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?

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.