Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain

By Kari Kallioniemi

English pop music was a dominant force on the global cultural scene in the decades after World War II—and it served a key role in defining, constructing, and challenging various ideas about Englishness in the period. Kari Kallioniemi covers a stunning range of styles of pop—from punk, reggae, and psychedelia to jazz, rock, Brit Pop, and beyond—as he explores the question of how various artists (including such major figures as David Bowie and Morrissey), genres, and pieces of music contributed to the developing understanding of who and what was English in the transformative post-war years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783206018

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2016 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2016 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

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Production editor: Tim Mitchell and Mareike Wehner

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-599-8

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-600-1

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-601-8

Part of the Studies on Popular Culture series

Series ISSN: 2041-6725

Electronic ISSN: 2042-8227

Printed and bound by Gomer, UK

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: Englishness, History and Writing about Pop Music – Seeking the Authentic Voice of Pop-Britain

Chapter 1: Strategies for Conceptualizing Notions of Pop-Englishness

1.1. The Peculiarities of English National Pop Identity

1.2. Between Modernity and Tradition: Imaginary Englishness

1.3. Englishness and Pop Geography

1.4. Pop-Englishness and Transnationalism: The History of Americanization and Relation to Europe

1.5. The Peculiar Entrepreneurialism of British Music Management

Chapter 2: From Tommy Steele to Village Green Preservation Society

2.1. Pop, English Parochialism and Post-War Britain − Change and Continuity

2.2. Young England, Half English: Englishness, the History of National Music and the Emergence of British Rock’n’roll

2.3. The Myth of Swinging Englishness: The British Invasion and Swinging London

2.4. Lazing on a Sunny Psychedelic Afternoon − Englishness and the 1960s Nostalgia for Imaginary Spaces of England

Chapter 3: Anarchy and Enterprise in the UK and the Multiplying of Notions of Pop-Englishness

3.1. From the Winter of Discontent to Free Enterprise: Thatcherism, Pop and Englishness

3.2. Punk, Disco and Progressive Rock: The Proliferation of Pop-Englishness in the 1970s

3.3. Dandyist Masks and Escape Rout(in)es of David Bowie and the New Pop

3.4. Pop-Englishness and Politics: The White British Soul Boys

Chapter 4: The Road to Britpop and Back

4.1. Blairism and Cameronism: Pop, Politics and Englishness

4.2. Morrissey as an International Outsider

4.3. The North Strikes Back − Madchester and the Northern Metaphor Revisited

4.4. The Battle for Britpop

4.5. Post-Britpop and the Ghosts of Englishnesses Past

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This fourth volume of the series Studies on Popular Culture by Intellect Books (Bristol, UK) and the International Institute for Popular Culture, IIPC (Turku, Finland) was partly based on my Ph.D., presented in the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, some years ago. The idea for this volume came from the co-editor of the series, Professor Hannu Salmi, and together with him I came to the conclusion that there has been new momentum developing in the study of nationality and popular culture, and it was therefore an appropriate moment to revisit the issues raised in my dissertation. I would like to record my warmest thanks to him, and especially to Professor Bruce Johnson, the other co-editor of the series and the translation editor of this book. I would also like to thank Emil Aaltonen and Kone Foundations, for the funding I received while finishing this project. Some of the ideas presented in this book were also originally conceived as various conference papers, mostly presented at IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) and EPCA (European Popular Culture Association) EUPOP conferences, and also discussed as working papers in IIPC (International Institute for Popular Culture) seminars at the University of Turku. My warmest thanks to everybody – too numerous to mention here – who participated in these discussions and commented on the papers. My final thanks go to the Intellect staff, especially Tim Mitchell, for all the help provided in producing this book and shepherding it to the marketplace.

Foreword

What do they know of England, who only England know?

