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England, Pop and Me
An article by Robin Carmody
Brought
up by middle-aged parents (war babies not baby boomers - unusual for my generation,
and it makes a BIG difference), I was fed on an antiquarian vision of England
as a child, all Ursula Moray Williams, Second World War songs and Adam Faith
(the last great burst of Little Englander pop music: check the orchestral
ripples on "How About That?") on the radio. As an only child, I
didn't have an elder sister blasting Wham! or Duran Duran or anything like
that - never heard a second of Radio 1 or Top 40 music until I started listening
to it out of my own choice. My innoculation was completed by my Asperger's
Syndrome and the removal from any sort of peer group influences it brought
on. I suspect I am the youngest person ever to have grown up believing that
the words "gay" and "queer" still had their original meanings
- I tell that to my people my own age and they literally can't believe me.
A young royalist, brought up on the simplistic "Our Island Story" idea of national history, I was a glittering youthful romantic. But then, at the age of nine, I discovered pop music, and suddenly the modern world seemed infinitely more appealing to me. The weird thing was that a lot of the sounds that initially caught my ears came from mainland Europeans gone mid-Atlantic - the first song I knew all the words to was Technotronic's "Get Up (Before The Night Is Over)", while Roxette's ballads "It Must Have Been Love" and "Listen To Your Heart" caught the summer of 1990 in a flash, and their "Joyride" encapsulated the spring of 1991 - it was so omnipresent that liking it seemed to me a fact of nature, not an artistic choice.
Maybe some of my original pop choices were a subliminal
means of not interfering with my romanticism - choose what comes from elsewhere
so it doesn't interfere with your higher myths (though actually I adored Tove
Jansson's Moomin books at the same time as loving Roxette, so maybe not).
But that
was NEVER the whole story. The pre-MOR, pre-crap, pre-Batman Seal was an instant
favourite - his pained, agonised, desperate vocal on "Killer" stood
for a whole other England, fucked to exhaustion by the Thatcherism my parents
(on the cultural right but the political left) had taught me to despise, and
in that sense I'd followed them like a sheepdog. "Crazy" and "Future
Love Paradise" got saturation airplay and said it all about '91 - England
dreaming of something higher, reinvoking a faint echo of the hippie ethos,
but conditioned through the 12 years of brutalism gone thus far to be brutally
realistic at every turn. Years later, I'd discover that Seal had been given
up at birth to a white foster family in Essex, reclaimed by his mother, then
went to live with his father who beat him with whips and fists. A very English
question came through instantly - had he stayed with his foster family, living
among those who had left the East End during the mass immigration of the post-war
years, enjoying a happy suburban / rural existence even if he was the only
black kid in his school, he would certainly have been a more contended man,
but his records would probably have been as bad as "Kiss From A Rose"
(or even - shudder - Des'ree's "Life") from day one.
But as all this happened my other cultural life was little changed - obsessed with Philippa Pearce's "Minnow on the Say", pestering my parents to go on holiday to Cornwall (I'm still waiting, incidentally), endlessly wondering what the 1950s would have been like, I still lived the life of the young romantic, whose childhood had been the most old-fashioned one could possibly have lived in the 1980s (and, I think, impossible today if only because, with a tiny number of exceptions, people my parents' age simply aren't bringing up young children any more). It cracked around the time I hit secondary school and got pissed off that all my friends had gone to big, proper schools - a brand new technology college or the ancient grammar school that pissed Mick Jagger off as a kid, it didn't matter, it was A SCHOOL - and suddenly life seemed a hell of a lot harder. Then the Tories won a fourth term. Then I was diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome.
