the band that best addresses 'Englishness' and the subject of England

Madness, esp. the latter unfunny Madness.

later Madness - good - and indeed the Specials. What about The Streets?

Interested you poo-poo the Jam suggestion - they almost made a career out of their 'we're all about Englishness' image - why do you disagree (if you do)?

LESS OBVIOUS: the wedding present, felt, buzzcocks, billy childish, wire,

(I'd mention Kate Bush, by the way. Ultramarine. Nurse With Wound. Current 93. The Sex Pistols.)

Others make this a little more gritty because they come from somewhere, but its somewhere not very nice (The Specials).

In both cases a strong element of Englishness is the way passion is buttoned down by self control. It's an urge that makes our funk scratchy, our romanticism desperate, and fuels the love/hate syndrome with a banal environment that both these brands of 'Englishness' embody.

Of course there are those who come from somewhere nice and then the music is more pastoral, the self-control something to celebrate rather than be imprisoned by. The Genesis suggestion fits this nicely.

This covers an awful lot of very similar and perhaps rather obvious 'English' music. Things get interesting when we move beyond this.

There are for example pop people who have addressed the bucolic, passionate pastoralism that's a strong tradition in English poetry. The 'rural' bits of XTC, the best of Jethro Tull, the Wire of 'Outdoor Miner'. Kate Bush has taken this further into wild romanticism than anyone I can think of.

Only one band I can think of - the long-forgotten Dancing Did - have summed up the 'imprisoned but don't want to leave' ordinary rural experience in the way so many have done the urban/suburban ones.

And a few people have found a 'black Englishness', or have distilled it enough to let it change their music. The latter is why the Bristol bands of the early 90s were so great. Interesting they come from the city with the longest-established black community.

But what other black musics embody/say something specifically about also being English? Drum n bass? Steel Pulse?

the prob i have always had wiv the jam is that they ANNOUNCE what they are going to be abt w/o very often BEING about it: i like a handful of songs a lot ("going underground") and a *whole* buncha others are k-lame => plus i think their "englishness" is very stick-on

although it tends to be more a 'Britishness' that he's describing rather than a distinct 'Englishness'. somewhat unnesecarily overdone in BBR's case too, I'd argue.

But for me, the glaringly obvious answer is Blur.

Sure, Britpop turned into a jingoistic nightmare by the time it reached its second or third generation, but that doesn't diminish its original London-loving McCulture-hating message.

Maybe I loved them because the Englishness they promoted was my background and my childhood. It's very hard, it seems, to be English, and to be proud of being English without swerving into accusations of Nationalism. So even the fact that they have been trying to DISTNACE themselves from their musical culture, what with crap excursions into American or African music only reenforces their white, middle class guilt, and therefore their inherent Englishness.

I'd go with Ewing and the Nipper, some of the way. An important point might be that music that makes you think of Englishness might not be English at all - it might be a totally foreign kind of thing that you have incorporated into your English context. Maybe there are people whom the Boss reminds of Walsall.

In general, this is one question that I think maybe needs counter-intuitive answers more than most - mainly cos 'Englishness' is an easy fiction, a lazy thing to fall back into. (This brings me back to Mark S's good point: eg: it's easier to wave union flags around than actually to articulate anything about 'England'.)

But if this argument is too pointlessly contrary, forget it.

hood, manix, liberty x, autechre, st etienne, montgolfier brothers, the field mice, sonz of a loop da loop era, liberator djs, gavin cheung, jonny l, the sundays, orbital, the fall, pickettywitch, random number, pickettywitch, john cooper clarke, the sundays, pitman,

or, to put it another way

But re. the pictures: I dare say they were taken in England, it's just that for me they don't esp. get at my experience of England (which would be more re. high streets, for instance). Maybe they get at yours. Maybe some of your other pics get at mine. I agree that 'England' is amorphous, and also that it is, at the same time, kind of too easy a category(cf. my post above re the Jam).