(Rudyard Kipling, The English Flag, 1891)

As this book will suggest, imagining England from the outside, from the point of view of a foreigner and through pop music is both a strange and familiar feeling of Anglophilia, inviting me to construct such a highly contested subject as pop-Englishness – ambiguously associated with the precious sentiments that ‘only England know’. Very distant from these spirited sentiments, my tastes as a fan of English/British pop/rock music were formed in my early teenage years in the 1970s, listening to artists like the Sweet, Pink Floyd, David Bowie (1947–2016), Cockney Rebel and Genesis. This obsessive period of pop fandom consisted both of following current music and assimilating the 1960s through collecting records of an era of which I had little direct experience, apart from occasional songs heard and remembered as a child, like Sandie Shaw’s Girl Don’t Come (1964). This fandom, and especially punk- and new wave-ideology, made me a bit suspicious of the canon of the classic albums and the iconic bands, like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper (1967), which was already included in the progressive canons of 1970s rock culture. Avoiding the accepted wisdom, I imagined Englishness, not by English literature studies or my personal visits to Britain, but by pop music saturation, gazing on the unexpected and marginal nooks and crannies of British pop history.

Thus, while preparing this book, I reconsidered the view that notions of pop-Englishness can be best recognized in complexities and in hidden corners and distant flashes of culture, which I have been observing from outside as a Finn in my somewhat isolated society of the 1970s and 1980s, which had its own peculiar relationship with the West, including Britain. This was experienced, for example, by watching English TV comedies like Dad’s Army (1968–1977) as an act of mild rebellion for my generation: although it is a celebration of English characteristics, it was also read as an anti-military show broadcast in the land of compulsory military service. Or, in the case of pop music, artists like Syd Barrett representing the lunatic and free whimsy of liberal human (Anglo) behaviour, which was in stark contrast to Mitteleuropa stratifications and the grey conformity of the Scandinavian welfare state.

Thus, the approach I have taken in this book also reflects this situated account: this is not a definitive or comprehensive history of British post-war pop music, but an attempt to criss-cross through ephemeral debate concerning the various manifestations of pop music in its relation to Englishness. This debate has been circulating in sources of written media texts, fictional works and academic research – from weekly music papers to cultural commentators and intellectuals interested in popular culture. The background for this study is the tradition of cultural history, from which base the cultural past of British pop is also in dialogue with contemporary issues, through interaction with societal processes and continuity and change in British society.

The focus on Englishness as a model for the analysis of the construction of national identity through popular culture has been extremely topical since the mid-1990s. In the new reading of the national popular, apparent everywhere in early twenty-first century England, from national populist political parties and British devolutional/isolationist tendencies to magical embodiments of Englishness like James Bond, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes, a convergence of popular/everyday culture and nationhood seems to provide the continuing reference point for Britain. At the same time, the field of British popular music and culture has been becoming more multicultural and fragmented than ever before, addressing ongoing European debates regarding not only nationalism, but also migration and multiculturalism.

The deeply rooted concern regarding English national authenticity and experiences of modernity thus appears from time to time in public debates on the nature of British culture. David Cameron’s 2011 speech on the failure of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, demanding that immigrants embrace a British identity instead of remaining outside the culture of the majority, is one of the latest links in the continuing debate on British/English nationalism, which during the twentieth century has also been connected to the supposed threat of Americanization and popular culture. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet bloc unexpectedly activated public debates on national authenticity and its political and cultural manifestations. These debates are still very much a topical issue, and are likely to remain so. Central to a post-Soviet (and so-called postmodern) age of neo-nationalisms, the emergence of strong devolutionist tendencies around Europe is also connected to this re-negotiation of the identity of Britain. England/Britain has also been debating vigorously its identity in relation to Europe, and its post-war history provides a particularly complex and ambiguous terrain for this discussion, once again activated by the financial crisis of the European Union and its repercussions.

