British Rock Modernism

British Rock Modernism,
1967-1977
The Story of Music Hall in Rock
Barry J. Faulk
1967-1977
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1967-1977
The Story of Music Hall in Rock
Barry J. Faulk
Florida State University, USA
© Barry J. Faulk 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Barry J. Faulk has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Faulk, Barry J.
British rock modernism, 1967-1977 : the story of music hall in rock. –
(Ashgate popular and folk music series)
1. Rock music – Great Britain – 1961-1970 – History and criticism.
2. Rock music – Great Britain – 1971-1980 – History and criticism.
3. Music-halls (Variety-theatres, cabarets, etc.) – Great Britain.
I. Title II. Series
781.6’6’0941’09046–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulk, Barry J.
British rock modernism, 1967-1977 : the story of music hall in rock / Barry J. Faulk.
p. cm. — (Ashgate popular and folk music series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-1190-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4094-1945-7 (ebook)
1. Rock music—Great Britain—1961-1970—History and criticism. 2. Rock music—Great
Britain—1971-1980--History and criticism. 3. Music-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.)
—Great Britain. I. Title.
ML3534.6.G7F38 2011
781.660941’09046—dc22
2010024211
ISBN 9781409411901 (hbk)

ISBN 9781409419457 (ebk) V
Contents
General Editor’s Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 British Pop Women Singers of the 1960s and the Struggle for
Modern Identity 21
2 Modernist Rock Constructs the Folk: The Beatles’

Magical Mystery Tour 47
3 New Left in Victorian Drag: The Rolling Stones Rock and

Roll Circus 77
4 The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and the
Making of the Rock Auteur 105
5 Modernist Nostalgia: The Sex Pistols’ Music-Hall Revival 129
Conclusion 155
Bibliography 165
Index 173
General Editor’s Preface
The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the
twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music
alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic
outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international
ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution
of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context,
reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the
status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has
arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new
genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes
authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of
free, individual expression.
Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in
the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and
meanings in cultural context, and draw upon methodologies and theories developed
in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology.
The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco,
whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary
or traditional.
Professor Derek B. Scott

Professor of Critical Musicology
University of Leeds
Acknowledgments
Rock music in the 60s and 70s still represented the sound of a subculture—or
so it seemed to me, growing up. And even though I thought rock music was
uncompromisingly, aggressively, modern, there also seemed to be something
older than rock itself about the British groups that mattered to me. Whatever this
ancient element was, it seemed deeply exotic, and vibrantly other, to a teenager
living in the American South. My interest became an obsession; this book is
the result.
I am fortunate enough to work in an academic environment—the English
Department at Florida State University—that has been both nurturing and inspiring.
I couldn’t have written this book, or any book, without the support of supremely
generous colleagues like Mark Cooper, Robin Truth Goodman, Helen Burke,
Ned Stuckey-French and Jim O’Rourke, to name just a few. Ralph Berry,
Timothy Parrish, Lauren Onkey, and Neil Nehring provided intellectual guidance
when I most needed it. I am forever grateful to some brilliant former students
who were tireless listeners and unswerving in their enthusiasm for the project;
my debt to Jackie Bitsis, Cameron Stuart, and Hala Herbly is enormous. I was
also fortunate in having a superb editor, Heidi Bishop, and a sympathetic reader,
Derek Scott, who believed in what the book could be. It has been a pleasure
throughout working with the amazingly professional staff at Ashgate Publishing.
My heartfelt gratitude to Moscovia as well: another untiring listener, and the
world’s most reluctant rock fan. The mistakes, of course, are uniquely my own.
Introduction
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock
performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are
legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on and thereby
intervening in the commercial art enterprise in which they engaged. They did so
by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. I focus
on the moment in the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already
achieved commercial success began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. To grasp the
significance of the moment, we must look beyond rock music itself to the tradition
of British music-hall song. The book discusses recordings (the Beatles’ Magical
Mystery Tour record, the Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society, the Sex
Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols), and television films
(the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus)
that defined rock’s early high art moment. I argue that these texts disclose the
primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly composed of young
working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by
sampling music-hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose
main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture
above the new medium. Rock groups engaged the music of the past in order both
to demonstrate the vitality of the new form and signify rock’s new art status,
compared to earlier British pop music.
Rock groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks began to
reference the 19th-century musical entertainment that preceded British rock,
the music hall, as rock music’s Other; it was made to represent everything that
rock was supposedly not. The music hall past was engaged in two ways that
substantially altered the evolution of British rock music: first, 60’s bands invoked
music hall largely in order to hijack its authority for the new music; later, bands
like the Sex Pistols, conscious of the association that developed in the rock era
between music hall entertainment and a fully outmoded Englishness, revived the
older form in defiance of the consumerist ethos of 70’s British pop, but also to
subvert the authority of the previous generation of British rock bands.
My project situates British rock in the 1960s and 70s within a broader social
history, but does not reduce music merely to its context. Focusing on the evolution
of aesthetic projects from within British rock in the late 1960s and 70s provides
a way of addressing rock as a music genre with its own rules distinct from other
cultural spheres. The link I posit between aesthetic value and classic British rock
may still be provocative to some, even in a world of Rock museums and “Halls of
Fame.” Yet British rock bands at this time entertained artistic ambitions, sometimes
explicitly modeling themselves on earlier generations of modernist artists, more
british rock modernism, 1967-1977
often by rediscovering the objectives of modernist artists, concerned with achieving

greater control over the means of artistic production, for themselves. My focus
on rock music in its art-phase rather than pre-art rock is for greater descriptive
purchase, not a prescriptive purpose. The point is not to reinforce a binary between
rock as art music and rock as dance music, but to clarify the specific role played
by “classic” rock in various discourses of class and nation specific to the British
1960s and 70s.
Any one who cares about the music of the era can think of artists and bands
missing from this story of rock’s evolution; it is even difficult to treat every British
rock group that made music with a nod to music hall. The project of recapturing
childhood experience, begun with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s record and a touchstone
of British psychedelia, often resulted in music built on the formulas of music hall
song. The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (1968) is exemplary British
psychedelic rock in this regard, a record where the music’s experimental ambitions
co-exist with antique Englishness. “Rene” is a rock song that incorporates music
hall sing-a-long, and tells a not-uncommon story about East London life: a woman
of extraordinary vitality at the center of a large, multi-racial family, fathered by
sailors temporarily docked in the East End and looking for company (which dates
both Rene and Marriot/Lane, hearkening back to an older time when the East End
docks were a major shipping center rather than the low traffic zone it was by the
1960s). The intrusive neighbors we hear complaining about the singer in Marriot/
Lane’s “Lazy Sunday” on the same album have signature, and caricature, East
London voices. However, the Small Faces evoke the recent past without the larger
aesthetic ambitions of contemporaneous records by the Beatles and the Kinks,
and for this reason falls outside the parameters of this study. In defense of this
and other exclusions, I can only reiterate my primary aim of focusing on bands
that invoke the music hall in a manner to authorize British rock as a modernist
art project.
One of the book’s sub-arguments is that it is a mistake to claim that 60’s
rock music is somehow intrinsically radical on account of the link between
the rock music of this era and a generation of politically radicalized youth. It
is true that rock music played a major role in fostering generational solidarity
during this era, especially among the politicized university students across the
globe. In Britain, rock pushed out jazz music to become the primary soundtrack
of the British underground, and fostered a generational divide that separated a
British Left which had come of age before the 60s from younger radicals. The link
between British rock and the 60’s counterculture is so strong that rock, at least in
its subcultural forms of heavy metal or “hardcore,” still retains the reputation of
being underground music. As Robert Colls observes, British university students of
the 1960s sought authenticity in a large class of goods, among them various media
forms: in blues and folk, the free jazz movement, realist cinema, modernist or
“Mod” fashions, and later, in long hair and ethnic clothing (366). Rock was valued
at the time, along with other cultural goods and practices, as a mode of authentic
expression. I argue that contemporaneous claims for rock’s greater authenticity
introduction
were exaggerated, and that the radical aspect of British rock in the 1960s and 70s
resides instead in its aesthetic form. Not that the new audience binding features
that distinguished the rock audience weren’t radical: only that such arguments tend
to overlook the revolutionary character of music at its most “arty” (e.g. the Beatles’
“I Am the Walrus”). In retrospect, it seems most of the rock audience—or at least
the rock critic or journalist—associated the music with a vision of classlessness
that had more in common with the free market ideologies that came to dominate the
neo-conservative 1980s than with rock’s aesthetic development. At any rate, the
primary focus of the book is not on the efforts which British rock musicians made
to align themselves with the activist politics of the age, although my chapter on the
Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus interprets the program as a self-conscious
attempt by Jagger and the band to harness their anti-establishment reputation in
the service of New Left activism. My primary focus instead is on how key British
rock groups addressed the specific medium of studio-based recording.
It is important not to lose rock’s text in its many contexts of production and
reception; that said, understanding the role music hall played in rock offers
considerable insight into issues of class construction and the British national
imaginary in the post-WWII years under review. As the book makes clear, residual
ideas of an empire and working class associated with Victorian/Edwardian England
retain their potency in the adolescence of post-WWII musicians. This persistent
Englishness had a lot to do with WWII itself and the struggle of an island people
to resist invasion, as well as the uncertain position of England in the decolonizing
world of the Cold War. For this generation, music hall condensed the old Victorian
era, and the survival of older notions of class and community in modern times.
Although music hall later became a way of preserving unfashionable values,
it initially had transformed British culture. As the first British mass entertainment,
music-hall fare reached cross-class audiences; its popularity, often based on
communal conceptions of working-class London, also upheld stereotyped images
of working-class character. At the same time, music hall song and comedy tended
to subsume class differences to a broader discourse of national identity. For these

In “Eight Arms to Hold You,” Hanif Kureishi emphasizes the symbolic importance
of the Beatles as northern outsiders who rise to the top in a rigid, caste-ridden country: which
seems an all-too familiar gesture of the 60’s generation, where counterculture freedom
becomes indistinguishable from the “freedom” to consume. In other words, Kureishi claims
the Beatles as avatars of the exceptional individuals who flout conventions of caste and
class in Kureishi’s own novels.

In this regard, the British rock festival at the Isle of Wight at the end of the 1960s
demonstrates the inherent gap between left politics and rock musicians as a social group.
A politicized segment of the audience demanded free entry into the festival, not only to the
horror of Murray Lerner, the festival promoter and organizer, but to the general indifference
or active resistance to the free concert idea expressed by the artists themselves. Joni Mitchell
interrupts her own performance, pleading for a restless audience to recognize the labor
involved in performing, and songwriting as hard work; see Message to Love.
reasons, a history of British rock and its music-hall past tells us much about class,
nation, and that reordering of global mass culture that was the British invasion.
To understand why and how British rock took a modernist path, we must first
briefly consider how music hall came to represent the past of the British nation. By
the 1880s, British music hall had evolved from its mid-Victorian origins in comic
song and sing-a-longs in pubs and penny gaff stages in seedy neighborhoods into
a fully capitalized enterprise (Fountain 32). Victorian folklore scholar A.L. Lloyd
condemned the music hall as a commercial enterprise that replaced the folk song
believed to offer a direct means of communication in the working-class community;
yet most middle-class intellectuals, from Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm in
the Victorian era to T.S. Eliot and George Orwell in the 20th century, celebrated
the music hall, even in its upscale form as syndicate owned “variety theater,” as
quintessentially English pastime. In 1903, American theater critic Horace Barnes
claimed with confidence that London music hall, unlike New York vaudeville
or Parisian cabaret, had attained “the dignity of [an] institution,” and a general
knowledge of the stars and songs was common to all classes of English people.
The commercial music hall had gained the unique power to insinuate itself into
all corners of everyday life. “From the lout to the lord,” Barnes declares, “there
isn’t a Londoner who doesn’t look on the halls as his own…Each hall has its
specific audience, its quota of regulars, its own peculiar feeling and atmosphere
in keeping with its environment” (www.arthurlloyd.com/). The most successful
music-hall performers, he suggests, were those who reflected the aspirations of the
entertainment’s mass audience. When one of the most celebrated music-hall singers
of the day, Marie Lloyd, performed at several halls in London each night, Barnes
insists that every show effortlessly creates a community in each new space: “if you
followed her you will find that in each instance, strong as is her personality, it has
been merged, chameleon-like, into the omnipresent personality of the hall.”
Late-Victorian and Edwardian music hall was both a pop culture form and
a nascent culture industry. Popular culture is a contradictory phenomenon,
containing the voices and values of different social classes. As Stuart Hall
observes, pop culture, including popular music in industrial capitalist societies,
is neither the unfiltered voice of the people nor a confidence scheme, but a site of
conflict between social and cultural elites and non-elites. As recent studies of the
19th-century music hall have shown, even the more commodified entertainment
of the variety theaters built for middle-class patrons still posed problems for late-
Victorian cultural elites because of its continuing popularity among the British
working class.

T.S. Eliot also praises the ability of famous music hall performers like Little Tich
and Marie Lloyd to take on the character of their audience in “The Romantic Englishman,
The Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism.” Eliot goes even further than Barnes in
suggesting that the persona of music hall performers convey timeless national archetypes.

See Hall.
introduction
The music hall was perhaps exceptional in the late 19th century on account of its
enthusiastic supporters among the artistic elite. Once music-hall entertainment had
become a commodity form, it gained defenders among the cultured class; in their
many partisan accounts of music hall comedy and song, they inevitably identified
the halls with “folk” entertainment, and authentic Britishness. In particular,
middle-class observers characterized the apparently intimate relationship the halls
fostered between performers and their popular audiences as thoroughly “English.”
T.S. Eliot’s famous appreciation of Marie Lloyd is exemplary in this respect; he
insists that Lloyd’s popular success has a deeper meaning. “Popularity in her case
was not merely evidence of her accomplishment,” he writes, but “evidence of
the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation
which has perhaps the greatest vitality and interest” (172). Even in the music-hall’s
decline, and with the passing of its most successful entertainers, Eliot saw the art
form as an authentic cultural expression of the popular classes, with the special
function of reinforcing British unity. The praise of Arthur Symons in the 1890s
and of later intellectuals like Eliot and Orwell for music hall also attested to the
special capacity of the modern bourgeois to properly appreciate working-class
culture; this discourse also helped popularize a specific image of the redeeming
social function of British music hall.
Music hall began as popular entertainment on the margins of London, but soon
became a commercial force that marketed its own popular appeal, expanding the
reach of consumer culture. Many music halls were replaced by movie theaters
in the 1930s, but the form persisted long enough to remain a powerful image
of class solidarity for a generation of British youth born after WWII. For that
generation, growing up in households without a television and only three radio
stations, music remained a mostly amateur affair, a craft learned in the family,
and mostly performed for neighborhood audiences. For them, the writing, music,
and comedy of the British music hall constituted their first experience of popular
culture. Music hall carried over an image of working-class community, even as
American-style consumerism was beginning to impact British society. Music-
hall conventions had a second life in film and television comedy, with music-
hall singer Gracie Fields making the transition to British cinema, and comics like
Max Wall and Arthur Askey becoming a staple of BBC radio and television fare.
The entertainment may have been moribund by the late fifties, but Tommy Steele
and Billy Fury, the first generation of British rock and roll singers, still came up
through the old music-hall circuit and shared the bill with its comedians. Cliff
Richard’s first performances were at the Metropolitan music hall on Edgware Road
in 1957; Billy Fury shared the bill with comedian Frankie Howerd (Double 37).

I argue that one of the distinctive features of the late-Victorian bourgeois is the
development of a “taste” for working-class entertainments; see Faulk.

For a comprehensive history of consumerism as ideology and social organization in
20th-century Britain, see Hilton; Chapter 8 focuses on consumerism and the individual in
the 1960s.
Such odd pairings would persist into the 1960s, and in fact, reach absurd heights
with Jimi Hendrix’s first tour of the UK paired with middle of the road pop singer
Engelbert Humperdinck. Such concert bills suggest the typical way that rock
music, whether Fury or Hendrix, fit into distinctly British institutions. The week
the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band record was released in June
1967, “The Black and White Minstrel Show,” a BBC One program that recreated
the “Blackface” entertainment that was standard late-Victorian and Edwardian
music hall fare, was among the top rated television programs in Britain. The ITV
television program Sunday Night at the London Palladium, which lasted well into
the rock era, was the British equivalent to the equally long running Ed Sullivan
Show in America. Both programs presented variety entertainment in a format
which derived from music hall and its American equivalent, vaudeville, and helped
define the cultural mainstream. The young working-class and lower middle-class
musicians who formed rock bands in the 1960s would find it difficult to exorcize
the powerful associational link between the halls and working-class Englishness
that they had learned in their youth.
The main experience of the post WWII generation of British rock musicians
with music hall was in the more sensory, existentially immediate context of the
Blitz and decolonization, of growing up with scarcity and state-imposed rationing,
without a recognizable mass media, in an era that revived the austere Victorian
values of self-denial, discipline, and sexual prudery. These musicians learned to
associate the music hall with older visions of Britishness, and the kind of Victorian
morality that seemed newly relevant as necessary equipment for surviving the
dangers of life during wartime. Music-hall’s glory days coincided with the height
of empire, with many of its posh theaters dubbed little “empires” and flaunting
exotic names like the “Alhambra.”
The career of the young Julie Andrews provides an exemplary case. Andrews
was already a national icon before her stage career, the youngest performer ever
to give a command performance at the London Palladium (in 1948, at the age
of 13). The stories of how she entertained the troops with her music-hall parents
and sang music-hall songs in the bomb shelters during the Blitz became common
knowledge—a small child singing in that little corner of the world that even under
siege and fire, will be forever England. Although I know of no concrete evidence

Not surprisingly, the generation of 60’s rock bands had ambivalent regard for music
hall, especially televised programs that recreated the older entertainment form. The music
of the Small Faces frequently uses music hall forms, ironically (“All Our Yesterdays”) and
not (“Itchycoo Park”), but in a 1969 interview, Steve Marriott expresses both his admiration
and his distaste for music hall comedy. Asked by Keith Altham about “how much brain
damage” you get from TV, he replies, “Quite a lot from things like the Ken Dodd show and
those Palladium-type shows. They are all so Workers Playtime mentality. I don’t believe it”
(23). Yet when asked what makes him laugh, he rattles off a list of comedians in the classic
music hall mode: Frankie Howard, Tommy Cooper, and Marty Feldman.

See Julie Andrews, 29.
introduction
that a young John Lennon or Paul McCartney listened to Julie Andrews, just five
years or so their senior, on the BBC, it is almost impossible to imagine that they
would not have, and thus be reminded of the continuing presence of music-hall
Englishness into the modern age.
The image of the northern woman as popularized in music hall by Marie Lloyd
and Gracie Fields (the latter would take the persona into a popular film career)
also passed into the rock era with minimal changes. In Mark Simpson’s account,
the northern woman persona mixed emotional intensity, directness, good cheer,
and the stoic strength of the lone survivor (48). She lives large in a world she
didn’t create and appears powerless to change; the contradictory aspects of the
stereotype suggest that we are in the presence of ideology. Simpson also notes that
“Northerness in British culture has faint echoes of blackness in American culture,”
suggesting the extent to which feminine identity acquires a quasi-biological aspect
here (50).
The ideology of the suffering northern woman helped construct a complete
identification of the singer with the song. Pop singer Petula Clark began as a child
singer in the music halls; a decade later she began her pop career with hits like
“I Know a Place,” a song about the Cavern, the Liverpool club where the Beatles
had their residency, and which helped establish Clark as a rock fellow traveler.
But all of Clark’s hit records, especially her biggest chart record, “Downtown,”
suggest the strength of her ties to music hall, as well as the logic linking the
music-hall stage and the pop world in the rock era. Clark celebrates individual
agency, but within the frame of a consumer ethos that was implicit from the
beginning in music-hall song. Fame for women singers largely meant complying
with an industry structure that severely limited the autonomy of the individual
performer. Singers who accepted the terms of stardom set in the old days had to
assume a subordinate role to their management; in the studio, they had to take
orders from the company producers brought in by their managers for the purpose
of making studio records. As a consequence, 60’s women pop singers were from
the start almost totally incorporated within an industry scheme.
Whereas the image of the music hall preserved connotations of working-class
community as authentically British in a post-War era, or its derivations preserved
older notions of class, the young men who formed rock bands in the 60s themselves
experienced the alienation and identity crises endemic to young celebrities.
Bluntly, the Beatles and the Stones made a pile of money in their early twenties,
enough money to convince anyone that they were déclassé. This unprecedented
celebrity was accompanied by a particularly acute identity crisis. Was the rock
star a bohemian, alienated from the middle-class; part of the new social elite; or a
glorified contract laborer, exploited by record company owners? If class barriers

See Wilson for more on music hall song’s presentation of the urban consumer. Even
as Dusty Springfield attempted to make the transition from cabaret pop to grittier song in
1968, the British media still represented women performers as privileged consumers rather
than auteurs; see Hagan for a blatant example of this.
seem to be eroding a bit as the British empire was in its death throes and you are
fortunate enough to be making piles of money in your early twenties, then it makes
sense to write deeply ambivalent songs about a pastoral, English past that was
perhaps never your past, but rather that of your parents and grandparents. Here
too, youth identity crisis overlaps with a broader authority crisis: had a younger
generation earned the right to draw on the legacy of Britishness?
As stated, the narrative of my book does not begin with the commercial success
of British rock but with what a few select groups did after they attained popular
recognition. Soon after the beginning of the British Invasion, pop musicians
quickly adopted the modernist persona of musician as artist and savant.10 The
ideology of rock as a modern art form is vividly displayed in the otherwise
dispiriting documentary film of the Beatles’ sessions for what would be their last
record release, Let It Be (1970). By this time the consensus that rock musicians
were artists and not mere entertainers had settled to the extent that George Harrison
could shut down a conversation with his fellow Beatles about touring by reminding
his band mates that they had no obligation to their audience, or to anything else,
aside from their art—the sort of sentiment that any self-respecting modernist since
Stravinsky would have immediately understood (Christgau 145). For Harrison, the
Beatles’ sole responsibility is personal: to the pursuit of the artistic vocation for its
own sake, rather than to a popular audience.
The Beatles, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones consciously cultivated artistic
ambitions that potentially set their status as a franchise at risk. Unlike an earlier
generation of music hall artists, these bands did not seek a more intimate, organic
relation to its popular audience; instead, they aspired to exert control over every
facet of the music-making process by performing their own material and making
the key decisions in arranging songs and in the recording process. Songwriters like
Lennon/McCartney and Ray Davies resembled an earlier generation of modernist
writers in their aspirations to autonomy more clearly than they did music-hall
singers like Alma Cogan and Gracie Fields.11
The ideological struggle between rock as modern art and music hall as traditional
Englishness determines the form that the new, most ambitious British rock music
would take. Bands evoked the sound of earlier British music primarily to show
off the dense musical textures of the new genre. The first casualty in this clash of
musical styles was the notion of musical authenticity which had been the source
of the music-hall’s special charisma. In contrast, British rock would champion
instead the values of artifice, technical expertise, and musical eclecticism: all
values that fostered an ironic, self-aware perspective of Britain’s past. The
contradiction between the new values of British rock and the core values of the
10
See Richard Williams on 1965 as both the emergence and artistic zenith of British
rock, 78-91.
11
Of course, not all British rock bands had songwriters with auteur ambitions, and
even those bands that did inevitably began their recording careers with covers of American
music.
introduction
youth audience for rock music are often overlooked. As Robert Colls observes,
the university student community of the 1960s craved clothes and art that they
regarded to be anti-Establishment and thus more authentic (183). As British rock
musicians followed their ambitions to produce music based on artifice, lacking
a clear organic relation to earlier British music, these musicians potentially set
themselves at odds with their youth audience.
In spite of the demands of the core audience that constituted rock’s primary
consumer base, you can hear the new, potentially unpopular agenda of British rock
in songs like the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Rolling
Stones’ “Something Happened to Me Yesterday,” or the Kinks’ “Picture Book.”
Such songs compound two musical styles: voices of regional Englishness, singing
to rock rhythms, the jazz horns of the “trad” band interrupted by the prominent
guitar sound of the ‘heavy’ rock combo. These songs show their seams, so to speak,
by sonic means; they mix hybrid parts that never add up to an organic whole.
The result is music that wryly acknowledges its composite character, reminding
listeners of the distance separating the singer either from the song’s lyrical content,
or between the sound of English music and Black Atlantic rhythms.
Songs like these underscore the fundamental artifice at the core of the enterprise
of British rock. A statement by Robert Christgau succinctly captures the perception
that British rock was “inauthentic,” compared to its American counterparts:
“For the English, rock and roll has never involved doing what comes naturally. No
matter how well off the prospective American rock musician, it seems he is closer to
down-home funk than his often working class English counterpart” (243). Critical
and audience discourse on British rock often recapitulates Beat ideology from
the late 50s and continues the white middle-class romance of the hipster; but it is
also true that British bands often signify their essential distance from Blackness
and highlight the artifice at the core of their brand of American music. Strictly
speaking, British rock was “art rock” from its conception: that is, music based on
a conceptual, intellectual relation to its sources. For the Beatles and Stones, it was
a given that “their distance from the Afro-American source would be a necessary
and authentic part of whatever they did with it” (Christgau 245). The modernist
moment in rock emerged with the awareness that no amount of love or reverence
for the sources of British rock could breach the distance between England and
America.12 The constructed character of British rock is precisely what made it
possible for rock musicians to establish new work rules for rock music settled on
by the managers, as it were, and differentiating their work from amateur practice.
Recognizing the link between British rock and artifice is not the same as saying
that the taste of a post-WWII generation for American blues and R&B was a mere
pose; no one takes up a pose knowing that it will remain so. For that matter, calling
12
Similarly, Devin McKinney suggests that the Beatles’ music was shaped by the fact
that “they simply had to work harder”: “Foreigners playing a foreign music, they couldn’t
assume it as a national birthright, or absorb it in all its Afro-centric detail; and so, driven to
somehow own it, they were forced to absorb it as pure feeling” (38).
10 british rock modernism, 1967-1977
the British taste for blues unnatural simply begs the question of why so many
musicians of this era were drawn to making “foreign” sounds. The answer lies in
the specific historical conjuncture, in part from the experience of being gendered
male and coming up through the British education system in these years. Rock was
the last in a succession of partisan tastes for American music centered in British
suburbia; throughout the 20th century, students encountered jazz and blues outside
the curriculum of secondary school. Some believed that they were forever changed
by the experience. The taste for jazz and blues cemented the feeling of young men that
they were alienated, set apart from the “Englishness” that once was their birthright.
As Richard Williams put it, the “children of the English middle-class, in their blazers
and house ties,” discovered that Duke Ellington 78s or Muddy Waters records
“meant more to them than ‘Adieu Sweet Amaryllis’ or ‘Belshazzar’s Feast.’”(4).
Regardless of whether these children were Philip Larkin or John Lennon,
J.B. Priestley or Mick Jagger, lives altered as a result of contact with another
world through sound recordings. British youth first heard American music as a
way to break with the traditions of culture they learned in formal schooling. You
couldn’t just find this music; you had to search it out. Tracking down African
American sounds forced British listeners off the beaten path: to make contact with
American soldiers with solid record collections, or to anxiously try to tune in radio
stations other than the BBC, European stations with jazz and R&B programs, like
Radio Luxembourg. When ordinary kids, enthused by the advent of skiffle and
rock’n’roll, went to art school, they often used the extra time at school to learn
more about the unofficial music they discovered during their early adolescence.
Despite the essentialist notions of race which often underlie these practices,
these activities still offered an alternative to cultural nationalism. Dancing to
Charlie Parker and listening to Mingus; taking pills; following French fashion,
tracking down music that you would never hear broadcast by the BBC: these acts
became ritual practices for many young Britons. The exposure to African American
music and culture cemented the link between style and social discontent, between
R&B, American rock, and bad behavior, as suggested in the recollection of
Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren: “The first time I saw a Teddy Boy,
it provoked in me sheer menace…and helped me understand you could look
bad—not just be bad” (1076). Aspiring rebels like McLaren learned a special
vocabulary in art school that allowed them to articulate their musical taste as an
anti-establishment practice; as Ian Macdonald notes, the art school backgrounds
of 60’s rock groups “allowed them to introduce the concept of ‘concept’ into pop,
along with other postmodern motifs like eclecticism, self-referentiality, parody,
and pastiche” (xv). Art school graduates like McLaren went on to propagate a
by-now familiar story about rock and roll’s subversive, anti-capitalist force: why
R&B-inflected rock seemed more appropriate to modern sensibilities than other
introduction 11
music, and more art than commerce, at the same time that the practice of making
rock music began to seem a lucrative career move for musicians.13
Like the absurdist humor of the Goon Show radio program in the 1950s (starring
Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan), which was often aimed at the colonial officer,
an authority figure born in the Victorian era, British rock musicians engaged
and challenged long standing assumptions about Anglo-Saxon superiority.
George Melly characterized the Goons as “the agents of a profound subversion,”
who aided in modernizing Britons who “were still thinking of [themselves] as
a nineteenth-century power” (176). British rock modernism is also part of this
history of the internal de-colonization of Britain, though rock’s role in this process
is perhaps more ambivalent than the one Melly ascribes to the Goons. Sourcing
the music-hall legacy allowed rock bands a way to engage their past at a historic
period of transition. It represented a break with the past and previous modes of
Englishness while at the same time reviving older notions of the unique, exceptional
character of British culture. British rock in its modernist moment was built on the
knowledge of Britain’s new, diminished role as a global power in the post-WWII
world, on the growing sense that England now constituted a “shrinking island,” as
Jed Esty puts it. However, the sheer ambition of British rock modernism, the scale
of its efforts to re-imagine the nation’s musical past, seems of a piece with imperial
hubris: as if some British rock groups responded to Britain’s imperial contraction
by endeavoring to symbolically re-conquer the globe.
My study begins with the premise that the evolution of British rock into art
represents a semi-autonomous development, something that cannot fully be
explained by recourse to historical context. Nonetheless, we can enumerate the
social and historical factors that help explain when and how the British rock
aesthetic developed as it did, and which set the direction this evolution followed. In
large part, British rock music is the legacy of the policies of the post-WWII welfare
state and its programs for mass education, which as Jim Melly notes, both gave
“young people an education,” including its working class young, as well as “time
to develop their art” (62). As Simon Frith and Herbert Horne detail in Art into Pop,
and Michael Bracewell’s exhaustive research on the educational background of
seminal glitter rock group Roxy Music corroborates, British rock is the result of
working-class empowerment schemes, smart kids taking up the ideas they learned
13
Considering the extent to which the British jazz scene was commercially eclipsed
by British rock, it is interesting to note that for example, Ray Davies recalls how as an art
student he considered both American jazz and rock as similar examples of high energy
dance music, associating Charles Mingus’ big band jazz with American rock (“Davies”)
Peter Townshend also credits Charlie Parker’s sax as the inspiration for the guitar feedback
solo on the Who’s 1965 single “Anyhow Anyway Anywhere,” also suggesting that rock and
jazz were more or less interchangeable on account of their American origins, since most
British art school students first experienced both jazz and rock while at university.
in art school.14 Barry Miles attributes the growing art associations of British 60’s
rock to the emergence of a student counterculture, where young people had enough
leisure time and spending money to combine the leisure activities of drug taking
and concert going.15 The invention of the rock festival in San Francisco in 1966
with the “Human Be-In” crossed the Atlantic to the UK, where it became the
marathon rock happening of the Technicolor Dream Show at the Alexandra Palace
in 1967. In these events, rock music and hallucinogens, especially acid, became
fatefully linked. The reorganization and transformation of the small concert bill
and the concert-going experience created a link between British rock and grander
art projects, and proclaimed higher aspirations than commerce and career making.
Working or lower-middle-class Londoners often lived and worked in the same
neighborhood where they were born, but to wealthy musicians migrating from
the north, London offered itself up as a global city. Metropolitan, post-imperial
London still played the same role for rock musicians that it had played for artistic
and cultural elites in the late 19th century, offering a means to escape the provincial
expectations for an orderly life, situating artists amid a linguistic and cultural
diversity, and encouraging aspiring performers to seek the respect of their peers in
the profession above all else. Rock bands were not masters and apprentices who
crafted an indigenous music out of civic pride, but working or lower middle-class
musicians who had left East End neighborhoods or the industrial north, looking
for liberation from the responsibilities of work and family. Raymond Williams
writes about the importance of London as a space to the development of late-
19th-century modernity, noting that the Victorian metropolis became a space
where artistic elites became more self-conscious of their medium as their subject
matter.16 In a celebrated Rolling Stone interview after leaving the Beatles,
Frith and Horne detail the influence of art school ideology on rock bands from the
14
60s through the 1980s. Michael Bracewell inventories the influence of art school concepts
of performative identity, happenings, gay liberation, and the collapse of the high/low art
divide on Roxy Music (Brian Ferry and Brian Eno went to school at Newcastle Polytechnic).
In one respect, they belong to the rock modernist experiment; but I have restricted myself
to a discussion of those modernists who explicitly engage the history of British pop music
in order to assert rock’s own claims to artistic status. Self-conscious futurists, both Roxy
Music (and David Bowie) mostly treat the past through the filter of camp or kitsch, and thus
keep the past at bay. Bryan Ferry’s first two solo albums blend the history of rock song with
traditional pop, but with the apparent aim of suggesting that the whole enterprise of the pop
song is always-already kitsch. Both Bowie and Roxy Music are more interested in blasting
through to a space-age future than with engaging the present.
15
See “White Light, White Heat.” Drug use and artistic experimentation have been
linked since Romanticism, and remained standard practice for most subsequent artistic
avant-gardes; see Boon.
16
See Raymond Williams; Esty’s gloss on “metropolitan perception” links it to modes
of imperial capitalist appropriation: “Metropolitan perception names a distinctive feature
of modernist art in the urban centers where European artists had free access to each other’s
work and to cultural materials from all over the world” (30).
introduction 13
John Lennon suggests a continuity of experience between metropolitan London