1992 was easily the worst summer of my life. I didn't read children's books anymore. I didn't read much, to be honest. The entire Top 40 sounded like shit. Whitney at number one forever, then 2 Unlimited ditto - the antithesis of Englishness on both counts. I quite liked Blur's "For Tomorrow" but didn't think seriously about the ideas behind it. I didn't know who the Auteurs were, or who Luke Haines was. I liked Saint Etienne's singles, but as a rule I didn't buy albums - just taped the Top 40, listened to the radio, and bought the odd Now! compilation. And I was less and less happy, feeling less and less of an affinity with a country that appeared to be disowning me, and all its progressive citizens. The institutions I'd thought were godlike were revealed for the hollow shells they were - two words: "Annus Horribilis". The Queen looked totally pissed off, unthinkable even a year earlier.
Then I had several years of unrelenting depression - we'd
moved house but it wasn't how I'd hoped, and I got pissed off in the extreme.
I flirted with the political right, started reading the Daily Telegraph, and
found myself agreeing with what Dr Digby Anderson had to say about England
and Englishness. 
Then
I heard Blur's "Parklife". I changed a bit, and then I changed a
lot, and swung back to the left almost overnight. I became obsessed with pop
music. I bought a Pulp album, a Tindersticks one, a Saint Etienne one ...
modern Englishness (the chill lake of "David's Last Summer", the
broken bedsit of "Cherry Blossom", the urban dislocation of "Avenue"
but always somehow gravitating to the relaxation and happiness of "Mario's
Cafe") formed in my mind. I tore up my old Telegraphs, hated Oasis with
a passion, and wanted to kill Ocean Colour Scene. I even wanted to bomb Royal
Fucking Ascot.
I also started writing, aware subliminally that this was the only way to work out all the contradictions I'd amassed in sixteen short years. I wrote about Oasis and New Labour, the Incredible String Band and Slade, the Divine Comedy and the Prodigy. By January 1997 I was capable of this:
"I reckon that the main thing that fascinates me about the early-to-mid Seventies is that they were, in pretty much every sense, an auspicious time; Britain's post-war cultural institutions had fallen apart, but traces of the old order remained, so in the first half of the Seventies it was still possible, just, and for the last time, for a film to reflect the creation of a perfected, stilled, idealised bourgeois Britain without seeming false, unreal, living in the past. 'Look, Stranger', a criminally forgotten BBC series of the first half of the Seventies, reflects the quest for perfection of its time just as assuredly as British Transport Films' early documentaries like 'Heart of England' (1954) and 'Cyclists' Special' (1955) had for their time, as indeed do later-period BTF productions like 'Seaspeed Story' (1969), 'A Tale Out Of School' (1969), 'Good Ship Versatility' (1971), 'Key To Britain' (1972) and 'Overture One Two Five' (1978). By the time the last-named was released, punk had happened, a vital change had taken place across Britain's wider culture (the depression that followed the rise in unemployment, the removal of grammar schools in many towns and cities in the mid-Seventies) and Modern Britain, as we see it today, had truly begun. After 1977, there were still films and TV programmes evoking this world, but the EMOTIONAL AUTHENTICITY (always the most important aspect of any film or TV programme when it comes to impact) had gone. The world being portrayed was now not merely going, but gone, so it's not surprising that, as it's become more distant, people have given up even attempting to portray it over the past ten years. What's fascinating about, say, John Betjeman's masterpiece, his two-part documentary 'Thank God It's Sunday', made for the BBC in 1972, is that the emotional impact that was lacking in so many earlier Betjeman poems and TV ventures, but undeniably present here, is provided by the fact that the world he celebrated was, by this time, dying. Contrary to popular myth, Betjeman realised that things were changing, and he strained the very poignancy that makes the works of his later years so much more affecting than his own material out of the obsolesence of the only cultural signifiers he knew.
In 'Thank God It's Sunday' all those signifiers are present,
but they're presented like messages from a decaying world of people struggling
to survive on their own, after the end of their culture. Shots and snatches
of 'found' dialogue are there, but it's not a celebration of a culture in
its prime so much as a display of spiritually lost middle-Englanders struggling
to survive after the strictly-defined boundaries and rules by which they had
lived their lives had been eroded. For the first and only time, the implicit
sadness that Betjeman, who defined a sense of English melancholia more than
anyone else, always strived for is fully rendered whole here. A comparison
between 'Thank God It's Sunday' and what Betjeman was doing two decades before
offers all the proof you need that when the culture in which they grew up
is in its prime, artists often produce incredible mediocrity.
