Home Grown?
No sensible person would try to draw a neat line between British pop and its origins in America. For everyone except the Americans, rock is an import and a transplant. Rock and Roll was black American slang for having sex. It derives from the Deep South, via rhythm and blues and eventually mated with the country music of rural white America – which in turn had come from the folk music of Ireland, England, Scotland and France. Accelerated, amplified and sexualized, when it arrived in Britain it was immediately denounced as alien, indecent, anarchic, corrupting ‘Negro’ music, thoroughly un-British. This was not just the view of the occasional retired squadron leader sitting in his Kent garden. The hugely popular music magazine Melody Maker described rock as ‘one of the most terrifying things to have happened to popular music…The Rock-and-Roll technique, instrumentally and vocally, is the antithesis of all that jazz has been striving for over the years – in other words, good taste and musical integrity.’
Modern jazz fans and folk music purists would try to hold the line for years. Yet the diabolic Elvis and all his works, were too big, too mesmeric, to be resisted. Few of the first performers and bands in Britain wrote their own material. Donegan sang in an American voice; thousands of would-be pop stars did endless covers of Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Fats Domino. Again, it was the breakthrough lead given by Lennon and McCartney in singing their own material that persuaded scores of other bands to follow. Even today and after a lifetime of hits, there is little about the music of the Rolling Stones that feels particularly English; Dusty Springfield had one of the loveliest voices of the age, but if you didn’t know you could have been forgiven for thinking that she was a black babe from Motown not a Catholic girl from High Wycombe.
Yet the British Isles had traditions which would feed back into the American musical revolution and change it dramatically, both in sound and content. We have discussed the art schools already. But there was also the folk tradition which was being revived even though the pop and rock stars rarely had first-hand experience of it. John O’Leannain (as his name should properly be written) and Paul McCartney both came from musical Irish families but had been cut off from their heritage. Bands such as Fairport Convention, which began in North London in 1967, taking its name from the house where they practised, and Jethro Tull, founded by the Scottish and Blackpool flautist Ian Anderson in 1968, would incorporate some of the feel of British folk back into rock; others like the Ulsterman Van Morrison would cross the lines repeatedly.
A stronger influence still was the music hall, or variety tradition, discussed earlier and the humorous or sentimental music played on pianos in the home. These can be heard in the brassy, knees-up sound of Beatles songs like ‘Strawberry Fields’ or through most of the Sergeant Pepper album, in which the stomp of the fairground and the wheezing of the circus organ are not far away. As Lennon and McCartney, who both lost their mothers early, put it, ‘Let’s all get up and dance to a song, That was a hit before your Mother was born.’ And beyond the Beatles, with their Liverpudlian nostalgia, a host of bands filled their lyrics with local references. To take just one example, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung of 1971 name-checks Preston railway station, Hampstead Heath and Piccadilly Circus, while their following album, Thick as a Brick, which was a huge hit in the US, not only addresses the mood of post-sixties despair – ‘the sandcastle virtues are all swept away in / the tidal destruction / the moral mêlée’ – but manages to ask ‘So where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?’
The most impressive and sustained attempt to create a distinctively British pop came from the Kinks and was at the time a huge flop. Banned from the US while others were breaking into American stardom, Ray Davies, a cussed observer of modern life, turned back to local subjects. He had always written pop songs about everything from the death of the dance-halls to the joys of the English autumn, but The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society of 1968 was on an entirely different scale. As Ray Davies put it himself: ‘While everybody else thought the hip thing to do was to drop acid, take as many drugs as possible and listen to music in a coma, the Kinks were singing songs about lost friends, draught beer, motorbike riders, wicked witches and flying cats.’ He is not exaggerating. The title song calls for the preservation of, inter alia, Desperate Dan, strawberry jam, the George Cross, the ‘Sherlock Holmes English-speaking vernacular’, little shops, china cups, virginity, Tudor houses and antique tables, while attacking the new skyscrapers and office blocks. The album which sold in tiny numbers compared to the Beatles, worried and confused the critics who could not decide whether the Kinks were being serious or satirical. Today it is regarded as one of the great achievements of British pop in the sixties, a subtle mix of affection and derision, nostalgia and micky-taking, and no less essentially English for that. The Kinks were hugely influential not just on other bands of the time such as the Who, but on the later waves of ‘Britpop’. They showed that it was possible to write inspiring rock music about what was around you, without posturing as a New Yorker or Alabama boy, indeed without pretending to be (just a little bit) black.