for me, this can perhaps be wittled down to what i feel about West Yorkshire, and the difficulty in pinning even that down to something. forlorn drizzly sundays, rainy days in Halifax outskirts, faded books on forgotten local history, from the moors you can see right down into Bradford centre, rows of terraced houses, how different really from the 1930s? Sky, supermarkets, cheap software, they have ice skating now? the whites only estates on the edge of town, the working mens clubs, the arndale centres, the bustling market towns. 1958. 2002. garden centres, net curtains, could be lancs now, the feel...different somehow

but then london, the tower blocks, the bass, the drugs, the vibe, but then dissipation 5am, SE5, david bowie, hunky dory, sabres of paradise haunted dancehall, 23rd floor jamaica road, Origin Unknown, murk. '93 rush green road vistas...but then betjamen...the flightpath estate...metroland replaced by the thames valley overspill. and what of leadville, and what of Iain Sinclair...stepney lies and saveloy simulacra...serbians in ill fitting suits...trite imagery and death on the kent coast?


Leysdown...1950s resort, seemingly preserved in aspic. Rows of chalets, a forlorn tourist sign in 4 languages, i struggle to imagine legions of Italians, French and Germans making the journey to this lost little outpost, a Majorite fallacy gone populist. The place is packed out, the main street, comprised entirely of amusement arcades and pie shops, is positively teeming. Rather at odds with the old style appearance, a tape player blasts out 1996 era jungle from outside the arcade. But somehow Metalheadz seems more appropriate than the Adam Faith or Bay City Rollers that you might lazily think more fitting.

why? disparate images...amorphous, maybe, different no, there is overlap, but how? where, are they separate worlds, how do they interlink, you choose, you ignore, you live. but how? the jam, blur, costello...not enough a second hand england, handed down, not there, too real, not real enough. carnaby street revivalism beats hands down. take it, look, think, heritage culture...between two stools. the fake of the Merc more real. are the italians and the swedes of nw1 more english than you, than me.

thoughts typed rapidly...apologies...make sense of it in the morning...but there is material here...huddersfield...swindon...castleford market...the spice girls...spit out the englands...join the dots...somhow...

is it possible the Elvis sums up england more than all the above anyway, in the way that Peshay and Andy C can weirdly sum up New Jersey Turnpikes? What would Dennis Potter think? i can only guess...

House Crew Euphoria (Ninos' Dream). vibin on sofas, keep methalenedioxy grins internal.

if i had more time, would work some of this through, but why? scattershot it, see what sticks...reassess. think!

2. 'arndale britain': interesting, to me, but doesn't esp. relate to those pics.

3. >>> forlorn drizzly sundays, rainy days in Halifax outskirts, faded books on forgotten local history, from the moors you can see right down into Bradford centre, rows of terraced houses, how different really from the 1930s? Sky, supermarkets, cheap software, they have ice skating now? the whites only estates on the edge of town, the working mens clubs, the arndale centres, the bustling market towns

- All fascinating, in my view: I would like to hear more about it, whether from you or someone else: but again: NOT esp. evoked by those pictures.

Conclusion: you are working with territory that is (to me) very interesting - but (for the last time) **those particular pics that you posted on that particular thread** do not, for me, do much to evoke it. --> they are a red herring: USE OTHER PICTURES PLEASE!

JJReece your answer came in just as I was posting mine. Whoa, kismet.

This is probably due to hearing tapes of 60s UK pop (Manfred Mann, Herman's Hermits, Shadows, Lulu, etc) in the car as a kid, which Giant Steps evokes (as well as the New Order/shoegazer/psychedelic/cutup-esque things); & Carr's lyrics + Sice's vocals seem, well, unAmerican (& possibly unNZ) (or is this buying into the "miserable Brit"/fey clichés?). (heh this is sadly reconstructing thee
(return to 60s pop => return to childhood) = (NZer thinking of "Englishness" => thinking about OUR/THE PAST!!!)
trope rubbidge.

Otherwise I'd say "Ponderosa" + "Group Four", "Bodies" + "Oh Bondage! Up Yours"; & perhaps "Still Ill".

