Why the Beatles sound better under Cameron than under NuLab

Yes, yes, I know I posted here many times in the run-up to the last election that I'd never be able to listen to the Beatles again once the social tribe I had wrongly believed they had laughed out of power for good in 1964 was back in government.  Yes, yes, I did listen to "I Should Have Known Better" on election night, staring desperately at the sea I've so often wished could be drained to nothing, genuinely believing it would be the last time.  But strangely enough, things didn't turn out that way.  The Beatles actually sound better to me now - stranger, more rebellious, more of a challenge to the dominant ideology of the ruling elite - than at any time since before the Blairites and their pop-cultural allies got hold of them and turned them into a front for all the timewarping and imposing of fixed agendas on the working class that they ever opposed in their time.  The Beatles - or at least their mutant, uncontrollable side (why did I ever dismiss "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" as blues-bore purism?  It's easily the best and strangest thing on Abbey Road - an album which otherwise offers ample proof as to precisely why their split was necessary, and the fact that a teenage Alan Parsons was an engineer on it is frighteningly, chillingly apt) - have been rehabilitated, freed from elite manipulation, by the very event I thought would finally rob them of all meaning for good.

What has made the difference is that our current rulers come from the first generation for whom the Beatles are Before Their Time, a mere detail that contains no personal or emotional resonance and may have been dismissed as an unwelcome parental imposition (indeed, their adolescence was during the very period often dismissed during the Blair/Britpop ascendancy for not sufficiently venerating the band).  George Osborne was born a year after Let It Be was released. But Ed Miliband was also, crucially, born when they had more or less ceased to exist.  It works both ways; the Beatles being History (if not quite, yet, Proper History) to a politician may be a factor in a complete inability to see that alternatives to neoliberalism even exist, a significant reinforcement in an institutional belief that pop culture is merely a front for increasing elite power, but it might also be a reason (Miliband was born at Murdoch's first Christmas; McDonald's first came to London when he was four) for that politician being open to at least quasi-socialist ideas on the organisation of British society, without being blinded - as the Blairites were - by the misleading childhood glamour of Radio Caroline and tabloids and fast food seeming exotic and unobtainable.  Not having lived in the pre-Murdoch world utterly closes some politicians to other options, but makes some politicians far more open to other ways than those who actually grew up in it were.

Virtually throughout the first thirty years of my life (with a slight reversion to older ways under John Major) Britain was governed by former members of one or other of the two great revolutionary movements of 1974.  In my childhood, during which most of my considerable pleasures came from the dying embers of the pre-1979 world, those who - after early political careers which they would later dismiss, with Britain itself at that time, as drifting and directionless - sensed that their time might be coming when they Found Themselves as part of the right-wing anti-state movement of the mid-1970s held sway.  In my late teens and twenties, from which I can take few positive recollections of any kind, erstwhile members of the mid-70s radical student-left who had also supported the withering away of the state, albeit for entirely different reasons, came to the fore, having created a brilliantly cynical hybrid between their old pop-cultural loyalties and 80s neoliberalism which they (absolutely and entirely correctly) now recognised was a far more potent and workable method of enforcing their anti-old-establishment cultural visions and post-Marxist enthusiasm for global capitalism - the capitalist stage of the Marxist process with the ending changed (a phrase which effectively describes New Labour, the American neoconservatism it embraced so enthusiastically, and to a great extent Thatcherism; never forget Alfred Sherman's political origins).

But now, for the first time, those whose political thinking was developed during the tumult unleashed by Harold Wilson's cathartic defeat-in-victory have retired from the front rank, never to return. In the process, the Beatles really have become Proper History - and thus, as they never were before 2010, immune to the distortions and misinterpretations of the political process.  Nothing can touch them now; the elite no longer care anyway.  We have a rising political elite for whom the mid-1970s were about nothing so much as Brian Cant and Geoffrey Hayes (if even that), not a grand-scale left-right power struggle.  And that can mean anything the politicians want it to.  It can mean what George Osborne wants it to mean, or what Ed Miliband wants it to mean.  What do you want it to mean?  That is as decisive a question in 2012 as "what do you want the collapse of the post-war consensus to mean?" was in 1975.  Nobody can afford not to answer it.  There is the Cliff Richard / Duran Duran / Dappy answer, or the Beatles / Human League / Trilla answer.  How will you answer for yourself, if the judgement of history condemns you for not giving the latter answer sufficiently loudly and forcefully here, now?