of the 1890s and “Swinging” London of the 60s. He explicitly links his growing
artistic self-confidence to the experience of meeting and exchanging ideas with
his musical peers:
… it’s like while Shaw was in England and they all went to Paris, and there’s
all that, and New York, San Francisco, and London. Even London we created
something there, with Mick and us and all of them. We didn’t know what we
were doing, but we were all talking and blabbing over coffee like they must have
done in Paris talking about painting. We—(Eric) Burdon and Brian Jones would
be up night and day talking about music and playing records and blabbing and
arguing and getting drunk. It’s beautiful history. It happened in all these different
places. (Wenner 147)
Lennon regards fellow members of the London rock elite not simply as working-
class kids made good, but as constituting an artistic society sharing similar aims,
working to make music that pleases themselves and their peers, rather than chase
popular acclaim.
British Rock Modernism is organized around the analysis of selected recordings
and television programs made by 60’s and 70’s British rock bands. My choices are
mostly conventional, intentionally so. My aim is not to expand the rock or pop
canon, but to focus on aspects of familiar music that remain largely ignored. The
key records and movies I discuss represent the high point of what I designate as the
era of British rock modernism: a time when British rock bands made a conscious
bid to challenge the authority of the past in order to further their own artistic
agendas and establish rock music’s aesthetic status. A sub-genre of British rock
emerged that sampled the music of the past in order to control it, appropriating it
to new ends.17 Sometimes the results were music that did quite well commercially;
sometimes, as was the case with the Kinks, the venture into art territory marked
the beginning of the band’s cult status. In all these instances though, British rock
modernism aimed to challenge the symbolic authority of conventional British pop
song represented by music entertainment and its folk ethos, while at the same time
challenging the assumption that rock, as a popular, youth-oriented form, lacked
intellectual seriousness, and a sense of history.
Frequently the records or television programs I discuss assume the form
of ordeals where the comparative strength of the new genre is proven through
struggle. Soon after British rock emerged, rock bands became acutely aware of
17
See Unterberger: it is usually forgotten that New Orleans musician Dr. John’s debut
record Gris Gris (1968) had a large influence on British rock musicians for its mash-up
of musical styles. The record mixes new styles like rhythm and blues, the new free jazz
of Coltrane and Albert Ayler, with older vaudeville song (Dr. John’s grandfather was a
minstrel show performer). Dr. John was also the Stones’ first choice for musical guests on
their Rock and Roll Circus program.
a key difference between rock music, which seemed to segregate mass audiences
along generational lines, and the social function of music-hall song, which served
to unify the different classes and generations.18 The sharp, brittle sounds on
arguably the Beatles’ most experimental record, Revolver (1966) was partly the
result of the band’s new intent to replicate the accelerated perceptions of road life
on a studio record. The Beatles, like their hero Bob Dylan did during his 1966 tour
of Britain with the Hawks, learned that the pressures of tour life combined with the
right drugs enhanced artistic creativity, at least in the short run. During the period
of stock taking which followed the Beatles’ decision to quit the road, Lennon and
McCartney seem to have become obsessed with the past, both their own past and
a broader, national past, represented by their Liverpool home. This introspective
turn seems to have led naturally to a consideration of how contemporary rock
related to the experience, and the music, of their childhood. Building on the
precedent of Revolver’s “Yellow Submarine,” the Beatles’ music begins to
incorporate a broader sonic palette than only American rock or rhythm and blues.
The personal and national past becomes a lyrical theme in songs like “Strawberry
Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” Increasingly, non-rock instrumentation
and rhythms become regular parts of Lennon/McCartney songs, at the same
moment that Eastern instruments and tempi enter the songs of George Harrison.
Magical Mystery Tour, the first film directed by the band, is aimed at a television
audience, rather than the concert or record-buying audience. With an eye toward a
national, mass audience, the film contains some of the group’s most experimental
music (“I Am the Walrus”), set in the decidedly quaint narrative frame of a bus
tour of the English countryside. The surreal adventures of the tourists allude both
to the experiment in communal living on a bus pioneered by Ken Kesey’s Merry
Pranksters, but even more obviously to the not-quite bygone age of cheap British
holidays for the working and lower middle-class in the countryside, the world of
seaside tours and popular entertainment dating back to the late-Victorian era.
The Rolling Stones, fresh from a commercially successful and critically
lauded album release, 1968’s Beggars Banquet, made a television movie,
18
As I discuss in my chapter on the Rolling Stones, the idea for the Rock and Roll
Circus program originated in a discussion of Mick Jagger, The Small Faces’ Ronnie Lane,
and the Who’s Peter Townshend about the future of the rock concert. Conscious that rock
bands had become big enough draws to play solo concerts rather than on the variety bill,
their discussion about the future of the rock concert tour occurred at a critical juncture for
the capitalization of the music genre. The Stones’ American tour of 1969 would inaugurate
the era of stadium tours and high price tickets, but for a brief time, Jagger considered other
options for rock performance like Lane’s suggestion that the rock show could become a
populist enterprise. The Stones eventually chose the stadium rock route rather than Lane’s
path, but Lane would later take his own advice and get off the grid after leaving the Faces.
He toured England by caravan with his band Small Chance as part of the Passing Show,
which also featured clowns, comics, and belly dancers. That Lane in 1968 could imagine
the rock circus as a means to escape the commodification of rock music supoorts the idea
that the year represents a crossroads for British rock in general.
introduction 15
Rock and Roll Circus, in an attempt to outshine the Beatles’ television special,
which was critically panned. The Stones and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg
set live performances by the Stones and other rock bands in the scenario of the
Victorian circus. That same year, the Kinks made their most ambitious record,
The Village Green Preservation Society (1968), effectively giving rock music a
whole new content area: a lament for the traditions of old England that rock and
modernism had transformed, or displaced. Rock modernism quickly went imperial,
rewriting history, or appropriating the past for its own purposes. Rock groups had
learned to do what T.S. Eliot did to the Marie Lloyd story: rewrite history in order
to legitimate the new mode of art.
These bands contest with previous musical forms and parody them, in order
to establish the hegemony of new music. In Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles’
bus caravan unloads and puts up a tent that transforms into a theater with plush,
red Victorian decor. The film that is screened in an ominous, half-lit inset video of
George Harrison singing “Blue Jay Way,” a song with disembodied voices moving
in and out of the mix, to an exaggerated, then halting beat, with ghostly effect.
The Goon Show clowning and circus costumes donned by the Beatles to mime
“I Am the Walrus” fail to make the song any less intimidating to listeners; nor
does it lessen the intensity of Lennon’s vocal, or temper the lyrical barrage of the
song. In Rock and Roll Circus, four songs into the Rolling Stones’ set (the first
time the band had performed before an audience in a year and a half on account
of Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s arrest for possessing drugs), Jagger strips off
a red shirt to reveal a new Baphomet tattoo, adding a ritual touch to the Stones’
pursuit of transgression for its own sake. The film’s fairground setting and the
Circus ringleader costume Jagger dons earlier in the program also suggest that
the group’s efforts to dramatize the darkness of their age now entails recreating
the past. Similarly, the “Blue Jay Way” sequence in MMT highlights the internal
distance that exists between the space-age modernism of the Beatles’ music and
the program’s mise-en-scène.
These television films mix a broad sonic range, thus invoking a wide range of
emotional responses. In each case, the formal devices of the setting and the music
on film are blatantly displayed. All told, these various devices disclose the greater
risks and new ambition of British rock. Perhaps the television program that both
MMT and RRC most closely resemble is not a rock movie at all, but Coronation
Street, the long running ITV soap opera of working-class life and love. That TV
program could hardly be called modernist: but it does provide viewers with a view
of traditional Englishness, at the very moment when it seems to be passing away.
The Rock and Roll Circus and Magical Mystery Tour programs both present rock
as a modernist art while simultaneously preserving in quasi-documentary fashion
a vision of pre-WWII Englishness.
The trajectory of British rock into art developed at its own accelerated pace,
with its own attendant contradictions. In the context of late-60’s British society,
rock modernism had the more primary effect of widening the already sizable
gap between pop stars and working-class audiences. Since the end of the
nineteenth century, sport and entertainment played a paradoxical role in British

working-class life. Football and music making were foundations of working-class
cultural identity, and at the same time, the primary means of dodging the traditional
working-class fate of leaving school, getting married, and joining the work force.
Music, especially pop music, offered the quickest escape from social conformity:
master three chords and you can make a living. Young musicians, most of them
working class, made it rich and, cut off from their roots, began to insist their
music be taken seriously as art, not entertainment. The cultural transformations
we associate with the 1960s were luxury items for most working-class people
in Britain. Young working-class women often could not afford the luxury item
of the contraceptive pill. Unlike the speed pills favored by young Mods in the
early 60s, LSD, the new preferred drug of university art students and psychedelic
rock bands, did not easily accommodate the routines of the working week. The
Anglican Church and the Socialist party alike spoke out against what they deemed
the selfish, hedonistic morality of university students. The student Left was not
exempt from the charges of reckless pleasure-seeking, and rock groups themselves
seemed to embody the worst excesses of nihilist youth. By the end of the 1960s,
British rock music was a world of young men who lived like princes, with similarly
large retinues of hangers-on, segregated from everyday life by their enormous
wealth. In this context, the aspirations of British rock groups to establish rock’s
aesthetic merit, and the cult of artifice that was a distinctive feature of British rock,
widened the gap between rock music and working class culture. This seems the
context for the lyrical fatalism of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” which
appeared on Lennon’s first post-Beatles record in 1970, where a rock singer only
realizes after becoming a star that the music he makes has the broader function of
maintaining the status quo.
The story of the Sex Pistols represents the finale of the modernist experiment
in British rock covered in this book: the moment when, for the first and last time,
the music hall as an image of ersatz Englishness played a role in furthering the
specific evolution of British rock. The Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten
incorporated the broad theatrical gestures of music-hall performance in the style of
the hard rock singer. It is clear in retrospect that larger historical forces, including
the crisis of Labor and the end of growing working-class prosperity prompted
Rotten/formerly Lydon’s incorporation of music-hall theatricality in hard rock
performance; the result was an anxious attempt to reintegrate British rock with a
specific British working-class identity, at the very moment that workers’ struggles
were marginalized in British politics, and the welfare state under attack by social
and fiscal Conservatives. Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock recalls the Kensal
Green neighborhood where he grew up as “an old-fashioned, tight-knit working
class community, the kind that survived through thick and thin since Victoria was
on the throne and that nowadays only exists in sociology textbooks and TV soaps”
(although it is precisely because the old world exists in TV soaps that Matlock can
evoke it in a single sentence) (20). However, the welfare state that had put in place
policies for alleviating extreme poverty was being contested on several fronts.
introduction 17
Rampant youth unemployment; the relocation of working-class neighborhoods,

terraced houses being replaced by high rise concrete council flats; perhaps most of
all, the popularity of American-style consumerism among the young, transformed
the value system that once held tight-knit working-class communities together.
In this context, The Sex Pistols’ embrace of the music-hall past represented
an attempt to reclaim a link between class and traditional Englishness that would
prove as significant to the music and ideology of the band as their later, infamous
attack on the archetypal British institutions of monarchy and parliamentary
democracy. The old entertainment still retained its association with an earlier age,
when working-class culture had seemed cohesive and still isolated from American
influence. Where the previous generation of rock modernists had relegated
music-hall Englishness to the past, Rotten embraces the form in large part because
it had fallen out of favor among the British rock establishment.
The Sex Pistols also attempted to reaffirm the status of rock music as
oppositional, in the face of the obvious fact that rock had now become a global
industry, as suggested by the rise of stadium rock. In one respect, the Pistols
succeeded in linking punk rock with a style of dissent; now, more than thirty years
later, punk rock is inseparable in popular memory from the colorful subculture of
multi-colored Mohawks, safety pins, and torn clothing associated with the Pistols’
first audiences in the UK. The Pistols’ endeavor to splice rock music and traditional
Englishness no longer signified what earlier attempts at a cross-pollinated musical
style did in the 1960s. In its way, the Pistols’ music represents the kind of nostalgia
for social hierarchy that the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society record
merely pretends to be; unlike the Beatles, the Pistols’ appropriation of music-hall
form was not a gesture of modernist irony, but an attempt to infuse the genre with
a contemporaneous sense of working-class misrule.19
I treat UK punk rock as the definitive close of the narrative of British rock
modernism outlined in this book. The Sex Pistols became closely identified with
the subculture community that formed around them, and the term “punk rock”
quickly came to designate a specific music formula, or a social movement,
more than an art practice. Punk rock music lost what Bernard Gendron calls its
“arty, avant-gardish, studied, and ironic dimension,” elements restored by the
subsequent post-punk movement in the UK (270). It was only after the break up of
the Sex Pistols that lead singer John Lydon could return to making music that was
avowedly conceptual and experimental, in his band Public Image Ltd.20
19
The link the Pistols’ forged between contemporary punk and music-hall theater was
not lost on either an older generation of performers such as Ian Dury, or on younger bands
like Sham 69. Both acts had strong working-class followings, and wrote songs that revived
the traditional music-hall sing-along chorus, without, as was the case with 70’s British rock,
signifying a saving, ironic distance from older pop music. For more on the link between
Dury and music hall, see Double.
20
The finale of the modernist moment in rock music that I discuss is found in UK
post-punk, not in punk rock. The movement is comprehensively treated in Simon Reynolds;
The Sex Pistols’ meteoric rise and flame out compromises the end of my
story; the book begins, however, with a narrative that suggests both the capacity
of tradition to stifle or hamper creativity and an essential link between modernist
aesthetic projects and masculine privilege. Rock modernism arguably reproduced
gender hierarchy in more pronounced ways than British literary modernism, where
at least two women, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, were recognized by
the literary establishment as standard bearers of the movement. In contrast, the
modernist moment in British rock was almost exclusively male.
My first chapter focuses on Dusty Springfield’s (London Irish Mary
O’Brien) attempt to escape the stereotype of the northern woman and adopt a
cosmopolitan musical style intended to parallel the work of the experimental
wing of British rock, with her 1969 record, Dusty in Memphis. The record is a
remarkable musical achievement, and represents a declaration of independence
on Springfield’s part that was also a risky career move; yet at the same time,
the record represents a bold attempt to leave behind the ersatz folk aesthetic
of music hall. Dusty in Memphis marks a key transition from one discourse of
musical authenticity, rooted in the stereotype of the emotionally direct, naturally
expressive northern woman, to another discourse of authenticity, this one rooted
in the transatlantic “Soul” aesthetic. At the same time, the record was a triumph
of artifice. Springfield’s record establishes ground-breaking links between
subaltern femininity, Black American music, and the “primitive” American South.
Still, the record presents a troubling legacy for British Women singers. With
the brief exception of punk and post-punk British music, British women never
became integrated in the collective enterprise of the rock band (Harris). Even
today, the most celebrated and critically acclaimed British women performers
remain neo-soul singers in the classic Springfield mode, like Amy Winehouse and
Duffy; their “blackface” performance (and in Winehouse’s case, self-destructive
behavior) also serves to reinforce their musical integrity since the persona seems
so authentic. Or as British folk-singer “KT” Tunstall states, in this revealing
appreciation of Winehouse, “You have to go through some hard experiences to sing
what she sings about and sing the way she does. She’s absolutely real” (Miller).
The book also aims to contest the prevailing interpretation of British rock of the
1960s and 1970s that has recently become hegemonic in British music periodicals
like Mojo and Uncut, which casts rock groups of the era as representatives of an
explicitly national cultural achievement. British rock in the 60s was a transnational
phenomenon; it developed from admiration for its sources in American music,
an admiration that broadened to include a respect for classical Indian music; but
to a surprising extent, British Rock modernism is now interpreted as “heritage”
culture, exclusively tied to the national past.
It is not mere coincidence that the 60’s rock experiment was so susceptible
to being re-branded as a heritage-related commodity. A legacy of the so-called
I hope that my compressed account of rock modernism sets the aesthetic evolution of British
rock in sharper relief.
introduction 19
Britpop movement of the 1990s was that Indie rock bands could make hit records
and, in the case of the rock band Oasis, draw stadium size audiences. Britpop
served as yet another reminder that, for all the extensive discourse of pop and rock
criticism extolling independent artisans and equating creativity with low budgets,
powerful economic interests dominated the production popular music. Britpop
produced a carnivalesque travesty of rock history: the Mod subculture from 1960s
returned, but this time as its evil conservative twin. In 1966, when England won
the World Cup and it appeared as if London produced the best magazines, fashions,
and pop music in the world, Mod style expressed the underside of triumphant
Englishness. As Jon Savage observes, 60’s Mod had signified something dark,
edgy, androgynous, subversive, multiracial—a taste in the Supremes and Four
Tops, West Indian ska and bluebeat, the Stones in drag emblazoned on the sleeve
of the “Have you Seen Your Mother Baby (Standing in the Shadow)” single, and
in full musical anarchy on the record inside the sleeve.21 Mod returned largely as a
result of championing of Mod fashions and music by new rock icons like Oasis: but
now it represented an Irony-lite response to resurgent Jingoism, also evidenced in
the not-so-Camp trend of wearing Union Jack apparel. Britpop revived a simpler,
less dangerous version of Mod that easily accommodated the most crudest sort
of national chauvinism. The need for community represented by the fandom for
Oasis quickly degraded into “New Lad” culture, working-class consciousness into
a new stereotype of “thick,” working-class louts, at the same time forging a link
between the new rock and a mindless party ethos.
The concept of British rock is now increasingly linked to a protectionism that
contradicts the roots of the music in cultural practices that traversed the Black
Atlantic. The revived interest in the Beatles in the Britpop era was part of this
systematic re-interpretation of British rock as heritage culture, representing an
age of British hegemony over popular music that new bands like Oasis aspired
to reclaim. Britpop inserted the Beatles back into a quasi-imperialist version of
Britishness, reinterpreting the dissident social currents of the 1960s as an aggressive
nativism.22 Even the Sex Pistols, who Johnny Rotten/Lydon proudly proclaimed
as “the anti-Beatles,” have been recast as avatars of national culture since the
band reformed as an occasional touring unit in 1996. Given the chance to tell
their own story as a band in Julien Temple’s documentary, The Filth and the Fury,
the Sex Pistols treat their childhood memories of working-class community with
the same reverence, perhaps more, as the Beatles did in post-Revolver recordings
like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The recent neo-nationalist
mood in British rock seems to have heightened the Sex Pistols’ investment in
Englishness. The band’s CD box set is blazoned with a Union Jack: no longer
quite the controversial gesture it was when Pete Townshend of the Who wore a
jacket of the flag design on the cover of the Who’s debut record. The DVD of the
21
As Jon Savage observes; see Savage’s interview in the “Extras” on the Live Forever
DVD.
22
See Andy Bennett for more on the Britishness of Britpop.
Pistols’ recent reunion concert (May 2008) takes its title, There’ll Always Be an
England, from a patriotic song that became hugely popular with the outbreak of
the Second World War. The Sex Pistols further underscored a specific identity as
a London band in the press interviews promoting their most recent reunion shows
in Brixton in 2007.23
British rock now faces the fate of the defunct music hall: of becoming a mere
artifact of “Englishness.” Such a misreading may be inevitable, since no music can
float above history. Still, I hope that reexamining the evolution of British rock into
art might also make it easier to reclaim the cosmopolitan ethos that once animated
rock music, and unsettle, if only slightly, the new consensus that British rock is an
innate expression of Britishness.
By returning to the moment when modernist experiment marked the musical
practice of once working class and suburban British youth, my main goal is to clarify
the character of British rock as vernacular culture. My aim is to redefine British
rock as a cultural hybrid: as a practice interwoven with the techniques of modernist
art, on account of the English art school legacy. At a moment when budget cuts
in education dominate state economic policy in most Western industrial nations,
and with a virulent anti-intellectualism dominant in the American media sphere,
it is timely to recall that British rock was the surprising legacy of the policies that
constituted the post-WWII British welfare state: of the 1944 Education Act passed
by Clement Atlee’s Labor government, which mandated education for all until
age 15 and thus delayed entry into the work force, and the National Assistance
Act of 1948, which gave young working-class people the time to learn a craft—
and perhaps master a musical instrument—after leaving school (Jim Melly 4).
The modernist moment in rock is not a story about individual “geniuses,” but
the unplanned result of popular creativity facilitated by state policy. It was a
modernism made possible by welfare state reforms, and not “pure” working-class
expression.
23
Although in fairness, the Pistols’ discourse on London is attractively inclusive;
Rotten/Lydon always links the musical diversity of his Finsbury park childhood with the
social mix of the neighborhood. The Sex Pistols’ working-class community is not a closed,
racially exclusive territory but a multicultural space that opens out into the world; see
Simmons.
Chapter 1
British Pop Women Singers of the 1960s
and the Struggle for Modern Identity
Unlike the Britpop scene of the mid 1990s, which was almost exclusively a
male-dominated enterprise, and at times emphatically masculine (Oasis), the
British beat boom of the 60s was more gender integrated; women artists such as
Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield and others were able to take advantage of the mass
appeal of the many “boy bands” of the British Invasion and score chart success
in Britain and North America. However, as I will argue in this chapter, this hardly
means that the British Invasion was gender neutral. On the contrary: gender was
the fault-line that separated male bands from women artists in the enterprise of
establishing a modern identity for British pop music.
Unlike the male beat groups, women singers faced a disadvantage in that they
often lacked the coherent identity that characterized a musical scene. In so far as
British pop women had a distinctive look it was arguably in the traditional mode of
feminine glamor. The public image of 60’s women singers did not manifest a total
break with the visual representations of bobbed hair, smiling faces, painted lips,
provocative clothing and thin bodies that had characterized the image of woman
in modern global advertising since the 1920s and 30s.
Nonetheless, British women pop singers had a novel aspect that is still under-
recognized. The new woman was more attuned to American music, to jazz or soul
sounds, than the previous generation of female performers in England; increasingly,
lead vocals were no longer about volume or range but about expressive qualities.
Singers instead emulated the performance style of soul artists, which highlighted
the stylized expression of emotion in vocal performance. Sixties’ pop performers
also broke the mold by singing almost exclusively of romantic love, rather than
in the typical lyrical mode of music-hall song, which focused on the traditional
duties and responsibilities of women in the private sphere: as dutiful daughters,
wives, and mothers.
These various stylistic features may not seem to add up to a revolution, especially
if compared to transitional figures like singer Alma Cogan, whose pop career in the
50s occupied a transitional space between American pop song and more obvious
music hall derived fare. Still, glamour and feminine independence were largely
new to post-war Britain, after years of food rationing, power outages, and with