Well, there's:

http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/english.htm
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/inglesfield.htm
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/exotic.htm
http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/english.html

but of course they don't tell the whole story.

--------------

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 (as mentioned by Gareth) 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 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 the modern world seemed infinitely more appealing to me. The weird thing was that a lot of the sounds that 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 '91 - it was so omnipresent, 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 and Roxette at the same time, 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 AREN'T BRINGING UP YOUNG CHILDREN ANY MORE). It cracked around the time I hit secondary school age 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. OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD what a horrible, horrible summer 1992 was. 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 moved house. It wasn't how I'd hoped. I got pissed off. I flirted with the political right. I started reading the Daily Telegraph. I agreed with what Dr Digby Anderson had to say about England and Englishness. Then I heard Blur's "Parklife". I changed a bit. Then I changed a lot. I swung back to the left. Became obsessed with pop music. 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. Wanted to kill Ocean Colour Scene. 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. 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 was 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 (USE OTHER CLICHES PLEASE!!! - RPC 2002) 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), '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 earlier 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 since, 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. 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, foxhunting was a matter of major national debate, and 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. Wrote obsessively about "England" and "Englishness" and their ramifications in the modern world all over the net. Wrote songs on the subject. Then I got here.

Oxide and Neutrino's "Rap Dis (U Can't Stop This Shit)" was in its way one of the most English records I'd ever heard - maybe it was Asian Dub Foundation if they'd been nihilists rather than activists, but really it was our "Welcome To The Terrordome", a brutal scowl completely denying any blame for what had happened and portraying themselves as the real victims of the furore whipped up by a racist media and culturally paranoid and frightened nation. In its exposure of the sense of mortal fear and uncertainty that lies beneath Blairite consensus - 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 new one. 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 but 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.

Apart from that Gareth is SO RIGHT. Blur/Kinks/Jam represent English heritage culture where everyone has tea at four, the beer is warm and everyone wears a bowler hat. Stuck on stereotypes of Englishness past to appeal to the cultural tourist. Anglophiles love it because it confirms their ideas of England rather than showing it as the messy conflicted place it is. Whereas eg Hood, Autechre, The Fall, Oxide and Neutrino etc. manage to capture much more of what England feels like to me, my country, the place I've live all my 26 years not that imagined by someone else.

Tom E also OTM, above, for same reasons.

Don't know much about RT's suggested bands, though; doubt they say any more to me re. UK than Blur do.

Robin C: an epic return - was that stuff already typed out elsewhere, or just done for this thread?

2) fantastic to get such a response to a favourite subject. Will be back for more - that longy needs printing out and reading on the train I'm about to get - and people here remember the Dancing Did!!

3) you people meet in pubs to talk about this kind of thing?? wow! can I play??? (it's a nice day and I fancy a drink)

4) ... or perhaps that should be a little cup of tea, if its not too much trouble, sorry to bother you, how's your father missus got the ump mustnt grumble.

Yes we do meet in pubs. Discussions about that tend to happen on ILE (link at the top right).

PF: You're probably right about my list. Not your sort of thing really, though there's a slight chance you might like some Hood stuff.

the choice of picture for the thread isn't that great, the strange texan/meditterenean ness, the heat. there are some others here, although they are not 'england' photos, just photos i have taken. some are in america. but some may be applicable. also, there are some others within this slumbering project...

I still think the post-industrial "English Underground" bands (C93 etc.) are a good pointer.

Hmmm. The Kinks DID have a particular Englishness, but I don't think they *represented* English heritage culture (whatever that is). RD was equally critical of *Englishness* as has was warmly nostalgic about it (VGPC is a mix of both). Nevertheless, cutting loose from America as the prime source of pop/rock to create something was a fantastic achievement.

I think The Jam (who I have a lot of time for) kind of stumbled upon something of their own through a mixture of aping The Kinks, The Who and mixing in Weller's own brand of teen punk/mod frustration. I think it worked.