High Speed 2 and England's eternal conflict

When I was a child a stone's throw from the current site of Ebbsfleet International station, there were vain hopes that the Channel Tunnel rail link would be ready by the time the Tunnel itself was completed, and thus avoid the 13-year tragedy/farce of one of Europe's greatest trains being forced to crawl along congested Victorian lines (hopefully it would also have avoided the unnecessary demolition of Waterloo's Windsor station, but I don't expect anyone else reading this to care about that particularly). There were many reasons why this did not happen - most of them connected to the chronic underfunding and deliberate government destabilising of the then still-nationalised British Rail, which effectively rendered any major, long-term project impossible - but part of it had to do with the staunch, virulent hostility of many residents of Kent to its construction. There is something quite frightening about old news footage of the protests against the link - the attitudes that had been stirred up clearly went considerably beyond reasonable environmental concerns, and into a whole other, more unsettling territory.

The instructive thing about this hysteria is that many of the same people had seen no problem whatsoever with the building of the M20, and any number of other projects which had diluted Kent as they had always dreamt it, but - crucially - had no direct connections to the political red rag of Europe. Even beyond the fact that most would have been Tory voters who had absorbed Thatcher's rhetoric about public transport being for "losers", there was a deeper political subtext to the pettiness and insularity of the opposition. What, eventually, became High Speed 1 was opposed in Tory heartlands not because of where it was going through, but because of where it was going to - a place from which these people had cherished an (almost entirely mythological) vision of separateness and isolation. Anything which brought this scary, hostile land across the Channel closer to them was a threat. Supposed concerns about its effects on the landscapes it would go through were just that; a flag of convenience, a quick and easy cover.

Exactly the same rhetorical smokescreen is currently being revived over High Speed 2. I don't think the shrill shire-Tory voices really care, in most cases, about the areas they object to the line going through (because if they did, why didn't they object when those areas were ruined for other reasons and other purposes years ago?). What they do feel, much more profoundly, is a deep-rooted antipathy towards the areas it is going to. Lord Astor gave the game away with his conspiratorial suggestions in The Spectator, redolent of the language we heard from Tories at the turn of the century when they had pretty much given up capitalism for the Blairite duration and reverted to pre-industrial nativism, that "northern Labour MPs" actively enjoyed seeing the Chilterns built over, out of an antipathy for the region's lingering quasi-feudal ways, that they took pleasure out of seeing a Tory heartland defiled (his suggestion that the internet should be used as a method of contact instead is an unintentional sick joke when we remember how, in the days of foot-and-mouth pyres and Countryside Marches, people like him were suggesting that its very existence was a dangerous socialist plot). In some cases, he may be right. But if anyone in the Labour Party thinks in such tribal terms, it is only a response to equally tribal thinking on the other side.

Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds (Glasgow is suddenly an entirely separate issue, one I will get to in my next post here), the cities that High Speed 2 would bring closer to London, are the cities the Industrial Revolution - and, indeed, the original railways - built. They are the fervent, ever-faster-beating hearts of mercantile capitalism - and thus, by their very nature, a threat to the assumed social prevalence and superiority of the aristocracy. Right from the moment they became great centres of commerce and industry, they challenged aristocratic values with a vibrancy and vitality which, in many ways, proved irresistible. Except when it came to the final challenge, it didn't; the extreme national constitutional stability (in so many ways more of a hindrance than a help) which is the result of an accident of geographical location ensured that the traditional ruling class retained a residual stake in national affairs, the result of an uneasy trade-off with the capitalist class who had made those cities great (and also built the railways, very much against the will of the landed gentry; the railways turned thriving, comparatively advanced regional centres that rejected them into quaint feudal relics just as assuredly as they turned Swindon and Crewe from villages into the heartbeat of an empire of industry). England's eternal conflict was never really resolved, merely put on the backburner in the vain hope that everyone pretending to get along could make people forget about it (just as had happened after Cromwell and the restoration of the monarchy), and that is the real division in everyone's lives, a division that has - in its own uncanny, second-hand ways - permeated tensions in our own time such as that between prog and punk, or between the BBC and ITV in the '70s. It's always there, somewhere, all the stronger for the attempts of several lifetimes to pretend it is just an insignificant, trivial difference (you don't try so hard to hide something unless you're profoundly affected by it in the first place).

