1966 and all that....
an article by Robin Carmody for livingstonemusic.net
The scenes of the esctatically happy England football fans in central London on 30th July 1966 have the instinctive feel and atmosphere - even the smell - of a very different era to this one. It isn't just the fact that they're almost all white, nor is it even the way that the few black people in the crowds, who had often been in this country for less than a decade up to that point, stand out, as though they could feel a distinct removal from the official culture around them, as though they could never be part of it. It's more the formal plainness of their dress sense, the restrained nature of their behaviour, the feeling you have just from looking at the photos that their patriotism was based around a few absolute certainties in their mind (the general idea of "British restraint", the good name of the monarchy, the rousingly simplistic history textbooks they'd been taught as children) which can never be applied again. But already the old order of football support, and the old game itself, was dying, though it is typical of the 1960s that very few people seem to have seen there and then that this was not the gateway to more confident celebrations of the old "One Nation" Britain but the last of a glorious line - in other words, more of a wake than a celebration.
I recently saw "Tomorrow's Saturday", a 1962
film of life in the working-class industrial Yorkshire town of Doncaster,
very typical of that sort of community (one big difference with, say, Barnsley
or Halifax: it is located directly on a very fast main line to London, so
the centre of metropolitan life has always been a quick and direct train journey
away, without any inconvenient changes and awkward connections). Among the
many fascinating images of close-knit communal life - the whole thing was
a timely reminder of just how incredibly *individualistic* everyone seems
to be these days - was a scene of crowds queuing to watch Doncaster Rovers
play in the lower divisions of the football league.
Their
clothes seemed to fade into various shades of grey - most of them were wearing
suits, a good many even wore hats, and the stadium was unbelievably *undeveloped*,
a sort of compendium of all those faded working-class dreams that died when
you just failed to get promoted on the last day of the season, working-class
Northernness of the old school before it was boiled down to a Monty Python
sketch in the public mind.
And this was the model of the English football supporter - decent, white, collectivised, humble working-class men, diehard supporters of the more socially conservative streaks of Old Labour. As late as the autumn of 1968, the British Transport film "A City For All Seasons" captured a Highbury crowd straight out of Picture Post - they looked dowdy, stultifyingly "respectable", utterly foreign to the thrilling, cosmopolitan Arsenal team we have today, and its informal, heterogenous supporters.
But in the mid-60s a new young generation was watching
football - it was all comparisons between George Best and the Beatles, the
new bright jauntiness and upbeat self-assurance in Northern popular culture
translated straight into the national game. Many clubs found their traditional
songs, anthems of working-class solidarity that would have warmed Robert Blatchford's
heart, rapidly usurped on the terraces by pop songs of the day which symbolised
the way that, for the new generation, American culture *was* Northern working-class
culture - "You'll Never Walk Alone" is an old Rodgers & Hammerstein
song which had no connection with the city of 
Liverpool
whatsoever until Gerry and the Pacemakers recorded it, after which it almost
immediately started to echo around Anfield. (It is worth noting here that
last night, September 25th 2002, supporters of Swiss club FC Basle went to
Anfield for the hundredth European tie there, and while frustrating Liverpool
to a 1-1 draw they started singing "Yellow Submarine", both a wicked
trouncing of 1960s Liverpool fans' habit of singing Beatles songs and also
an interesting sign of the way the world has changed - in the 60s, it would
still have been assumed among Liverpudlians, without a trace of irony, that
the Swiss really *did* spend most of their time blowing on flugelhorns.)
During the World Cup summer, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich's "Hold Tight" - a roistering English provincial farming lads' take on the call-and response tactics of early Atlantic and Stax records, several times removed - became a sort of unofficial national anthem, chanted by fans throughout the country, in the most exciting and liberating way of letting go they yet knew how. During the tournament the group would travel on the newly-modernised West Coast Main Line from London to Liverpool and have breakfast with Prime Minister Harold Wilson - at that stage, pop music just seemed like another part of a process which was moving Britain on to something cleaner and brighter than what had come before (steam railways were being eliminated at pace, new school buildings were going up left, right and centre) but which would not actually threaten the status quo. It was still assumed that Britain - which in those days was effectively a synonym for "England" among the English - would always change and yet still stay eternally the same, as Orwell had said in one of his more sentimental moments. It wasn't long before nobody could believe that anymore.
