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The Battle for the English Soul
An article by Robin Carmody
Some thoughts on the quest for an English pop identity, 1960 to present.
A lazy spring Saturday afternoon, I'm taking my weekly
holiday in radio pop nostalgia. The chart from this week in 1960 comes on.
As expected, it reveals an era when the pop aesthetic was 100% American, when
American records were written in Pop English (natural, flowing, joyously ungrammatical,
understanding the way the language must be restructured to write pop songs
worthy of the name), while British records were written in a hopelessly polite,
unnatural, restrained style (some of the lyrics read like declamatory statements
from a 1930s drawing-room play, while one contained the peerlessly stilted
line "You sure could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather").
But one contrast was particularly noticeable. On the one hand, Johnny
and the Hurricanes' "Beatnik Fly", an effortless fusion
of traditional American-ness and the new pop identity, the mainstream media's
word for its casual stereotyping of the "radicals" of the era applied
to a rocking-up of the folk song "Gimme Crack Corn". In its approach
to its source material, it's closer to Stock Aitken Waterman than Eliza Carthy.
And on the other hand, Lonnie Donegan's "My Old Man's A Dustman",
a laughably crude, bludgeoning, failed attempt at creating something similar
for Britain - essentially the "Parklife" of its day, based around
an (even then) offensive, outmoded and tedious cliche of what it was a be
a Lahndahner (it is also wholly unrepresentative of Donegan's earlier, highly
influential hybridisations, especially the epochal "Rock Island Line").
There could be no better illustration of where Britain stood vis-a-vis America
- the originator of all pop's early hopes, dreams and aspirations - forty-three
years ago.
Looking
back to those years, you can sense the British living with a desperate, crushing
inferiority complex - America had it all. With its much shorter and less weighty
history, it could coolly and casually fuse the old and new in a way the British
were incapable of. Its pop music contained all the virtues of the form (sexual,
spiritual and emotional release, loss of control, and reinvention of the language)
while the British seemed constipated and terminally constrained by comparison.
And as Michael Bracewell puts it much better than I could, pop "was transported
like an exotic animal to a country which was wholly the reverse of its natural
habitat". This cultural explosion, the creation of a continent that was,
in Bracewell's words, "young, wealthy and warm", had been thrust
into a nation which seemed stuck in permanent snowy winter and wet summer,
whose towns were still Victorian in appearance and distinct from county to
county, whose main establishment newspaper still devoted its frontpage to
announcements rather than news. Pop was, quite simply, staggeringly *out of
place* here. And in an age before globalisation, the gap was simply too wide
to be bridged.
No wonder the only unique and inspirational British music of those years deliberately
avoided all Rock values, and instead celebrated a sense of mystery, quiet
"otherness", the translation of the era's prevailing values of stability,
decency and ever-increasing affluence into new, exotic locations beyond this
Earth (a kind of Butlins in space). The Joe Meek sound - with its symphonies
of rural memory and loss (peaking with John Leyton's "Johnny Remember
Me") and its hymns to this perfect new world (peaking with the Tornados'
"Telstar", still for me the greatest Number One this country has
seen) - is one of British pop's highest peaks, and its rapid commercial eclipse
by Merseybeat, which achieved roughly a hundredth of its sonic sophistication,
is a classic example of public desire for the raw and unfettered making a
delicate pop visionary sound undeservedly outdated.
But at this point - the moment when Harold Macmillan's calm, gentle futurism
was overtaken by the edgier, more brutalist Harold Wilson variety - I hear
a chorus of establishment voices chirruping that British pop Found Its Voice,
came for the first time to develop its own identity, lose its inferiority
complex to America, achieve overnight that same fusion that had once been
beyond us ... well, *half*-true. A string of records too familiar to need
listing here have an incredible self-confidence about them, the Beatles *became*
Britain in the global consciousness, Dusty Springfield became one of the great
English Soul vocalists. 