I think Blur had nothing to say about anything and were hoping to disguise this.

PF is right that these are the obv, and not very good answers.

The Specials is a good call, whoever said it.

Oh, and welcome back everyone. Talking about Piano Magic, what of "Amongst The Books An Angel"? Now *that* is restrained, quiet English intellectualism - the "time hasn't touched her yet" line is almost unbearably moving to me.

Also: Disco Inferno's "The Last Dance", the dystopia of '93 incarnate.

Side A:
1. Autechre – Fold4, Wrap5
2. Derek Bailey – Niigata Snow
3. The Fall – Cash ‘N’ Carry
4. Scritti Politti - Confidence
5. The Specials – Friday Night & Saturday Morning
6. The Streets – Too Much Brandy
7. Tricky – Ponderosa
8. The KLF – Last Train To Trancecentral
9. The Beta Band - Sequinsizer
10. St. Etienne – He’s On The Phone

Side B:
1. Disco Inferno – Summers Last Sound
2. 4Hero – Journey From The Light
3. Shanks & Bigfoot – Sweet Like Chocolate
4. Pulp – Common People
5. Swell Maps – Let’s Build A Car
6. Throbbing Gristle - United
7. Associates – Party Fears Two
8. Brian Eno – Julie With
9. Piano Magic – Snow Drums
10. Robert Wyatt – At Last I Am Free

How are they making *mistakes*, Gareth? Why is The Kinks 'England' falsified? The idea the Ray Davies is singing *about* England to somehow put his Englishness on display as an end in itself ('for export')is wrong, and irritatingly so.

I've no idea how you've shoehorned Costello into this theory.

*A Nation Mourns*

The Pines!

bands that currently remind me of a certain kind of Englishness more than any other: Girls on Top/Sugababes, Blue, Momus, Interpol.

Momus songs are riddled with varying perceptions on Englishness, made all the more fascinating by the fact that he's not English at all but still (wherever he is in the world) lives out a culture defined by others as 'English'. Bands like Interpol and, to an extent, Rancid feed off a perception of Englishness provided by the English bands that influenced them, and feed it back with a romanticism glaringly absent in those original records (Joy Division, Bunnymen, Sex Pistols, Clash etc).

Their aim is to sell an American sound back to the Americans and to sell an American ideal to the British. something that is experienced as natural and omniprescent within British/English culture, yet still carries associations with glamour. At the same time they're banking on not letting their Englishness corrupt their attempts at credibility within the US market.

It is interesting that 'Englishness' is so much more defined by and in relation to American culture than 'Britishness' is, or than Scottish and Welsh culture is.

perhaps not for export overtly, or even as an aim at all. but i dson't see the problem with the rest of what i have said here. i am uncertain to how it is wrong (it may well be so, but i would need that explained)

Dom:The voice of English music does tend to be overwhelmingly middle class,

the voice? perhaps. the sound? no. maybe theres a difference in whats being said, the spice girls, Suburban Base records, Reinforced, Locked On, the sound rather than the voice. the voice, explicity descriptive rather than experiential. middle class as observer, working class as participant? don't agree that englishness middle class, that blur/jam thing, yes (despite protestations of the opposite), but thats an irrelevancy. I don't see how Bragg fits in here, his working mand schtick is entirely Carnaby Street, for those that see working class people through his distorted lens. i can live without the rose tint

jess, good tape, i agree with much of it (argued with josh last year re: englishness of autechre, he didn't hear it. 'what of electro?' he said, 'don't be literalist' i said. when (and where) were you in england Jess?

interesting conflation of english and british on this thread (including by many of the brits here) - boc sound english to me (although scottish). for myself i am only thinking of englishness, (welsh/scot/irish a different concept, imagery not same for me)

As I said I don't see why the Kinks/Jam/Blur are making *mistakes* and why their England is *falsified*. Can you explain why you think that?

they are not *inherent* mistakes, but they are mistakes on their terms, oppossite result from aim.

maybe it is just that i have never seen the england described in their music

But I reject the notion that that 'obvious' Englishness is not a 'real' national identity. You don't have to feel a kin with it to be English, but I certainly feel it. I can feel it inside me right now! (mmm, nice).