The attempt to redefine modern femininity in terms of its usage in global discourses
of consumerism is explored in The Modern Girl Around the World anthology (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2008).
middle and working classes only beginning to adapt to the new consumer lifestyle.
Neither the fashion nor the performance style of singers like Dusty Springfield
and Lulu were rooted in pre-WWII notions of working-class community; instead,
they pointed to a fantasy future of classless leisure and social mobility. These
women artists seemed to herald a new era where British men and women would
be glamorous, and Britain transformed itself into merit-based, affluent consumer
society. The 60’s woman singer existed in a complex but evident relation to the
economic upturn of the era, before high inflation and massive unemployment
would bring the dream of a consumer utopia crashing down.
However, woman artists of the era functioned in an ambiguous relation to
modernizing categories in the music industry, often actively discouraged from
following the modernist art strategies that would increasingly characterize the
music style of their male cohort. This chapter elaborates on how the British
recording and entertainment industries centered in London reproduced an
older style of musical performance, associated with the music hall and variety
entertainment. In the cases of 60’s British women singers, this primarily meant that
women were largely restricted from becoming equal partners in the construction
of a transatlantic mode of music production, characterized by the new sound of
the Black Atlantic. The story of the mixed fortunes of British women singers is
part of a longer history of the ambiguous fate of a laboring class, originally from
the industrial north, and their rise in the ranks of a national music industry. The
pursuit of a career as popular artists traditionally required singers to relocate to
London, the metropolitan center. These singers had mixed fortunes in London’s
music and television circles. In most cases, performers cast off their northern roots
and assimilated the very different cultural prerogatives of the metropolitan South.
The interests of a music industry headquartered in the South continued to have
a major impact on the careers of British pop women of the 60s, insuring that the
full modernization of British pop music, including its gender-integration, would
proceed unevenly.
Jeff Nuttall remarks that by the 1930s, post-industrial England had become
stratified in the popular imagination along clear geographic lines, with London
and the South representing the governing head of the United Kingdom, and an
industrial north residually linked to the nation’s “guts and root bodily functions” (5).
If British cinema of the 30s and 40s spoke in a predominantly mid-Atlantic accent,
the Blackpool lights still attracted northern working-class audiences with a taste
for a more ribald humor. The geographical divide separating northern performers
and audiences and Southern finance, the owners and managers of the record and
film industries also represented a discernible cultural divide. Northern audiences
responded to rougher fare, to risqué song and bawdy humor, as evidenced by the
1930’s seaside postcards of Donald McGill, or the stand-up comedy of Max Miller
(from the South, but Brighton, not London) and Frank Randle (a Mancunian).
Northern popular culture exercised a greater freedom in regard to propriety and
respectability than the pop culture product of the South, which was tasked with
representing the abstract totality of the modern nation-state.
british pop women singers of the 1960s 23
Inevitably northern film and music stars like Gracie Fields and George Formby
went on to bigger and better contracts with southern film studios. The Mancunian
Films studio was an exception, an independent enterprise that did enough business
in the North of England to maintain relative independence from London studios.
By the 1960s, however, more northern performers were working for corporations
based in London, and relocated to the south. What American listeners characterized
as the British Invasion in popular music was in the British context closer to an act
of reverse colonization: the northern periphery asserting a new prominence in a
pop music industry that had its center of gravity in the South. By this time, EMI
was the major British record label; and along with the Rank Organization, the
London-based corporation would remain one of the largest film companies well
into the 1970s. There had been many women popular singers in Britain in the
early 20th century, with successful careers in both music hall and film, and their
various career trajectories amounted to a set of procedures for success that later
performers pursuing a solo singing career were compelled to follow. In almost
every instance, British women in pop in the 60s were in turn advised and pressured
by management and media professionals to repeat these formulas. The paradoxical
result is that record companies selling modern pop often resisted the attempts
of women singers to make music for a youth audience with an increasingly
cosmopolitan musical taste. The residual formula for successful popular music
dominated how record producers and managers treated their talent in the 60s, with
the effect that performing traditional music-hall derived pop became the routine
way for singers to extend their career, though at the price of re-branding their pop
music as mere entertainment.
As I elaborate later, male pop groups of the era achieved greater autonomy
over their careers on account of their relative freedom within the structures of
pop music capitalism. The Beatles, the Stones, and the Who struggled to achieve
control over their studio process and their recorded work as soon as they achieved
financial success. The male groups were able to build on their comparatively
privileged position in the industry, and negotiate the musical traditions of the
British past from a position of strength. With the aid of record companies and
their management, male bands had license to fearlessly affiliate with transatlantic
music in the modern mode, following the precedent of an earlier generation of
self-consciously modernist artists (another primarily male social group).
The cultural divide separating north and south Britain helped construct a
gendered division of musical labor in the 60s, with the role of modernist auteur
largely restricted to men. In contrast with the male groups, women artists had
to struggle to resist being identified with the pre-WWII world of working-class
entertainment. The new women singers were different: they were no longer
singing the family oriented fare of Gracie Fields and Alma Cogan. The shift in lyric
content and musical styles in British Invasion women singers was hardly trivial:
it encompassed a more emphatically urban sensibility, and reflected a heightened
self-conscious about image, fashion, and an artist’s visual presentation. Yet the old
stereotypes prevailed, in spite of these innovations. As a result, the careers of many
British pop women developed according to the predictable path set by previous
generations of women singers, into the mode of the more traditional music hall.
The legacy of the British musical past still bore down heavy upon the women
singers of the 60’s British Invasion. The formulas for a successful career in popular
music for women seemed set for all time by singers like Fields and Cogan, as far
as the conservative British music industry was concerned. Not surprisingly, with
few exceptions, the new women artists failed to develop a performance style that
would convincingly signify their distance from the past for their youth audience.
For many, including many in the music industry, the new singer seemed a
variation of an older type, the music hall diva of the previous generation. In
particular, the label of the northern women, a crucial component of the public
image of singer Gracie Fields, continued to loom large in post-WWII pop
music. As Mark Simpson elaborates, the northern-woman persona constituted
a powerful ideological image that symbolically resolved key contradictions in
the lives of working-class British women. The persona blended “intensity” with
“breeziness…a certain desperation [and] self-irony” (47). The northern woman
was both charismatic and yet a familiar part of everyday Englishness, “a survivor
but strangely tragic.” The stereotype dominated popular culture well into the
1960s, given new life in successful TV programs such as Coronation Street (first
broadcast in 1960). That show provided a visual context for other kinds of female
performance, and suggested the stereotype still provided a frame for interpreting
modern women artists, even if singers participated in the modernizing idiom of
transatlantic music.
Despite her considerable talent, Gracie Fields was increasingly typecast
as the model northern woman in popular music; born in Rochdale, Lancashire,
both Fields’ mother and father were mill workers. Fields rose to national fame a
year after the death of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd, in 1922. As Simon Frith
details, by the end of the decade, the performer was starring in three London
venues simultaneously: playing a straight role in the musical comedy, SOS, the top
of the bill at the low-brow Alhambra in Leicester Square, and performing on a
late-night bill for the more affluent audiences of the Café Royal (67). This unique
achievement also represents what became her chief legacy as an exemplary British
popular singer: her special talent for turning various social groups segregated by
class into a “mass” audience.
As Frith explains, Fields built a career out of her ability to turn the gap between
working-class and mainstream entertainment into popular comedy that appealed
to mass audiences. “The joke,” Frith writes, “was that such a grand bourgeois
voice should belong to a shrill Lancashire mill-girl” (69). The singer’s trademark
burlesque ballad both explored and exploited this contradiction (69). Capable of
modulating into a powerful tremolo at will, Fields had the vocal skill and technique
required for the comfortably middle-class art form of European operetta. In the
course of her trademark song, “Sally in Our Alley,” modulated between various

My chief reference is Joan Moules’ 1997 biography of Fields.
tonal registers with ease, just as the song built to a climax. At a crucial point in
the performance, Fields’ “natural” working-class voice would emerge, peeking
out from under the accumulated layers of learning and vocal technique. The comic
appearance of working-class character still reverberated powerfully in an England
that remained a class hierarchy.
Fields did more than reach a popular audience: she developed a mode of
performance that helped bridge the chasm of social class, while at the same time
materializing class difference. Even in her sixties, living in Capri, Fields remained
an icon of Englishness, and a fixture on British TV variety shows into the early
70s. At this point, Fields’ iconic status had dimmed the appreciation of her talent;
she had become, as Frith notes, mostly a nostalgia figure for “some pre-war
working-class community.”
As a social phenomenon, the women singers of the British Invasion reflect
a larger economic trend, the consolidation of British pop music within a
consumer society. As Mark Simpson observes, the old hierarchy between north
and south was being challenged in popular culture. It was now fashionable to be
working class in popular music and the new realist cinema; the working-class
ethos seemed to provide “an antidote to the stuffed-shirt, stiff-lipped (Southern)
British bourgeoisie” (49). British women singers were part of this popular, but
media constructed, challenge to dominant notions of Englishness centered on
self-restraint, as well as even more antique images of passive, self-sacrificing
womanhood. They represented a challenge to the status quo, a rebuke to social
prejudice against strong women, especially assertive working-class women. At the
same time, it was easy for a record industry headquartered in London to play it safe,
and simpler to market male rebellion in the form of rock bands than to promote
assertive women performers. Not surprisingly, the typical career trajectory of most
women artists in the 60s is highly ambivalent. Their songs and self-presentation
present mixed messages as to whether the singer is rebelling against social roles,
or simply modeling a new way of conforming to them.
Like Gracie Fields, Alma Cogan was a popular singer with a massive voice
that belied her diminutive size. If Fields represented the exemplary career for a
British woman pop singer, Cogan remained in this mold, although a transitional
figure in key respects. For one, Cogan was native to London, from a family of East
European Jews who immigrated to Golders Green in north London in the early
20th century. The East London audience identified with her, but crucially, Cogan
came to represent the ethnic and racial mix of London’s East End to the nation at
large. Most of her chart hits in Britain in the 1950s were taken from the American

Fields’ self-conscious, and self-mocking, delivery can be seen in the performance
of the title song, which became her trademark, in the 1931 film. She sings the first verse
of the title song in a dramatic, operatic tenor that brings the pub audience to silence, and
then affects a masculine, quasi-Cockney phrasing in the second verse, more suitable to the
male persona of the song, in the next verse, to the amusement of the crowd. Available on
YouTube.
songbook: Tin Pan Alley pop hits written for American crooners. Most of the
songs, like her version of Rosemary Clooney’s “Half as Much” had light jazz
touches, without emphasizing the transatlantic origins of her musical sources. By
the end of the decade, Cogan’s star image had evolved from the casual black dress
and white collar typical of the lower middle class (as pictured on the Alma Cogan
record cover [1953]) to the more classless “party girl,” dressed in cocktail hour
attire, on the Dreamboat album cover. The new persona suggested a notion of
glamor clearly derived from Hollywood. The party girl figure would seem passé in
the wake of Beatle-mania, as Cogan herself realized, but the transatlantic touches
that became part of her star image in the late 50s anticipate the post-austerity style
cultivated by British pop women in the next decade.
Cogan was a transitional figure in another regard. Unlike Fields, who took
the Noel Coward route of living in exile from England, Cogan would never leave
central London. Rather than separate herself from the music industry, she re-
invested the cultural capital she accumulated in her career back into the idea of
the city itself: reinvesting, as it were, in the spectacle of the metropolitan center.
Even after the run of chart hits ended, Cogan remained a London celebrity, a
favorite subject of the UK press on account of the all-night parties she threw at her
apartment on Kensington High Street. The Cogan family residence at 44 Stafford
Court became a salon for a transatlantic cast of popular singers and entertainers;
regular visitors included celebrities such as Noel Coward, Tommy Steele, Sammy
Davis, Jr., Audrey Hepburn, Yul Brynner, and countless others. At Brian Epstein’s
insistence, the Beatles themselves would join the cast of “beautiful people” as
soon as they left Liverpool for London in 1964.
Cogan’s salons represented the new milieu of classless celebrities. Her soirees
also represented the singer’s investment back into the music industry that had
supported her career. It reinforced the notion that London was a proper global
music scene, and that the entertainment industry had a culture aside from money
and power. In this regard, Cogan’s parties created a “spectacle” of “Swinging
London” in Guy Debord’s sense: a powerful media image that reproduces the
status quo of social hierarchy.
Cogan’s chart-reign ended soon after 1961, in part because the dated “party
girl” image that originally launched her career seemed quaint in the changing times
of the post-Macmillan era in Britain. The last years of Cogan’s recording career
serve as a harsh reminder of the singer’s subaltern status in musical capitalism.

The official web site for Cogan provides images for the singer’s discography.

For more biographical information on Cogan, see Sanda Caron’s Alma Cogan:
a Memoir (1991); the authorized website almacogan.com is also a reputable source of
biographical information and discography. Shawn Levy’s survey of British pop culture
in the 1960s details Cogan’s relationship with the Beatles, and her late career turn to a
more contemporary pop rock style. David Gooch’s account of working as the singer’s
last producer is another source for Cogan’s career impasse before her untimely death,
cf. almacogan.com.
Cogan made an attempt to revive her career by recording songs written by the
Beatles and the Stones, only to find that her record company, EMI, was unwilling
to release the results. The resistance that Cogan received in her attempt to adapt
to new modes of music production reveals the structural hierarchy between the
singer and the recording industry that was there all along. Still, Cogan’s chief
legacy for 60’s women artists was the example of an assertive singer who
triumphed on account of her immersion within the structure of London music
capitalism.
Petula Clark began as a popular entertainer in the Cogan mold, a pop vocalist
whose talents were showcased by performing mainstream pop songs. Although her
hits spoke to a new affluent and younger audience, Clark began her music career as
a child star, just as film and Broadway star Julie Andrews would, singing with her
father on the Variety stage and radio. Like Andrews, Clark’s career began during
the Blitz, and her spirited singing resonated with wireless listeners in wartime.
Clark also resembled Cogan in having a pop music career that overlapped with the
late days of music hall and variety; five years before “Downtown,” the singer had
been playing Princess Marigold in a variety panto.
Yet Clark distinguished herself by eagerly identifying as a singer with modern
trends, and even urban subcultures. She emerged in the 1960s as part of the new
group of woman singers, with hits that exuberantly celebrated the bright sunrise
of British affluence, like “Downtown” (1964) and “I Know a Place” (1965). The
city celebrated in “Downtown” is a quasi-symbolist landscape that requires a
pop audience to complete it. It exists as a dreamscape for lonely teenagers in the
city; for those outside the metropolis, the city in the song beckons as a haven and
refuge. Although “Downtown” was not the gospel-derived pop sound that was
beginning to be called “soul” music in America, the song celebrates a typically
modernist image of the city.
Clark’s hits were aimed at the teenagers who were going to rock and roll
concerts that now played in the remaining music-hall venues; for a brief moment,
it was possible for neo-music-hall singers like Clark to be considered by a youth
audience as a rock “fellow traveler.” Unlike male rock groups such as the Kinks
and the Stones, whose knowing references to specific places in London suggest
an urban savvy, Clark’s romanticized metropolis is more abstract: “downtown”
could be anywhere, provided it was Anglophone, crowded, with bright lights,
movies to see, and things to buy. In contrast to the Kinks’ “Dedicated Follower
of Fashion” (1966), in which urban fashionistas become a target for satire, or the
Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire” (1965), which revels in its dark, insider view of
London’s complex class geography, “Downtown” celebrates the city without an
agenda, aside from the obvious one of shopping.

For more on Cogan and the British Invasion, see Levy 129-131.

This detail and others about Clark the child star is documented on her official web
site, petulaclark.net; cf. Nigel Fountain’s brief account of Clark in Lost Empires, 11.
Above all, “Downtown” is a paean to the new consumerism that was ablaze
everywhere on the Atlantic trail, with pop singles like Clark’s song increasingly
emerging as a vital part of the trade. Of course, consumer pleasure was not that
far removed from the music-hall stage where Clark began her career. Music-hall
songs celebrated the worker on holiday, and cheered on the profligate spender.
Even as music hall beat a retreat, Clark’s songs would simultaneously herald an
affluent future, and evoke an older version of consumer utopia. “I Know a Place”
represents another kind of urban manifesto, more explicitly linked to youth. The
song situates Clark with the modish Mersey-beat scene, both fan and a Mod
insider, in Liverpool’s “cellar-full of noise.” The song expresses the same message
of personal liberation in the city as “Downtown,” but with a twist. Invoking the
Beatles also allies Clark with youth culture, and beyond them, with the imagined
global community of transatlantic music.
In relatively short order, however, Clark’s cultivated singing persona as female
cosmopolitan was refashioned to a more conventional vision of classless elegance.
Stan Cornyn’s liner notes to Clark’s These are My Songs record (1967) praises
Clark, but even more emphatically applaud an image of well heeled Los Angeles
that has little room for youth, marginal social groups, or even other women aside
from Clark. Cornyn describes a singer “up and zipping in a white Mercedes
convertible, leaving behind the gardeners” in Forest Hills, and making a record
in between filming Finian’s Rainbow with Tommy Steele and Fred Astaire. With
Clark’s husband uncorking a “Cordon Bleau Napoleon Brandy” to celebrate the
final recording session, and in-demand Session One studio drummer Hal Blaine
presenting a gift drumstick to Clark’s young son, we are indeed “downtown,” but
in a safe enclave with the rich and famous, rather than astride teeming masses
in an all-inclusive metropolis. Clark covers John Philips’ “San Francisco,” the
counterculture anthem that became a hit single for Scott McKenzie in 1967, on
These are My Songs, but Cornyn’s liner notes position the album squarely in the
mainstream. The cosmopolitan Clark has become a latter-day version of the Alma
Cogan party girl, rather than an ecstatic participant/observer of the urban scene.
Clark is still performing transatlantic music, but the focus is now on adult pop
music, and away from the charged multi-racial transatlantic that Dusty Springfield
will evoke two years later with her record, Dusty in Memphis. Clark’s cosmopolitan
modernity here becomes more chic, and also more exclusive.
However, Clark’s career as a London hit maker opened up a range of new
possibilities for northern women singers; she makes it possible for a singer like
Cilla Black to do more than simply repeat Gracie Fields’ career. Clark’s first
hits, with their vision of a transatlantic, gender-inclusive pop culture, clearly
inspired Black’s manager, Brian Epstein, as well as Black herself. Black was still
the northern woman, with a performance style that raised the same incongruity
between her voice and her body that implied a working-class character within the
British context: yet Black was also a cosmopolitan, recording pop and rock songs
in Clark’s transatlantic idiom. Perhaps inevitably, given the tensions in Black’s
persona between a regional and cosmopolitan identity, the singer’s moment at the
cutting edge of British pop music would be short-lived.
Music writer Johnny Rogan suggests that if Black had died young, she would
have been regarded as an artist more than an entertainer: “one of the greatest British
singers of all time” (Du Noyer 73). Sadly, Black’s career is a salient example
of how northern talent, especially women artists, was steered by management
to pursue predictable career paths rather than set their own aesthetic agendas. In
Black’s case, the variety circuit for family-oriented entertainment remained the
safe way for a woman singer to maintain a career. A docker’s daughter raised in
Scotland Road, the Catholic enclave of Liverpool, Black spent her lunch hours as
a secretary watching the beat groups at Liverpool’s Cavern before she took to the
stage herself. John Lennon recommended Black to Epstein, who became her agent
and helped secured a record deal for Black with Parlophone, an EMI subsidiary.
Her first number one hit single in February 1964 was the Bacharach and David
written “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” which Epstein encouraged Black to record
after hearing Dionne Warwick’s hit single on American radio, while traveling on
tour with the Beatles. The song was a softer version of the new hit sound coming
from Detroit’s Motown, and Black modeled her vocal sound on Warwick’s intense
yet restrained performance. It was Black’s “You’re My World,” a number one
single in the UK (1964), that was the breakthrough hit, as well as a crucial record
in constructing Black’s persona. Quintessential northern woman fare—the small
woman from the provinces who makes a huge sound—it also situated Black in a
powerful residual stereotype.
“You’re My World,” was a cover of an Italian ballad, with its sources in the
operetta. As a host of pop singers from Judy Garland to Dean Martin and Elvis
Presley had demonstrated, an authoritative performance in this genre provided pop
singers with enormous cultural capital. Like Gracie Fields, Black had a near-operatic
range, as well as a knack for singing loudly while maintaining a pure tone.
The camera eye perspective on Black as she sang the hit on Thank Your Lucky
Stars (August 1964) is especially illuminating. The performance begins with
Black walking on stage; the camera pans closer to settle on a medium close-up of
the singer by the end of the first verse. As her vocal intensity builds in the second
verse, with Black singing louder and sustaining long notes, we see her from a
different camera angle, positioned above the vocalist. The image dramatizes the
contrast between Black’s diminutive frame and her voice, massive enough to fill
the large studio revealed by the camera panning back. The visual image situates
the singer squarely in the northern woman pigeonhole: a regional singer who gains
a national audience on account of her gigantic vocal sound. The TV performance
recalls the comic paradox between working-class origins and classless vocal
talent that propelled Gracie Fields’ career. If Black represented a threat to pop

Paul Du Noyer is my source for this detail and other facts regarding Black’s career
trajectory.