The harsh fact is that to acknowledge the vital importance of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds at all, to recognise that their much greater populations (certainly when combined with their de facto suburbs/extensions) gives them a greater deserved stake in the national debate, a bigger deserved slice of the pie, than the quasi-feudal shire hangovers that mercantile capitalism's great compromise gifted a status beyond their true significance, is to undermine and threaten the place in national life that the aristocracy had the extraordinary luck to retain even in the birthplace of mercantile capitalism (but did not cling on to in many countries where it was a relatively late adoption). Despite the resurgence of the monarchy and the various well-documented cultural phenomena which have set the tone for the Cameron era, the aristocracy and their hangers-on still feel a deep sense of cultural uncertainty which may superficially appear to be left over from the Blair era, but is in fact the legacy of industrialisation itself (a clear line of descent; remember how Blair spoke openly about seeing the whole era of left-right politics, now a bigger part of the national debate than they have been for two decades, as an accidental island of history, and about his own aim being to restore the connection between social and economic liberalism that was lost in the early 20th Century, and to recast the Tories not as capitalists but as feudal reactionaries against his own position as a modern-day Whig; Blair, more even than Thatcher, was a far truer descendant of those who built the Industrial Revolution, as opposed to the upper class who resisted it or the working class it created, than any prominent figure in the politics of the mid-20th Century).

Those who object to High Speed 2 on their doorsteps are really, underneath, objecting to their own children having a greater identification with the modern-day version of mercantile capitalism as expressed by the popular culture of the cities it will serve (not least because they are increasingly able to price the people who actually live in the Midlands and North out of those cities' universities) than they have with Julian Fellowes. They may also resent Cameron's support - presumably out of a residual One Nation Conservatism - for High Speed 2 as a means of breaching the North-South divide; even a slight desire on Cameron's part to apologise for the increased divisions even within England that he must know his own government is creating is politically suspect for them, and almost makes him some kind of class traitor. For them, the Midlands and North, and specifically their great cities, are best kept at as great a distance as possible because they embody a way of existence that they have to resist for their own lives to make sense. To paraphrase Auberon Waugh during the GB75 years, they don't want to get into other people's lives so much as keep those other people out of their own lives - and High Speed 2, with its symbolic ties to the other England with which their own England never had a final, decisive conflict, so much as an endless, unanswered question and savage war of peace for command of the country, never quite fought to the finish and thus never truly won by either side, is the epitome of what they want to keep out the most. Never forget that the areas most closely affected by both high-speed lines have been among the few to retain grammar schools this side of the '70s.

I support High Speed 2 above all else because of its symbolism, because of its sense of rebirth, because of its linking us with the rest of Europe, because of its modernity, because of its giving a whole new lease of life to the cities that built the modern world. This, rather than anything more technical and practical, is also entirely why those who oppose it are against it. There really aren't any other positions. Not here. Not in England.

John Major and the law of unintended consequences

We all know the horrible tawdriness of the Mandelson and especially Blair memoirs. We all know, unless we are actually Blairites ourselves, that the loss of faith in pop music and pop culture feels like the loss of faith in God after the First World War must have done, and every bit as emotionally painful even as we know it is the only possible way. We may not know that John Major's "long shadows on county grounds" speech of April 1993 was the most important British political speech of the 1990s and the starting point for the Cameronite taunting of Brown. But it was arguably the former and definitely the latter, because without it the Blairites would never have had an instantly-understood basis for their reduction of politics to playground taunts about their opponents' cultural backgrounds rather than actual policy and ideology - the very tactic that was eventually used so cynically against Labour (which is why I can never take seriously Blairite complaints against it).