I think of all the people who most obviously address this Englishness, XTC have taken it furthest and deepest. Something about Swindon being both the ultimate English post-industrial non-place but nestling in the most inspiring and ancient of countrysides may be a reason for this.

But that still doesnt take us very far into addressing what this Englishness is.

In fact I think one of the few defining features of Englishness is the way our culture divides up on a class lines, so that one classe's national identity is (or was) different from the others. I think this has two side-effects:
it means the culture, like the language, can absorb a lot of change, a lot of new cultures, and interract with them. This for some makes it a 'weak' national identity; for me its a strength.
it (conversely) means that there is an unresolved tension at the heart of the culture which is both its motor and explains some of its nastier traits. football 'hooliganism' is very old - football originated as a ritualised 'riot' - and the barely restrained violence-matched-with-energy at the heart of say Killing Joke, the Sex Pistols, or the hardest drumnbass/garage - is a result of this.

I've tried several 'Englishness' c90s. My favourite is 'English Epics'. Actually its a C60: the point was to be very very focused. I only recally 2/3 of it sitting here; something like this:

1) Van Morrison - Summertime (in England)
2) PiL - Poptones
3) The Smiths - Suffer little children
4) Jethro Tull - Heavy Horses
5) drum n bass sorry I forget the name - The Dark Stranger

I've not bought anything on 4AD for a long long time but I believe I rather sadly have most of their first dozen or so catalogue numbers. I used to put them in order of an evening....!!

do NOT buy the last piano magic album. it is rubbish! buy Low Birth Weight instead, then try Popular Mechanics, A Trick Of The Sea and Seasonally Affective.

But the best sketches of Englishness are in songs like the inferiority complex of David Watts, the slight decay of Autumn Almanac, the guilt of All of My Friends Were There, the gentle nostalgia/regret of Do You Remember Walter? the resignation of Where Have All the Good Times Gone? and Act Nice and Gentle's tongue in cheek diffidence. Davies wasn't all about beer and Carnaby Street!

I might return to The Jam later.

We both seem to have thought a lot about this Englishness thing. Any reactions to my charachterisation above?

...are a completely English experience, unless we're talking about some mythical unmediated England which exists outwith efforts to sell Englishness beck to ourselves.

My answer: Mel and Kim. And Richard Thompson.

I was adding to what Mark said in an attempt to address the suggestion of 'a falsified England' (Gareth's words). I was trying to say such things (bowlers, mugs, etc) are a crucial part of the experience of living in England.

I don't think I recognise the pure unmediated experience of England / Englishness implied by the 'falsified England' idea.

Apologies if that was unclear or if this has failed to make it clearer.

Welcome beck to ILM.

eg: the Irish have shops full of leprechauns, Guinness key-rings and GBS tea-towels, where we have toy policemen / phone boxes etc -- my question is, what is more important: the similarity, or the difference, between these two things? (I don't know the answer.)

Ali G

an t'ing, as we used to say, and some of you still do.

falsified was a poor choice of word in my case. 'created' would have been better. yes the false bowlers etc are a part of england, but i'm not sure that blur or the jam have achieved such a level. if i think of blur/jam/kinks as japanese then perhaps that makes them sound more english, because its a second order representation then. i agree that the use of 'false' implies a 'true' that does not, and cannot, exist.

but i still fail to see the connection between blur and plastic bowler hats. i do not think they manage such a thing

Reith was, naturally, a Scot..

there is much of the kitchen sink about it, or the feeling of walking through the 4am mining village streets post acid, stark light imminent, simultaneosuly airy and grim...

but yes, it's a crap *record*, obviously

Seriously!

