Here, where the Sommer is so little seene …
SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT, ‘To the Queene, entertain’d at night by the Countesse of Anglesey’
In June 1977, the Queen celebrated twenty-five years on the throne and I was arguing with my mother about the Union Jack. The village was going to have a street party right outside our house and in doing her bit, she wanted to hang flags from the windows: not sandcastle pennants but duvet covers. I was mortified, but as she actively disapproved of embarrassment she didn’t listen until I came up with this: ‘It’s fascist. It belongs to the National Front now.’ This surprised and interested her. The duvet covers were hung, I went out for the day but she listened thoughtfully to my news.
England was no longer England, at least not the England it persisted in believing itself to be. Twenty-five years earlier when the news came of the death of George VI, people stopped their cars and stood to attention at the side of the road as a mark of respect. Twenty-five years later, the 2002 celebrations for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee would be like a show on which the curtain had gone up after the audience had left the building. As the Queen made her way through a lunch in each county, her progress had the definite air of a farewell tour. It was as if she were asking, Is anyone out there? And we were saying, We don’t know, Missus, I mean Ma’am, we’re not sure.
In 1977, England was halfway between these two points. People everywhere were eager to celebrate, and they were still in the habit of civic duty and collective responsibility. They formed committees and working parties, and strove to find original ways to mark this anniversary. There are trees, schools, bridges, swimming pools and community centres which carry this date as their inauguration, and hundreds of plaques throughout the country commemorating a royal visit.
The England of the Jubilee committees was already changing. Faraway events were affecting the price of petrol, tripling the cost of coffee and prompting the disappearance of sugar from the shops. There were terrorists, foreign ones, who might be here (this was the time of the Red Army Faction and Ulrike Meinhof). While council members and social clubs planned their Jubilee parties, unemployment was climbing sharply. There would be dancing in the streets, the great act of togetherness, while 100,000 Londoners had recently voted for the National Front.
The 1977 charts were moody and indecisive, full of songs about not wanting to talk by bands who couldn’t be bothered: ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ – Racing Cars; ‘Torn Between Two Lovers’ – Mary MacGregor; ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ – Barbara Dickson; ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ – Abba. Even the Muppets were ‘Halfway Down the Stairs’. Otherwise, there was a lot of shrugging and sulking: Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’, Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’, Hot Chocolate’s ‘So You Win Again’. They were fed up and so were we.
By May, a month before the Jubilee, punk bands were making forays into the charts: The Stranglers’ ‘Peaches’ and the Ramones’ ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker’, songs which were built on familiar rock models. Later in the summer, things would speed up with Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’ and The Jam’s ‘All Around the World’.
Elizabeth toured her domain and, like a Tudor monarch, processed along the Thames while the Sex Pistols hired a boat called The Queen Elizabeth and did the same, playing their version of ‘God Save the Queen’. Banned by the BBC, it still reached Number One, although many record shops refused to admit it, leaving a blank space in its place in chart listings. The pressing plant had at first refused to manufacture the record and the printers to print the cover. ‘God Save the Queen’ got to Number One not just because it was shocking but because it was a real tune. It was catchy. Jamie Reid’s cover was more disturbing than the song itself. It featured an official portrait of the Queen in necklace and tiara, with her eyes and mouth covered by ransom-note style newspaper text. Blindfolded, gagged and pierced by a safety pin through her nose, she looked far more frail than she might had Reid just added a moustache and glasses.
In the new England, little old ladies got hurt, even royal little old ladies. Those who organised the street parties might have remembered the celebrations for the Coronation, or even the end of the War. This celebration was taking place in the shadow of unemployment, terrorism, fascism and punk rock. I believed then that only the young understood this, because we listened to the music, went on the marches, and had bad dreams. I didn’t understand how the world absorbed and adapted to change, and that punk rock would soon be, was already being, soaked up.
I avoided the village and ended up in a nearby town with friends. We couldn’t think of anything to do and so we went to look at a street party. We danced on the edge, in the rain, for a brief moment part of the national celebration of an island where people laid paper cloths on tables and strung paper flags, where bands played in the open air, beacons were lit and everyone wore paper hats and drank from paper cups and ate ice-cream and jelly, as if rain were an impossibility.