Black’s television performance can be seen on YouTube.
music convention, the television image brings out the comic incongruity of the
performance: the Liverpool woman with the prominent nose and big voice, singing
in a northern accent.
Black’s chart run continued into the 60s, in part because of her continued close
relationship to the Beatles and George Martin, via Epstein. In 1967, Black would
borrow producer Martin from the Sgt. Pepper sessions, irritating McCartney,
in order to record “Abyssinian Secret,” the closest the singer would come to
psychedelic rock (Du Noyer 73). But Black would not be allowed her psychedelic
period. As Paul Du Noyer remarks, it had been so often said that Black was the
next Gracie Fields that it eventually “became a self-fulfilling prophecy” (74).
Black was offered her own television variety show, and at Epstein’s urging, shifted
course mid-career toward the adult market. Black’s television career would extend
far beyond her singing career. John Birt, another native Liverpudlian would sum
up the secret to Black’s success in the medium: her embodiment of the “classic
northern virtues of warmth, good humor and the enjoyment of others, [allowing her]
to oversee the show in a non-threatening, non-sexual way” (qtd. in Du Noyer 75).
Like Fields, Cilla Black would be an electronic emissary of the North tasked with
representing Englishness to the nation.
While Black seems from the outset to have shared Brian Epstein’s vision of
her becoming the new Judy Garland, with a mostly adult audience, other British
Invasion women singers emerged with a tougher sensibility that management had
to work hard in order to tamp down. Both Lulu and Sandie Shaw began their
singing careers committed to the new R&B sound in a partisan fashion that set
them apart from a musical mainstream that still regarded American soul as both
unmusical and un-British.10 Yet as these singers progressed in their careers, the
rough edges of their persona were worn down, more evidence of the predicament
shared by modern British women singers.
Lulu’s image was stereotypically feminine, in terms of looking young and
attractive, but her musical aesthetic was at odds with the traditional woman performer.
There was an even bigger difference: singers like Black and Clark seem resigned at the
outset to the idea that they would evolve sooner or later into the career entertainer à la
Gracie Fields. They too would reach a popular audience in a Britain still segregated
by class by utilizing the mass media techniques pioneered by Americans in their
entertainment industry. The links between Black and Clark and the new teenager
were somewhat tenuous from the outset, and became even more so. Both the singers
and managers seemed to anticipate that the “teenage” song would serve as a brief
moment in a longer career trajectory that would largely look like Fields.
10
It is useful to recall that Angie Sneddon, one of the most notable Mod girls, hailed
from the same working-class Glasgow neighborhood as Lulu. It reminds us that one of Lulu’s
most notable achievements was bringing the Glasgow Mod subculture to a mainstream
audience: but also that the gap between commercial British pop and the Underground was,
for a brief span in the early 60s, quite small. For more on Sneddon and Glasgow Mod, see
http://www.themodgeneration.co.uk/.
The case was different for Lulu and Sandie Shaw. For Lulu in particular, R&B
and teen rock signaled a rupture in British pop. As “Boat That I Row” (1967),
her biggest UK hit made obvious, Lulu never had an artistic interest in being
the new Gracie Fields. Although the song was written by Brill Building veteran
Neil Diamond, with a sound informed by the pop music sensibility of Lulu’s new
producer Mickie Most, sung by Lulu, the song nevertheless brought the defiant
spirit of the Mod Underground to the mainstream. “Boat That I Row” was a frank
declaration of feminine independence from social roles, including traditional
romance. Lulu easily assumed the vocal persona of assertive womanhood, making
demands on the world in a way that the songs of Cogan or Fields never did. Just
like the male rock groups, with their loud teenage rock, Lulu’s performance
declares that the Fields moment in British culture is over, supplanted by the Black
Atlantic sound.
Lulu grew up in Glasgow, and shot to fame at the age of 15 with her version of
the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” in 1965, delivered in a raucous style true to her R&B
roots. The R&B singer in Lulu, and the singer who had seemed to join the boys
club of British male pop on her 1966 tour with the Hollies (from Manchester) was
eventually lost in the shuffle when she signed to Columbia Records, and began
working with Mickie Most, who had established a career of making pop records.11
Most was instrumental in re-branding folk singer Donovan as a pop star. In 1967,
Lulu would host her own variety entertainment program, in the style of Sunday
Night at the London Palladium, an ITV program stable since the 1950s. Her
recordings became more homogenous, further removed from the singer’s initial
musical roots in American soul. After the singer’s 1969 hit, “Boom Bang-a Bang,”
a Eurovision contest winner, the die was cast: her music would move to “adult”
mode of the heavily orchestrated pop song.12 Although Lulu began with a voice
and image that distinguished her from Cilla Black, they were now on parallel
career tracks, with Lulu having a hit run in a Christmas Pantomime at the Palace
Theatre in Manchester in 1972.13
Like Lulu, Sandie Shaw was pressured to tone down the frank, casual femininity
of her star image: the same elements that made her a youth celebrity. Shaw’s first
single, “(Always) Something There to Remind Me,” followed in the path laid by
Cilla Black: a pop song written for an African-American singer, and the British
artist mainly following the lead of the original vocalist. Yet even as a beginner,
Shaw was a distinctive performer. While “You’re my World” was a traditional love
11
For Lulu’s own account of her artistic conflicts with Mickie Most and her early
management, see I Don’t Want to Fight (2003).
12
The Eurovision contest began in 1956, a time when black American music forms
were still distinct from European pop music. The contest would continue to award highest
honor to songs in a more traditional pop mode rather than soul or rock music through the
next decade. Lulu’s triumph in the contest represents a significant break with her earlier
music style.
13
Information taken from the official Lulu web site: http://www.lulu.co.uk/.
song, “Something There to Remind Me” (1964) was filled with little details meant
to resonate with urban audiences: all this before the release of Clark’s “Downtown”
later that year. Shaw blazed other musical paths as well: “Girl Don’t Come” (1964)
amounted to an exercise in sustained melancholy, anticipating the morbid pop love
songs characteristic of a later, post-punk era. The song was more concerned with
interiority than most pop fare, as well as more purposely androgynous: an attempt
by a woman to get inside a man’s head in order to express a less gendered yearning
and frustration.
Shaw’s voice was strong, like Cilla Black, but unlike most of her peers, her
vocals were predominantly in a lower register, which provided a new sense of vocal
intimacy. She was also physically different from the other celebrity women stars of
the British Invasion: tall and long-limbed. Shaw shucked off her shoes on the ITV
pop music show, Ready, Steady, Go!; the small gesture seemed a sign a far broader
liberation from restrictive definitions of femininity, not to mention comprising an
iconic look. Shaw’s vocal style, along with her unconventional persona, added
to the impression that the singer occupied an ironic distance from the traditional
emotional landscape of the pop song. However, like Lulu, Shaw’s success with the
Eurovision song contest, with “Puppet on a String” (1967), would signal the end
of her appeal to young audiences. The song’s message of female submission was
in sharp contrast with the rest of her repertoire. Shaw’s efforts to re-brand herself
as a rock singer were blocked by management, who persuaded her to go the route
of family entertainer, which resulted in a short-lived television program in 1969.
Once the show went off the air, Shaw’s recording career ground to a halt.14
The careers of pop women singers show how powerful, even intractable, class
hierarchy remained in the new postwar meritocracy. The loss of empire abroad
was simultaneous with the democratizing effects of growing consumer society at
home. The discovery of Black Atlantic music by postwar British youth coincided
with the realignment of Britain and America as global powers, with America
becoming the preeminent international power and Britain losing its Empire. As
if to compensate for the loss of global eminence, the postwar generation refused
to stand back and observe the new musical developments in America: they sought
to fully participate in the modernization of popular music. In this way, a partisan
appreciation of American music linked up to a uniquely British mode of class-
consciousness (cf. Randall 45).
British pop in the 60s is indelibly linked to specific consumer fetishes: the
sartorial emblems of skinny ties and tailored trousers, or venerated 45s and
long-playing albums. Fashion designer Mary Quant would clearly articulate the
collective ideals of Mod women by highlighting their cosmopolitan attitude:
“They represent the whole new spirit that is present-day Britain, a classless spirit
14
There is as yet no authoritative Sandie Shaw biography; I relied on the artist’s own
www.sandieshaw.com for biographical material. On it, the singer refers to her 1969 record,
Reviewing the Situation, with songs by more alternative artists like Dylan, the Stones, and
a just starting Led Zeppelin, as a personal favorite among her albums.
that has grown out of the Second World War…They are superbly international”
(Hewitt Sharper 73). Not surprisingly, the classless Mod was also a cultivated
consumer, and Quant’s assessment reflects her analysis of shopping preferences
among youth: “The same clothes are worn in Britain, Europe, and America. The
same sort of food is eaten, too.”
With the obvious link between British pop music and consumer-driven fantasy,
it is not surprising that utopian idealism extended to the wish to transform the
marketplace itself, including the record industry. The political climate contributed
to progressive-minded optimism, with the liberalizing or repeal of laws regulating
personal morality, and Prime Ministers of both parties appealing to the same
notion of general prosperity and happiness achieved though mass consumer
enfranchisement. Already by the mid 60s, the English music industry had increased
exponentially, a state of affairs marked by the official recognition of the Beatles as
MBEs in October 1965 (Savage 16).
Yet the Beatles’ assent was not a sign of a takeover in the mode of musical
production; they had climbed the ladder of success, and took it with them.15 For a
brief moment, northern pop music and its new guard of women singers seemed to
herald something bigger than the Beatles: a genuine modernization of the English
music industry, and a new balance of power between the industrial north and
the south. Women singers, many of them outsiders to the London music scene,
appeared to be a vanguard social movement that signaled a total transformation of
society: or at least the record industry. But women singers of the British Invasion
were never allowed to take control of the means of production: far from it. Their
attempts to broaden the range of their musical material were often rebuffed, and
they were pressured to accommodate their art and self-presentation in accord with
conventional notions of class and gender.
In this regard, the career of Gerry and the Pacemakers, another Liverpool beat
group that emerged in the wake of the Beatles, and scoring on the national charts
is instructive, the history of the group demonstrating the tenacious hold that older
pop formulas retained in the rock era. Gerry and the Pacemakers scored a series of
number ones in 1963 and 1964. As was the case of Cilla Black, the range of songs
that the group turned into pop chart material was various, including Mersey-beat
songs like “I’m the One,” but also a cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
15
The success of male rock groups in achieving a social solidarity that crossed
regional boundaries suggests another gendered difference between men and women artists.
Northern groups like Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and the Hollies
usually developed a bond with southern R&B groups (Stones, Manfred Mann, Yardbirds).
The southern groups were also able to find something in common with northern bands like
the Beatles that compensated for the lack of a blues moment in that group’s musical career.
The solidarity among rock bands from various regional scenes made British rock seem
like an organized movement. With the exception of Dusty Springfield and Madeline Bell,
discussed later in the chapter, examples of women singers building peer networks among
themselves are rare.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” a song that remains synonymous with the Liverpool
Sound to this day (Du Noyer 72). The band also developed their own manic version
of northern beat music that transformed even traditional pop love songs like
“How Do You Do It.”16 However, when mid decade, the Beatles had begun to push
the range and scope of their own musical style, Gerry rejected the new sound of
art rock.
Yet as a male performer, Gerry could elect to step aside when his kind of
pop music became unfashionable rather than evolve in another direction. Singers
like Sandie Shaw and Lulu did not have that option; their efforts to control their
musical evolution were largely stymied. The result of Gerry’s choice to opt out of
pop was his musical “feminization”: in most respects, his subsequent career ran
parallel to women singers of the British Invasion. Gerry began an acting career in
West End theatricals, but quickly moved to Sooty and Sweep, a long-running BBC
children’s program) and the obligatory Christmas pantos, sometimes joined by
Cilla Black (Du Noyer 72).
Nearly two decades later, the Smiths’ charismatic, outspoken singer and chief
songwriter, Morrissey, would work to rehabilitate the image of 60’s British women
singers like Shaw and Black. Morrissey placed photos of these women on Smiths’
record sleeves, and later his own solo records, often referencing their song titles
or lyrics. Most famously, the singer tried to revive the career of Sandie Shaw
by producing her cover of the Smiths song, “Hand in Glove” (1984). However,
Morrissey’s famous remark on Shaw, made nearly thirty years after Shaw’s
heyday—“I liked “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” because it
sounded as if she’d just walked in off the street and begun to sing, and strolled
back home and bought some chips”—suggests the ideological perspective that
both British audiences and record industry managers adopted in regard to women
artists of the day (qtd. in Simpson 47). Rather than viewed as fully enfranchised
participants in the music scene, sharing the autonomous spirit of the male bands
in regard to their musical aims, women singers were primarily viewed through
the lens of an all-determining notion of national character. Reality replicated the
movement of the Morrissey quote: Shaw’s provocative visual style and vocal
performance quickly assimilated into prosaic Englishness.
The earlier forms of music-hall performance for women singers had ossified
into a set of visual and verbal cues that worked as powerful, limiting stereotypes
for women artists, even serving as management protocols. The old rules still
applied, even as the British record industry adapted to a growing market demand
for music that sourced the new sounds coming from America. While male groups
like the Beatles and the Stones were able to stand outside music-hall traditions,
and construct a musical identity that emphasized experiment and innovation, by
16
The high-energy music of Gerry and the Pacemakers is on display in the band’s
performance of the single to a stunned audience on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury (available on
YouTube).
various devices, women singers were diverted to the mainstream, and re-fashioned
as emblems of tradition.
Yet what about Dusty Springfield? I deliberately left the singer out of the story
of 60’s women pop singers so far, in order to focus this second section on the
evolution of her pop music career, and its more complex, ambivalent relation to
the music hall legacy. The contrast between Dusty’s story and the career narratives
of women singers from her generation was largely due to the singer’s talent of
adapting the same means used by earlier artists like Alma Cogan, the consolidation
of one’s cultural capital as a performer, but putting these means to the unique end
of furthering her own project as singer-auteur. In contrast to Cogan, Dusty’s new
concept of pop music would exceed conventional stereotypes regarding gender,
and even transgress national boundaries.
In the years since Dusty’s death over a decade ago, a powerful consensus has
formed around the singer that celebrates her as the premier woman artist of the
British 60s, a case powerfully made by Annie Randall’s recent, excellent study
of Dusty the performer. Randall highlights Dusty the creator of musical hybrids:
of “pop arias” like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” Although her career
stalled in the early 70s, Springfield managed to sustain a pop career and an arc
of musical development throughout the earlier decade. In 1969, she released
Dusty in Memphis, recorded in that city; the record did not sell well initially, but
it has subsequently become a cult album, lionized by fans, including pop music
divas like Shelby Lynne who recorded her own tribute to the record, and highly
regarded by music journalists. Declared in 1989 by Rolling Stone to be one of the
“Best 100 Albums” of the Rock era, the record has been written on endlessly, and
is considered one of the greatest “white soul” music albums ever made.
However, the new consensus regarding Dusty’s merit also performs some
dubious cultural work, sustaining a broader fantasy about a kind of music that
transcends difference, especially racial difference. The contemporary construction
of Dusty that emerges in the mainstream is ambiguous about whether Dusty’s
version of British pop was the result of the singer’s careful study of transatlantic
soul, or a more authentic expression of the singer’s self. These new constructions
of Dusty are ideological, in the precise sense of mystifying the singer’s mode of
production.
Music writer Stanley Booth could be rightly claimed as the source for the
notion that Dusty was the great white soul singer of her era, as well as being
a cause of the confusion that reigns over dominates discourse regarding her
achievement as a singer. “A lot of people weren’t sure Dusty in Memphis was such
a good idea,” Booth writes, noting the obvious clash between the heavy backbeat
of American soul and Dusty’s reputation as a singer of “big ballady things”:
a polite way of referring to the racial divide that separates Dusty from the other
Stax soul singers Booth names, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett (Zanes 3).
Booth quickly goes on to claim that Dusty’s record transcends genre categories by
virtue of its particular art invention: “the Memphis sessions revealed something
new in Dusty’s singing that we had not heard before—a softness, a vulnerability
that is quite moving and attractive.”
While Booth is clear that the Memphis record constitutes an aesthetic
achievement, he is less sure about what comprises its true merits. Is her vocal
performance on the record a creative response to the pressures of working in new
circumstances, creatively adapting to the work methods of American session
musicians, based on close interaction between singer and band, which, as Booth
adds, “must inevitably produce music with greater involvement and more genuine
emotions than that which results from reading a chart standing alone in the studio”?
Or was “soul” always in Dusty, genuinely in her, regardless of specific kinds of
musical collaboration? At the same time, Booth suggests that the less hierarchical
work environment of the small town, southern studio liberated the singer from
restrictive music traditions, freeing her to express the “vulnerability” that is her
equivalent to the soul music of Aretha Franklin or Irma Thomas.
Booth’s comments raise the issue as to whether Dusty’s “soul” is intrinsic to
her, or if her soul sound is a construct, only to leave the matter open. He was
certainly not the last of Dusty’s listeners to beg such large questions. Most of
the recent discussion of the singer, among fans and critics alike, amounts to
an echo chamber, endlessly iterating the same message about how the singer’s
innate soulfulness transcends race and class boundaries. Some YouTube posts,
selected almost randomly, express this quasi-mystical vision of Dusty’s powers
to escape identity categories: “[…] I can easily see how people would mistake
her for black…she’s got that soul sound that you don’t usually hear with a white
singer” (RyeEncoke); “Wow, I always pictured a black girl singing. Goes to
show white people can have soul” (apestaartje321) (“Dusty Springfield”). And:
“Hard to believe she was a Brit. Sounds like the distaff version of blue-eyed soul”
(TheHardcase; ibid). The popular image of Dusty in the internet represents a sort
of postmodernism lite: a non-essentialist view of race and music, but also one that
seems rather blandly multicultural. For reasons that remain largely unexplained,
Dusty has posthumously achieved the status of true “Negritude.”
Such sentiments are not limited to YouTube; in a recent overview of neo-soul
music in Britain offered in the London Times, a critic confidently asserts that
British women like Amy Winehouse “are able to sing from the soul in a way that
the James Blunts of this world just cannot,” and points to Dusty as the obvious
precedent for Winehouse’s accomplishments (Times). In the same article, another
journalist argues for Dusty’s authentic soulfulness compared to neo-soul singers
like Duffy, explaining that “the real greats were those women [like Dusty] who
channeled their soul into the music” (Times). Like Booth’s appreciative note, such
remarks prompt more questions than they answer: was “soul” present in Dusty
before she “channeled” it in the music?
This is not an argument that the posthumous acclaim granted Dusty’s recorded
legacy is not richly deserved. Like the Beatles but by different means, the singer
seems to be consciously forging a new kind of pop music in her late-60’s records
that aims to cross over class and racial boundaries: a new kind of soul music that
relies as much on her ability to create culture, and negotiate the contemporary pop
culture landscape, by means of a self-conscious musical eclecticism. Her particular
brand of soul is chameleon in character; it takes on different elements at will, but
never adopts fully the singing of the black artists she admires, and as a result,
creates a new type of soul singing, one can be identified as British but still as soul.
As I elaborate below, the greatest novelty of the style is Dusty’s conscious refusal
to avoid the trap of authenticity in the sense of studiously copying black vocal
styles. Instead, the singer engages in collaborative work with American singer
Madeline Bell, and pursues a hybrid of European and American soul in her studio
recordings, in order to gain credibility.
Such labor required an incredible amount of cultural work: but it does not
suggest a full break with the broader story that I have related regarding the unique
struggles of British Invasion women singers with an oppressive class politics with
roots in British pop culture of the pre-WWII era. In fact, Dusty’s immense aesthetic
achievements are to a unique extent built on her professional relationships: above
all, on her working relationship to an inspired, creative-minded manager, Vicki
Wickham, who has a passion for soul music as well as industry connections with
American record labels like Motown, and above all, situated comfortably within
the power hierarchy of London music and television industries.17 Dusty will
not express her soul; she will attempt to create it: and not, as was the norm, by
establishing her authenticity. Dusty’s accomplishments are based on her growing
ability to negotiate different modes of cultural production: and in her case, her
impulse to evolve musically was actively encouraged by her manager. The singer’s
talent for creating new situations where she could recreate her unique hybrid soul
music would make it seem as if the singer was getting closer and closer to making
“real” soul with each new recording.
While Springfield escapes from the neo-music hall formulas that otherwise
restrained most British women singers of the 60s, her elaborately constructed
identity as soul singer reflected her privileged position in the London-based record
industry of the day. Yet while Dusty was positioned in the mainstream, neither
she nor Wickham took their cultural capital for granted. They would always bring
their winnings back to the table. The result was that Dusty managed to achieve
something that no other woman singer was able to do: the ability to play with
authentic identity categories, rather than be trapped by them. Dusty’s celebrity
status afforded the time and resources to undertake a serious “study” of soul music,
as well as place her in direct contact with expatriate American soul artists.
Dusty’s subsequent legacy resides in large part on account of her embrace of
soul music, a partisan taste she shared with the British Mod subculture. As has
been well documented, the Mods were devoted to soul music, expressed in specific
sartorial emblems like skinny ties, oversized parkas, and chic French-cut hairstyles.
17
The narrative of Dusty’s artistic partnership with manager Vicki Wickham is central
to Dancing with Demons: The Authorised Biography of Dusty Springfield (London: Hodder
& Stoughton Ltd, 2000).
The passionate attachment of Mods to American soul was motivated at least in

part by the realization that the taste for the music placed the connoisseur at odds
with English musical traditions, and thus with typical notions of “Englishness.”
Like most British youth subcultures in the postwar era, Mod was young,
working or lower middle class, but principally male. However, although Dusty did
not actively participate in the London Mod scene, she, like Lulu, closely identified
with the subculture, particularly the Mod enthusiasm for soul music. When a
contemporary account interprets the singer’s “eye shadow” and “immovable
hairdo” as so much “armour against the audience,” the remark reveals both the
critic’s unawareness of London Mod’s fashion codes, and inadvertently suggests
the singer’s own proximity to the subculture.18 Misreading the singer’s look as a
personal quirk, the reviewer misses out on the chief significance of the singer’s
television persona: the movement of Mod to the mainstream.19 Neat, short hair
was a trademark look of the young Mod woman: a sharp break with the pale eyes,
bright lip look that had defined feminine glamour for the previous generation, as
represented by the dark smile and elegant gowns of Alma Cogan.20
Mod was an urban subculture, and Dusty’s credibility and authority as a soul
aficionado had much to do with her privileged position both in London music
circles and her ties to highly capitalized media. The path of soul rebel was not the
traditional path of British women performers; I have noted the various kinds of
resistance that women performers encountered when they tried to adapt or evolve
their repertoire, especially when women tried to adapt the new American music.
However, by the mid 60s, the London recording industry was tangled in a typical
contradiction of capitalist production: fearful of too much innovation but reflecting
the expansive, modernizing tendencies of post-1968 capitalism (Wise 65). In this
context, Dusty’s brand of hybrid soul comprised both an artistic innovation and
a safe middle-ground between American soul and European pop. The metropolis
offered resources, in terms of social or financial capital, for ambitious singers like
18
The quote is from Nancy Banks-Smith’s review of Dusty on TV: SUN TV
16/08/1967: http://www.dusty-springfield.com/Dusty-Sprrcom.
19
Bob Stanley’s recent remark—“What now seems most remarkable about Dusty
Springfield was her self-invention. Nobody helped her to become the bee-hived, sequined
creature seen in stark monochrome on the cover of her Greatest Hits; it came out of nowhere
in much the same way as (Amy) Winehouse’s impossibly piled-up hair, bright red lipstick,
and tattoos”—also overlooks the singer’s many links, documented by Annie Randall, to
Mod. In contrast, Vicki Wickham’s comment in the same article stresses the singer’s vocal
pastiche, and her eagerness to mash-up various singing styles: “Dusty once said: ‘You can
never be authentic if you’re British. It’s mimicry’—she was right, and followed this to a T.
She listened to a huge range of singers and took on board the phrasing, breathing techniques
and attitude of each” (Times Online, “Legacy of Dusty Springfield”).
20
It is worth noting in this case the Juliette Greco pose that Cogan strikes on the cover
of “The Girl with a Laugh in Her Voice Sings” EP (1955). It is a striking visual anticipation
of the Mod look for young women, in part because of Mod’s passionate Franco-philia.
A photo of the sleeve is on almacogan.com.
Dusty who sought to modernize British pop along the path blazed by American
soul artists.
From this perspective, it is significant that Dusty’s stylistic evolution in the
mid 60s did not represent a complete break with the melodic traditions of earlier
British pop. Annie Randall observes that Springfield herself regarded the recording of
“You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which reached number 1 in March 1966
(US no. 4) as a pivotal moment of the singer’s career (57). With this song, Dusty
declared, she had had “found her own style” (57). Like “You’re My World,” the
song was translated from Italian into English. The record constituted a unique,
and unlikely, pairing of operatic melodrama and vocalizing in a deep register,
suggesting the more intimate style of soul singing. The record builds to a convincing
crescendo, in the familiar manner of operatic pop. The new development audible
in the record is the careful weave of lead and backing vocals sounds in the song,
a sound rooted in the gospel tradition. The result, Randall argues, constitutes a
musical innovation on Springfield’s part, fusing new American sounds with
musical parts associated with British pop (58).
While arguments about the novelty of the resulting sound are persuasive, it
should not obscure the hybrid character of the sound: “You Don’t Have to Say
You Love Me” was both novel and reassuringly familiar. Dusty’s lead vocal
incorporates the gospel shout that became part of her vocal repertoire from 1965
onward, but the song’s ballad rhythm lacks the backbeat that characterizes most
soul music, even ballads. While the record broke with some aspects of standard
musical practice, the song is not “un-British” formally or in its timbre. Dusty’s
signature achievement, a hybrid of British pop and American soul, may have
challenged its audiences, but it bore enough resemblance to traditional British pop
to constitute a reform rather than a revolution. Yet a musical revolution was not
the singer’s chief aim; the record’s success demonstrated her talent for negotiating
between different modes of culturally inflected music production. The hit single
represents Dusty’s central project as a solo performer: the attempt to expend her
cultural capital in order to rearrange the musical landscape, reconfiguring it in
order to situate her recorded work within the American category of soul. The
result is a cosmopolitan, ultra-modern concept of soul music that is still somehow
“rootsy.” More remarkable, or if one compares Dusty’s success in this regard to
her women peers, tragic, the particular niche she carves out for herself in the music
culture of the day seems exclusively for Dusty to occupy.
Dusty’s assessment that “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” was a
pivotal moment of her career seems correct; the success of the record not only
meant financial security, but more important, the self-confidence to incorporate
her increasingly serious study of American soul in her recording process. It also
provided Dusty with the requisite professional capital to negotiate a new record
deal. As Randall documents, Dusty had spent the last three years in avid study
of American soul, especially Motown records, becoming friend, mentor, and
co-worker with American gospel singer Madeline Bell, who had moved to London
to establish a solo recording career. “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me”
allowed Dusty to further integrate her intellectual passions into her work. She could
now demand that her record company allow her to make records in America with
R&B musicians.
The success of the single helped Dusty earn the cultural capital to develop
and expand her repertoire further away the formulas of neo-music hall style
that, as we have seen, continued to be foisted onto her musical cohort. In this
regard, Springfield’s real counterpart in British pop music is not Lulu, another
woman singer devoted to R&B, but Alma Cogan. Like Cogan, Dusty profited
from her established place in the British recording industry; her success bolstered
the hegemonic notion that London constituted a “Swinging” music center, just
as Cogan’s celebrity soirees subtly reinforced the idea that the metropolitan city
was also a global culture center. Dusty’s art strategy helped give substance to the
notion that London singers worked at the cutting edge of the new soul sound.
The singer’s increasing commercial success helped reinforce her credibility as an
interpreter of soul music to be taken seriously; Dusty’s integrity was now linked
with the authority of London as a hub of an emerging “transatlantic soul.”
The first wave of British pop had come from the North; performers like Cilla
Black and Gerry and the Pacemakers had hits recording material by black American
artists, but at a time before any Motown artists had toured the UK. By 1965, as
Paul Du Noyer notes, the hits were drying up for the Mersey-beat groups, and
becoming scarcer for northern singers like Cilla Black. This was mainly because,
after 1965, the Liverpool bands were now competing with the Motown artists
that they covered. Yet the commercial success Dusty Springfield achieved after
1965 must be counted among the factors that rendered soul inflected British pop
from the north obsolete; these groups were now irrelevant in light of the more
sophisticated soul record pioneered by Dusty, a native Londoner.21
As a London-based entertainer with a powerful manager involved in both
the record and TV industry, Springfield was better positioned than most of her
competition when it came to spotting and following trends. As it happens, Dusty
and her manager, Vicki Wickham, who worked in both the record and television
industry, were largely responsible for Motown acts touring the UK. In what
became another career-defining moment, Dusty and manager Vicki Wickham made
their most boldest attempt to define pop music trends in Britain up to that time:
negotiating with Berry Gordy to allow Motown artists to tour the UK and appear
on the popular music television show, Ready, Steady, Go!, which Wickham assisted
in programming, to bring American soul to a mass audience in Britain. Wickham
arranged “The Sound of Motown” program, a special edition of Ready Steady Go!
which aired in April 1965; Dusty herself provided input on what guests should
appear, with a final list including the Temptations, the Miracles, Diana Ross and
the Supremes, and Stevie Wonder. As Paolo Hewitt notes, the Ready Steady Go!
program played an essential part in broadcasting the sophisticated, cliquish taste
21
Of course, the privilege that goes together with being a native are complicated in
Dusty’s case by her Irish Catholic heritage, not to mention her closeted, queer identity.
of London Mod throughout Britain.22 At the same time, “The Sound of Motown”
program also connected Dusty to American soul in British consciousness. She
featured prominently in the program, serving as host and co-performer, opening
the show with “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” backed by the Funk Brothers, Motown’s
chief studio band, as well as Martha and the Vandellas.
If as Hewitt notes, the new British soul community was constructed via TV,
the link between Dusty and modern American music was a crucial part of the
assemblage. Wickham’s key role in the construction of the Dusty aesthetic is
exerted by elevating the status, as well as the autonomy, of the singer: she allows
Dusty to collaborate in programming the show, rather than just program Dusty on
TV. Wickham generously allows the singer to share a managerial role, previously
unavailable to women.
As a long-time admirer of American music, Springfield, with Wickham’s
support, could now exert agency over which performers appeared on British
TV, to an extent wielding influence on British musical taste. As a London-based
performer, Dusty was also well positioned to capitalize on the growing success of
American soul in the UK, in ways the Merseybeat bands, most of them choosing to
stay in Liverpool, were not. The “Sound of Motown” program was also the catalyst
for Dusty’s burgeoning career as television personality, hosting six television talk
and music shows on the BBC, beginning in 1967.
None of this is to suggest that Springfield or Wickham simply exploited the soul
music movement in Britain in order to further Springfield’s career, or capitalized
on Dusty’s musical interests in soul in order to beat the competition: only that it
would be naïve to simply ignore the existential and monetary rewards that were
available for the soul aficionado in the metropolis compared to a like-minded
partisan from the provinces. In the mid 60s, Dusty existed in the public sphere
as a contradiction: a mainstream artist with a cultish sensibility, not to mention
access to media coverage and modes of publicity. By 1968, however, the singer
had gained privileged access to social networks and performances that could
materially buttress and forward her study of soul music. In contrast with Cilla
Black or Sandie Shaw, Dusty, through Vicki Wickham, had the unique opportunity
to meet and work first hand with American musicians. In London, she had a
close-up view of the musical evolution of American soul, a front row seat, as it
were, on the most up-to-date musical developments.
That said, Dusty worked hard to differentiate herself from those performers
who paid tribute to black music by mimicking the accent, phrasing, or stage
performance of black performers. As Randall chronicles, Dusty conceived herself
as more a co-worker than the “boss” of her backing vocalist, Madeline Bell, both
singers working the same musical seam of gospel and soul. Springfield and Bell
worked together closely for five years beginning in 1965, a collaboration that
shaped how these women sounded and which determined the larger arc of their
22
Qtd. in Randall, 50. My reading of Wickham, Springfield, and Ready, Steady Go!
program draws on facts provided in Randall’s book chapter, “Migrations of Soul.”
solo careers. The relationship allowed the singers to develop in different directions.
As Randall puts it, “while Madeline absorbed British pop, Dusty absorbed gospel;
both landed in the uncharted waters of an emerging transatlantic pop that was
neither one nor the other” (36). In this respect, the contrast between Dusty’s work
protocols and the many white male rock groups in London who sourced black
American music is striking. Groups like the Stones and Yardbirds primarily played
to white audiences, at clubs like the Marquee or the Richmond, and in mostly
white neighborhoods rather than areas with sizable black immigrant populations
since the mid 50s, like Hackney or Notting Hill. Furthermore, unlike Dusty, these
groups worked in largely segregated circles, mostly with other white musicians.
Living and working at a remove from black Britons, it was easier to fetishize
blackness per se. The romance of blackness explains why in the case of white rock
groups, a faithful imitation of phrasing or the stage moves of black performers
could by itself suggest musical credibility, and authenticity. What Lauren Onkey
calls “the purist desire for ‘authentic’ black experience” never seemed to greatly
appeal to Dusty, or play a major role in her version of British pop, despite the
soul accents she brought to the genre (11). Dusty’s professional relationship with
Madeline Bell seems to have liberated her from idealizing soul or soul singers for
being exotic, wholly distinct from ordinary Englishness.23
More than most pop women singers of the 60s, Dusty Springfield seems to have
realized the cosmopolitan musical aspirations peculiar to the postwar generation.
As noted earlier, postwar British youth were not just inspired by American music,
particularly black American sounds, but asserted a right to participate in the new
music culture, and compete with their American influences and inspirations. This
generation of young British singers and musicians seemed to believe that their
involvement in rock and soul escaped the bad faith of white American R&B
artists. Despite the waves of immigration prompted by the British Nationality Act
of 1948, the stereotype remained that Britain did not have a race problem, largely
because it had been, and remained, an exclusively white nation. Moreover, there
had been precedents in the 1940s and 50s, during the British folk revival, for
imagining that political and musical solidarity existed between the grandsons of
slaves in the US and mining and industrial laborers in northern England.24 Not only
did black American-inflected British pop seem less implicated in exploitation than
blue-eyed American soul, it was also easier for American audiences to believe that
23
At the same time, as Randall notes, Dusty seems to have felt empowered by the
very presence of Madeline Bell in her band, which both “emphasized the cultural origin of
the gospel sound and gave Dusty the stamp of credibility she seemed to crave” (49).
24
Randall credits Proud Valley (1942), an Ealing Studios film starring Paul Robeson
about striking miners in North England as laying the groundwork for later efforts to clearly
articulate a link between class and race in both the British folk revival and later Mod (45).
British musicians who sourced black American sounds as being “somehow free of
racial complications” (Onkey 11).25
The perspective that Britain in the 60s constituted a post-racial society was
pervasive enough to be widely shared; at least, such a notion seems to inform the
remark of Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, that the sight
of a black guitarist leading a white rock trio was not an exotic sight for Britons:
“Colour never entered into it at all, certainly not in England (as) English audiences
were used to integrated bands” (Mitchell 36). Randall makes the persuasive case
that Dusty was more acutely conscious than most of her white male peers in rock
groups about the politics of appropriation. Dusty treated soul music as part of
a cultural dialogue open to revision on both sides, rather than as a style set one
assumed by means of stylized mimicry. The aim was less sonic imitation than
a broader effort to redefine what British music and Britishness signified in a
post-imperial age.
Nonetheless, it is important to recall the extent to which a project of
self-creation and reinvention like Dusty’s requires extensive social networking
for its realization. Despite their differences, London bands like the Stones and the
Yardbirds shared the same tendency to musical purism as Dusty. As the country’s
leading woman Mod, she shared with her male cohort in the subculture, as well as
other rock bands fascinated with American roots music, an obsession with musical
credibility. Having a cult taste places you in a minority, albeit a proud one; yet
even a cult member was less marginalized, or at least better situated to spread and
communicate cultish opinions to others, as part of the London community.
Bearing Springfield’s cultural capital in mind, we are able to view her most
critically acclaimed record, Dusty in Memphis, from a different perspective. Dusty
set off for the United States with her new Atlantic Records contract, an exclusive
agreement to work with soul producer Jerry Wexler, determined to fulfill her
“dream to make a definitive and authentic soul album” (qtd. in Randall 60). What
the singer had not anticipated was the considerable difference between studio
production methods in London and work routines in Memphis. Dusty experienced
the making of her transatlantic record as difficult, often disheartened by what she
believed was her lack of control over the recording process.
As Randall and Zanes document, making soul records in America entailed
work in a completely different mode of production than the singer was accustomed
to. As Dusty observed of her experience making records in the Philips’ label
London Studios: “For five years, since I started recording, I had been coming
into studios and finding everything all done before hand” (qtd. in Randall 63).
She had developed a working process that would maximize her creative input
25
Onkey’s argument here recalls Elijah Wald’s polemical claim in How the Beatles
Destroyed Rock’n’Roll (2009) that the Beatles’ American success is best explained by the
fact the band represented a white version of rock that allowed white Americans to separate
rock music from black performers, in much the same way that Swing-era bandleader Paul
Whiteman was a surrogate for white jazz fans.
into the process: improvising backing vocals with Bell, requesting adjustments in
microphone placement and recording levels until she was perfectly satisfied. In
these conditions, she also discovered a special way for the singer, usually dictated
to by the producer in these circumstances, to wield power, and a mode of expertise.
While accepting a division of labor where the singer was a crucial but relatively
small part of the actual recording, she would seize the role of the all-important
interpreter of her songs.
Dusty’s vocal creativity, her crucial input into studio records, always came last
in the process, after the rest of the track, including the instrumental bed, had been
completed. I will discuss later the efforts of the Kinks’ Ray Davies to construct
a version of the rock auteur in order to assert his autonomy in relation to the
pop-music industry of the late 60s. When Dusty undertook the work to make a
Memphis soul record, she had already developed her own particular version of
it. Dusty’s auteur was not the songwriter, or the individual who harnessed all
musical elements of the record; the auteur was the singer, in full control of her
vocal performance. This kind of auteur requires the resistance provided by outside
elements, such as the musical bed. Supremely conscious of vocal performance
after all the other elements of the record have been fixed, insisting on take and
take, Dusty imagined a musical practice where all other elements would be less
significant than the ultimate vocal track. The practice of adding a vocal last, after
expert session musicians performed in accord with the producer or arranger,
suggested the singer’s role was inessential. Dusty’s auteur practice amounts to a
counter-strategy that claims her voice as the singular element of the music, as well
as defiantly asserting the aesthetic character of vocal performance.
In contrast, the Memphis mode of record production democratized the relation
between singers and backing band. Studio musicians would play chords in search
of a specific rhythm pattern, with the singer in the studio. Singers were expected to
take a hands-on role in the process. Typically, Aretha Franklin would interact with
the studio band, as in other Stax recordings. The musicians would revise the chord
pattern of a song until they fit within the vocalist’s range. As Randall puts it, Dusty
seemed “entirely out of her element” in Memphis: meaning primarily that the
singer refused to adapt to studio routines that had evolved since the 50s into studio
protocol by the late 60s, to the massive frustration of producer Jerry Wexler (62).
Specifically, Dusty refused to participate in the process of group improvisation
which culminated in song writing. The London mode of record production, which
treated song writing and arrangement to be the specific task of professionals and
no one else, was the only work regime that Dusty knew. Although she worked hard
to get a chance to make the Atlantic crossing, it is telling that she resisted learning
another way of record making, besides the London way.
In retrospect, it seems evident that Dusty, a famously nervous, anxious
performer, grew more self-confident after the success of her mid-60’s records
like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” Her self-confidence made her
restless, eager to take her marriage of soul and melodrama to the next level. An
album that was a pure expression of the idiom of transatlantic soul was the next
logical move, for both commercial and artistic reasons. The making of Dusty in
Memphis, however, appears to have left lingering psychic wounds in the singer,
who never felt that it lived up to her ideal “real” soul record (Randall 61). The
album did not end up reversing the original journey of soul, from the US to
Britain; nor did she achieve what her co-worker and mentor Madeline Bell did,
a successful career as a solo artist outside her native land.26 The recording of
Dusty in Memphis suggests the limits of Dusty’s careful, cerebral study of soul.
After years of rising through the ranks in London, she had also learned habits
of deference and reserve that she was unable to unlearn in new circumstances.
Although she had spent years edging away from the British music mainstream
and the northern woman stereotype, the story of the Memphis sessions is also
revelatory about Dusty’s struggles in London, where she evolved an auteurist
notion of her work as a singer partly to cope with the restrictions placed on her
in the studio.
Almost in spite of Randall’s account of the singer’s travails in making Dusty in
Memphis, Randall goes on, as she should, to celebrate the considerable merits of
the record. Dusty had still managed to create “a hardy new strain” of “transatlantic
soul” with the album that had considerable longevity, as demonstrated by the
international success of the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
soundtrack, which featured the Memphis hit single, “Son of a Preacher Man” (69).
Yet Dusty’s album statement was ill timed. For the first time, rock groups sold
more albums than singles, with albums outperforming singles more generally on
the pop music charts. If Dusty’s Memphis record suggests her self-confidence and
commitment to the soul genre, the album’s negligible sales suggests the venture’s
“failure” in both commercial and artistic terms. In spite of her best effort to take
her career to the next level, Dusty was unable to make the record that would
establish her as a “serious,” concept-minded album artist, like the male British
rock groups of the era, and in keeping with her own lofty notion of her vocal
artistry.
Although Dusty’s music has grown in stature over the years, partly because we
now recognize how the singer brought a new mode of conscious deliberation both
to music making and career considerations, Dusty’s aesthetic legacy also reflects
her fundamentally privileged place within music capitalism. The canonical status
since granted to Dusty in Memphis is, at least in part, of a piece with the typical
privileging of metropolitan taste and tastemakers over the provinces. Wickham
and Springfield were part of the media elite, and, in that regard, Dusty’s creative
work performed the typical work of cultural elites, normalizing a specific value,
elevating one mode of music appreciation over other, less “legitimate” musical
tastes. For example, what would become “northern soul,” soul music made by
26
Dusty’s next album, A Brand New Me (1970), would repeat the same gambit of
transplanting Dusty in America; this time, Dusty collaborated with the house producers
of the Philly-Soul Sound, Gamble and Huff, though with less commercial success than the
Memphis record.
multi-racial British singers primarily for regional audiences, and a less melodic,
more intensely rhythmic version of American soul than the Motown and Memphis
hits championed by Dusty and Vicki Wickham, would remain on the margins in
British music compared to Dusty’s brand of transatlantic pop soul.
Yet that can hardly serve as the last word about Dusty Springfield’s singular
achievement. Unlike other women singers of the 60’s moment, Dusty was able to
liberate herself from a hegemonic notion of working-class femininity, appropriating
that image in order to legitimate her own unique notion of soul as a synthesis of
Britishness and black American artistry. Viewed from this perspective, Dusty in
Memphis represents a massive accomplishment with reverberations everywhere
in the cultural landscape, Amy Winehouse being the latest, where authentic soul
is no longer seen as essentially raced or classed. After Dusty, it is possible to be
a huge pop star, white, British, and a woman, and still soul—and importantly, the
soul Dusty exudes is not about her adopting someone’s else’s style, but her ability
to negotiate and remake shape cultural terrain.
From Dusty onward, soul will be about such a synthesis, about social
constructs rather than musical essences. The question that will be raised by scores
of interpreters from Stanley Booth onward, about whether the soul is genuinely
in Dusty, or if it is entirely constructed is precisely the point: the production of
ambiguity specifically in regard to national, class, and gender boundaries in music.
The dissolving of such categories would comprise the new meaning of soul.
Dusty’s soul sound is both at the same time a construct and an authentic sound.
As such, it represents a fantasy of total control: of a singer seizing the mode of
musical production. It can hardly be a surprise that Dusty harbored such fantasies:
the dream wish represented the contrary, the utopian inverse, of the compromises
and frustrations that accompany the kinds of alienated labor that she and the other
women singers of the British Invasion knew all too well.
Chapter 2
Modernist Rock Constructs the Folk:
The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour
As the first and most popular British rock band of the 60s, the Beatles are also the
chief example of the emerging modernist ethos in rock music that I trace in the
book. As soon as the Beatles reached a celebrity status around the world, the band
aimed not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but commenced
at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on and thereby intervening in the
commercial art enterprise in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically
appropriating and re-contextualizing the traditional forms of Victorian music
hall. Although critically reviled and regarded largely as a curio by their fans, the
Beatles’ home movie, Magical Mystery Tour (1967) is central to understanding
the historical context from which the Beatles’ music evolved, as well as to better
understand the character of the modernist evolution of British rock.
The Beatles’ TV film perhaps should have been titled “A Tale of Two Cities”:
for the film project and the songs on the soundtrack were shaped by the Beatles’
awareness of the new role that rock music played in mediating a traditional
conflict within the nation-state, specific to British capitalism: the tension between
the country, seen as the locus of true morals, manners, and national virtues; and the
city, specifically London as global metropolis. Like many other popular entertainers
that hailed from the north of England, the Beatles moved from periphery to
metropolis when they became rich and famous, leaving their home town Liverpool
for London. The film MMT self-consciously marks the Beatles’ return to the world
from which they came; it places the Beatles back on a democratic footing by setting
them as fellow travelers with lower middle-class northerners on a bus trip moving
cross country to a temporary destination in the metropolis. Magical Mystery Tour
restores the Beatles to their origins, but primarily, I will argue, to make the world
of traditional Englishness unfamiliar and exotic, and thus de-stabilize it. The result
is folk life as seen from a futuristic, modernist perspective.
In other words, the MMT project is bent on de-familiarizing Englishness: a
fact passed over too quickly, even by Beatles fans. The project of estranging the
folk may not be fully conscious to the Beatles as they made their home movie;
but it is a consequence of the Beatles’ new confidence that they had transformed
from a pop band into the equivalent of an avant-garde enterprise in rock music.
As I will explain, the Beatles had come to believe that they had been tasked with
modernizing rock music, on account of their special place in an expansive music
industry, and their new invention of a more cerebral, sophisticated approach to
rock songwriting.
The plan for Magical Mystery Tour originated in April of 1967, soon after the
band had finished the sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released
in June that year. Paul McCartney’s original concept for the record soon evolved
into a conceptual project that included film as well as music. When manager
Brian Epstein died in August, the endeavor gained a therapeutic function: a way
of keeping a band that was no longer a concert act, reeling from shock and grief
and increasingly racked with internal tensions, a functioning collective. As Ian
MacDonald puts it, the band “wandered drug-dozy” into film-making, insouciantly
confident that anyone with good ideas could make a watch-able movie (223). The
chief idea of the movie was to put the Beatles on a bus tour through the English
countryside; there would be music interludes, what we now call video segments,
where the Beatles would mime to new songs, including new psychedelic songs
made more for listening than dancing. In the new spirit of European art cinema,
the amateurism of the film would jettison the typical apparatus of narrative story-
telling. The band would wear costumes, and frolic in the countryside on camera.
It would be largely improvised, of course, although the band had ideas for certain
skits that would happen in no special order, on the way of the Beatles bus tour. One
skit, including a restaurant scene, where Lennon eats a seemingly endless plate
of spaghetti at an upscale restaurant, infuriating the other proper, very English
diners around him, was based on a “real” dream. The scene would later become
something of a trope in British cinema comedy, from Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky
(1977) to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983).
In one respect, the Beatles’ film project was revolutionary: an extended music
video, twenty years ahead of time. It did away with standard narrative and seemed
to escape any commercial category aside from the obvious one of being a Beatles
film. It would all be very casual, and court chaos: but it would work out all right.
They didn’t really need a script for a movie; this was the Beatles, after all. Their first
movie, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) had a brilliant director, Richard Lester, anxious
to adapt Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic ideas, in particular Godard’s play with
narrative sequence, into British cinema, as well as a clever screenplay writer, Alun
Owen. But wasn’t that film’s success finally about the Beatles themselves; would
that film have worked sans the group’s casual on-screen demeanor, good looks, and
unique talent for making arch dialogue seem natural and improvised? Moreover,
by this time Lennon and McCartney were aware of goings in contemporary high
art fields of painting and composed music; McCartney had met and discussed
film making with Michelangelo Antonioni, while the latter director shot Blow-
Up in London in 1966, and was aware of the cut-up experiments in sound and
image pioneered by William Burroughs and Byron Gysin. The Beatles knew that
sophisticated culture had begun to incorporate chaos, indeed privilege it, that
chance and improvisation was necessary for truly “modern” creative expression.
The band may have stumbled “drug-dozy” into directing a film, but they also knew
that such tightrope walks and induced chaos had a pedigree in high-culture. Their
TV film would translate these experiments in deconstructing form into their own
kind of vernacular modernism.
modernist rock constructs folk 49
As in their earlier movies, the Beatles would play themselves in their new
project. However, among the many dramatic social and cultural changes that
had occurred in the brief time span separating A Hard Days Night from Magical
Mystery Tour was the revolt of the creative class against the notion of high culture
itself, understood as a realm set apart. American pop art painters blurred the
boundaries between high and low art by incorporating pop culture images in their
work. The filmmakers of the French New Wave also self-consciously referenced
popular culture, in a way that suggested the vitality and integrity of pop culture,
compared to older art traditions. By 1967, the Beatles had consolidated their
preeminent place in the pop-music field, having come to represent popular culture
itself. Popular culture like the Beatles was now redefined as an insurgent force
on account of its links to a dynamic youth movement world wide. Even as the
Beatles sought to learn from their contemporaries working in other, older media,
they were acutely conscious that many of these same artists were watching them,
if only to discover more about the new popular culture the band symbolized. If
there is a smug aspect to the Beatles’ home movie, it lies in the group’s confidence,
evident both in the film and the nonchalant way they approached film-making, that
role-playing as “the Beatles” this time around meant representing the group that
many believed to be the most important band in contemporary pop music.
Magical Mystery Tour was made for the British television audience, to be
broadcast on Boxing Day. For this reason, the film was (and remains) somewhat
obscure to the band’s American audience, immersed as it was in a specifically
British history of working and lower middle-class entertainment. The movie
largely presumes an audience intimately familiar with the history of British
popular leisure, originating a century before in the industrial north, as well as
the relation between leisure culture and class identity. This was a pleasure world
where fun could be had on the cheap: of seaside leisure and circus fairs on the Pier,
a world alien to most Americans outside of New York or New Jersey. The Beatles
knew this world intimately as their Northern English heritage. In the 1850s, the
tradesmen and entrepreneurs who built the great seaside resorts in Blackpool
catered to the popular taste for food, drink and popular entertainment. Most of the
fare that comprised the popular holiday in the Victorian era—mechanical rides,
waxworks, monstrosities, freak shows, amateur theatricals—are reprised in some
form in the MMT film, suggesting the essential continuity between pop culture
before and after the Beatles. The group’s choice to make a film so steeped in the
stuff of traditional Englishness for a mass audience in the television age seems
to suggest a desire to please, to appease a mass audience rather than challenge
it. It seems easy to dismiss MMT as one of many narratives that seek to, in Homi
Bhabha’s words, turn “the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life…into the signs of
a national culture” (292).