*Everything* seemed to be on the cusp in 1966 - none of
the other UK teams qualified for the World Cup finals in England, and the
England fans that summer were firmly cast in the "England-as-Britain"
mould, hawking their culture around as the *only* culture that everyone in
these islands should look up to. It was still assumed in the media that Scottish
and Welsh fans would support England - they were "our" team, and
England, not Britain, was "us". But Plaid Cymru won their first
by-election victory in the summer of '66, and the following year the Scottish
National 
Party
broke through into Parliament - although the England team of 1982 was still
being promoted in British rather than specifically English terms (that wonderfully
old-fashioned rhyme of "Ron's 22" and "the red, white and blue"
in the '82 World Cup song) the denationalisation of Britain - the force which
has now come to a head and pretty much compelled the English to look at themselves
anew - was already under way by 1967.
In the long years since, many of us have wondered where the flowing optimism and confidence for the future that stands out from 1966 went, and how we can get it back. Perhaps some of us have been too inclined to blame the cynicism of the Tories and all who sail with them, when maybe we should have been blaming the nihilism of the subculture born so soon after the collectivised euphoria of the World Cup summer, following Ian MacDonald's argument that "All You Need Is Love" was not the harbinger for a new era, more the last great cultural statement of togetherness before everyone started playing their own games, living entirely by their own rules (you can hear pop-music-as-one dying on the Beatles' White Album, which is their best album for me because it's their most varied and, at its heart, confused - it *sounds* like a beautiful object shattering into hundreds of tiny little pieces, and you know that "Mother Nature's Son" and "Helter Skelter" could never have had coherent, friendly conversations with each other for one moment longer). Perhaps, indeed, we should have been drawing connections between the late 60s / early 70s nihilists and the Thatcher movement at whose blame we kneejerked everything - all those who took "Sympathy For The Devil" as their anthem and translated it into an "as long as I'm happy, fuck everyone else" political ethos, utterly devoid of positivity, stern and stoney-faced towards all who didn't want to live in exactly the same way.
And just as endless invocations of 1966 among football commentators, summarisers and journalists became a tedious irritant in the long years ahead - as much to many of us in England as to the Scottish, Welsh and Irish fans who often cite it as the single worst element of the Anglocentric worldview - then it similarly wormed its way into our music, TV, popular culture ... just about everything. The idea that we could never get that good again, musically and culturally, became a terrible recurring cliche - Oasis, to cite merely the most obvious example, were a band formed on an inferiority complex, it ran through everything they did. An entire era of British music was weakened massively by the fact that its dominant band had a limited confidence in their own abilities, founded on the principle that they could be good, but they could never be *that* good. I first became a songwriter and essayist during the Oasis epoch with the specific intent of restoring the kiss-the-sky ethos, that there is *nothing* we're not capable of: the season is ours, to invoke Flying Saucer Attack's most significant gaze at the land and the sky. The 60s were always my blueprint - it was just that negative interpretation of the era I reacted against, because it crystallised the inferiority complex I'd come to hate about my country.
As
Radio 2 plays more new music, the Gold radio networks dabble more and more
in the hits of the 1980s, and the basis of our daily lives edges further away
from everything it was in the 60s and before (of course there are some who
can't cope with that - most of them were on the recent Countryside Alliance
march) 1966-and-all-that is, finally, beginning to fade out of the mainstream-nostalgist
perspective. Looking back we can see the strengths of the collectivist model
of society (compare the efficient, perfectly-planned nationalised modernisation
of the West Coast main line which was in full swing that year with the drifting,
massively-overbudget privatised upgrade of the same line which is dragging
on today) but also its weaknesses - the suicides of young gay men, still criminals
in the eyes of the law in 1966, and the way that divorcees were socially excised
back then. The facade of collectivism may seem wonderfully appealing, but
very, very few of us would want a return to its downside.
English
culture didn't die with the World Cup summer, but a certain era of it probably
did. The summer *after* that saw a subcultural explosion mythologised to the
point of near-tedium, but also it saw the key moment when the old establishment
gave in - William Rees-Mogg's famous defence of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
in a Times editorial, possibly the most startling and dramatic defial of the
expected official line in any British newspaper ever. The summer of 1967 must
have felt like a table-tennis match between old order and new breed - if the
Times gave in to the Stones, then the state could get its own back and ban
the offshore pirate radio stations as if to say "We're still in charge
here, mate, whatever you think", but they were fighting a losing battle.
It must have been fantastic - thrilling new records every week, fast new trains,
bright new clothes - but it would have been the opposite of consensus, which
was what the whole atmosphere of the World Cup summer just 12 months before
was built around.
So, yes, those two fateful swing-summers did crystallise the final glories of one English culture and the first fruits of another - it's just that at the time the old seemed to be flowing into the new much more than it actually was. But still, what a way to arrive ... and what a way to go.
[Dedicated to the memory of the author Ian MacDonald]
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