The actual context of the speech, as with most universally-recognised soundbites, has long since been forgotten if it was ever really known by most: its intention was to convince the Europhobes who Major famously called "bastards" that the traditions they claimed to love would not be threatened by further integration into the EU. That both Major and his supposed enemies completely ignored the much greater role of American influence in eroding that world need not be gone into again. But for the first year after it was made, I don't remember it being quite as famous and widely quoted as it became later, because there was no need for it to be - Labour policy under John Smith was sufficiently different from Tory policy, and the party significantly serious in its approach, that there was enough genuine ideological contrast and division between the two parties for Labour not to need to resort to ill-thought-out trivialities.

It was only once Blair had taken over, and dropped most of the policies that seriously distinguished Labour from the Tories, that the speech became a legend which almost overnight replaced proper politics in this country. The Blairites had to mock Major on those criteria alone, and for his not knowing about Oasis and the Spice Girls, and for his being old and grey, because they had ceased to be a genuine alternative to the Tories in any meaningful way. When Major desperately dribbled in 1996 that "our pop culture rules the world" (a blatant post-imperial lie of course: at the core of the EU at that time, the Backstreet Boys were bigger than Oasis) they thought they had achieved their greatest possible victory. To hear Major, impotent and destroyed, gibbering words like that was far more important than hearing him admit that Thatcherite ideas on the economy and society had been wrong - they would have been actively repulsed had he ever conceded that (as a social traditionalist such as he claimed to be should have), because in some ways the Blairites were more Thatcherite than Major; certainly the last thing they'd have wanted was to see any Tory admit that the mass privatisation of the mind had been a mistake, because that would have killed the whole Blairite myth before it even started.

Without that 1993 speech, the Blairites might well have found something else to put in place of serious politics and ideological differences between parties, but it would surely have been much harder, and had they failed to find such an easy stick to beat Major with, might they not have dropped most policies that were even social democratic, let alone socialist? We will, alas, never know. But as these profound and dangerous things happened, they were cynically hidden behind the facade of Knebworth, itself a perfect setting for the collapse of serious left-wing thought, being a once-crumbling old pile whose aristocratic owners had saved themselves from penury in the '70s via Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Genesis. A generation was conned and lied to. A generation - mine - grew up thinking that taunting opponents for not knowing enough about celebrities was a substitute for real politics. Some of them - unforgivably - even thought there was something left-wing about it. And then a Tory clique - an Etonian-led one, at that - used exactly the same criteria to taunt a Labour prime minister, and Blair very clearly sees nothing wrong with it.

If my generation ever had a reckoning, it is now.

The complete collapse of all journalistic integrity in broadcasting even before it's been officially approved part 34621

ITV News on Saturday night began with fast-cuts of David Cameron appearing to repeat the word "change".

And there are in this country people who think party political broadcasts no longer exist other than at election time.

I note also that the latest Presley wankfest - an ever more desperate reminder that, for our rulers, what were in fact the British state's greatest missed opportunities in the last 100 years were in fact great and wonderful things because their long-term legacy allowed our current rulers to shape and define themselves and the whole neoliberal agenda - is all over BBC Four, as well as everywhere else. I don't recall it being so five years ago this month, when amid terrible, unbearable desperation we at least had the best Dennis Potter season ever. Never forget: "choice" is a chimera. I know how much DVD has boomed and how much Blu-Ray will, but in many ways they merely give the elite the excuse for greater control of everybody else.

Just one other thing: I know downloads of individual tracks are the dominant force now, but the top two British acts on the first album chart published in 2010 are both Scottish (I've no love for either - Nutini is in many ways far more aesthetically offensive than Boyle - but still). The top three English acts all come from either private schools or the West Country, until the shakedown of the last decade just about the two most un-pop environments in England. I think that might give some idea over who will in all likelihood come out best from the decade to come. And, of course, who will come out worst.

Ahead of the game

Sometimes, of course, I'm caught out.  Like when I cited two particular grime MCs in the early days of this blog who have since had crossover hits which in three out of four cases (I'll still stand up for "Take Me Back") are excruciating or worse (Elton John is by far the most bearable bit of the new "Tiny Dancer", and even he, even when he first recorded that, was just another shell in the end).