Bob Neaverson’s chapter on the film in The Beatles Movies is a definitive source on
the film’s release and negative reception in the press; he also provides a useful overview of
the film’s allusions to surrealism and contemporary avant-garde film in Europe.
However, I argue that the Beatles film does some very sophisticated cultural
work. While it is true that a knowing view of local practices is central to the
film, it also shaped by the metropolitan standpoint that dominated the Beatles’
new rootedness in the cosmopolitan habitus of London. Magical Mystery Tour
recreates the band’s Liverpool roots but with a quasi-ethnographic distance. The
film reinterprets the culture from which the Beatles came; it presumes the group’s
talent, their skill, at pivoting between metropolitan perspectives and an insider’s
knowledge of local culture. MMT, both film and record, shows the band at their
zenith as artisans, fabricating both their metropolitan knowingness and their native
Northern identity. The band construct and pivot between both stances in the film:
but for reasons that reflect the moment when the film was made, its central purpose
is to elevate the value of the metropolitan over mere ‘indigenous’ Englishness.
Although McCartney, a self-styled cinephile and maker of experimental home
movies, took the lead in the film project, the rest of the group enjoyed the process
of making the movie and were finally won over to the idea. The film and record
easily recouped the 40,000 pound outlay for the venture, but Magical Mystery
Tour marks, as MacDonald notes, “the breakdown of the cross-generational
consensus on the band; it was the place where the generation gap that the Beatles
seemed to deflect, established by the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, reasserted
itself” (224). One reason the film turned off the elders that otherwise appreciated
the band was that the film’s non-linear, casual character seemed to suggest being
stoned as much as the group aspirations to high culture. Unlike the Beatles’ other
movies, MMT seemed to target a specific segment of their youth audience, namely
those more interested in counterculture “lifestyles.” Moreover, the film also had a
clear agenda: of satirizing consumerism and media clichés (cf. Macdonald 224),
although as I argue later, it is unclear the extent to which the ersatz Hollywood
musical set-pieces in the film, like the climactic scene of the Beatles and a Busby
Berkeley chorus line, offers itself as a kind of complex pastiche of the idea of
stardom. Although the Beatles’ counterculture audience constituted perhaps the
ideal public for MMT, this subgroup never articulated a defense of the film that
opposed the daily papers. For many in the burgeoning counterculture, the Beatles’
new project seemed uncomfortably close to the middle-class customs of the older

Ian McDonald was the first to make the case that the movie was misunderstood
because critics and audiences disliked the consciously avant-garde form of the film, not to
mention its broad satire of institutions and Englishness. More recently, Bob Neaverson has
argued that the time the film was broadcast and the way it was marketed accounts for the
negative popular response. As Peter Black of The Listener speculated at the time: “Slotted into
one of the arts programmes’ times, the Beatles film would hardly have raised a whisper” (it
was screened at 8.35 p.m. on BBC1, the time slot for light entertainment intended for family
viewing (qtd. in Neaverson 74). After the broadcast, Paul McCartney defended the movie to
the Daily Express, implying that the movie’s disregard for conventional narrative form was
behind the puzzled response: “the mistake was that too many people tried to understand it.
There was no plot, so it was pointless trying to find one” (qtd. in Neaverson 74).
generation, embedded in the Englishness that it represented. The immediate

legacy of the MMT project was perhaps to set the stage for the more pronounced
break between the Beatles and radical youth that occurred with the release of the
Beatles’ “Revolution” single at the close of the tumultuous summer of 1968, a
song that seemed to express the group’s pointed rejection of violence as a means
to revolution.
Magical Mystery Tour reflected the confident, optimistic view of its creators,
that the avant-garde in rock culture that they represented, were poised to take
over and modernize the rest of the pop world. The video segments were key to the
aggressive modernism of the film: the Beatles mimed singing such songs as “I Am
the Walrus” and “Blue Jay Way,” remote from the danceable rhythms normally
associated with rock music, making the songs impossible to separate from the
rarified space of the high-tech recording studio. The visual sequences linked to
the music play up the association of the songs with extreme states of mind, with
dream states or chemically altered consciousness. If the film misfired, it is partly
on account of the ambiguous frame in which the Beatles presented their modernist
statement: with a gentle evocation of the recent British past that, in the context of
rapid social and musical change, seemed backward looking. To their detractors,
it seemed as if the Beatles were bent on reproducing Englishness even as their
innovative pop songs, and as I will elaborate, their transformation of songwriting
into an existential and experimental endeavor, seemed to reject tradition.
The Beatles’ Pastoral
On first glance, the Magical Mystery Tour project seems to persist in the same
trend to musical and social nostalgia that began with the records the band made
after retiring from touring and their immersion in studio recording, beginning with
1966’s Revolver and escalating in the recording sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, later that year. The cover for Sgt. Pepper’s had its source in two
McCartney memories: a photo of James McCartney’s dance band, posed proudly
around a bass drum, and no doubt less specific recollections of the dressed-up
Edwardian bandstand in civic festivities. Wartime Liverpool comedian Tommy
Handley, a music hall veteran, was among Lennon’s choices for the famous collage
of celebrities, trouble makers, and art heroes posed around the band on the album
cover.
Most important, the first songs written and recorded for the Beatles’ new album,
“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” were deeply rooted in childhood
memory. With their evocations of childhood places and powerful emotional states,
the Beatles invented a new pop genre, with the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” (May
1967) and the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” (August 1967) their answer records:
songs that elevate the English quotidian and celebrate the spirit of a specific
place. The Kinks’ record views the urban spectacle from a certain remove, the
better to express a melancholic distance from the crowd; the Small Faces’ song
follows the precedent of the Beatles even more closely, with its privileging of
childhood experience of alienation and treated sound, the disorienting of “phased”
vocals in the song giving a small taste of the psychedelic experience. However,
the resemblance between the Beatles’ records and a well-established tradition
within British culture of celebrating provincial life and marginal views is a bit
misleading; “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” are less celebrations
of a unique space, or even the lost period of childhood, than about recovering an
emotion or state of mind in the present. The return to childhood pastoral comes
after the fracturing of consciousness through acid and other aspects of modern
life, so that the band’s Liverpool past seems both new and familiar at the same
time.
The bus tour in the MMT program has its clear inspiration in the homely
proletarian coach excursions that a young McCartney had watched depart from
Liverpool, headed for Blackpool or some Northern holiday spot (Du Noyer 76).
One of Paul’s songs for the film, “Your Mother Should Know” pays tribute to the
more genteel era of the tea-dance song that McCartney would have associated
with his father’s Liverpool dance band. Yet although oriented to the past, and
suggesting both the lingering influence of and affection for the band’s Liverpool
childhood, MMT is anything but a simple celebration of the past. The program
represents the band returning somewhere, but bringing a whole new way of life
with them. Rather than negating the past, the point seems to be to embark on a kind
of journey that used to be possible in the way McCartney remembered, but now is
possible in an entirely new, transformed form, in a post-LSD age.
The Magical Mystery Tour film goes further in its competitive relation to
traditional Englishness by either transforming the pastoral scenes on the bus tour,
or, most notably in the “I Am the Walrus” segment, unleashing a carnivalesque
reversal of the pastoral into a scene that highlights a specifically urban kind of
disorder. Traditional Englishness is evoked, but largely to play the role of the
Other to the Beatles’ achieved experimental style.
The Magical Mystery Tour record and film, then, continue a trajectory begun in
Sgt. Pepper: the resonant particulars of a typically English tradition are recreated,
but importantly, set in a new frame, dramatizing the disparity between the old
pastoral, and the new “country” as it was being re-defined by both Californian and
British counterculture, as a space that one “returned” to, with a mind to remaking it
by a collective, utopian-minded effort. The countryside remained a pastoral place,
but the plans for social transformation involving the notion of the countryside are
new, tied to the late-60’s moment. The landscape has been de-familiarized for the
Beatles, on account of their new cosmopolitan perspective; MMT takes place in a
misty somewhere, not an actual locale but not just a state of mind.
The past represented by the English countryside is a locale not to be dismissed,
but to be integrated, traversed, with the new cosmopolitan perspectives represented
by the city. Like the transitional singles mentioned above, the film suggests the
need to intergrate the myth of childhood, including a mythical ideal of England,
into a present-day consciousness. That said, I will mention later how some of the
music video segments in MMT seem to imagine the Beatles’ new state of being as
comprising a total negation of traditional Englishness, where the past, thrown in
sharp relief as past, is depicted as retrograde.
In one respect, the strategies on evidence in the Magical Mystery Tour film
extend the procedures the Beatles had already adopted toward the pre-rock past
beginning with Revolver (1966); here, the Beatles’ suite of pop songs began to
encompass a new stylistic diversity with a temporal resonance. If the Beatles’
Rubber Soul was notable for incorporating some of the innovations that Bob
Dylan had wrought in the folk song—foregrounding intimate self-expression, no
matter how idiosyncratic or abstract— Revolver showed an even greater musical
range, juxtaposing chamber orchestra pop (“Eleanor Rigby”), variety sing
along (“Yellow Submarine”) sequenced in the album alongside a new “song,”
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” by John Lennon that was in fact an audacious
experiment in incorporating tape loops. On the Sgt. Pepper’s record, the music
hall pastiche becomes more pronounced, with Lennon’s “Being for the Benefit of
Mr. Kite” adding modern studio effects to a music-hall pop song (with a lyric that
incorporates the spiel of an English circus poster from 1860). The sequence of the
songs on the album juxtapose music-hall pastiche like McCartney’s “When I’m
64” closely to their most sonically adventurous song, “A Day in the Life,” a pop
song that basically splices a Lennon verse and chorus with a McCartney bridge,
and an experimental orchestra interlude in which string musicians go from the
lowest to the highest note on the scale in a measured interval. The juxtapositions
of rock and pre-rock British pop music that constitute the sonic texture of the
record is taken to a comic extreme in the title track, which alternates between
music-hall song and the rock sound of distorted guitar and heavy drum, prominent
in the mix.
By the time the Beatles began the Magical Mystery Tour film and record, the
band had become adept at hybridizing two traditions: a new experimental, studio-
dependent, more cerebral (and less danceable) pop music with songs or song
fragments taken from pre-rock British pop. Barry Miles, publisher of the chief
“underground” newspaper of the London counterculture, the International Times,
or IT, and close friend to McCartney, was one of the first critics to recognize the
hybridization that had come to play an important role in Beatles music. Miles also
apprehended the interlinks between the Beatles’ experiments and a specifically
British music culture: “The Beatles’ musical background stems not only from
Presley, Perkins and post-war US pop but also from British music (listen to
‘Mr. Kite’ or ‘Yellow Submarine’); traces of the NDO (Northern Dance Orchestra)
and Light Programme (explain) are everywhere” (IT ).
Miles grasps the relation between the Beatles’ experimental moment and
specifically British music traditions, though without addressing the specific
relation between the Beatles’ music and earlier pop. From our vantage point, the
link between the Beatles’ more experimental records and the English mainstream
is more clearly grasped as a self-conscious attempt to establish the band’s
modernist credentials through the masterful juxtaposition of new rock sounds
with songs from the pre-war past. The Beatles’ records of 1966 and 1967 rely on
the modernist aesthetic of musical collage, cutting up and re-assembling past and
present in order to signify the band’s sonic futurism. The so-called “White Album”
(1968), one of the few significant double-album releases in rock music, dilutes the
historicist message of the Beatles’ other post-66 records on account of its length
and sheer variety. The record demonstrates the group’s mastery of contemporary
music styles: of ska (“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” name checking Desmond Dekker’s
1968 UK chart-topping single), the new “heavy” rock (“Helter Skelter”), the pop
harmonizing of the Beach Boys (“Back in the U.S.S.R”), even musique concrete
(“Revolution No.9”). That the results are more an exercise in style-hopping than
their previous ambitious efforts to re-constitute the history of British pop by
juxtaposing modern sounds with older music genres also suggests that the Beatles’
investment in futuristic collage was transitory. They relinquish the role of musical
alchemists, content with being electic aesthetes.
George Melly’s comments on the Beatles’ roots in earlier British music,
made a year after Miles, are useful here. Noting that “the influence of the music-
hall on British pop has been surprisingly strong,” and offering the Beatles and
the Kinks as chief examples of this trend, Melly goes on to speculate why, and
finds the answer in youth nostalgia. The return of traditional sounds in 60’s
pop expresses, he writes, “the yearning for a simpler, earlier time masked by
irony; the musical equivalent of the rash of Union Jacks with which ‘Swinging
London’ was to conceal its uncertainty” (63). Perhaps: but the presence of
irony in post-WWII British rock requires a fuller explanation than Melly’s
casual remark provides. We begin to understand the complex work performed
by the Beatles’ “ironic” deployment of earlier music forms if we consider it
as a mode of modernist irony: as a willful appropriation of the past, aimed at
instructing an audience in a specific way of viewing its national history, and
thus potentially reconstructing or rewriting that history. In other words, the
Beatles’ sampling of the sounds of the pre-War past at this moment in their
career is less an exercise in nostalgia than a sign of an emerging historicist
consciousness within British rock itself. In this context, the decision of the
band to do a film program for the BBC, and a British television audience
(I am not certain whether the band or the BBC made the decision to air the
program on Boxing Day, traditionally a time spent shaking off the torpor of
the Christmas celebration) seems something of a conscious intervention
within the national context of pop music production. Barry Miles’ critical
appreciation of the Beatles suggests that the group’s artful arrangement of
archaic sound with contemporary pop had a pedagogical aspect: it taught a
version of British musical history where pop music culminates in the Beatles
as modern masters. At the heart of the ironic juxtaposition of old and new
sounds in the Beatles’ “progressive” era is a, sophisticated notion of history.
Like any theory of history worth its salt, the conceptual understanding of it
entails rewriting history: pushing aside some facts, foregrounding others. The
Beatles’ musical eclecticism challenges the assumption that rock as a popular,
youth-oriented form, lacked intellectual seriousness, by presenting a coded

version of history through the skillful array of old and new sounds.
By 1967, the Beatles had made various efforts to apply a specific kind of
historical consciousness to British rock. In one respect, Magical Mystery Tour is
an attempt to render a progressive theory of music history, about pre-rock sounds
that culminate in a new art form, in visual form. Barry Miles recalls conversations
with the band during this period that suggest the Beatles were quite aware that they
were acting as modernist re-interpreters of what had been a “folk” art form: “(They)
were really sure that they were pushing forward, creating art. The conversations
we would have was about how all kinds of art began as a popular form—opera, or
photography, or the cinema—and that at some point, people come along and use
this new medium to create something more” (77 MOJO).
It almost seems that the Beatles were tasked with modernizing rock music in
this way. And in a way, they were. In historicizing rock for their mass audience, the
Beatles were reproducing the logic of their artistic education. Like so many of the
young men who formed rock groups, the Beatles had passed through art school,
and approached music appreciation and then music making with the attitudes of the
aspiring middle-class student. As another suburban rock star Mick Jagger recalls,
what differentiated groups like the Beatles and the Stones from other bands was “a
good overall history of the thing, blues, country…whatever…its that middle class
knowledge, the sense of history, and the desire to know everything,” exactly “how
Slim Harpo’s harmonica licks work” (qtd. in Noyer 98). John Lennon echoes the
remark in his recollection that the Liverpool musical underground was defined
by cognoscenti practice, the proper “appreciation” of rock music, rather than just
naïve pleasure: “We felt very exclusive and underground in Liverpool listening to
Richie Valens and Barrett Strong and all those old-time records that nobody was
listening to anymore” (109).
These quotes are evidence of a shared generational outlook; the historical sense
is something one learns, the result of training. As Christopher Logue remarks,
the air of heady experiment in the creative arts that distinguished the British 60s
was the “direct result of that great act of national will, the creation of a welfare
state” (58). The first generation of British rock bands came of age at a time when
Welfare State reforms such as the 1944 Education Act, which gave schooling to
all children until age 15 with the possibility of further training, were having broad
transformative effects. It created an engine for social mobility, since children
were encouraged to stay at school and receive the kind of training that meant the
difference between factory work and office jobs. The link between the evolution
of British rock music in the 60s and art schools has been well documented. The
British art school curriculum had an emphasis in artistic modernism, encouraging
self-expression and experiment. Art school education included training in the
history of painting and design, assuming that knowing tradition was a starting
point for experiment and innovation in the present time.
The Beatles’ evolution into art rock song-writers, evidenced by their concern
with the sequencing of songs on albums, reveals a growing preoccupation with
the conceptual form of a record, as well as the music. A proper sequence of songs
was also a means to transmit the group’s growing self-consciousness to their
mass audience. The Beatles’ brand of rock historicism legitimated art rock, not
in terms of its popular success of course, but by asserting the relation of rock
music to a broader musical history, and implying that rock constituted the next
logical step in musical evolution. In this view, the Beatles establish their authority
because they provide us with the popular (rock beats) in any way you like, and
now encompassing the historical (rock beats and brass band) as well. The past is
not discarded, but self-consciously integrated within the new form.
Popular successes themselves, the Beatles helped popularize the idea that rock
contained a conceptual component, that it comprised a mode of consciousness,
requiring a theory of music (and music history) as much as technical finesse. Art
school training reinforced the point that history mattered, especially those moments
when personal history overlapped with the national-historical. Surely this accounts
for the brass band uniforms and ersatz Victorian costume the group wore on the Sgt.
Pepper cover and again in MMT. Art College, embedded as it was in a post-WWII
state apparatus, had the practical effect of reproducing a version of Englishness.
As the earlier quote from Homi Bhabha suggests, our general sense of history,
including national history, consists of precisely this sort of inchoate, personal
data: family memories, fashions recalled from childhood, or strong attachments
to specific places. Inevitably, the Beatles’ endeavor of providing a clearer link
between rock music and history necessarily grafted a vision of Englishness on the
American art form.
This is not to say that Art School somehow equals history. The main component
of art school training relates to aesthetic strategies. Just as Pete Townshend’s
work with the Who in the 60s represents a creative response to hearing lectures
about contemporary art from Gustav Metzger, and the young Mod audiences that
came to the Who’s early concerts, the influence of art school is mainly seen in the
songwriter’s interest in finding specific art strategies, whether this means new ways
to address the musical medium, or the attempt to construct audience perception of
the band and their music. For punk rock, art school influence entailed a concerted
project of uncovering hidden or marginal forces in national culture. The Beatles’
musical project came to be defined by a construction of contemporary rock music,
culled from a rigorously selective view of the past. Yet whether it is Townshend,
the Beatles, or later punk rock, all of these endeavors exist in a larger continuity
of modernist art strategies.
Among other things, Magical Mystery Tour testifies to British rock’s character
as a cultural hybrid. The multi-accented quality of British rock explains why so
many 60’s rock groups including the Beatles were ciphers to many social groups
in regard to class. The Beatles, whose music seemed to effortlessly cross age and
class boundaries, were especially ambiguous in this regard. The result of modernist,
state-funded education programs, British rock emerged as a bourgeois art form,
but of a unique sort: it reflected a progressive-minded bourgeois, self-conscious
about their place in history, and inclined to artistic experiment. Although rock was
pop culture, and still linked in the British imagination with the violence of young
male subcultures like the Teddy Boy, the popular aspect of rock modernism was
always contested, and occasionally resisted by working-class audiences. Teds and
their Rocker successors (by the mid 60s, little distinguished the two groups aside
from the American biker gear that came to signify the Rocker) violently disrupted
performance by the art school groups, whether the Rolling Stones in Blackpool
(1965), or notoriously, the Who’s Royal Albert Hall concert in 1969.
Working-class audiences saw most British rock as the work of art-damaged
poseurs when compared to 50’s American rock and soul singers. Rock music as
the product of history-minded bourgeois: the death, in other words, of the initial
rock aesthetic of Little Richard, with his annihilating screams, nonsense lyrics,
all rhythm and outrageous pan-sexuality. Cars, women, sex, drugs, and violence
(in Link Wray’s suggestively titled instrumental, “Rumble”): who needs history,
when it’s all happening right now on the streets? In comparison with British rock
groups Little Richard and the rest of the first generation rock and rollers seemed
like a force of nature, or more accurately, that the inevitably more self-conscious
approach of the Beatles to first generation American rock and roll would make
the legacy of Little Richard and others seem more spontaneous, and authentically
“primitive.”
On a casual viewing, The Magical Mystery Tour film would seem to perpetuate
the built-in class masquerade of British rock by establishing a visual link between
the Beatles’ music and traditional working-class culture. As I argue in my reading
of The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus in the next chapter, the Stones’
attempt to best the Beatles’ TV film with their own rock movie, is also an exercise
in class masquerade, surrounding the new, technically proficient, aesthetically
professional rock with signifiers of working-class culture in order to reassert rock’s
proletarian credentials. Despite the Beatles’ reputation among some rock critics
for being mere entertainers compared to bands with greater musical integrity, like
the Stones, the Beatles’ rock movie is arguably more confrontational, and honest,
about the incompatibility of rock art and versions of traditional Englishness.
The Beatles and Music Capitalism
The Beatles symbolized the ultimate capitalist success story, as old as Balzac
novels: the young man who came from the provinces to take over the metropolis,
reaping the rewards of financial success on account of their talent and hard work.
Even as late as 1970, years after the Beatles had relocated to live and work in
London, the topic of London prejudice against Liverpool as the “sticks” could
enrage John Lennon—“we were the ones that were looked down upon by the