When that culture is dying, their work can achieve an emotional scope it never
managed elsewhere. The effect is similar to that of Momus's 'La Catrina' and
of the Pet Shop Boys' 'Being Boring"; a reflection on life since the
1920s, particularly the beauty but ultimate utter emptiness of upper-middle-class
opulence. When late-period Betjeman reflects on the sadness of those of his
own age and background, it's with an emotional strength most other chroniclers
of middle-class English life have never managed. In every sense, the 1967-75
period gave rise to some of the greatest works of melancholia created in the
20th Century."
I had found myself, somehow.
Then Labour got in - I didn't join in the hysteria but,
like everyone else of my politics, I felt a sense of elation when "LAB
gain = Hastings & Rye" appeared on the screen (I might have asked
my mum to pinch me when that came on, to convince me I wasn't dreaming). The
old assumptions of "universal Conservatism" in certain places were
vanished, and with them a key part of the cultural idea of Englishness I'd
been raised on, and I was loving it.
Then I discovered hip-hop, and with it the British variety. Adored the Brotherhood,
thought Blak Twang was ace, didn't like Jay-Z at all. I got on the net, tried
to get others interested in my writings, then started my own site.
A time of major change was upon us - hereditary peers were mostly gone from parliament, devolution was forcing the English to look at themselves rather than just assume that the Anglocentric concept of "Britain" and "Britishness" would last forever, the Conservative Party was in crisis, the future (or otherwise) of foxhunting was a matter of major national debate, and foot and mouth disease, a chimera for the decaying farming industry - in its original charming rosy-cheeked form the universal, absolute backdrop to the Enid Blyton / Eve Garnett childhood I'd lived and loved - was just around the corner. I wrote obsessively about "England" and "Englishness" and their ramifications in the modern world all over the net, and I wrote songs on the subject. One way or another, I got here.
Oxide
and Neutrino's late 2001 single "Rap Dis (U Can't Stop This Shit)"
was in its way one of the most English records I've ever heard - maybe it
was Asian Dub Foundation if they'd been nihilistic rather than activistic,
but really it was our equivalent of Public Enemy's "Welcome To The Terrordome",
a brutal scowl completely denying any blame for what had happened, portraying
themselves as the real victims of the furore whipped up by a racist media
and a culturally paranoid and frightened nation. In its exposure of the sense
of mortal fear and uncertainty that lies beneath Blair-ite consensus it could
not have been bettered - it could have been the Real Countryside Alliance's
theme song, it could have been the BNP's song, it could have been the song
of ANY group within society who felt hard done by and marginalised and treated
like shit. Maybe there was literally no deeper to go (but deeper than "A
Little Deeper" - inspirational shit though "It Takes More"
still resonates with the heart of a modern sea shanty) but I'd hoped they'd
follow it further - deep down into the fucking ugly grind, like DMX if he
was intelligent, like the cover to Dynamite's damp squib should sound - and
I'm not feeling the chorus (for fuck's sake!) on O&N's current "Dem
Girlz". Don't want to join in the jubilee scam. Don't want to start pushing
the lie that everyone's happy and satisfied again because of some stupid Surrey
gawpers in the Mall. Do what the fuck you want but PLEASE don't fucking do
that.
But in terms of having so much shit thrown at you while still always feeling that your optimism and spirit will see you through, I think Daniel Bedingfield's "Gotta Get Thru This" covers a lot of modern English bases - perhaps more than any other chart hit so far this decade. Maybe that edgy intro exploding into ecstatic middle eight is where "Gobbolino The Witch's Cat" plus "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" times "Different Class" times "So Tough" plus "21 Seconds" led me. Maybe there was, as someone a bit crap said in 1991, no other way.
Robin Carmody, September 2002
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