But more often, I actually think, I can lead the way in terms of inventive thought.  In 2004, I was posting extensively in various places - few of which I'd particularly want to revisit now - about the way those who had historically been part of the traditional elite had jumped on to pop music in the 1980s, and that this had had long-term ramifications for both pop and the society it exists in. Anyone could say that now and nobody would bat an eyelid.  But I was saying it before even I, let alone anyone else, had heard of David Cameron.

That is why I fear my current predictions may be correct.  To a substantial extent, I think I foresaw Cameron, and what he would mean for whatever his territory may eventually be, before he rose without trace in a way nobody else I have read did.  I hope I am not doing the same for future developments now.  But I fear I am.

The death of British pop revisited

Sorting out mid-1990s editions of Melody Maker isn't like sorting out any old magazines.  It's like going through a litany - at once both personal and public - of lost dreams ("we could just be seeing the most art-literate generation since the mid-60s, and in a roundabout way you can thank Blur for that" - Taylor Parkes in November 1994, a tear in the retrospective eye), dying worlds, collapsing subcultures, bloated new-elite arrogance, the birth of a false, lie-built consensus, and the ultimate end of almost everything the magazine itself had stood for.  It was much more cathartic than I thought it would be. And I think, as with almost everything else, that it was the power of timing that did it.

In January 1994, two structures which now seem impossibly irrecoverable - the genuinely political (as opposed to showbiz by other means) structure of Conservative and Labour parties, the latter fairly recognisable as historically Leftist, both essentially pre-pop and pre-marketing, and the idea of subculture in British music established by punk and redefined by rave - still existed in the present tense, even though actual public belief in the relevance of the former and confidence in the latter's cultural power among its exponents had been in decline for years.  Within two, certainly three years, neither existed in the same sense, nor could they ever exist again.  We were into a whole new world by now - of British politicians defining themselves by jumping aboard pop bandwagons (adopted by NuLab largely because all the genuine political differences that had previously told them from the Tories had been thrown on the scrapheap, and later by Cameron because all the supposed genuine political differences that told him from the old Tories didn't actually exist), and of what had been a subculture defining itself by its absorption into a Radio 1 which within a year of Blair's election had decided it no longer needed them because fashions had changed.  The cultural dynamic which British pop had thrived on since its post-Suez prehistory had well and truly died: from this moment, nobody pretended that it could ever be more than a tool of the neoliberal state. 

I am not saying that there is no good pop music being made in this country - indeed, if you know where to find it, there's at least as much as there ever was, whether it's Chipmunk or Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (parallel pops which in truth have far more in common, inasmuch as that both define and express the experience of those who never had credit to play with as if normal economic rules had come to an end during the Blair era, than dogmatic camp followers of either would ever want to admit) and of course there are means of bypassing the industry middleman that simply weren't around 15 years or more ago - but when everyone has their own clique, and nobody needs to take the "norm" because that norm simply isn't around anymore other than as Simon Cowell's plaything, having collapsed in its vainglorious last gasp that came with Britpop, you can't blame people for feeling a sense of loss, a sense of frustration that the most potentially transcendent pops are happy to exist in their own ghettoes while the elite ideology becomes an ever more brazen mistranslation of pop's essential opportunism.

It's incredible, in retrospect, just how much non-thought, and how many non-ideas, were justified in the mid-'90s on the grounds that they weren't the same thoughts and ideas as had prevailed in THE EIGHTIES (spoken of almost as if it had been an actual, as opposed to mere pop-cultural and political, war crime).  In a manner all too typical of how the Blair government would turn out, genuine thought was suspended, and criticism of the era's holy grails was seen almost as blasphemy, as a distraction from what turned out to be a deluded, false promise. NuLab had to be the wholly good because at least it wasn't full-on Thatcherism, the Premiership had to be the wholly good because it was the opposite of what football had become in the mid-'80s, Britpop had to be the wholly good because it was a different situation from that of a decade earlier when Phil Collins had been dominant and the Smiths stalled at number 26. There was a good deal of justification to the anti-1980s attitude, but it's increasingly shaming to reflect on how few people dared to say that NuLab did not represent a genuinely radical or profound shift from Thatcherism, or that football might eventually become every bit as unequal, dominated by plutocrats and removed from the lives of most of its followers as it had previously been squalid and outmoded, or that Britpop's denial of the very idea of a subculture, and abandonment of interest in all territories beyond the singles chart, might do profound, long-term cultural damage.  All that mattered was short-term interests and being the opposite of the '80s.  We can see the results of the pop-cultural short-termism all around us, and we can see all too viciously that NuLab proved to be simply a continuation of all the aspects of the '80s most portentously condemned in the mid-'90s, which in some ways might reach their natural conclusion in a regression even further back, combining the essential self-centredness and disdain for public provision of Thatcherism with the autocratic / aristocratic rule of the '50s and early '60s as it would have been without the Attlee settlement as a constant background presence.  If Britpop remains for the foreseeable future every bit as untouchable and beyond the pale as prog used to be - and I can only see its reputation declining even further - it will be the political nature of its con trick that damns it, not its regressive but, in itself, unremarkable music.