While suffering the postcolonial blues, England has also experienced a cultural boom since the 1960s as one of the significant centres of global popular culture. Those changes that Britain has faced since the war, including principally the decline of Empire, the emergence of mass culture and mass media and the creation of urban youth cultures, have either accentuated a traumatic relationship with its own national identity or formed a competing dynamic that is conferring a constructive tension on Englishness and its relation to popular culture, but also acting as a positive encouragement in the evaluation of its history. There can hardly be a more convincing articulation of this alternative history seen through popular music than the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics, celebrating the whole spectacle of the historical British pop (music) imagination. In this connection, there had already been before the Olympics a particular interest in the conscious and contrived spectacle of Englishness being visible from the outside, but its privileged viewer has most often come from the Anglophone axis. A further reason for extending work in this area thus relates to my position as a cultural historian, who cannot but wonder why the rather superficial canonization of the recent cultural populism fails to recognize the complexities of the national, and especially its relationship with popular culture.

This book will thus analyse the contemporary interest in the exploration of national identity and its cultural dimensions, and ask what is the fascination for nationally orientated popular culture and identity in the increasingly globalized, (de)industrialized and multicultural world. In a way, this gives another answer to Kipling’s familiar phrase by saying that there is more to know of England.

Introduction

Englishness, History and Writing about Pop Music – Seeking the Authentic Voice of Pop-Britain

Imagine a war/which everyone won/permanent holiday/in endless sun.

(Pet Shop Boys, Dj Culture, 1991)

The Pet Shop Boys’ song Dj Culture was written as a response to the early 1990s conflict in the Gulf, and as a critique of public jingoism created by the war, also directing its attention to the national homophohic ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family (Zuberi 2001: 101–102). This is depicted in the video directed by Eric Watson, in which Victorian matrons, some in drag, wag their fingers in moral disapprobation while scantily dressed showgirls strike poses in the court in which Oscar Wilde (Neil Tennant) is found guilty of sodomy in his trial in 1895. The song, and especially the music video, can also be interpreted as portraying a collection of English national obsessions: from football (Chris Lowe dressed up like a vintage soccer supporter) to pop music (deejays) and from heritage culture of Victorianism and the Second World War (Tennant and Lowe dressed in the khaki uniform of British officers) to gender-bending, posing and pantomime derived from English pop (dance troupes mimicking various episodes of the video, such as a football match).¹ This pop cultural extravaganza of ‘winning the war like a football match and permanent holiday in an endless sun’ is the fantasy of a nation trapped in the straitjacket of puritan values, usually only loosened by the contemporary consumer culture of sport, holidays and pop music.

In this connection, England of Dj Culture is also like a netherworld, as suggested at the beginning of the video by loudspeakers making obscure announcements in French, taken from Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950),² in which the radio transmitter of Death’s car, driving Orpheus into the underworld, broadcasts Dadaist radio messages interpreted by him as exceptional pieces of surreal poetry. In Dj Culture, outlandish French surrealism, also an influence on the imaginary worlds of English popular culture, is haunting the ordinary pleasures and puritan certitudes of Englishness and its various (popular) performances of nationhood. This is an ambiguous vision of the nation as ‘a crucial but ambivalent category for understanding how cultural texts and practices function in the construction of personal and collective identities’ (Biddle and Knights 2007: 1), and also a critical frame for the articulations of pop music. In this case, pop is predominantly seen as an audio-visual culture of the digital world, offering limitless horizons for (trans)national imaginings and performances in the twenty-first century.

Of course, English national identity has not been traditionally defined by modern pop culture. When it was expressed in popular culture performances, it was various forms of traditional areas of festivals, travel writing, shows, dances, cricket matches and political speeches, which represented first a homogeneous idealism related to nationhood, only gradually moving into the tensions in the English experience of modernity versus tradition (Featherstone 2009: 4–5). The contemporary view of pop-Englishness, depicted in Dj Culture, and coming from below, contests the superficial idealism related to nationhood and the special relationship between an exclusive idea of Englishness and discourses such as English literary studies.

Thus, the main concern of this book is to explore the recent history of post-war Britain and ask how its pop music culture has explored, expressed and articulated new readings of English national identity. These readings can be placed in the context of the study of Englishness, writings on pop music and its history, and special strategies that claim authenticity for national pop music. All of this will provide a point of departure, connected to the models of Englishness, to be revisited in three different periods of post-war British history, to study special strategies by which to claim authenticity for national pop music.