In Blackpool, young Teds spat on Brian Jones on account of his androgynous look,
and a riot ensued. The ban on the Stones in the city was just lifted last year. For a fascinating
account of the Ted attack on the Who in 1969, see Neville, 115-122.
southerners as animals”; at the same time, Lennon suggests that the metropolitan
prejudice against outliers is not without merit (“[Liverpool] was a port, that means
it was less hick than somewhere in the midlands” (italics in text; 145-146).
That Lennon’s sense of civic pride is evidenced when he speaks of Liverpool
as an embodiment of that quintessential urban value, cosmopolitanism, suggests
how quickly he adapted to the ethos of the metro center (147). By the time the
Beatles began shooting the Magical Mystery TV film and record in Fall 1967,
they were at the forefront of modernizing tendencies of the 60s, and thus at the
heart of rock’s incorporation into what for the moment seemed like a progressive
version of the record industry. In 1967, it was easy to believe that the post-war
boom in industrialized nations would sustain itself endlessly; even the nascent
youth revolutionary critique of consumerism espoused by groups as diverse as San
Francisco’s Diggers and the French Situationists, who proposed the re-distribution
of surplus in order to alleviate human need and stop the tyranny of overwork,
skirted the question of how the new society would cope with scarcity and the
possibility of depleted resources. Like many in their generation, the Beatles became
concerned with changing life; if capitalism could not be overthrown, then at the
very least, it could be transformed and humanized from within.
The Beatles came to represent a world of limitless possibility, an epoch of
never-ending affluence and capitalist expansion: the postwar affluence endlessly
extended. As the world’s best-known rock band, the Beatles embodied all the
contradictions of commercial entertainment in mass society. Their worldwide
fame made the band seem “beyond common reality,” as Michael Bracewell put
it, and each new photo or record “opaque transmissions from a distant planet of
celebrity” (133). But the reality of the pop music world was that most professional
rock bands remained workers producing surplus value for the profits of record
companies, often forced to subordinate self-expression to the dictates of the music
industry.
The class ambiguity that accompanied the rise of British rock was clearly
evident in the mode of production, the process of record making. As musicians,
the Beatles were still wage laborers for EMI, a multi-national corporation that
held a near monopoly on the British record industry. The record company placed
the Beatles under the tutelary care, but also the strict control, of record producer
George Martin. Martin’s qualifications for producing the Beatles mainly rested
on his previous work on “novelty” records for Radio comedians such as the
Beatles’ beloved Goon Show comics Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. Not that the
managers or even the staff at EMI envied Martin’s job, especially at the beginning
of the Beatles’ career; EMI staff producer Malcom Addey, originally asked to do
the artist test for Beatles declined, uninterested in recording “that Liverpool shite”
(Emerick 57).
On account of their privileged position in the pop music industry, the Beatles
managed to live out a dream of something like un-alienated labor as they
spent more time, and the record company’s money, in order to experiment to
achieve the sonic results they sought in the studio. EMI studios represented a
very English kind of music capitalism: studio recording was run according to a
strict hierarchy, as a technocracy, with producers and engineers still required to
wear lab coats over formal wear, overseeing the musical “proletariat” on the factory-
room floor. Eventually, the Beatles’ track record as hit record makers distinguished
them from most recording bands, elevating them quickly from a position of wage
slave to something like co-workers with George Martin, management’s primary
representative in the studio lab. As phenomenally wealthy wage laborers, with the
opportunity to develop ideas in the space of the studio, a privilege denied to the
vast majority of musicians, forced to work according to strict restraints on studio
time, the Beatles had obtained a measure of autonomy that also permitted them to
evolve their songwriting craft. By 1966, EMI had waived the rental fee for using
its studios, a sign of their privileged role within music capitalism. While they
remained mostly respectful of George Martin, the Beatles became increasingly
vocal and unafraid to test his capacity as technician to the utmost, and make the
most extravagant demands on his patience. As EMI engineer Geoff Emerick’s
recent memoir proves, the Beatles, or at least Lennon and Harrison, were no
slouches when it came to high-handed treatment of the label’s low paid staff of
recording engineers.
Still, Emerick’s memoir also suggests that the Beatles realized the dream of
finding a “libidinally gratifying work.” The band’s uniquely satisfying experience
of their labor process was largely achieved at the expense of others, ironically
people like Martin and Emerick who were being paid to supervise and otherwise
handle the band, with a mind to cutting the costs of record production. By 1967,
producer George Martin was a freelance producer, but he still retained his role as
studio representative, charged with keeping studio expenses to a minimum. The
Beatles had managed to turn the EMI studio hierarchy into a situation that harkened
back to what Fredric Jameson describes as “the more psychologically satisfying
world of the guilds”: a work place where older, more expert masters mentor their
successors in the complex work processes associated with their trade (62). Initially,
the relation between the Beatles and their producer and engineers reproduced class
and cultural barriers separating workers from managers, and the provincial north
from the metropolitan south. As their working relationship evolved, the Beatles

Fredric Jameson uses this phrase, taken from Herbert Marcuse, to suggest the
mystique of the scientist held in post-WWII America (62).

Although of course, the Beatles were the main recipients of the benefits of their
re-organization of studio labor, they were not the sole beneficiaries. Geoff Emerick’s
account of his work as engineer for Beatles’ recordings post-Revolver, suggests, that for
all the petty slights and ill treatment he received from members of the group, he often felt
the same gratification, or at least shared in the fantasy, of record making as non-alienated
labor. When George Martin decides that Emerick and engineer Richard Lush were being
overworked during the sessions for Sgt. Pepper, Emerick recalls that, even though “we had
been burning the candles at both ends,” “we would have both preferred to have been in on
every Pepper session” (175).
managed to change circumstances to their advantage, developing protocols that,

for a time, emphasized spontaneous work that entailed collaborative labor, and set
a premium upon musical experiment and innovation, in the technocratic situation
of the studio.
The transformation of the Beatles into studio aristocrats is the basis for their
confidence that they were no longer a mere pop group but a new beast, an art
ensemble within rock music. More specifically, the Beatles’ hauteur was pride in
a specific achievement: their rapid mastery of studio technology once they began
spending more time in the studio, and, most of all, their growing skill at incorporating
studio technology and the process of studio recording in the songwriting process.
The transitional moment was probably “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver,
where Lennon brought in a rough sketch for a song, some lines taken from a
pamphlet by Timothy Leary, and then ordered George Martin to treat the vocal to
make so it sounds like a thousand Tibetan monks chanting on the mountain top
(Macdonald 167). Martin’s response was to run various tape loops backwards and
forwards directly into the studio board and mix the results simultaneously as the
different tapes played. But the real turning point was the recording of “Strawberry
Fields Forever,” where Lennon effectively discovered that song could evolve in
the studio, not just through collaborating with a songwriting partner, or working
with instrumental ideas from the rest of the band, but by studio experimentation,
through multi-track recording and layering sounds until they became sonic
textures. The final product of “Strawberry Fields Forever” was only possible by
modulating the speed of the tape so that different takes of the song at different
tempo, and thus various pitch, could be re-assembled onto a single master tape.

Again, this is not to say that the Beatles’ realization of ideal work conditions
transformed social relations more generally. Resentment and prejudice rooted in class and
age hierarchy often reasserted themselves. Arguably the countless overdubs and intricate
score that George Martin wrote for Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” turn a fair song into a
memorable one: but according to Emerick, his initial reaction to hearing Lennon sing the
song, with its crude lyrics and music structure, was a disgusted “what the hell do you expect
me to do with that?” (213).

Stewart Home shrewdly remarks that the Beatles, like the Sex Pistols after them,
“benefited enormously from the mass media wrongly treating them as THE leading
representation of contemporary music” (stewarthomesociety.org). While the positive
reception of the Beatles in the mainstream press no doubt impressed their record label
and is one of the factors behind the Beatles’ growing autonomy over studio production,
Lennon and McCartney’s evolution into self-conscious studio artists, composing a new
kind of art song impossible to realize without state-of-the-art recording technology,
seems more a function of the duo’s growing interest in an international avant-garde
temporarily living and working in London in the mid 60s, including Luciano Berio,
Michelangelo Antonioni, and William S. Burroughs, and less to do with media discourse
about the Beatles.

I owe a great debt to Cameron Stuart for suggesting a way to conceive the Beatles’
developing art ambitions through their studio recordings beginning with Revolver (1966).
At any rate, once producer George Martin performed this editing miracle, the
group’s learning curve was steep and speedy. Both Lennon and McCartney became
more willing to bring song drafts to the studio, confident that studio technology
would take parts of songs and transform the hybrid into an aesthetic artifact.
Arguing against the common notion that rock history begins in 1965 with
Dylan’s electric music and the first stirring of the counterculture, Jon Savage
notes that the “previous three years are even more fascinating,” with the Beatles
key musical “revolutionaries” who helped youth “[shrug] off the vestiges of
Victorianism” (MOJO 75). A shrewd remark, but there is much evidence that the
Beatles themselves felt that it was the studio incarnation of the band that was truly
“revolutionary.” Their growing self-understanding that they were studio artists,
and not mere pop songwriters, was the result of their retirement from touring, and
their ascetic immersion in a studio the band treated as their laboratory. The Beatles
found a new way to distinguish their music from others in the pop marketplace.
The decision to stop touring was accompanied by a more or less conscious effort
to make more complex records that would age better. In this case, more complex
records also required more experimentation, both with studio technology and
the song-writing process. It is as if the Beatles themselves now constituted the
social totality of high and low culture: they were now intent on making studio
records that would signify the high end, compared to their previous music, which
by implication, they deemed “merely” popular. Like an earlier generation of
modernist artists, they had discovered the unique power of modernist “difficulty,”
which, as Anne Witchard argues, has historically functioned as a “charm against
the commodifying power” of the marketplace for the modernist (160). Lennon’s
cutting remark when George Harrison missed a studio session for “A Day in the
Life” (from Sgt. Pepper) and thus “the most important overdub” of the Beatles’
career, confirms recording as the most crucial part of their music, and illustrates
the group’s new aesthetic priorities (Emerick 162).
“A Day in the Life” demonstrates their confidence in creating studio song
by collage methods, bringing song fragments into the studio such as a verse and
chorus, and proceeding on, with only the vaguest notion of how the final recording
will sound. The new premise of the Beatles’ studio work was that incomplete drafts
of songs were preferable to finished compositions; they allowed more opportunity
for chance to intervene in the creative process. Songwriting itself became about
process as much as product, as when the Beatles turn the recording session where
a chamber ensemble plays the ascending melody line that crescendos in the middle
and climax of “A Day in the Life” into a studio-party cum-“happening,” inviting
friends for the taping, and even filming the event.

See Geoff Emerick’s absorbing account of the “A Day in the Life” sessions in
his book, which recounts the class-based enmity between the Beatles and the classical
musicians, especially the string musicians, brought in for the session. These musicians
predictably resented being asked to wear costume for the paid session—in order to create
the carnival atmosphere of a happening in staid EMI recording studios, but above all, they
In other words, the Beatles rediscover the modernist aesthetic of the collage
and the cut-up within the medium of the pop song. The modernist collage emerged
in painting at a time of social upheaval, and was associated with the angst-ridden
world of war-torn Europe; the dark pessimism historically associated with the art
form was a perfect complement to “A Day in the Life,” with Lennon’s strangely
passive vocal and the song’s overall aura of numb alienation, punctured by terror
or epiphany, depending on your interpretation of the crashing chord that closes the
record. The curious culmination of the Beatles’ experiment in collage is “Happiness
is a Warm Gun,” one of the highlights of the Beatles’ “White Album”: a Lennon
composition that only consisted of song fragments. In this case, however, the parts
were spliced together through marathon studio sessions with the band rather than
the producer’s ingenuity: an attempt to prove that the Beatles could arrange a
collage without Martin’s oversight. In its way, it was the most audacious of the
Beatles’ various studio collages, constructed by the band themselves as a rock
ensemble, and still proudly displaying the seams between the parts of the song in
the end product.
As a recording group, the Beatles had emerged at the cutting edge of rock-music
capitalism. On one level, this meant that the band viscerally experienced the most
extreme contradictions of capitalism: the freedom that accompanies the wealthiest
wage earner, and a near complete alienation from everyday life, exacerbated
by the mass media frenzy of modern celebrity. When the British Underground
rock scene emerged in late 1966 and ’67, with many groups directly influenced
by the Beatles’ new version of art pop, record companies like EMI moved in
immediately to sign the most outrageous, unconventional bands. Innovations in
the new capitalized rock music was no longer opposed to experiment, but moved
in lockstep with the more spontaneous and expressive agenda of the emerging
rock “artist.” Record companies provided financial support for alternative bands
that rejected the conventionalism of the traditional pop song, and began to identify
with progressive trends in culture far removed from an older, more bureaucratic
style of capitalism. By the time the Beatles began the MMT project, a synergy had
developed between an expansive recording industry and rock musicians interested
in breaking the conventional rules of the pop song, transgressing the form in terms
of length and lyrical content, as well a predilection for multi-track recording
and up-to-date studio effects. The standard first response of state capitalism to
challenges posted to aesthetic hierarchy is to affirm the notion of a higher aesthetic
order; but in this rare instance, the music capitalism of 1967 began to positively
encourage an experimental approach in rock. The new emphasis on “weird,”
cutting-edge rock was relatively short lived, and by 1970, the record industry
had become complacent again. By then, the major labels in England and abroad
turned their back on the idea of endless innovation in rock, confident that the
huge revenue stream generated by marketing the rock underground would persist
took exception to being asked to go against the grain of their classical training and improvise
their playing on the track in the mode of a rock ensemble.
indefinitely. Moreover, the development of rock shows into festivals and some
rock bands into stadium attractions meant a new revenue source just waiting to
be tapped; recordings were no longer the only way for bands to earn profits for
the record companies. In fact, by 1970, most of the musicians at the forefront of
the experimental rock movement were on the rock casualty list: cracked up, like
Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, or dead.
Confident with the success of these art experiments, the Beatles begin to
imagine their peers are not pop groups or Motown, but instrumental virtuosos
like Cream, the sophisticated Beat satire and ambitious avant-garde rock of
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, as well as various other pioneers
of the new “heavy” rock. When film director Tony Palmer made All My Loving in
late 1967, the first BBC documentary on pop music, as pop turned into rock and
got weird, his first thought was to feature the Beatles; the Beatles responded by
deflecting attention from their work, and lining up interviews with Palmer and
a cast of “progressive” rock musicians, including Eric Burdon of the Animals,
Pete Townshend of the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa.
These rock groups were more than entertainers who mattered to a niche audience
and the record companies; they signified to young and old agents of disruption,
opposed to the dominant ethos of careerism, militarism, rationalism, and (at least
nominally) consumerism that held sway in postwar Western industrial nations in
the 1950s. The Beatles’ place in the vanguard of the modernizing rock scene gave
them a cosmopolitan outlook on the genre, and they strongly self identified with
other modernizers of the contemporary pop music scene. Palmer and the Beatles
took All My Loving as a pedagogical occasion, an opportunity to teach the elders
and those in authority about the aspirations of the new rock avant-garde for not
just a musical but a social revolution (Palmer).
Although Palmer took all of Lennon’s suggestions about which bands to
interview for the documentary, All My Loving perhaps demonstrates a stronger
grasp of the extent to which the rock revolution depended on the new status of rock
music as “the world’s biggest selling industry” (Palmer) and to the already existing
structure of music capitalism than many of the rock groups Palmer questioned,
Lennon and McCartney included. At that moment, the Beatles were confident in
the plans for their new record label, Apple Records, which would constitute a
genuine alternative to music capitalism, largely because, with the Beatles and like-
minded youthful staff in charge, the “heads” called the shots, and not the “suits.”
Palmer’s BBC program provides valuable insight into the Beatles new
self-understanding of their role within rock music as they began the Magical
Mystery Tour project. The Beatles’ TV film represented the group at their most
utopian, but also at their most musically confident and assertive. Like the rest of
the musicians Palmer interviews in his film, the Beatles were convinced that the
music revolution they spearheaded would be accompanied by social change on
to a revolutionary scale. To grasp the historical significance of Magical Mystery
Tour, we need to consider the Beatles’ role in Palmer’s documentary: as arbiters
of the rock avant-garde, aggressively pursuing a modernist agenda that old
forms of all sorts were inadequate to deal with the new realities of culture and
music. Magical Mystery Tour was less a period snapshot of hippie idealism than
an attack, albeit coded, against the Establishment. The film’s mise-en-scène is
crowded with the apparatus of traditional Englishness: the cheap holiday from
the workaday world that reveals your more deep-seated alienation from pleasure
and from other people, the forced conviviality of being on the bus, young and old
in close quarters where neither can escape the other. At the heart of the Beatles’
TV film was the subversive intent to champion the forces of modernization and
innovation in British culture, in the guise of celebrating old-fashioned English
entertainment.
The Movie
I have argued that Magical Mystery Tour mirrors the contradictory relation of
the Beatles to music capitalism, and have treated the Beatles as auteurs of the
film. However, MMT deserves treatment as a text in its own right; it is full of the
kinds of productive contradictions that occur in texts beyond the conscious aims
of its authors. Shifting from a view of the Beatles as the collective auteur of MMT
and focusing on the film as text, we can see how its music sequences negotiate
the contradictions of modernizing Englishness in the musical field. Underneath
the genial journey story and the middlebrow romance subplots in the film, the
key music videos in the film dramatize a pitch struggle between Englishness and
modernity.
Although MMT expresses the ethos of casual spontaneity that ruled the day,
there is a coherent approach to the various snapshots of provincial life presented
in the film. Magical Mystery Tour does not nostalgically recreate traditional
Englishness, but de-familiarizes it, estranging the English everyday familiar
to the film’s audience who, of course, first saw the program when it aired on
that quintessentially British holiday, Boxing Day. In MMT, the Beatles and
the spectator are encouraged to view the practices of their own country with a
cosmopolitan mix of curiosity and detached survey. The central conceit of the film
is that the group of travelers on board the bus, are participating in a customary
and classed pastime, the Beatles included. But the Beatles in the film represent
something more: what James Buzard identifies as “objectifying participants,”
describing a familiar terrain from a perspective at a remove from the constraints
of class and national identity. The film stages the Beatles’ return to childhood,
while recognizing that the band had long departed from that world. This world is
reproduced from the band’s current perspective of detached curiosity, as evident in
the subtle work the film does to the traditional idea of the bus tour. The provincial
English bus is reworked into an international emblem of counter culture practice,
reflecting the thoroughgoing stylistic eclecticism typical of the Beatles’ new
classless habitus. All the representative English places and customs captured in the
movie are filtered through this alienating consciousness. MMT, then, represents
various forms of English folk life, but from a totalizing perspective that reflects
the Beatles’ inner distance from their host culture. Yet the film is not about the
Beatles’ alienation from home or the past; the key musical sequences in the film
suggest the pedagogical purpose of the program: to suggest that Englishness can
be transcended if one adopts the modernist perspective.
It may seem an odd thing to say about a film whose most memorable sequence is
a gross-out, spaghetti-eating scene, but one of the reasons for the confused response
to the TV program is the Beatles’ subtle approach to traditional Englishness, even
as they try to rewrite the older narrative. The trope of the Northern bus trip itself is
evidence of the band’s understated approach. Critic George Melly speculated in a
contemporary review of the TV program whether the bus tour in the film expressed
the Beatles’ nostalgia for childhood; at the same time, he wondered (correctly) if
it alluded to the acid tests and filmed “happenings” staged on cross-country bus
tours organized by author Ken Kesey in the early 60s. Melly mentions the trans-
American bus trip organized by the acid proselytizer, who loaded up his inner
space cosmonauts into a Day-Glo bus and set off on a trip while filming and tape
recording the experience. “Were the Beatles aware of this?” Melly wonders. As
Jonathan Gould notes, the answer is yes, they were; the idea for the film came from
a trip that McCartney took to California in the Spring of 1967, where the Beatle
had met the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and learned about the Dead’s
older mentors in the SF Beat scene, the Merry Pranksters (438). Furthermore,
McCartney’s friendship with Barry Miles—McCartney would become a key
patron for both IT and Miles’ counterculture news and beat literature book shop,
Indica, allowed the Beatles to keep tabs on their competition in the Bay Area
Underground.
Without knowing this, Melly seized on the allegorical import of the bus tour of
the film, and the grander ambitions of the project, in spite of the casual approach to
filmmaking adopted by the band. The movie mainly works on tropes of conventional
Englishness, but always with a mind of transforming them. Among these tropes,
the northern bus tour is both central and the most extensively reworked. Here the
group selected a historical, class-specific symbol, augmented with a new definition
of travel supported by the burgeoning counterculture, as an exploration of inner
space. The make-over of the northern bus suggests the central visual and narrative
strategies of the film: extra meanings are piled into various signifiers of traditional
Englishness until something more unconventional, and “modern,” displaces the
prevailing meaning of the sign.
Although the link has been overlooked, MMT has an inter-textual relation with
the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night; at any rate, it is productive to think about
the films as a pair in regard to the issues of modernism and the metropole. HDN,
with a screenplay by Liverpool radio and TV screenwriter Alun Owen, addressed
the same issues of class mobility in a still class-stratified England as Karel Reisz’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of
the Long Distance Runner, essential films of the short-lived Realist movement in
late-50s and early-60’s British cinema.
Despite the remarkable novelty the Beatles represented as a massively successful