Rock was an arena for dreamers or harmless humorists, the fun factory for weekend rebels whose stars were too busy buying country estates, Rolls-Royces and drugs to worry about the condition of the country. Little of it was political. As John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 when asked to assess the impact of the Beatles: ‘Nothing happened, except we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it’s exactly the same.’ That feeling was shared by the counter-culture left who had been attending seminars and protest meetings about Vietnam, marching against capitalist stooges in the Labour Party and ranting about the need for revolution. Like the world of pop, it was essentially an American import. When counter-culture poets had put on an evening of readings at the Albert Hall in 1965, alongside the British contingent which included Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue, there were the New York and San Francisco gurus, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso. The poets were the most eloquent voices.
The American influence was, not surprisingly, strongest in the antiwar movement. When the Vietnam Solidarity Committee organized three demonstrations outside the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square, the second of them particularly violent, they were copying the cause and the tactics used to much greater effect in the United States. The student sit-ins and occupations at Hornsey and Guildford Art Colleges, and Warwick University, were pale imitations of the serious unrest on US and French campuses. There was even a (literally) pale imitation of the ultimate US underground movement, called rather pathetically the White Panthers. Their main revolutionary aim seemed to be free access to rock festivals, or what they called ‘the People’s music’. A two-week gathering to debate ‘the dialectics of liberation’ was organized at London’s Round House in 1967. The star speaker was the American Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael. The event finished with a speech of abject apology from one of the British organizers on behalf of ‘we deracinated white intellectuals, we who are bourgeois and colonizing in essence’. The conference’s intellectual guru was a Californian exile from Germany, Herbert Marcuse, whose central message was that the affluent society was oppressive, based on the creation of ‘false needs’ and impossible to change by conventional political revolution.
In the same year a French revolutionary named Guy Debord came to England with a call to arms. When he arrived at a Notting Hill flat to meet the promised group of twenty hardcore revolutionaries only three had turned up, and they spent the afternoon drinking cans of McEwan’s Export and watching Match of the Day. Not surprisingly, Debord gave up on the Anglo-Saxons. British revolutionaries in modern times have been so little real threat that they were easily and cheerfully incorporated into mainstream television comedy through the character of Citizen Smith of the Tooting Popular Front. Debord’s followers, however, taking the name ‘Les Enragés’, were heavily involved in the great Paris and Nanterre student uprisings of 1968. This was on a scale like nothing seen in Britain – nearly 600 students arrested in fights with the police on a single day and, at the high point of the revolt, 10m workers on strike across France. Hundreds of British students went over to join what they hoped would be a revolution, until de Gaulle, with the backing of an election victory, crushed it.
British alternative politics in print had no equivalents to the Beatles, the Who or the Kinks. The underground magazines such as International Times, Black Dwarf and Oz copied the rhetoric, art work and cartoon style of similar American publications and lacked the salty, surly working-class energy of rock. The greatest confrontation with the state focused on whether Rupert Bear, as manipulated by the pen of Vivian Berger, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy with a particularly lewd imagination, was behaving obscenely. The cartoon strip was central to the long summer trial in 1971 of the magazine Oz. At the Old Bailey, despite the best efforts of the publishers’ barrister John Mortimer, the priapic Rupert was judged to be behaving disgracefully. Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson ended up with suspended sentences. Immortally, the young Berger told the jury that though he wanted to shock ‘your generation…also, I thought it was funny.’ A teddy bear with a stiffy: it rather sums up Britains answer to revolution.
The counter-culture would curdle and gurgle away for fairly obvious reasons. It had no practical agenda. It was deeply hostile to organization. It was largely middle class and had no effective links to the working-class socialists who wanted higher wages and perhaps even workers’ cooperatives, but were less keen on long-haired students taking drugs, or indeed angry black people. Those parts of the new politics which would stick, would be anti racism; feminism, to the extent that it focused on practical and realistic ideas, such as equal pay and refuges for battered wives; and the gay liberation movement, which also had clear objectives, and also looked to the United States for a lead, particularly after the Stonewall riot. But the great irony is that the counter-culture, disdainful of sell-out pop music, was far less successful than pop at creating an indigenous British movement. It was dependent on passing American fads and voices as, by the mid-sixties, British pop was not.