But
the Beatles sold in America at least partially off their assimilability as
Cute Little English Boys, and other mediocrities like Herman's Hermits and
the Dave Clark Five achieved huge success based around their charming, grinning
all-English personalities. Don't believe everything you've read about the
so-called British invasion *completely* redefining Britishness in American
eyes. And as for the mid-60s blues boom ... the Spencer Davis Group and the
Yardbirds were merely recreating what had already happened without applying
their own situation to it (as the Rolling Stones did in all their best songs).
There was no brave new fusion here, no joyous dual identity.
But there were the Animals, and specifically Eric Burdon, who couldn't have
been further away from this ilk of culturally embarrassed imitators. His vocal
genius on records like "I'm Crying" and "It's My Life"
was to identify the tonal similarities (deep, angered, hurt) between the Southern
American bluesman (his model) and the North East English working man (his
background), and create a new voice all his own, and as such his tone - lurching
from pristine anguish to the unstoppable urge to escape - is probably the
most successful cultural fusion Britain produced in the mid-60s. There's a
moment on "We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place" where, lost in his
own emotional excess and struggling to find a means of expression, Burdon
gives up and just *howls*. For 10 seconds. It is devastating. It remains one
of British pop's high-water marks. In his way, Eric Burdon - unlike the pathetic,
straining vocal fretwankery of Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton - is as fine
a representation of the whole "English Soul" concept as we've seen.
It's well-known to the point of cliche that attitudes to traditional / establishment
notions of "Englishness" in pop changed dramatically in the late
60s and early 70s, becoming infinitely more positive and embracing (the earlier
tradition of Rockist fantasies and pseudo-Americanism persisted in metal and
the continuing blues-rock faction). The Kinks' "Village Green Preservation
Society" was mythologised enough in the mid-90s Britpop boom to turn
any right-thinking person against it for life, but what strikes me returning
to it is how many good songs there are, amid the unlistenably, ostentatiously
quaint likes of "Phenomenal Cat" and "All Of My Friends Were
There" (grasps at "Englishness" every bit as silly and overdone
as Lonnie Donegan back in 1960). "Johnny Thunder" and "The
Last of the Steam-Powered Trains" are incredibly well-observed portrayals
of small-town and provincial "characters", but their strength comes
at least as much from the globalism that lurked within Ray Davies as from
his nostalgia (a French girl's name is mentioned in the former, while the
latter is arranged as a blues pastiche). The conclusion, "People Take
Pictures Of Each Other", is a misleadingly childish evocation of just
how you feel when you see a photo that reminds you of a part of your past
you don't *want* to see again.
I've
written about this period enough elsewhere
that I don't want to repeat it here, but Manfred Mann's Earth Band's "Joybringer"
(a grindingly compulsive, soaring rewrite of Holst's "Jupiter"),
Steeleye Span / Mike Batt's gloriously trashy rocking-up of "All Around
My Hat" (an English "Beatnik Fly" 15 years later), and Sandy
Denny's best moment, "The Sea" (a 1970 fatalist rewrite of William
Morris' "News from Nowhere") were all among the most iconic moments
of the 1968-76 experiment in pop-as-ruralism (which withered after punk, but
did not totally disappear as often mistakenly claimed). Very often, the main
indication of the intent of these remakers of pop wasn't so much what they
actually recorded and released, but the very names of their labels - Joe Boyd's
Witchseason label, and the EMI offshoot of Harvest (to which most of their
vaguely hippyish or prog-infected offerings were diverted). In the mid-60s,
the Stones and all their ilk would *never* have wanted to associate themselves
with labels of such names, even if they'd existed then - they'd have thought
the pastoral suggestions of those names beneath them. The very word "Harvest"
would have reminded the blues boomers of *what they had fought to escape*.
But the irony of Harvest was that, after the fall of pop ruralism in 1977,
it became not only Wire's label, but the home of Marshall Hain - a duo whose
education at Dartington Hall School placed them at the heart of a radical
ruralist tradition going back to the 1920s, but reaching a new peak around
the early 70s - and their one-off 1978 hit "Dancing in the City".