The Study of Englishness and Popular Culture

It is no surprise that the hierarchically structured tradition of Englishness – as the celebration of a fictitious harmonious heritage, propagating a sense of an imaginary national culture and manifested in a set of high fictional discourses – has sometimes disclosed its xenophobic foundations, which once marginalized popular culture and its alternative heritage. In trying to control the mutations of the national popular imagination and its other (Doyle 1982 8, 15), symbolized by Dadaist radio messages in Dj Culture, these discourses eventually recognized a need for alternative views of Englishness (Featherstone 2009: 1).

This homogenization of the popular imagination, and the profound antagonism between popular culture and the heritage of English history and literature are some of the reasons why Englishness has traditionally been left to be defined primarily by high culture. For a while, left-wing populism tried to pursue an authentic but now lost popular culture of the past (Kallioniemi and Kärki 2011: 112–17) as an alternative heritage of Englishness, often failing because of an inadequate understanding of the complicity of the whole spectrum of the popular. The fact that the English-speaking world has been leading the way in the production of pop music, popular literature, most popular sports, TV programmes and films with their global influence was long ignored by high culture discourses, in which the idea of a national imaginary could not accommodate what Williams described as ‘a whole way of life, the common meanings and the special processes of discovery and creative effort’ (1993: 6). The whole idea of ‘ordinariness’ of people as part of a new England was activated by two key-texts in the 1950s, which centred on ideas of British popular/ordinary culture: Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958). At the same time, they created a discursive space that enabled the emergence of the bathos of self-conscious working-class Englishness, sometimes fetishized parochially in ‘pieces of Coronation Street − corner wisdom’ (Brooker 2010: 28) of working-class flavoured British popular culture.³ However, this background also produced a broader, internationalist conception of cultural studies in the work of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies under the directorship of Stuart Hall.

Since then, like the Dadaist poems from the underworld, international and continental influences have overshadowed English cultural studies. At the same time, the end of Empire and its post-imperial melancholia, the claims of feminism, black politics and the discourses of the Other gradually dislodged British cultural studies from its narrow national and class preoccupations. This process compelled it to turn from its meditations on the condition of England to the ‘double consciousness of transnational culture’ (Featherstone 2009: 22–23), and the complex connections between new interpretations of Englishness and popular culture. This also made popular culture a contested site. The attempt to construct a common culture is now conducted in a context in which neo-liberalism and a general invention of tradition, with its pre-modern symbols and rituals of nationhood, are taking a growing hold over the popular imagination. Commenting on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee on April 2012, journalist and ex-punk-provocateur Julie Burchill felt compelled to entitle her article ‘Once we had anarchy in the UK. Now all we have is monarchy in the UK’.⁴ She recalled how anti-establishment the 1960s popular culture was, while contemporary Britain is witnessing an unprecedented celebration of tradition, nationhood and Royalty: all of this with the enthusiastic help from the contemporary popular culture figureheads.

Popular music (history) has thus finally been given wider acknowledgement by the English establishment and vice versa, while demonstrating its durably mercurial adaptability. Along with this process, the study of rock music in cultural studies now largely recognizes much of this situation (Brabazon 2012), and growing since the early 1990s beyond all the expectations of old cultural studies, no longer overestimates the revolutionary potential of the music. Instead, it has now been steadily becoming an example of the culture of the selective and curatorial tradition, which it used to resist (Reynolds 2011). At the same time, the use of music to situate oneself historically, culturally and politically in a much more complex system of symbolic meaning than is available locally or even nationally has created new understandings of this tradition, interpreted by national and transnational notions of culture. These processes can be seen as ‘pathways’ (Finnegan 1989: 297–326) showing how the hierarchies concerning national history and culture are always under reconstruction, renegotiation and redefinition in the field of popular culture. Thus, the redefinition of nation through popular music occurs in the interaction between the lived experiences, the written texts and the tradition. This redefined analysis of nation, and its symbolic dimensions of pop nationhood, will be conducted in this book by reading its history through various writers who questioned the hierarchies within English studies but who also tried to extend these dimensions of English nationhood as re-evaluated by pop.