British rock band, A Hard Day’s Night underscores the deeper continuities of social
life in England. The group’s story is set in the traditional frame; like countless
others, the Beatles represent a provincial group who travel to the metropolis in
order to achieve their personal and economic aspirations, only to discover that, in
spite of all the energy displayed by their youthful fans, that London remains the
same very much the same as it was before Beatlemania, rife with social prejudices,
and critical of outsiders. HDN marks the Fab 4 as Liverpudlians, and thus as
interlopers in spite of their massive fandom. The film depicts the band’s journey
on a train ride to London, as they prepare to play a live TV broadcast. Although
the group journeys to the center, the film suggests that the Beatles do not, perhaps
cannot, inhabit or relate to the city as the “natives” do.
The Beatles may represent a vital force that either crosses or transcends class
barriers, but HDN makes it clear that the old world of English class hierarchy
remains largely intact. Owen’s script underscores this image of the Beatles as
outsiders or tourists, rather than metropolitan insiders. The opening scene of
the film, where the band finds clever ways of evading a horde of female fans in
pursuit, establishes the Beatles as a special case among other culture workers in
the city. Once the group arrives in the TV studio, the Beatles encounter various
representatives of London’s culture industry, ad men and studio professionals,
who are distinguished from the band by their sophistication and expertise, but also
by their very urban neuroses.
Screenwriter Alun Owen emphasizes Ringo’s regional identity, and through
him, the essential northerness of the Beatles. The Beatles’ manager in the film
quips that the missing Beatles’ drummer has been “loosed upon the unsuspecting
South”; the drummer yells out “Southerner!” to the cycling policeman who disrupts
his London walkabout (Lester). Goaded by Paul’s “grandfather” to go AWOL from
the TV studio just as the Beatles are about to perform, Ringo’s subsequent parade
through the city suggests something of the displacement of the provincial at the
heart of the metropolis. The movie portrays him as the band’s Everyman, as well
as their cultural “heart”; he longs for simpler northern pleasures—fishing with a
truant, trying to hang out at a pub—and seems to reject the myriad privileges and
pleasures associated with the metropolitan center.
That the Beatles chose to build their film project on Ringo’s star image as
the most conventionally northern group member suggests the band’s incomplete
identification with the southern metropole. It could easily have been different:
they could have elected to represent northern identity in ways that highlighted its
constructed character. However, by making Ringo a visual key to the film, they
also suggested that northern identity was something more than a performance: it
was rooted in community, and thus in culture.
Ringo’s key role in MMT is evidence that in spite of the Beatles’ nonchalant
attitude to plot, they carefully considered how their new movie would function
in regard to their previous movie representations. In HDN, Ringo portrays the
working-class outlier who escapes the pressures of celebrity by indulging in
aimless flanerie. In MMT, Ringo, not Paul, is the Beatle who travels accompanied
by a family member, reinforcing the impression left by HDN that Ringo is the
Beatle most rooted in northern culture of which the bus trip is a special part.
Although the drummer has no musical segments in the film, he remains a central
visual presence, inevitably accompanied—and visually framed—by his Aunt,
the stereotypically loud, forceful, and domineering northern matriarch. The
drummer is also shown eagerly participating in the sing-a-longs on the bus and the
beer-drinking scenes during way stations on the road.
Although MMT assigns Ringo as northerner a central part in the movie, the arc
of the film actually reverses the plot trajectory of HDN. The earlier film traces the
transformation of the Beatles into a spectacle at the hands of London media elites,
and even by their fans. Whereas the earlier film staged the travel of the Beatles to
the south as a small-scale, but comically disruptive northern invasion, MMT has
the Beatles, having become modernist kings, return to the Blackpool lights, in
order to make them psychedelic.
While the pairing of Ringo with a quintessentially northern woman is crucial,
I argue, for reasons of thematic and visual continuity, the resulting image, which
spans different generations of Britons, suggests one reason why the program was
not a special favorite of the band’s massive youth audience, even though, as I have
argued, it aims to revise old-fashioned rural ways in light of a modern, transgressive
ethos. MMT suggests that the northern bus trip and Englishness in general must be
reworked to accommodate a more avant-garde sensibility: but also, that a British
avant-garde must be linked to the popular, and not simply discarded. At the very
moment when cross-generation tensions between old and young were escalating,
the Beatles’ film rejected this popular logic and presented a vision of avant-garde
Britishness that implicitly encompassed old and young.
Another reason why MMT may not have resonated with youth is that it so often
reproduces the contradictions of modernism and the metropole without resolving
them. While Ringo and his Aunt, herself the object of unrequited love by an older
passenger on board, played by Surrealist poet and sometime musical provocateur
Ivor Cutler, represent one pole of the film, the effort to integrate old modes of
Englishness within a broader, cosmopolitan outlook, music segments by Harrison
and Lennon function as the movie’s other self, and its political unconscious:
openly revisionist, at times directly antagonistic, to the past and the authority of
tradition more generally.
The key music sequences in the film, featuring John Lennon’s “I Am the
Walrus” and George Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way” both share the same visual cues,
and polemical aim. In both cases, the Beatles’ bus tour comes to a momentary stop,
and the travelers get off the road for a brief respite in the country, only to encounter
a travesty of the conventional pastoral. These sequences revel in discovering
discontinuities, alternative temporalities, within the national landscape, especially
at that most resonant site of conventional Englishness, the English landscape.
John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus,” written and recorded in Fall 1967, originates
in a tangle of mischievous, satirical aims. The nonsense lyric served as a cynical
answer record to the genre of psychedelic songs that made the pop charts that
summer, in particular to the nonsense lyric of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade
of Pale.” Given that the record that is the object of Lennon’s lampoon was also a
special favorite of his indicates that we are in a terrain more complex than mere
parody. “I Am the Walrus” also exceeds the genre of satire, if by that form we
mean a reasonable, critique of aspects of the social status quo. Pete Shotton, a
former schoolmate of Lennon recalls the more direct inspiration for the song: a
letter that Lennon received from a pupil at his old school, the Quarry Bank in
Liverpool. Informed that students were now being asked by Quarry Bank school
teachers to analyze Beatles lyrics, Lennon’s bemused response was to recite lines
learned in the schoolyard with Shotton: “yellow mustard custard, green slop pie,
all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye”: all phrases that make it into the final
version of “Walrus” lyrics.
The letter from Quarry Bank nevertheless touched a nerve in Lennon,
evoking memories of childhood humiliation inflicted by teachers who found him
thick and unimaginative. Likely because of the link to still-vividly remembered
childhood pain, by the time that Lennon recorded the song in September,
“Walrus” had escalated into a musical and lyrical assault, into “a damn-you-
England tirade that blasts education, art, culture, law, order, class, religion, and
even sense itself” (Macdonald 232). While the abstract lyric and the open-ended
form of the song allowed producer George Martin the chance to develop an
equally abstract, non-linear arrangement, layering found sounds including a
BBC radio broadcast of “King Lear” into the song’s final mix, the rage against
repressive institutions in the song seems anything but abstract. Although Martin
does not allow Lennon’s double-tracked vocal to overpower the band track or
the elaborate arrangement of backing vocals, horns, and strings layered on top
of the band, Lennon sang the lyric with a force that overloaded the recording
equipment (Macdonald 236).
In filming the “Walrus” segment for MMT, the Beatles faced the problem
of how to represent a protest song about everything in a visual medium. They
decided to turn an anti-institutional rant into a dark carnival, with the band in
animal masks and costumes, to disturbing effect, and having the group mime the
song in the countryside. For Beatle fans who saw the promotional video which the
Beatles made for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the segment’s natural setting was
another clue that the band was returning to the rich subject matter of childhood;
the video also had the Beatles tramping through dark woods, and posing by tangle
branch trees. However, in “I Am the Walrus,” the bright finery of costumes and
animal masks donned by the band summon up far darker spirits than a countryside
gambol.
Lennon leads the charge on the song, dressed in a madman’s cap, looking as if
he just escaped from Bedlam—or perhaps the set to Peter Brooks’ film adaptation
of Marat/Sade, released in Spring that same year. “I Am the Walrus” expresses the
same message as Brooks’ film: that madness and rage are far more existentially
real than the external controls bourgeois society imposes on the defenseless
individual. The film segment where the Beatles mime playing the song in general
tropes institutional life as nature, a pastoral which the band came with masks and
costume full of a menacing intent to disturb the peace. “I Am the Walrus,” in
other words, is an anti-pastoral; it shatters the peace of the countryside otherwise
presumed in the film, as if the barbarous effects of English institutions had spread
to infect the countryside.
The video for the “Walrus,” an attack on provincial Englishness, might be
something of feint, distracting us from the real object of Lennon’s anger—and
fear—in the song. By 1967, as the Beatles came to identify almost completely
with the growing counterculture, the British movement was coming under fierce
attack by authorities. On one hand, 1967 was distinguished by the loosening of
laws restricting sex and other matters of personal morality; by year’s end, the
laws against abortion and homosexuality were abolished, and contraception an
over-the-counter trade. Official censorship of the London stage would end in the
next year, which had the effect of loosening the BBC’s strictures on what sort of
programming would be suitable for broadcast on TV, and what lyrical content
was permissible on radio. These changes in the legal sphere suggest that the
more “permissive” attitudes toward sex held by the British counterculture were
becoming part of a broader social consensus: but 1967 was also marked by a
series of high profile arrests that became flashpoints of social controversy. These
arrests targeted the leading representatives of the counterculture, including the
movement’s highly visible unofficial leaders, celebrity rock stars. The Beatles
had remained immune—so far—but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, along with
another fixture of the underground scene, art dealer Robert Fraser, were arrested
in February for possessing drugs, and sentenced to jail in June; with Brian Jones
detained in May, this meant that no less than three members of the Rolling Stones
were apprehended within three months of each other. Barry Miles’ IT paper was
also raided in March that year, ostensibly for printing obscene material. The arrest
of John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the British Underground’s chief organizer, in June, and
his subsequent jail sentence, also had a chilling effect. Judged against this context,
Lennon’s “Walrus” song seems a hermetic version of underground rock band
Hawkwind’s “Psychedelic Warlords” (1974): “Sick of politicians, harassment, and
laws.” In other words, the decision to stage “I Am the Walrus” in the countryside
may be ingenuous, given that the rage against order at the heart of the song was
likely aimed at the London establishment and encroaching authoritarianism in the
metropolitan center of London as much as provincial schooling. The decision to
film the “Walrus” video as a counter-pastoral suggests that this fearless critique of
institutions may nonetheless find the Beatles more on the defensive than might be
apparent at first glance.
The context of the song suggests that “Walrus” may have had a primary meaning
for its author as an outburst against authority. In MMT, the song chiefly represents
the new psychedelic art song that had become a new Beatles’ trademark since
“Tomorrow Never Knows”: yet another bold, highly self-conscious attempt to,
as Allan Moore puts it, “make music for the sake of doing so” (3). Not surprising
then, that “Walrus” was the product of Lennon/McCartney’s new-found practice

of treating the recording studio as a site where the medium could revolutionize
the message, rather than as a static environment where songs were put on tape.
In keeping with the band’s new emphasis on process, “Walrus” began more as a
rough draft than a finished composition. At the outset, Lennon requested engineer
Geoff Emerick that he wanted his vocal to sound like the Man on the Moon
(he had similarly requested of George Martin that he make his vocal on
“Tomorrow Never Knows” sound like a thousand Tibetan monks chanting
(Emerick 214). Such nonsense directions both intimidated studio professionals,
and turned them into creative collaborators. As a result, McCartney is not that
important to Walrus: the song is actually Lennon, George Martin, Geoff Emerick,
plus the Beatles as a backing band.10 The Beatles’ new approach to song writing
no longer treats songs as unmediated self-expression, or premeditated design.
Whatever were the results of Lennon’s surreal directives, they “naturally” fit in
the final invention.
As it stands, “The Walrus” segment amounts to a jagged, disruptive moment
in the movie; it dramatizes the clash of values, of country versus city for example,
that I have argued that the film tries to mediate. As we have already seen, it is
not surprising that the band chose to visualize Lennon’s lyric about “mister
city policemen/sitting pretty policeman in a row,” given the fear of a general
clampdown on the fledgling British Underground (Figure 2.1). On one hand, the
image in the video of policemen standing on a stone wall and swaying slowly in
the background represents a classic case of displacement: the effort to transplant
something troubling Lennon (policemen) into a rural environment where the police
become more a curiosity than a threat. At the same time, the image problematizes
the very premise of hippie pastoral, where the return to the countryside meant
liberating oneself from repressive authority. The police themselves are stacked
in a row, like measured units in the scene: a hint that the will to power has been
internalized, trailing along with Lennon into the scenery.
A magical rupture in the bus trip is required to prepare for the video sequence
of George Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way.” First, the holiday travelers decamp from
the bus into a field, entering a small white tent. The “tent” turns out to contain
the ultimate in cheap luxury: a red plush theater, reminiscent of a cinema or
variety theater from the 1940s. The camera focuses on a makeshift screen in the
theater, and Harrison emerges from a cloud of vapors, to mime the song in a yogi
posture. Although the song is one of several Indian style songs that Harrison had
contributed to Beatles records since Revolver, the visuals in this segment do not
evoke India or the East, but a fragmented reality, blurring the line between dreams
and waking consciousness. The disorienting visuals may connote “Indian-ness”
to a British audience, but the hazy camera views that go in and out of focus, like
the shimmering vocal harmonies that move in and out of foreground in the mix,
10
Emerick himself maintains that the artistic merit of the song is an effect of Martin’s
overdubs, which makes a not-so-special song compelling listening (233).
Figure 2.1 “Under Watch.” DVD © MMT and RBC Entertainment. Produced
by Bob Caisley and David Brady
also suggest the heightened awareness accompanying an exalted state of mind.

The “Blue Jay Way” segment does not contrast a foreign or exotic space with the
British landscape as much as insinuate that the Beatles, as enlightened moderns,
can access an interior reality far removed from everyday Englishness. Most of all,
“India” means expanded consciousness in this context, as well as another route to
drugs. Both are superior to merely provincial attitudes represented by normal bus
rides through the normal countryside.
Like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” (recorded for Sgt. Pepper’s
but on the MMT record), “Blue Jay Way” is a song rooted in place. It takes its name
from the street address of Harrison’s rental home in Los Angeles; it was written
while Harrison was waiting, jetlagged and fatigued, impatiently for a dinner guest.
The lyric, “please don’t be long,” a plea for the late guest to arrive, was often
misheard as the anti-establishment sentiment, “please don’t belong.” The music
makes this reading plausible; more than the other Lennon/McCartney songs on
Magical Mystery Tour, “Blue Jay Way” expresses an internal state, the languor and
anxiety of waiting, separate from the experience of place. The record provides an
analogue to the ego death associated with the acid trip in the way Harrison’s vocals
moves in and out of the mix, occasionally displaced by background vocals that are
slightly “phased,” i.e. shifting frequency. Like the “Walrus” segment, Harrison’s
star turn in MMT authorizes the integrity of personal views over consensual reality.
Both sequences utilize the tropes of conventional Englishness, in fact seems to
require them, but in order to suggest a new hierarchy where the modern trumps the
past. These sequences are built on images of Englishness, particularly the English
countryside, but reduce Englishness to a supporting role, a platform from which
the new can emerge. Both scenes imagine something like a view from above or
beyond Englishness that expresses a totality unknown to most, but somehow
accessed by the Beatles and their music.
In these sequences, the Beatles go a long way to embracing the most outlandish
elements of modernist aesthetic as part of their representation of national culture.
They are yet more equivalent of the stylized mash-up of prewar British pop and art
rock found on Beatles’ records: the visual evidence to support the sonic testimony
that the Beatles had pushed rock into an art form. The MMT film closes with the
bus tour arriving at a seedy casino, in what could be an English seaside resort
(actually the Raymond Revue bar in London) that provides all the tawdry pleasures
linked to the seaside holiday: showgirls, striptease, and a contemporary touch, a
performance by the Beatles’ current favorites, the cult neo-vaudevillian musical
comedy act, the Bonzo Dog Band who, as a rock band, are both out of place and
oddly appropriate for the scene. The setting contributes to some of the ambiguity
that accrues to the video sequence for “Your Mother Should Know.” On record,
juxtaposed with “I Am the Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the song is
subjected to the same containment of the past by the careful sequencing of old and
new that had become a Beatles’ hallmark. The mash-up of old and new on Beatles’
albums represent a precarious equilibrium between the past and present, in which
the pop music past is clearly segregated and implicitly devalued in comparison
with the new experimental sound. In the film, however, the ersatz Busby Berkeley
dance sequence in the “Mother” video, with the Beatles dressed in immaculate
white suits and dancing alongside a show girl chorus, turns the song into a camp
spectacle. The image of a flash, retro Beatles overpowers the reflective treatment
of the past enabled by the apparatus of the vinyl record.
However, if the Harrison and Lennon video segments seem to reject, or at
least significantly rearrange, the basic tropes of English pastoral, McCartney’s
star segment in the film, “The Fool on the Hill,” seems much more conventional.
The character of “The Fool on the Hill” seems a liminal figure, neither a part
of the provinces nor the metropolis. Unlike Harrison’s version of the mystic, or
Lennon’s angry madman, we still see the Fool as part of society, even if he’s
willingly relegated to its fringes. The video segment of FOTH is presented as
McCartney’s daydream reverie: the Beatle falls into a dream once his conversation
with an Italian actress is interrupted by a photographer eager to take snapshots of
a famous cinema star. The video footage, shot in the South of France, is largely of
McCartney either mugging for the camera, or standing still and looking pensive.
The shift to the countryside seems to comment on the soulless aspects of celebrity
culture, à la Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and privilege nature over culture in
customary ways. The video seems at odds with central facts about McCartney. As
the film’s central “auteur,” he is also the only one of the Beatles actually living
in London proper, the rest of the band living the suburban dream, with wives and
big houses; he is arguably also the Beatle who did the most to actualize the British
underground. However, the narrative logic of the FOTH video can be explained by
the simple fact that McCartney was also the Beatle with the keenest appreciation
of pop music from a bygone era, and at times un-inclined to experiment either
visually or musically for experiment’s sake.
Here are my main ideas in concentrated form: by 1967, the Beatles had
gained a new understanding of the relation between their personal history and
their music, grounded in their experience of something like un-alienated work
conditions, achieved in a most unlikely setting, the EMI recording studios. The
group’s apprehension that they had lived out a particular fantasy of un-alienated
labor played an unconscious, but formative role in the making of MMT, both
the TV program and the record. Understanding this can help us place both the
Beatles and their movie within their specific historical moment. Late 1967 was a
highly ambivalent moment for the band. By now, the band had not only relocated
to London, but appears to have internalized what Raymond Williams calls the
“metropolitan perspective,” an experience that, as Williams explains, brings in
its train both a “new consciousness of conventions” and a potentially radical
awareness of the contingency of social forms and conventions.11
The band’s pride in having achieved not only a new mode of music making
but a new experience of work also helps explain the symbolic violence aimed at
middle-class routine (touring, restaurant going) and pastoral Englishness in MMT.
Yet the Beatles’ experience of work satisfaction was placed under great pressure as
they faced a new crisis in their career, grief-stricken over the sudden death of their
manager, Brian Epstein. Epstein’s death put a huge question mark to the Beatles’
continued existence as a group. As is well documented, the ambitious new project
of the MMT film was developed by a career-minded McCartney, hoping to keep
a despondent band from throwing in the towel. After redefining studio time in a
way that was closer to the modes of production associated with the artisan than
the alienated laborer, the Beatles were now, in a bitter irony, faced with losing
their jobs. With Epstein’s death, the possibility of the band’s demise loomed in the
consciousness of the band, and with their demise, the end of their distinct mode of
rock music making.
As Ian Macdonald recounts, “YMSK” was one of the first songs McCartney
composed for the record and the film. But the band’s performance on the record
provides an audible testament to a group in mourning, over Epstein and the end of
the Beatles’ brand. “Let’s all get up,” urges McCartney in the song’s opening line.
The sense of forced cheer and indecisiveness is palpable, made manifest in the record
itself. Where most rock drummers usually struggle against speeding up the tempo of
a song, “Your Mother Should Know” actually slows down (Macdonald 232).
The closing sequence of Magical Mystery Tour has the group lip-synching
the McCartney song, “Your Mother Should Know,” in fancy white suits and in a
huge chorus-line, evoking the over-the-top, glamorous excess of the closing dance
numbers in a Busby Berkeley film. More important, the visual sequence succeeds
where the record fails as a statement of the band’s insurgent art ambition. The film
segment also becomes a means by which the Beatles can comment on their own
status as popular entertainers.
11
The Beatles chose to film “Penny Lane,” about the bus terminal in Liverpool, on
an estate in upscale West London: evidence that the group set more stock on transforming
individual consciousness, and the perceiving subject, than in the transformative aspects of
place. Lennon’s detached, dreamy—in a word, stoned—gaze in this video would later be
replicated by Paul in “The Fool on the Hill” video segment in MMT.
Like the group’s musical mash-ups of past and present British pop, the
“YMSK” video also plays on the contrast between the Beatles, as representatives
of the novel enterprise of British rock, and the old world of film and mass media
celebrity. The past, then, is viewed from the perspective of the band’s pride in what
they had come to regard as their major innovation, their radical new use of the
studio as a laboratory for sonic experiment.
The Beatles’ post-Revolver music in general recast the band as something
more than a brief flash-in-the-pan act, something with a little more weight, like
the music-hall tradition that persisted in the consciousness of the British public.
Perhaps more than anyone in the group, McCartney seems to have genuinely
enjoyed music from bygone eras; both the song and the film sequence of “Your
Mother Should Know” project himself and his band into a time when Beatles fans
will become older, and his own music continue to be popular. Within the Beatles
camp, McCartney usually heralded the various efforts made to extend the Beatles’
enterprise and turn their group work into a career: to stop touring, make more
complex records so they will age better, and finally, with MMT, to make a film
where the band was the auteur rather than film studio professionals.
The “YMSK” video segment seems to be doing much the same work; it serves
as visual, evidence that the band had realized their dream of pop immortality.
Setting the Beatles into the ultimate cinematic space of fantasy, of the Busby
Berkeley musical, reflects the band’s existential certainty that they had transcended
their mop-top past. The sequence replicates the logic of the Peter Blake photo
shoot for the cover of the Sgt. Pepper album, which also places the group in a
trans-historical continuum. There, the band is confronted with older, waxwork
versions of themselves in collarless suits, amid a pantheon of artists and outsiders.
The collage of past and present is its own separate space, neither the pure past nor
the present. The “YMSK” segment is a fantasy cure of the band’s severe career
anxieties by jettisoning the band out of history altogether, elevating them to a
timeless, upper echelon of 20th-century pop celebrity.12 In this otherworldly scene,
the band has finally, really made it, i.e., become eternal, a part of a visionary pop
culture space that seems to stretch on endlessly backwards and forwards. This,
the video suggests, is the end, the desiderata, of fame: becoming so big, that you
12
“Hello Goodbye” follows “YMSK” in the movie, playing while the credits roll.
The promotional video for the song is not included in MMT, but it was shot during filming
the program. Significantly, it follows the same visual logic of the Sgt. Pepper cover,
with shots of the Beatles waving “goodbye” in their old outfits inter-cut with the band
performing onstage in their new Edwardian-style Pepper uniforms. These segments seem
to communicate the same message, that the group has transcended their mop-top look
and ascended to a higher realm. “Good Night” from the Beatles’ “White Album” is the
musical counterpart to these visuals; the song’s swelling orchestral arrangement, so similar
to the music played over closing credits on countless Hollywood film scores, seems, like
“YMSK,” to forge a specific link between the Beatles and Hollywood, and thus to a broader
historical arc of popular entertainment.
finally access an immortal fantasy world. This is the Beatles’ version of W.B.
Yeats’ ideal, imaginary Byzantium: a gloriously unreal world of artifice, in which
they seamlessly assert their own presence. The Beatles project themselves into
what seems to be history, but what is really an image of “eternity”: the timeless
world of pop culture myth.13
The Hollywood ending of MMT, in other words, represents the ultimate
modernist fantasy of artistic immortality, the moment of transcending history, in
effect ending it. The music video resolves any questions the Beatles might have
posed themselves about their historical role in pop music, by inserting them in
a stratosphere of celebrity. Like the other charged juxtapositions of past and
present that accumulate in the Beatles’ music and visual images after Revolver,
the presentation of the past and the present is highly motivated. The resulting
assemblage of past and present barely conceals the dynamic power ascribed to the
present. After all, this vision of Beatles’ place in “eternity” is also confirmation of
their agency as artist-heroes. Again, the fantasy arises from the group’s certainty
that their new working experience as a rock group had set them apart from “mere”
pop music, in a modernist vanguard.
In retrospect, the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour is the culmination of the Beatles’
various strategies to turn rock into an art form by sampling, and thus historicizing,
British pop music of the past. That it now serves as a harsh reminder that cultural
innovation without accompanying structural change, a reorganization of the
social order, cannot sustain itself may be a reason why the film, if not the music,
continues to be neglected, or underrated. Without further radical transformations in
the mode of music production, psychedelic rock became simply one more cultural
style, among others. MMT may be fated to continued neglect, the scapegoat for the
failure of the counterculture to bring about the true modernity of revolution.
Still, when Elvis Costello recalls the Beatles as “a flash of color” that burst
“the mood of claustrophobic England” in the 60s, recalling a Britain suddenly
“illuminated by such imaginative music,” he sounds as if he assimilated the covert
message of Magical Mystery Tour (Emerick vi). Costello’s image of the Beatles’
creative revolution as a counterforce to tradition-bound, still hierarchical post-war
England, is the none-too-modest self-appraisal underlying the Beatles 1967 film.
Whether Costello is aware of it, MMT is itself a source for his notion of the clash
between the Beatles and Englishness. MMT aimed to dramatize a new musical
regime, where creative risk taking, aided by advanced technology, trumped the
past and the orthodoxies of musical composition, and even liberated us from
social and sexual restraints. For a brief moment, pop music and experimental rock
were synonymous, and the Beatles stood at the apex of a progressive movement
in music capitalism. The Beatles’ TV film is usually interpreted as a sign of the
13
Tim Armstrong’s description of the paradox of Yeats’ Byzantium pertinent to the
Beatles’ construction of Hollywood: what appears to be “historical recovery” results in
“histories peculiarly isolated from any dynamic context…a static version of temporality
in which the question of historicity per se can never be raised” (10).
Beatles’ over-reaching, or their inability to organize and lead the new audience
for rock, when rock still represented popular culture. The film raised the issue of
the relation between modernism, including rock modernism, and the metropolis.
The tension between a core and periphery, the perceptual model that organized
a modernist culture that emerged in an age of empire, is seen to matter to the
Beatles, in an age after empire. Yet the binary no longer provides a coherent way
of organizing the Beatles’ experience at the vanguard of music capitalism, and
the film represents tensions between their different modes of experience without
achieving a new synthesis. Ironically, for a film that was and remains poorly
regarded, the did achieve a measure of success in creating a new set of visual
signifiers, for a group creating rock music in the modernist mode. The bus motif,
with its overlapping allusions both to Liverpool and West Coast Beat culture, and
above all, the music video segments, constitute the lasting legacy of of the Magical
Mystery Tour project.
Chapter 3
New Left in Victorian Drag:
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
The Rolling Stones’ first television program was mostly, but not only, an attempt to
capitalize on the blunder that the band’s friendly rivals, the Beatles, had made with
their home movie, Magical Mystery Tour. The Beatles’ movie aired on the BBC
Boxing Day 1967, bewildering fans and irritating critics. The Stones’ television
program, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, filmed in December 1968,
aimed to one-up the Beatles in capturing rock performance on film.
Unlike the Beatles’ music movie, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
was never aired, and a quasi-consensus has formed that has dismissed the project
accordingly, and stigmatized it as an aesthetic failure. However, as a cultural text,
the Rock and Roll Circus program remains a key document of the era. The mise-
en-scène for the Rolling Stones’ performance, the rock show as circus act, a subject
chosen by the band and followed through on by the program’s director, Michael
Lindsay-Hogg, was, I will argue, chosen with deliberate care. The Stones’ movie
was meant to build a powerful link between the new rock music and the British
working-class past, an attempt to consolidate two different political movements,
traditional working class struggles with current youth politics.
This chapter sets the Rock and Roll Circus project in the specific historical
contexts of British popular music and the emerging cultural underground. I hope
to explain how the scheme, aimed at building a bridge between rock music and
radical politics, reveals broader transformations in what constituted aesthetics and
politics at the time.

Even though the Stones’ movie was never televised, the idea of a rock and roll
circus inspired other British musicians in the 70s. John Lennon, who participated in the
Stones film, told Richard Williams that he aimed to revisit the idea for his first post-Beatles
tour: “John’s plan is to turn the band into a troupe, a circus-cum carnival, with room for
participation by street theater groups and bands from wherever they happen to be playing”
(189). The British rock group Mott the Hoople billed part of their May 1972 British tour,
accompanied by jugglers and legendary music hall comic Max Wall, as a “rock and roll
circus” (Needs 63). Ian Hunter, Mott the Hoople’s chief songwriter, used the “rock and roll
circus” as self-deprecating designation for his band in “The Ballad of Mott the Hoople”
(Mott, Columbia, 1973). Ronnie Lane would resurrect his idea when he left the Faces in
1972, taking his Slim Chance band on the road with “the Passing Show,” touring with a
circus tent, clowns, and fire-eaters with predictably disastrous financial results (Jim Melly
291).
Historicizing the Stones’ film allows us to grasp the changing definitions of

art and politics in the British 60s. The Rock and Roll Circus project originated
in an effort to make rock political by explicitly aligning the music and musicians
with working-class struggles against capitalism; I argue that the final product
discloses Jagger and his band’s commitment to a self-conscious work ethic that
sidesteps the question of rock politics; instead, the guiding assumption is that the
politics of rock music is a consequence of how audiences use the music rather
than something set by the musicians themselves. The standard way that we have
narrated this development is by interpreting the self-consciously arty British rock
that distinguished the end of the 60s as expressing the increasingly bourgeois
character of the music. However, the Rock and Roll Circus film suggests that
rock’s embourgeoisment was not the same thing as its de-politicization. Jagger’s
performances are still political after the Rock and Roll Circus—how else to
explain Altamont?—and rock was art before suburban taste makers labeled it thus.
Yet what Jagger learned, in part from his experience acting in the Roeg/Cammell
film Performance, was the historical necessity of pursuing a specific aesthetic
niche for rock music. The results are on display in the Stones’ circus movie, which
establishes something like a new set of labor practices specific to rock stars. The
progress of the project from conception to production reveals the fierce struggle
among sub-groups of the bourgeois over the relation between taste and class
identity, over whether normative politics should affirm or reject capitalism, and
whether artworks that seem opposed to the “establishment” might in fact affirm its
most fundamental values. The history of the Rock and Roll Circus project allows
us to think through how these questions were importantly different, revealing
struggles and fragile alliances among the supposedly homogeneous, middle-class.
By drawing attention to shifts in how Jagger claims politics for the Stones’ music,
I also hope to shed light on a larger development specific to the late 60s, from a
production based notion of rock’s politics to a reception-driven one.
***
A year separated the making of the Rolling Stones’ movie and the Beatles’ Magical
Mystery Tour film, but the programs have crucial features in common. First, unlike
the many television or film appearances made by these bands, the groups exerted
a degree of creative control on their self-presentation. Second, both films aim to
restore the novelty of the beat group within the larger, imagined community of
the nation, or the national working-class. Finally, both projects seem provoked by
anxious competition with Bay Area rock bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson
Airplane, whose music was part of a local scene and consequently appeared to
have a more organic relation with their audience. The first wave of the new rock
and roll in the UK in the early 1960s with bands like the Beatles, The Stones, but
also the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and the Who, all took their inspiration from Black
American music. The sympathetic relation between British rock and American
rhythm and blues was an implicit rejection of the world of traditional Englishness
new left in victorian drag 79
that these bands had been born into. By 1965, British rock had become a leading
commercial export, but at home the music fostered a sense among white middle-
class youth that their rejection of the cultural establishment was as legitimate in
its own way as the struggle of African Americans for self-determination in the US
public sphere.
In contrast with the British groups, the new Bay Area rock bands lived and
worked in the same community as their young listeners; less separated from their
audience by commercial success, these bands were also more capable of evolving
with their public, and changing with their audiences. As White Panther party leader
John Sinclair remarks, the Bay Area groups seemed more like genuine “people’s
bands,” and their music played “an integral part of the life of their communities”;
in contrast, groups like the Beatles and the Stones who, Sinclair notes, “came up
through the entertainment industry” and thus “were still removed from the people
they spoke for” (34).
Sinclair’s comments suggest the many compromises that bands like the
Beatles and the Stones made in order to become commercially successful. The
Beatles were only one in a century-long line of actors, singers, and writers from
the industrial north of England who had moved from the provinces to London,
“blending in,” as Shawn Levy puts it, “with the culture of the city like assimilating
immigrants” (124). Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, understood the symbolism
behind moving himself and the Beatles to London, and immediately took up the
role of London swell, working equally hard to integrate the Beatles into the world
of middlebrow British showbiz. Epstein introduced the Beatles to the celebrity
couple of Jewish Cockney singer/songwriter Lionel Bart who wrote Oliver!
(1960), and Alma Cogan, the last music-hall singer to have crossover success
in the 1950s British pop music scene; the Beatles remained a part of Cogan’s
showbiz society soirees, where they met a score of mainstream show business
professionals including Cary Grant, Bob Hope, and Danny Kaye. The Beatles’
participation in such gatherings caused American drama critic and theater director
Charles Marowitz to remark in 1965 that “a distinction [was] made between what
the Beatles were doing and the more rough trade kind of rock music,” adding
that “because of their success they came to inhabit a different sphere” (qtd. in
Levy 136). The Rolling Stones began their life in clubs like the Marquee known
for a more downscale and boozy audience; but once entrepreneur Andrew Loog
Oldham became the band’s manager in 1963 and the Stones embarked on their
first national tour, they played the same circuit of ballrooms, clubs, and Odeons
still intact from the days of vaudeville and British jazz bands, like any other pop

