ll soon catch a whiff of the UK in decay.

Britain’s economic humbling can also be witnessed at close quarters in Coventry from the end of the month, when the Belgrade Theatre dramatises the fateful shift from robust Britannia to bust Britannia in a new play, Too Much Pressure.

However, the economic catastrophe depicted on stage isn’t the one playing out in 2011.

Too Much Pressure takes place in the fateful year of 1979, a time when the nation’s finances were as fatally flummoxed as they are today.

Written by local author, Alan Pollock, it’s the final instalment in the Belgrade’s Coventry trilogy of plays, which have dramatised pivotal moments in the city’s history.

The previous two episodes, One Night In November and We Love You City, examined the impact on local people of the Blitz and Coventry City’s victory in the FA Cup.

Now it’s the Winter Of Discontent that’s being put under the Belgrade microscope. A time of industrial and social strife that marked the end of the road for many of the city’s car factories.

Though not all is doom and gloom. The play also celebrates the vibrant music scene of the era, when Coventry became the centre of the pop world for a brief, thrilling moment.

Too Much Pressure follows the Austin family who live on the Canley Park estate in Coventry.

Cliff and his eldest son, Terry, are track workers at the Standard Triumph. Both are increasingly worried about their future job prospects.

However, Cliff’s youngest son, Gary, is more concerned about the music scene and forming a band with school mates Nick and Sonya (played by Holby City star, Rebecca Grant).

As industrial relations reach boiling point – and Gary’s band takes its first tentative steps – a shocking act of violence tears apart the lives of all involved.

The play promises to zing with the zest of the zeitgeist.

Though it turns out that Alan started working on it well before Britain’s economy bottomed out.

“Funnily enough the play was written two-and-a-half-years ago,” he tells me. “So it’s a ‘happy’ coincidence that a play set during the Winter Of Discontent should be coming on at a time when the rubbish has been piling up on the streets.

“I was really keen for it to be on a year ago, because I’d worked hard on it. But there were various programming reasons why the Belgrade couldn’t put it on back then. Now it looks like that was for the best, because it really does feel like it’s now the right play at the right moment.”

Just like his characters, Pollock lived through those unstable times. In 1979, he was a teenager living on a Coventry estate.

“The original impulse to write the play was simply that I’m interested in the turning points in the city’s history, and this particular one happened to coincide with my own rights of passage moment in Coventry.

“There are two major events driving the play. The closure of the big car factories and the music scene in Coventry. I was very much a part of both. I was in a band at the time, and I grew up on an estate where probably half the men either worked for Jaguar or some other car plant. Then in ‘79, half the men lost their jobs over night.”

Although there was an economic earthquake shuddering under the young Alan’s feet, he admits that it didn’t take prominence in his interests of the time.

“Obviously I was aware of what was going on with industry, but of course, I was also 16. So all I was concerned about was getting the band together and going to gigs. I played in a band called The Clique that were quite well known around Coventry in the late ‘70s.

"We were on this album, Sent From Coventry, that had sleave notes from Horace Panter from The Specials. All the quite well-known post-punk garage bands were on this one album. At the time, I was a not-very-powerful drummer.

"In fact, a local fanzine once said of one of our gigs, ‘The Clique powered along, as usual, by Alan’s semi-powerful drumming.’ We were sort of Siouxsie and the Banshees crossed with the Buzzcocks, really. And every bit as bad as that sounds.”

Because his focus wasn’t on the industrial strife of the time, Alan was forced to do a lot of research before starting work on the play.

The young actors in the production were also required to sweat over heaps of homework. Especially as it transpired that even though the industrial problems of ‘79 happened a mere 30-odd years ago, most of the youths had no knowledge of them.

Even basic cultural quirks of the era were beyond their ken.

“It’s very interesting working with the younger actors who are 21 and 22,” says Alan. “Things that you would assume that they might have heard about or know – cultural references, political references – actually, quite often they don’t. This is ancient history to them.

“I’ve got a pile of cuttings here from the newspapers of the time. And every other story is a strike story. So we’ve had to re-create that world where people were out on strike all the time.

“I’m somebody who is largely pro-union, but even I can see that it was completely out of control by the end of the seventies. So we’ve had to explain to young cast members exactly what that was like. People downing tools.

“Then, there’s a moment in the play where some of the characters are about to go off to a local carnival, where Miss Diane from Crossroads is going to be doing a sort of Celebrity It’s A Knockout thing.

"We literally had to explain every single thing in that line to the actors. What’s It’s a Knockout? What’s Crossroads? Who is Miss Diane?”

Alan adds: “There’s also a scene in the play which involves Boney M singing Ra Ra Rasputin. Again, not one of the young cast members had even heard of Boney M. I’m thinking, ‘Aren’t they played on Radio 2 all the time?’ It was 31 years ago, but it’s a different moment in time. It’s gone.”

Was Alan shocked that youngsters have so little knowledge of the recent past? Especially since that past now seems to be about to repeat itself?

“Yes, I was surprised,” he says. “But it also justified doing the play, because it’s a period drama – not much different from Jane Austen, really. And I’m certainly looking forward to the costumes.”

The costumes should help the author to remember his noisy youth, with The Clique.

However, his own rebel-rousing rocker years were cut short when he left Coventry for Oxford University, just after the period recalled in Too Much Pressure.

“My dad was a doctor. So I was the poncey middle class kid on a quite rough estate. I was always going to be alright.”

Oxford was a totally different world from the one he had left behind. In Coventry men were being deprived of their livelihoods, working with machines.

At Oxford, the only mechanical contraption of any note was the bicycle being pedalled by the youthful Boris Johnson.

“You would see Boris cycling up and down,” says Alan. “He was a star at university. That was a completely different world from my home town.”

But although he had been forced to give up performing with his Coventry band, music was still a big part of Alan’s life. “Every friend I ever made until 30 was something to do with music. ‘If you like The Buzzcocks or if you like The Fall you must be okay.’ That was my philosophy.’”

Music will also play an important part in Too Much Pressure.

The popular and current local band, The Ripps, were commissioned to work on music for two songs in the play, with Alan providing lyrics. The band will also perform on stage.

Did Alan, who now lives in Gloucestershire, enjoy returning to his former passion by working in harmony with a bunch of Coventry rockers?

“Oh yes!” he beams. “The Ripps are a great little band, and they’re very much inspired by outfits like The Clash and The Specials. They’ve got a real feel for the late seventies music. The band in my play come up with a couple of original songs, so somebody had to write and record the stuff.

“I wrote the lyrics, got together with the band and had a great time.”

And how does it compare to the songs belted out by The Clique, back in the dim and distance days of costume drama?

“The stuff we came up with this time is miles better than the stuff I was performing back in the day,” he chuckles. “If only The Clique could have been like those boys – I might have ended up with a career in music!”

* Too Much Pressure is at the Belgrade Theatre from Saturday, 29 January - Saturday, 19 February. For tickets and further information, visit the Belgrade Theatre website: www.belgrade.co.uk