Writing about (English) Pop Music

I was an academic sociologist as well as a rock journalist; but it reflected, too, a wider set of British assumptions about rock and its significance.

(Frith 1984: 3)

This revisiting of the question of nation has always been one of the distinctive features of British pop analysis and its contemporary digital media discourses. All of this bears out the observation that the ideology of rock as a rockspeak is a cross-generic plunderer: ‘from locale to literature; from the cinema to personal style’ (Warner 1996: 7). Thus, in this book, pop writing is a valuable tool for a cultural historian, providing instant access to the collective memory bank, especially because the most fascinating pop writing has been either contemporary commentary or (auto)biographical. Although the history of rock-writing unofficially starts with the emergence of the serious music press through the 1960s and 1970s, with a much broader history in the United Kingdom than in the United States, there are notable precursors – going as far back as the 1930s – embracing everything from fiction to personal journalism (Jones 2002; Savage 1995a: xix). In this connection, the 1950s/1960s new journalism and underground press were also important forerunners to the music press,⁵ but the roots of the latter were also bound up in the 1940s/1950s film-magazines dealing with screen personalities, both indicating their original places as facets of the music industry.

This poly-vocality in pop writing is emphasized by another tradition coming from the reportorial approach of cultural outsiders like Colin MacInnes, who tried to chart the translation of pop into the journalism of the late 1950s, and the analysis of 1960s pop by jazz singer turned journalist George Melly. All of these writers also tried to find distinctive notions of Englishness in transatlantic rock culture, trying to pay attention to the peculiarly national idioms that would strengthen the pop patriotism targeted at the conformist forms of American mainstream popular culture. Apart from this, two kinds of writing fed popular culture journalism during the 1980s: one in a more conventional academic mode, and the other what might be called a new form of cultural journalism. After the theoretically informed, analytical, but sometimes cynical and satirical writing style of the 1970s, new journalism was informed by theories of semiotics and youth subcultures in such magazines as NME, the Face, Blitz and iD. The style, combining rock’s streetwiseness with academic theorizing, was created by influential and often vituperative writers of the post-punk era, like Paul Morley, whose literate cutting and mixing style encompassed incongruously high and low cultural influences.

Morley moved from critic to pop cultural entrepreneur, and the ghosts of Roland Barthes (Long 2012a: 139) and Jean Cocteau were evoked when he became one of the masterminds behind English pop’s most extravagant success story of the 1980s, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and was hired by producer Trevor Horn as a kind of resident ideologue-cum-agent provocateur for his new label Zang Tumb Tuum (Maconie 2013: 263), a phrase borrowed from the Italian Futurist artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Morley’s controversial and egocentric writing and sloganizing were also inspired by French philosophy. This was especially evident on the cover of Frankie’s Welcome to the Pleasure Dome album, in which Morley played with the Thatcherite advertising and consumerism culture of the 1980s by selling the Andre Gide socks and the Jean Genet Boxer Shorts, the epitome of pretentious and hilarious situationist flirting with serious culture in British popular culture media tactics and journalism. Thus, the earlier post-punk mood of pro-Labour, anti-corporate, egalitarian righteousness (Long 2012a: 137) began to flirt with the Thatcherite world of free enterprise. Journalists operated as taste makers and interpreters not only for rock-related culture but also for more diverse popular culture, extending to lifestyle and retro-culture magazines, television, radio and books, and became arbiters of pop cultural history.

Morley’s and his colleagues’ work was thus an example of a peculiarly English expression of pop identity: one that constantly tests its boundaries while articulating its indigenous originality. The repercussions of its pop-saturated aesthetics provided wider opportunities in entertainment industries, for example, when people like Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys worked as Assistant Editor of Smash Hits (Long 2012a: 101), sharpening his pop sensibility for future use as a pop star while interviewing 1980s pop aristocracy. Unfortunately, the financial and ideological power of (weekly) music magazines has steadily weakened since then. Melody Maker, begun in 1926, closed in 2000, while New Musical Express (1952–) has tried to keep its finger on the pop Zeitgeist while the traditional music reader has vanished into cyberspace or has simply become a ‘lost species’.