Oft-heard but little-known, it's one of British pop's untold highpoints -
with its airy, open, slight production, enticing but nevertheless very English
female voice (it's essentially a disco song rendered as a folk song), and
promise of heated urban perfection, it might just be the orange-and-brown
"Foxbase Alpha". An even greater indication of the re-establishment
of pop as a fundamentally urban phenomenon was the biggest hit single ever
on Harvest - Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall", where the
former prog ruralists, ever more fatalistic ever since "Dark Side of
the Moon" six years earlier, became consciously, exaggeratedly urban,
disenchanted and disillusioned, an 180-degree turn from "Grantchester
Meadows". This particularly grim and perverse, grinding, nightmarish
take on disco - one of those songs that seems rhythmically propelled to continue
forever - puts a line under the 70s (being the last British Number 1 of that
decade) and seems to sum up the mood of sour, resigned disenchantment that
was Britain on the cusp of 1979 and 1980. No more wondrous stories, no more
morning has broken.
A notable downside of 70s Britain, and source of a demand for pop exoticism,
was the apparent incapability of the British in that era to understand and
grasp "sexuality" - the way British popular culture seemed unable
to get its hand on anything truly sensual and the uncontrollable, physical
urge of much sexual behaviour in the way that the French and, more surprisingly
from a British perspective, the Germans somehow *could*. It was his international
upbringing and time in Montreal and Athens that isolated Momus from all this
and would probably be the main reason for his later ability to come as close
to Serge Gainsbourg as any British artist has ever come. This emotional crippling
reached its peak in April 1976, as the British presented to the rest of Europe
Brotherhood of Man's notorious "Save Your Kisses For Me" (whose
final pay-off line is one of the most sickmaking sneers ever committed to
vinyl - it's one of the few records regarded as the nadir of its era that
really *deserves* to be viewed as such), and released 10cc's "I'm Mandy,
Fly Me", an overextended, gently plodding tale of being led astray by
an air hostess whose dull lack of emotion and patronising attitude to its
subject reveals much about the stultification of British music immediately
before punk (as usual with 10cc - see also the awesome thuddering middle eight
to the otherwise unremarkable "Wall Street Shuffle" - the guitar
break on "I'm Mandy, Fly Me" is far better than the song itself).
In
this context, the sensuality and, analog synth rumblings and vocal moanings,
of mainland European disco / funk were irresistible (again, the British finding
attraction in *what they only half-understood*). Donna Summer & Giorgio
Moroder's set of collaborations - principally "Love To Love You Baby",
"I Feel Love" and "Down Deep Inside" - are still untouchable,
still the finest examples of escapism plus sexuality creating great pop music.
"I Feel Love", with its pulse beat that attracts *in itself*, is
indescribably influential, and "Down Deep..." is among the weirdest
Top 10 singles Britain has ever seen (imagine a Stereolab drone up there with
David Soul), and Cerrone's "Super Nature" is just awesome, a fantasy
world of "control" and "takeover" made mentally possible
through pop, a semi-fascist desire for world domination made acceptable by
the voice, which is simultaneously "horny" and non-embarrassing
today (something *unthinkable* in 70s British quasi-disco - Tina Charles and
5,000 Volts suffered from the same failure to work out the vocal subleties
needed to master this genre that the boy rockers of the late 50s had been
destroyed by). Although this era is closer to our perception now, and easier
to understand and work out from a contemporary viewpoint, than the early 60s,
it still seems an echo from a distant time before globalization when it was
still absolutely *impossible* for the British to get certain emotions and
feelings into their music.
Of course these songs were still pushed into the mainstream of the time, played
at wedding receptions and treated as the stuff of "exotic" exploitation.
"Love To Love You Baby" was, of course, used most famously in Mike
Leigh's "Abigail's Party". It still places itself several light
years above all the cliches of the era, but, sadly, *only because it's not
British*.