It hadn't been the best of weekends, after all.  Hearing ELO's "Telephone Line" half-asleep on Sunday night hit me harder on pure emotional level than any song has for some time - I've always loved the song, responded to its desperate all-or-nothing, now-or-never last gasp as an accurate emotional reflection of its time (I'm not suggesting that Jeff Lynne specifically wrote about "living in twilight" to consciously mean the twilight of Butskellism, more that the feeling of the time was so total and all-pervasive that it affected very nearly everyone on some level) but now it's intensified and full-blown, because that 1977/78 feeling that even those of us who weren't even born at the time know almost as if we were there, that balance of dread (which briefly dissipated, it would appear, in the mirage summer of '78) and certain knowledge that everything is up for grabs, that whoever wins the next election has complete ownership of our forseeable future, feels so unsettlingly like now.  When Cameron invoked Hadrian in his New Year message, could he have been implying a coded message that he might even become an ally of convenience of the SNP when the final shoot-out is on?  And could the harsh moral of the mid-1990s - that what seemed to be a fantastic rebirth of British pop as we had known it actually turned out to be its death rattle - have been merely a trial run for the same fate befalling the Labour Party, even in its most neoliberal incarnation?

Murdoch's long game - a prediction

Sorry for the October 2008 flashback, everyone.  As I said, I should have started again a long time before now.

And now for an April 1992 flashback, far more horrific of course.  But back then, as its English edition warned the last person to leave Britain if Neil Kinnock became Prime Minister to turn off the lights, the Scottish edition of The Sun took a rather different line, encouraging its readers to vote for the Scottish National Party.  At the time, many were surprised by this stance - quite a few attributed it to the strong possibility that the vote in Scottish marginal seats might decide the balance of power at Westminster, and suggested that Murdoch wanted to split the vote and encourage those who might otherwise have voted Labour to vote SNP and thus increase the Tories' chances.  How much effect that had we cannot be sure.  But I think he was playing a longer game.  He had already, strategically, decided to support Scotland's secession from the UK so as to strengthen (as it undoubtedly would, massively) his own ideal socio-political model in England.  As far back as 1995, long before anti-Scottishness among English right-wingers had reached its current hysterical level, Jonathan Miller (not that one, but a truly loathsome Sunday Times columnist and obsessive campaigner against the BBC licence fee) was only half-jokingly proposing to stand as an SNP candidate in his ultra-safe Tory Hampshire seat so as to make the point that such areas, and their inherent politics, would be much more likely to have things their way at Westminster if the "socialist stragglers" of Scotland were hived off.  It was only the transmutation of the Labour Party into something Murdoch could accept on both political and cultural levels, coupled with the exhaustion of Major's Tories and (importantly) their continued allegiance to an essentially pre-Sky vision of Britain, that put him off continuing this simultaneous pro-Tory (because he meant it) and pro-SNP (for strategic reasons) stance.

Now the time seems to have come for that stance to return, with all it may bring with it this time.  I predict in doom-laden tones that The Sun in May 2010 will support the Tories in its English edition, and the SNP in its Scottish edition, and will know precisely what it's doing and why it's doing it, even if plenty of its own readers don't.  I may be wrong.  But I think the odds are in favour of my being right.