The relationship between journalism and some intellectual form of pop entrepreneurship has always been a turbulent but alluring one in a capitalist society like England. However, because of the recent populist nostalgia shifting emphasis towards the ordinary rather than the strange in English (popular) culture, and because of the expansion of academic popular culture studies, the undertone of the (populist) media in England has strengthened the association between street credibility and rock journalism since the 1990s (Frith and Savage 1997: 10, 14),⁶ while creating a lucrative book market for popular culture writers.

Men coming from a certain kind of class background, ‘lower-middle class to middle class […] from a certain hinterland in British culture which is very unstable and rootless’ (Giles 1989: 17), were thus likely to be in the business of music writing, nowadays probably working as curators in the net-archives like Rock’s Backpages. These people apparently typified English middle-class male-intellectualism, ‘theorizing about the nature of pop itself, rather than producing it, as a very British response’ (Savage 1995a: xxix), and used it as the basis for the escape from middle-class boredom by writing about rock. In such cases, popular music is a solution, ‘not to the problems of being young and poor and proletarian but to the problems of being an intellectual’ (Frith 1992a: 179). Making pop music a site for the play of intellectual fantasies has deepened its inclination to belong to a renegade tradition, but also strengthened its role in the established tradition of national culture. The British transgressing of categories – a researcher as a critic, a journalist as a novelist, a critic as a media personality – has thus also served its purpose in building alternative histories of Englishness.

At the same time, cultural studies infiltrated the university curriculum and brought popular culture from a position of triviality to one of respect (McGuigan 1992), contesting a long tradition of populist intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in England, which has used popular culture, the culture of the people, against academia and academics, while strengthening a discourse in which ‘to be an intellectual is to be by definition queer, depraved, foreign’ (Frith and Savage 1997: 9). The effect of the Thatcher Decade especially further widened the gap between academics and journalists and increased the importance of journalists as cultural ideologues, while undermining the cultural authority of educators. At the same time, the 1980s saw a boom in newspaper and magazine publishing, which increased media space for popular culture writing, typifying the assumed (pop)cultural position, but also exemplifying the important position, which pop music (culture) has achieved both in the media and in academia. The suggestion that this created a national populist ambience in English life at the turn of the millennium was often argued in the British dumbing down-debate, meaning that popular culture discourse has strengthened the traditional ideology of commonness and ordinariness of English life, while illuminating its love-hate relationship with the extraordinariness of pop.

Polyphony of the Pop Historical Moment and the Definition of Pop-Englishness

I sincerely don’t have time to mess around with the past, because I’m not sure the past exists anymore. […] Maybe history is dead, and if it is, it quite likely means that the future is dead, because they are two sides of the same coin. We might be coming in to a new era of nowness, which maybe is a very good thing.

(Sischy 1995: 147)

For God’s sake, the whole sodding point of pop music is that it’s about right here, right now. To sigh lovingly in false memory for a time when you weren’t even alive, marks you down as a sort of halfwit.

(Sutherland 1996: 9)

This conflict between a pop intellectual and a populist – a constant feature of the pop history of post-war Britain – is often acted out in pop’s simultaneous refusal and celebration of history. The ambivalence in the pop experience, celebrating the transience of pop music and recalling the Baudelairean manifesto of modernism, in which all is ‘present, new and transient’ (Berman 1991: 159–160), has always created new versions of the old, an ever-changing mood made out of borrowings, styles remade and remodelled.

However, this experience of modernity associated with pop music can also survey the histories of popular music in terms of a historical polyphony, in which the process of retroism, recycling and the deaths of popular music styles become entangled with each other. This retromania, pop culture’s addiction to its own past (Reynolds 2011), has rekindled debates over the death of rock, its re-evaluation as new heritage culture or a new experience of history in the present western culture.