I remember thinking this too, when it first came out. I think I still think it now. Wow, that was decisive.

we're English > we love curry > therefore we're going to win the World Cup

It's my contention that the Future (Future as faith, as motivation) died around 1973. (For the best analysis of the death of the future, I'd recommend Mika Taanila's 1998 film "Futuro - A New Stance For Tomorrow".) Despite the fin-de-siecle, romantic thrills offered up in those first few years of decay (punk, etc.), western culture (and pop culture in particular) has been floundering ever since.

I think it's dangerous, not to mention highly suspect, to equate Weller's, Blur's, etc. contrived images of England with Ray Davies' Something Else/VGPS England. Davies was at least chronicling his love/hate relationship to a vanishing England - a passing England which still (in 1967/68) existed, in places, if one cared to look. The rest is just pandering sludge, no more convincing than current slick Nashville pablum calling forth "American values". Or so it seems to me.

As for America today, whatever images it has of England are postmodern contrivances of long dead signifiers. I mean, does anyone in England today actually own (much less wear) a bowler hat? (Perhaps they do.) Not being English, but having spent some time there, it's obvious that much of (for example) what Monty Python parodied, savagely attacked, etc. is as quaint and vanished as the shiny transport systems Harold Wilson's government once promised the masses.

On a really bad day, I'd nominate London Gatwick Airport as the true face of England today: a nightmarish shopping mall atmosphere with an interior design based on, I swear, Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Useless shops staffed by wanna-be yuppies - slack-jawed yobs fresh off the cart from some obscure village, come to the big city to hit it big (suckers), polishing up on their fake London accents and spending their days off shopping on the high street. Dear oh dear, where does the smugness come from?

But that's on a bad day, as I said.

(Lest you think I'm being unduly critical, I invite you to an American rodeo or Monster Truck Show just to prove that I feel no less sickened or alienated from "my" local culture.)

For what it's worth, though, I - an outsider - would nominate Daniel Treacy's Television Personalities as the exemplary (post-60's) "English" band (why is it that no English person on this thread even mentioned them once?!)- one which knowingly and morbidly played with all the dead signifiers of English culture (mass and pop), the futility of which gave the music its considerable edge. And where did it get Treacy? A park bench to sleep on and a terminal heroin habit. Seems appropriate, somehow.

PAVEMENT!

LKS ... do I know you from anywhere? You are correct in everything you say, and I am genuinely honoured by your high praise. the Ray Davies point is particularly good in that the England he wrote about *did* still exist in 1968, and not just in the hinterlands; in his autobiography Ray likens the excitement of the early Kinks shows to "the roar of the North Bank" at Highbury (he being a north Londoner and Arsenal fan), and the Highbury crowd in the autumn of '68 still dressed like the classic Old Respectable Working Class (I have photographic proof). within five years, football was so deeply immersed in the decay of working-class solidarity and the descent into violence and "no future" that it would take a middle-class gentrification (that's the Blairite no-past sense of middle-class, not the historical sense) to escape it. further proof for your theory (and mine).

as for Ray's imitators ... well, suffice it to say whenever I hear "The Eton Rifles" it seems unreal, false, as though the battles it describes were bygone battles even in 1979, being played out one more time for the cameras even when the real conflicts in society had moved to something and somewhere else. that song would have been meaningful if it had been written in 1966, but in a late 70s / early 80s context it just seems childish. I do quite like the utter resignation to tawdriness and despair of "That's Entertainment", though - the condensing of "wishingyouwerefaraway" into one word is classic, one of Weller's better moments.

interesting juxtaposition I just made in an mp3 playlist (last flames of collective small-town society as a means of flowing into the future / dystopia, thwarted dreams, and the immersion of the Windrush generation itself killing off "little England" as it was): Keith West's "Excerpt From A Teenage Opera" into Hot Chocolate's "Emma".

but the ultimate 1966 Wilsonian "pop-optimism as a strain within a shared forward-looking society, not as an individualistic threat to it" song would probably be David and Jonathan's "Lovers of the World Unite". one could have heard that song at the time and genuinely believed that everything would go on getting better for everyone and everything. oil crisis, full-scale youthful insurgence, rampant individualism, football violence, soaring unemployment, government unity and control of the nation falling apart at the seams, plots to undermine the state from right-wing private armies on one side to trade unions on the other ... nobody could have ever brought themselves to believe that these things could ever happen.

but, like you say, by 1973 ...