I
don't know why I've largely omitted the 80s from this account - maybe it's
my natural antipathy to Thatcherism, which defined England in that decade
to the point where it almost *became* England. I could write about Morrissey
here, but I think it's more pertinent to mention The Style Council's "Confessions
of a Pop Group". By this point, Paul Weller's career had fallen to its
lowest commercial ebb ever, to the extent that he was unafraid to write epic,
cod-classical, MOR suites revealing a certain discontent with the way the
world had gone since his childhood (the mood of the album is defined by the
title "Mourning the Passing of Time"), disguising their political
disgust beneath a sweet but somehow eternally uncommercial surface. Indeed
much of the music, like the aspirational show tune "Changing of the Guard",
the piano instrumental "The Little Boy in a Castle" and the Swingle
Singers collaboration "The Story of Someone's Shoe", is closer to
el Records and the mid-90s "lounge" music boom than to any consciously
"political" music from the 80s. Not all of it is up to much (the
clunky 80s cod-funk of "Iwasadoledadstoyboy" and bland West End
musical pastiche "Confessions 1, 2 & 3" are nine wasted minutes
between them) but the title track is an endless perpetual nightmare of Thatcherism,
which stares at the type of society Britain had become, now isolated from
its American dreams *and* its rural past, where in the early 70s it had seemed
able to reconcile them both ("Poor relation to Uncle Sam / Bears no relation
to the country man") and looks up with disgust, but the kind of disgust
that is painfully aware of its own impotence. It's the most resigned, bitter,
and tragically accurate dissection of Thatcher's policies I've heard (especially
the lines "The Great Depression is organised crime / Their confessions
are written in your blood" and "The freedom you claim is the one
you hate / The victory you seek will never come") and makes Weller's
post-1990 descent into a middlebrow misinterpretation of 70s pop ruralism
all the more depressing.
Since 1990, we've seen Saint Etienne define themselves among pop's great dreamers,
with their vision of London, the perfect urban utopia it became in their minds,
the world they invited you into and made you feel part of, the way that on
"Foxbase Alpha" they made the city *their own* like almost nobody
else before or since. This has never been their only metier, though - there's
a great article still waiting to be written about the equally tantalising
and addictive virtual rural England they later created on "Tiger Bay",
in which reinvented sinister folk songs like "Western Wind" could
rub shoulders with the English Autobahn of "Like A Motorway", *and
there appeared to be no contradiction*. But if there's been one recent and
welcome development in the quest for an English identity and sense of belonging
in pop, it's been the recognition that a "lost homeland", a childhood
utopia to which, if you dream hard enough, you can at least *imagine* you've
returned, doesn't necessarily have to be a "changeless", mythologised,
idealised rural England, but an England of silvery glass comprehensive schools
and Arndale centres, a land of ITV regional testcards and vaguely scary football
violence and *everything* in orange and brown, an England that was maybe never
*supposed* to last and which now gains its poignancy from its failure and
replacement in the minds of planners and politicians by a kitschified approximation
of the rural past. 
A
new mythology of gentle urban decay and unobtrusive suburban mundanity (the
fact that this is the very Britain whose failure to understand sexuality all
those Giorgio Moroder and Cerrone fans reacted against back then is one of
the most delicious ironies of this story). Unsurprisingly, most of it seems
to come from Birmingham, a former Victorian industrial city (England's second
biggest) which was almost completely demolished, and then became an experiment
of the 60s and 70s built on low-rent futurism. Certainly, when I hear Lawrence
Hayward sing "People like me ... we're selfish and lazy and greedy"
with that ineffably poignant 1977 Birmingham lilt, when I hear the chord changes
in Plone's
"Be Rude To Your School", and when I simply read Broadcast's song
title "City In Progress", I hear a new mythological pop England
being created, a welcome counter to the ruralism of the Kinks and XTC. And
then there is the as-yet-unreleased, often quite beautiful instrumental music
of David Inglesfield (http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/inglesfield.htm) which
uses analogue electronics to reinvoke a rural past, and as such might be exactly
halfway between these two schools of pop-as-yearning.
Of course, one argument has it that to write an article like this in the early
21st Century is pointless - that pop's ever-increasing globalism has distorted
and removed us from all these concepts. Maybe this entire article has been
slightly necrophiliac, a dissection of cultural corpses, ideas of "identity"
and "belonging", that can no longer be spoken of as applicable in
the present tense. But even if it has, what a pleasurable dissection it's
been.
2nd May 2000 (some slight revisions 2003)
[Robin Carmody is part of a community]
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