This affirmative vision of modernity, also an important part of the formation of English pop music culture, coincided loosely with the emergence of pop art in the early 1960s, making it one of the driving sentiments behind much that is visionary surreal and subversive in British pop culture. Pop art’s dominant themes – breaking down the barriers between art and other human activities, such as commercial entertainment, fashion, design and politics – encouraged English pop entrepreneurs to work together on mixed-media productions and performances (Berman 1991: 314–332, 345–346), thus encouraging the traffic between cinema, visual arts and pop music. Hence, the historical moment of postmodernism broadly coincided with the arrival of a fully developed media-hybrid rock discourse and its emphasis on the integration of different media forms, the significance of the image and the fusion of art theory and marketing (Frith and Horne 1987: 5) – all important factors in the history of post-war British pop music.

It is on these foundations that I would like to define pop-Englishness in this book. It can be perceived as a pop/rock culture idiom or sensibility, which moves between different popular cultural forms (music, music video, pop cinema, art and advertising) and British past and present mediascapes, while imagining and commenting on English/British identity and society. This new sensibility or cultural idiom has also involved new approaches to the experience of time in pop. The rock discourse of the 1960s adopted the idea of linear progression, typified, for example, in a notion of musical progress exemplified most often by the Beatles. Turning from that linear progression to see the history of pop music more in the form of different paths leading in different directions during the 1980s, postmodern intertextuality created the experience of time being disrupted. Through most of the 1960s pop was still a relatively personal and subjective terrain with its weekly run of hit lists, Top of the Pops and going out on Saturday night, with little coherent public discourse by which the artefacts of pop were codified into a canon with historical depth, let alone into a canon of national culture. The idea of pop was in the lived experience that tried to widen the gap between itself and older forms of entertainment through the ideas of teen-specific music, and the notion of musical progress that emerged from underground rock culture.

By the 1980s, the relatively simplistic and undeveloped conception of the pop experience had been revised and textured. Paradoxically, the first major assault on the one-dimensional pop mythology came from the group who first exemplified it, the Beatles, who were the embodiments of pop music modernism, taking part in a collective, linear cultural motion, and their recording of Tomorrow Never Knows (1966): ‘built on a sequence of loops, it marked the moment when pop began to move out of the linear and into serial time, when directional was replaced by circular motion’ (Savage 1996a: 5). Therefore, the pop modernism of the Beatles challenged national constructs or did not particularly signify nation, albeit ‘the Fab Four might be read as a truly original and historically significant British pop band’ (Weisethaunet 2007: 194) – being characteristically the ambassadors of Englishness in the historical moment when England’s traditional national and global meaning was in decline.

However, the pop modernist process has now reached its zenith by digitization, in which the personal has eventually moved into the virtual and circular experience of services like Spotify, iTunes and Gnutella: fertile grounds for the retromania created by pop modernism, organizing and defining itself against the past, but now also with and through it. Therefore, pop’s apparent paradox is that although it exists to heighten the present, it is also irrevocably saturated with the past, up for resurrection and re-evaluation. Thus, the past really is now becoming a continuous present, felt through its overwhelming sense of excitement but also by the cultural inertia created by it, and caused by popular culture overdose of digitized entertainment and information.

Following from this, the current cultural ennui or euphoria might also recall French annalist Fernand Braudel’s idea of how every historical moment, as well as the present, contains the polyphony of different periods creating the uniqueness of each specific historical event. Therefore, in Braudelian terms, the pop moment follows his orchestra metaphor showing the multiplicity of different times in the given moment (Braudel 1982: 26–52) in which time flows like an orchestral epic where the different time spans and rhythmic elements form the cultural polyphony of the moment.⁷ Therefore, year after year, we become more painfully aware of every pop cultural moment and its polyphony, as chaotic or not-so-golden as any other, carrying the weight of multiple meanings, and exemplified by Jon Savage’s Spotify playlist 1974.⁸ In this, the year 1974 is