Sir Harmar Nicholls, Michael Ward, Monica Edwards, Dusty Springfield, The Monkees, Fairport Convention, Mott The Hoople ... the central chapter of MY BOOK is very nearly written.

the self-conscious delivery also precludes 'feel' on the part of these 'chronicler' artists

LKS seems to me to say some important things. He / she really hits on the crux with the idea that THE FUTURE was what ended in eg. 1973. I guess that can be pulled apart lots of ways, but it did ring a plausible bell for me. So the idea that Kinks = Real, Jam = Historical Pastiche -- yes, I'll buy that, and I like Robin C's observation re. the obsolescent 'Rifles'.

The one big doubt I have re. the LKS / Robin C analysis: they seem to be taking an old idea of old England at face value. ie: because 50s UK = Picture Post and old posters urging you to use the Underground, thinking it was all optimism and belief in progress / British is Best -- which then dissolves in later decades. But I find it hard to believe that that optimism / chauvinism etc was more than skin-deep in the first place. ie: it was the public image, but that != what most people were actually thinking & feeling.

This seems to be a general problem with trying to read the past - but I think we should think of our own moment, and seeing how misleading / selective much of our media etc would be to historians of the future.

I think that a look through literature or Mass Observation records might bear me out.

I saw the original promo film for Mott The Hoople's "All The Young Dudes" on VH1 Classic last night. There is something total, all-immersing and very, very important about it.

and, oh, there's this: http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/skylarking.htm (alluded to earlier in the thread) Peterborough is mentioned, but how could it not be?

I don't think they have a single song that doesn't name-check at least a dozen things about London. They seem more "English" to me than the Jam, which I would have posted if I had posted to this thread before making the tape. And definitely more "English" than Blur even at the height of Blur's "English-ness."

But is the English-ness of Television Personalities the faux-English heritage that was criticized upthread or a particular strain of authentically self-conscious London Englishness of their era? He was still singing about being a Mod in 1995. Where do they fit in?

"... they deal us to the bottom,
but what do they put back" and

"... an RUC dog of oppression,
barking at our feet..."

Fuck the Brits! Get the hell out of Ireland NOW!
http://www.fatwasam.co.uk/components/molotov.jpg

Cornershop

The Who

No explanations needed!

as a american midwestern indie rock dork, the ones i vote for are the Kinks, the Jam, the Who, and Billy Bragg.

(PS, PF, if you're reading, I hear you're in town.)

madness aren't that music hall, are they?

Okay, so 2 of them aren't English, but that's not the question. They are the first 2 I thought of though, they manage to include tradition folk and classic music, and English imagery which makes me think far more of England than and other bands do.

and i like malkmus' very specific idea of englishness: mainly centering around cricket and tea, as far as i know.

i'm not sure how accurately english pavement are, but that's hardly the question here.

Erm... Well obviously the imagery, they like cricket, and sing about things I associate with.
But also the music seems more influenced by English bands like The Fall, The Smith and folk music. Most English bands like Oasis just sound like they want to be American.

Oh also Teenage Fanclub.

You'll be talking about the Incredible String Band then. Oh ye of little faith (is it a direct reference?)

Spot on, old chap! Must rush...

england has changed since this

Genesis 1971-3. It's a very John Majorish England, sure, but still apposite.

I'd rather say a rather old England. And why John Major? Because they had a drummer who is currently a Tory?

The Mekons ! eg, "The Building", "52 Weeks", etc--lots of the early stuff

a john majorish england is an affectation that never really existed, i imagine

Well, OK. I find there's a lot of Olde England romantics on those three albums (you know, the age of Ivanhoe)

The Streets. Duh.

thanks, expert

The Streets only address 00s London and the subject of 00s Londonness.

Test Dept. - "Pax Britannica", obviously.