George Melly’s Revolt into Style (New York: Anchor, 1971) remains a concise
handbook on British beat groups and the new role of rock music in popular culture. Writing
during the 60s, Melly interprets Flower Power as both the product of an ongoing struggle
between US and British bands for pop music hegemony, with the result that “British pop
became in consequence provincial” (119).
act (cf. Lazar 41). The anti-Establishment Stones followed the Beatles on the same
established path for bands seeking commercial success.
In many respects, the success of the Beatles and other British rock bands
merely repeated an already established practice of British popular music-making
in the 20th century, which was heavily derivative of American sources. British
bandleader Ted Heath emulated Benny Goodman; both Vera Lynn and Donald
Peers modeled themselves after the Bing Crosby/Rosemary Clooney style crooner.
However, it seemed that the Beatles and other British rock music groups might
break this mold by remaining in touch with British working-class audiences in
spite of their success or their American-derived music style. As Arthur Marwick
observes, the general impression of Britons outside the working class was that the
Beatles were emphatically working class (and two of them, Harrison and Starr,
actually were) (87). The mass perception of the Beatles’ status as working-class
performers suggested that British rock might evolve differently from other kinds
of popular entertainment, and its performers could maintain a relation to working-
class community, even as they won over new audiences among artists or students
who felt at odds with mainstream British society.
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus was not the first instance of the
group raising the subject of working-class identity within the British context. The
Stones were middle-class youth in bohemian revolt against middle-class values;
they played blues music often derived from cutting-edge but obscure African-
American musicians, music that suggested a subcultural affiliation. Moreover, the
Stones’ public image in the 60s consciously invoked a specifically English class
politics, whether it was the Mockney accent Jagger adopted for press interviews,
the group’s generally unkempt appearance, or the lyrics to early hit singles such
as “Play With Fire” (1965) or “19th Nervous Breakdown” (1966), which targeted
posh women as objects of abuse, and cast the singer as the louche lover fortunate
enough to act out a fantasy of class revenge. In a still class-conscious Britain, the
Stones’ general air of hostility and aggression appeared to situate them along with
a newly assertive post-War working-class, determined, as George Melly put it,
“not to be kicked about” by bourgeois authority (Revolt 61).
Nor was The Rolling Stones’ TV film the first time that the Stones had evoked
music or visual images specific to British history. Beginning with Aftermath
(1966), the first album to feature solely original songs by Jagger and Keith
Richards, the group’s albums featured an unexpected range of musical textures.
The record culminated in “Goin’ Home,” an 11-minute blues jam that both looked
back to their days as a cover band of American R&B and just ahead to the free-
form, technically advanced instrumental improvisation that would characterize the
British psychedelic music which emerged a year later. Even more surprising was
the tender balladry of “Lady Jane,” with its delicate mix of dulcimer, harpsichord,
and folk guitar, and its lyrical Elizabethan-isms. “I am Waiting” also is in the
folk rock mode, restrained but ominous, where “High and Dry” and “What to
Do” borrows both from folk rock and American country music. The group’s
next album, Between the Buttons (1967), would be even more eclectic and
multi-layered musically, especially considering the band’s musical roots in

American R&B. Bob Dylan’s influence, or more specifically Dylan’s deceptively
casual approach to song-structure, derived from his roots in folk music, dominates
on songs like “Who’s Been Sleeping Here.” Between the Buttons also has a
distinctly English, even European, sound, thanks to the instrumental colors
provided by horn and keyboard player Brian Jones. “Back Street Girl” features
Jones on recorder, and the arrangement recalls earlier English folk songs.
Described as the band’s “vaudeville” record by the Stones’ manager and record
producer Andrew Loog Oldham, there is a distinct music hall flavor to joke songs
like “Something Happened to Me Yesterday,” an unpretentious, comic take on
experimenting with acid, with Brian Jones’ sax evoking the trad jazz sound that
dominated the British club scene in the late 1950s. Robert Christgau characterizes
this period of the Stones as one where the group “learned to respect and exploit
(never revere) studio nuance” (246). Still, the Stones’ music was central to their
specific version of youth rebellion; on these records, the band incorporated a new
variety of musical references, which in turn gave a broader, richer musical canvas
for the social criticism expressed in the lyrics.
In part, the sonic diversity of Jagger-Richards pop songs is a reflection of the
contemporary, indistinct shape of popular music: rock and roll had not yet become
“rock,” a recognizable music genre distinct and separate from teen pop singles,
folk, or R&B music (Nehring 263). Yet the Stones’ aims to master a variety of
pop music forms hints at a group will, a broader project of mastering pop on their
terms, from the “superior,” self-consciously modernist perspective of the blues
music connoisseur. The desire to cultivate an intellectually sophisticated position
for themselves within the world of pop music was intrinsic to the separatist British
Rhythm and Blues scene, from which the band emerged.
British R&B evolved out of the Soho club scene in the early 60s, at the same
time the Beatles became rising stars of the Liverpool scene. The Flamingo and the
Marquee club in Wardour Street were the chief clubs of London R&B; the Stones
played the Marquee, and gained attention during their residency at the Station
Hotel at Richmond, another suburban venue for blues musicians. The Stones
played blues music based on a combination of back-porch rural blues, dominated
by acoustic slide guitar and harmonica, and the newer, more aggressive sounds
of post-war electric urban blues, with amplified guitar and rhythm section. The
music at the Flamingo club was also derived from American blues, though freely
incorporating elements both of the new ‘Soul’ music by Ray Charles and even
modern jazz, and one of the few clubs that regularly drew audiences from the new
immigrant population of London (Melly Revolt 89).
Just a few years before, these same clubs catered to young audiences who
“raved” to trad jazz. The new R&B bands not only viewed the older jazzers as their
competition; despite their shared musical sources in American blues, they resented
the purist attitudes to music held by the slightly older musicians. However, as
George Melly observes, the rebellion of the young bands betrayed just how strong
the cultural links were between the opposing camps; the new clubs, as well as the
younger acts on stage were “like children who reject their parents and yet betray
their origins in everything they do and say” (89). The trad jazz revivalist paid
homage to a specific strain of American jazz, the Dixieland band music of Louis
Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, and imagined themselves as the protectors of
an endangered species of music neglected by the complacent masses. As Melly,
a participant-observer of the revivalist scene put it, the trad jazz musician “felt
themselves part of a crusade” (90). Jeff Nuttall, another critical observer of the
trad jazz movement, recalls the Manichean world-view of this strongly partisan
subculture: “The world was evil, governed by Mammon and Moloch,” and
New Orleans jazz represented “music straight from the heart and the swamp,
unclouded by the corrupting touch of civilization. It would refertilize the world”
(Bomb Culture 36).
There were also clear musical and stylistic differences between the trad jazz
revivalist and the R&B musical crusader. As Robert Christgau observes, the
Stones were youths who had “never known a non-electric culture, and who were
no more wary of distribution and exposure in the modern media than they were
of their own amps” (RS 244); they presumed a musical world with television,
electricity, and a corporate record industry. Where the trad jazz generation looked
down on the pop music industry as Mammon, the Stones were simply indifferent
to it and its machinations. Yet the trad jazz player and the R&B crusader shared an
oppositional attitude to the mainstream, a subculture allegiance to musical style,
and a built-in intellectual attitude to music. The Stones in particular kept the core
principle—or paradox–of trad jazz intact, maintaining a highly cerebral approach
to dance music. The trio who were the creative core of the band, Jagger, Richards,
and Jones, were never rockers; nor were they affiliated with mod subculture. They
were art-minded bohemians from middle-class families, and as Christgau notes,
Jagger in particular appeared fascinated with “music of a certain innocence as only
a fairly classy—and sophisticated—person can be” (RS 238).
Further evidence in support of Christgau’s argument is seen in the musical
style the group evolved early on, which set pop music against itself, in a manner
suggestive of the notion of “negative art” expressed by Theodor Adorno and the
Frankfurt School. In a world where the pleasure we take in art naturally extends
into a relaxed acceptance of the society in which such art exists, truly subversive
art must have the paradoxical aim of making us unhappy, and risk alienating its
audience. Hence the Stones’ “insistence on beat and volume so aggressive and
single-minded that they drove off the tender-minded altogether,” which Christgau
adds, “was the whole idea” (Any Old 224).
However, for various reasons, the Stones’ audience, especially their British
audience, overlooked the band’s intellectualism, and their consistently maintained
art pose. In part, this was the result of the band’s own myth of having escaped their

Melly recalls believing in a golden age of American jazz: “All real jazz existed in
a golden age before big bands and riffs and saxophones and commercialization had driven
the jazzers out of the garden” (Owning Up 387).
class: but it also suggests that the effectiveness of the canny marketing strategies
Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s manager and record producer, used to brand the
Stones as uncompromising non-conformists, which had the immediate effect of
mystifying the band’s identity. Oldham’s chief innovation was to break with the
precedent recently set by Brian Epstein for the Beatles, who were encouraged to
compromise with traditional show business and political establishments. Instead,
Oldham encouraged the Stones to follow their instincts and pursue transgression
on various fronts, and for its own sake, aggressively marketing the ensuing
scandal, anticipating the later insurgent managerial style adopted by Malcolm
McLaren vis-à-vis the Sex Pistols (Nehring 253). Even more disturbing, as George
Melly observes, Oldham “openly and brutally stressed his commercial ambitions,”
denying that the Stones had any redemptive agenda beyond upsetting the apple
cart, and becoming rich and famous (92).
This pointed to a further dissimilarity between the Stones and the Beatles,
specific to the British context. By 1965, the Beatles also represented a sea change
in pop music, or at least in the view of critics and other intellectuals regarding pop
music. Their celebrity image suggested a more intellectual-friendly pop music,
and that a taste for rock music could be accommodated with highbrow taste.
Richard Neville would observe, “Even today, people who should know better
believe that ‘pop and thought do not go together’ (to quote a BBC producer.) The
Beatles proved patently that they did” (98). However, as George Melly observed
at the time, “there was nothing of the didactic aura of the Beatles to the Stones’
persona” (Revolt 92). That this seemed the case indicated that Oldham’s carefully
constructed hype had worked; by 1966, the Stones seemed if not outside the culture
industry, at least less actively complicit with the Establishment, compared to the
government sanctioned, OBE honored, Beatles.
Yet none of these points impacted the Stones’ musical practice; they began
playing American R&B from the perspective of sophisticates, with somewhat
jaded palettes. No mere blues fans, the band were more like blues specialists:
“they liked not only rhythm-and-blues but obscure rhythm-and-blues” (Christgau
RS 223). This sort of specialized knowledge also proved the refined nature of
the band’s music appreciation. And, as Christgau adds, the band’s devotion to
American music was, on account of their secure middle-class positions, purer than
it could have been for Elvis Presley or the Beatles, who “loved rock and roll at
least partly because rock and roll was a way to make it,” as a vehicle for class
ambitions. As lead vocalist, Mick Jagger seemed to dispense early on with the
idealist creed at the heart of trad jazz and British R&B, that he and his band could
make music as “authentic,” or that capture the purity and expressive power of
their musical influences. Instead, as Robert Christgau notes, “Jagger acted out his
distance from the music he loved;” playing American music chiefly underscored
Jagger’s own “alienation from himself and his native culture” (223). The band’s
devotion and knowledge of the music was never in question; but there was little
pretense that such postures would secure the band what they desired from the
music, and even less that purist attitudes would result in recapturing a primal
innocence in the music they made. Instead, playing blues music, even bringing it
to mass audiences, was part of an art process, that made no promise that race and
class could be transcended.
In their mid-period records, the Rolling Stones appropriated other kinds of
pop music, emboldened by their ironic awareness of the insufficient, inadequate
character of this music compared with the music of the Black Atlantic. No wonder
then, that the most avowedly purist Stone, Brian Jones, the band member who
made it a condition of appearing on the BBC in 1964 that Howlin’ Wolf also
appear, and who slavishly modeled his slide playing on the technique of Delta
guitarist Elmore James, is also responsible for the achieved musical diversity of
Aftermath (1966) and Between the Buttons (1967). The augmented sound and
stylistic eclecticism was less a compromise with popular taste than the logical
outcome of the band’s musical philosophy, which had held blues as modern music
par excellence. The other side of the group’s faith in the modern blues is an ironic
consciousness toward musical styles based in a now dead past. It is precisely
because all other kinds of pop music, especially vaudeville, were obsolete from
their modernist perspective that allowed the Stones to apply their cut-and-paste
methods to older musical materials.
1967 saw both the Beatles and the Stones making notable efforts to meet and
beat their San Francisco competition in regard to these band’s hip credentials. The
fact that neither the Beatles nor Stones could claim an organic relation to a specific
subculture did not deter them from the contest: both bands worked hard to construct
a relation between their bands and the counterculture imaginary. The rock movies
made by the Beatles and the Stones in 1967 and ’68 are less music films than
quasi-conceptual projects that aim to manufacture a new radical identity for rock
music. The massive commercial success of the Beatles and Stones gave the bands
a considerable advantage over other rock groups, since it meant that both bands
could exercise an unusual degree of autonomy over their art, including these film

From this perspective, the Stones 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request,
commonly viewed as an aesthetic failure, invites re-evaluation; the case could be made
for the record being the culmination of the musical tendencies of the stylistically various
mid-period Stones. TSMR is primarily a novelty record, passing as psychedelic music of
the day, and thus consistent with the cool, ironic, distance the Stones managed to maintain
to the pop music mainstream, even as celebrity catapulted the band out of their suburban
subculture.
Specifically, most of the songs on TSMR represent the next logical step in the
musical evolution begun in Aftermath and continued in BTB. With its loose musical structure,
and single-minded pursuit of a blues feel, and for musical texture for its own sake, songs
like “Goin’ Home” clearly anticipated the expansive song structure that would become
normalized in British psychedelic rock. Also, while “Sing This All Together (See What
Happens)” incorporates a new exotic element, namely the trance rhythms of the Master
Musicians of Jojouka, the Sufi musicians the Stones had discovered during their travels
to Morocco in 1967, it also clearly harkens back to musical territory already explored in
“Goin’ Home.”
projects. In the process of re-imagining their relation to their mass audience both
the Beatles and the Stones reaffirm their ties to English folkways, and implicitly
to the British working class. The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour movie is a road
film; the band’s road trip places them among the British working and lower middle
class tourists at the same time as the subplot and skits showcases a counter culture
agenda at odds with traditional Englishness. The trip to the countryside is at the
same time, in keeping with the time, an inner exploration: but it also serves, as
Ian Macdonald notes, “[to send up] consumerism, showbiz, and the clichés of the
media,” particularly appropriate targets for a film broadcast on Boxing Day, the
British public’s “most bloated day of the year” (224-225).
Unlike the Beatles’ movie, the Stones film is without a narrative frame, and
largely without skits that offer an opportunity for social commentary or satire.
Aside from a short skit with Jagger as a pseudo-hip television journalist interviewing
John Lennon, basically an insider joke aimed at the music industry, the emphasis
of the movie is on live rock performance rather than discourse about music.
However, the movie communicates a great deal through its mise-en-scène, and is
even more emphatic than Magical Mystery Tour in linking the Stones and other
rock musicians in the role of outsiders to bourgeois society. The film downplays the
contemporary aspect of rock music, in an attempt to establish links between rock
and more venerable, less obviously commercial amusements. The Rock and Roll
Circus goes so far as to sublimate one of the most novel technological features of
rock music, high decibel amplification, in order to emphasize the commonalities
between rock and older entertainment. The main idea, Jagger recalls, was to create
a mixture: “of different kinds of musical acts and circus acts,” rock celebrities
sometimes in fashionable dress, other times in camp costumes alongside
the colorfully attired clowns, cowboys, and acrobats in the film (Dalton 80).
The on-screen action is similarly various, mixing improvised performances of
experimental music (represented by the Dirty Mac super-group consisting of John
Lennon, Eric Clapton, avant-garde violinist Ivry Gitlis, and Yoko Ono’s unique
vocalizing) with romantic and nostalgic images of the circus. Visually, the film
tropes the heavy volume of rock music as merely a variant of the antics of the
circus clown, whose broad gestures were required to communicate to audiences
under the non-reverbative big top. The visual style of the film reinforces what
seems the main thrust of the Rock and Roll Circus project: to establish rock’s
relevance to contemporary struggles while at the same time aligning it with a
wistful image of time past.
The Stones’ rock and roll circus ended up as a film, but it began as an idea
about the new shape of the rock and roll concert tour. While recording a demo for
the Stones’ 1967 record Their Satanic Majesties Request, Jagger, the Who’s Pete

The Stones provided a singularly dramatic demonstration of their artistic autonomy
by making the film and scrapping it, without explaining why. Pete Townshend’s response
is pertinent: “I realized, wow, they control their career. We (the Who) don’t have that much
control of our career.”
Townshend and the Small Faces’ Ronnie Lane speculated together about the likely
next step in the evolution of the rock show. Jagger envisioned a future where rock
bands would engage in a non-stop cycle of endless touring; Townshend imagined
rock bands playing long engagements at a single theater, akin to an art installation,
with the effect of the rock show becoming both site specific and, ideally, more
intimate. However, as Townshend recalls, for Ronnie Lane, “rock traveled in tours
and wagons”; Lane wanted to reformat the rock tour so it consisted of rock bands
traveling in a gypsy caravan, in a micro-community that also included families
and friends of the performers (Townshend). As Townshend recalls, the original
idea was to take an actual circus tent on the road. On stage, rock groups would
also share billing and rock music would be one entertainment among many. Bands
would collaborate with more traditional kinds of entertainment: jugglers, acrobats,
comedians, and dancers.
The whole discussion may seem grandly speculative, but the current pop music
concert format seemed on the verge of a genuine crisis. Various factors had converged
to make the standard mode of pop concert performance seem outdated. Marxist
film-maker Peter Watkins’s 1967 British film Privilege had offered a dystopian
vision of a future Britain where teenagers are turned into docile consumers. The
movie shows the mass hysteria surrounding the concert shows of a young pop
star micro-managed by a cadre of advertisers and corporate interests, eventually
including the Church of England. Watkins’ critique of the pop concert as culture
was not that far removed from the misgivings that rock groups and audiences had
concerning the conventions of rock performance. After 1966, Mick Farren recalls,
“pop stars were faced with a choice of either retreating into the protection of the
recording and television studio or finding a whole new way of putting on a live
show” (63). After seeing the hippie crowd assembled to watch Bob Dylan and the
Band perform at London’s Royal Albert Hall that same year, Farren wonders, “Was
it beyond the realm of possibility that we might find other common ground beyond
the appreciation of a single artist and their work?” Farren’s question was whether
the audiences for pop music could be established and organized for the purposes
of political struggle. In 1967, Mick Jagger, along with Townshend and Lane, were
asking similar questions of their audiences. By 1966, touring for the Stones meant
playing more sophisticated, carefully arranged music that was drowned out by the
mass hysteria of crazed fans, as well as risking life and limb moving in and out of
the concert stage. The exchange between Townshend, Jagger, and Lane was part of
a larger dialogue taking place in the British counterculture: could rock music move
outside the traditional producer/consumer nexus and still reach a mass audience?
Young bands, in tune with the aspirations of their own audience, sought to find
ways to integrate the business of touring with the aspirations of the alternative
community emerging worldwide by the mid 1960s. At stake was whether the rock

Of all these ideas, Jagger’s notion of the rock concert as permanent tour now seems
the most prescient for the way it blurs the work/leisure distinction, anticipating the take-
work-home labor regime that characterizes the high tech, post-Fordist workplace.
show might be detached from celebrity worship and form the basis for new kinds
of social relations.
The idea for a rock and roll circus originated from Ronnie Lane, and
understanding the Stones’ project requires us to grasp the collective image that
Lane’s concept was meant to reconstitute. Born in London’s East End, historically
the working-class district of the city, Lane’s notion of a multi-act rock and roll
circus was, sans rock bands, standard fare in the days when music hall reigned
at the beginning of the 20th century, the quintessentially British entertainment
that Hollywood cinema had pushed to the side by the end of the 30s. “I grew up
in the East End, the working class area of London. It was really poor, all debris”
(The Passing Show). He added: “My dad would take me to the old Club Road;
people would take all their things, and throw them down, and you could rummage
through and pick up anything.” Partly because of Lane’s memory of East End hard
times, his notion of a rock and roll circus could not be separated from the world of
his working-class childhood. The circus idea was also generated by Lane’s keen
affection for the working-class fairground and, his notion of a rock and roll caravan
has specific historical roots in traditional working-class Englishness. Lane had left
school at 16 to enroll in art courses at Lister Technical College; at the same time,
he got a job working at Battersea Fun Fair, where, as Jim Melly puts it, he fell
in love “with the nomadic romance of the fairground” and quit college to pursue
a career managing the Roll-a-Penny stall and working on the Big Dipper (14).
The fairground constituted a heterotopia, a provisional place where pleasure was
keener because it was temporary. Lane’s melancholy observation that “a fair when
it’s closed is the saddest sight in the world” makes greater sense when seen in this
context (Jim Melly 15).
The image of the Rock and Roll Circus constituted a childhood idyll of working-
class life, an implicitly utopian vision of a segregated but self-sufficient working-
class community. Even after WWII, East London entertainment remained a
basically family affair. Everyone had a song or “turn” they could do at a party; most
working-class families had at least one musical instrument in the house. Everyone
knew the same songs, passed down through generations and through music hall.
Linking rock with the circus as a barely capitalized leisure form implied that rock
music’s rightful place was with popular entertainment rather than big finance: a
neighborhood affair, and not a global commodity. Pete Townshend came from a
middle-class family in Chiswick; Mick Jagger was educated at the London School
of Economics. Neither had any experience of life in a working-class neighborhood
like Lane, but both would have understood the main point of the Rock and Roll
Circus: a particularly British entertainment free of association with American-style
glitz. The image harkened back to the self-sufficient, independent character of the
people’s culture in Britain, but its invocation at the precise moment also suggested
an alternative to the status quo of rock concert performance.
The conversation between Lane and Jagger that served as the inception of
the Rock and Roll Circus idea implicitly addressed the relation of rock music
and community. It also spoke to the question of what social group did the rock
star belong. The Stones and the Beatles, of course, had made a pile of money
in their early 20s; they achieved this commercial success just as class barriers
in Britain seemed to be eroding and the empire was in death throes: after Indian
independence, that is, and after the Suez Crisis, in the midst of the decolonization
of Africa, etc. Sports and entertainment in the UK had offered working-class
Britons a way out of poverty since the late nineteenth century, but moneyed elites
still retained control of the entertainment industry.
Jagger took the notion of a rock and roll circus seriously enough to meet with
American promoter Chip Monck, who laid out a blueprint for a bill that would
include the Stones, the Who, and the Small Faces in accord with Lane’s model.
The US tour bill would feature the Stones, the Who, and the Small Faces along
with a big top, and travel primarily by trains (in fact, tour plans were finally foiled
because of the low speed limit mandated for commercial train travel). On board
the train would be eating cars, a cinema, operating table, a recording studio for the
touring musicians, and enough living quarters for bands and a crowd of audience
members who wished to come along with the groups on tour. There were also
plans to film a tour documentary (Townshend).
Jagger’s initial aim seems to have been to turn the circus project into a kind
of hip capitalism along the lines of the Beatles’ Apple recording company, where
the general public was encouraged to audition and record without intermediaries
such as record managers and promoters. The younger New Left and those leaning
to the Left may have opposed the “System,” but they came of age in a post-war
boom and were inevitably, as Ellen Wood puts it, “deeply preoccupied with
[capitalism’s] apparent success” (xiii). The post-war economic boom elicited a
range of responses on the Left, from the utopian optimism of the Diggers and the
Situationists that capitalist surplus could be redistributed communally in order to
end work regimes, to Marcuse-inspired apprehension that the reign of consumer
capitalism had managed to buy off the working class. Like the Beatles, Jagger
seems to have entertained the idea that the post-war surplus would last for the
foreseeable future and that capitalism could be extended to serve ends other than
those determined by the dominant class. Jagger’s keenness to flesh out Lane’s
idea suggests Jagger’s eagerness to detach rock music-making from corporate
enterprise.
The project also offered the Stones the chance to regain any cultural capital
they lost with the rise of West Coast rock, by authorizing themselves as mediators
between different factions in the British underground. Lane’s concept of the rock
circus linked the music to egalitarian politics, evoking a world before rock music
and consumerism had disrupted traditional working-class community. Jagger was
perhaps more skeptical than Lane about the desirability of restoring communal
authority; but it seems that he shared Lane’s confidence that evoking an older style
would tweak rock music, and consumer capitalism, in a more egalitarian direction.
At the same time, the circus concept might even aid in defusing tensions between
student activists and an older non-student Left. The British underground was marked
by many internal divisions, among them a split between young people supporting
radical causes but also attracted to music, drugs, and sex, and an older generation of
socialist activists who regarded most of these activities pursued for their own sake
as so many diversions of the working class from its main charge of revolution. The
circus idea must have seemed a way to provide an authorizing British context that
countered the new celebrity image of the rock star, one more in keeping with an
older, more insular, but also more cohesive, working-class culture.
A series of high profile drug busts had kept the Rolling Stones from performing
live for a year and a half before they took the stage in the Rock and Roll Circus
program in December 1968. The targeting of Jagger and Richards by London
police consolidated the outlaw image the band and their first manager Andrew
Loog Oldham had long sought to project to the larger public. By the time the
Rolling Stones began recording Beggars Banquet in Spring 1968, after their various
misadventures with the law, the Stones seemed to embody a style of high life that
also seemed inherently political. At the same time, the band’s decision to ally the
rock band with the circus troupe distanced the Stones from their contemporary
outlaw status, and extended an olive branch to an older generation comfortable
only with eccentric outsiders of the kind that rose in the ranks of more antiquated
mass entertainment.
However, a full year passed between the conversation with Lane that was the
genesis of the Rock and Roll Circus and tour idea, and the film shoot in December
of 68; subsequent events had the effect of redefining the relation between
the Stones and their own project. The circus tour was premised on the notion
of rock populism, that rock music was a mass entertainment with ineradicable,
anti-bourgeois associations. Yet rock populism was itself founded on the idea of
an essential antagonism between the working class and the middle classes, with
workers in the vanguard of revolutionary change. However, it was precisely this
link between workers’ struggle and revolution that was challenged by the mass
protests that occurred throughout the globe in 1968. On March 17, the day after the
My Lai massacre by American soldiers, 30,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square
to protest US involvement in Vietnam, and an estimated 8,000 people challenged a
police guard at the US embassy in London, Mick Jagger among them. Two hundred
people were eventually arrested, and 48 seriously injured. The protest, specifically
the violent skirmish between the mob and the police, directly inspired the lyrics
to the Stones’ rock anthem, “Street Fighting Man.” When that song was released
as a single later that summer, days after the release of the Beatles’ “Revolution”
single and with images of Mayor Daley’s Chicago police beating up protestors at
the Democratic convention still in the minds of US audiences of the evening news,
both the song and the Stones were newly feted by the student Left and progressive
intellectuals for their apparently Anti-War, anti-Establishment stance, especially
compared to John Lennon’s message in the “Revolution” single that radicals can
count him out of street fighting.

See John Platoff for a detailed reception history of the Beatles’ “Revolution,”
contrasted with the New Left response to “Street Fighting Man.”
The Grosvenor Square demonstration revealed deep fault lines within the
British Left, and Jagger’s participation in the rally marked the beginning of the
end of his attempt to reconcile being a rock star and participating in street politics.
The British branch of the Situationist movement yelled “Hot chocolate, drinking
chocolate!” in an attempt to drown out the cheer of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh”
chanted by Tariq Ali’s marching Trotskyites (Vague 43). The rally succeeded in
publicizing the range and depth of popular discontent with US imperialism and
British support of the US war: yet it also exposed wide cleavages between middle-
class university students and British working-class youth. The march in Trafalgar
Square was ringed around by Skinhead kids at the fringes of the crowd, yelling,
“Students, Students, ha-ha-ha” (Vague 43). There are conflicting stories about the
extent and nature of Jagger’s participation in the rally. A recent eyewitness account
recalls Jagger as “standing coolly on the steps of a house in the square surveying
the chaos” (BBC); another insists that the singer put himself in considerable danger
and led a small charge against the police on horseback (Nehring). Yet most sources
agree that Jagger was pulled out of the march by a phalanx of autograph-seeking
fans (Nehring).
For my purposes in this chapter, the chief importance of the Grosvenor Square
demonstration is its role in facilitating Jagger’s new understanding of the relation
between art and politics. Although the underground community responded to what
they perceived as the more militant stance of the Stones, borne out in the link
between the recording of “Street Fighting Man” and the Grosvenor Square march, it
seems more likely that Jagger’s participation in the march made him recognize both
the difficulty of celebrity activism and the extent of schisms on the Left, especially
the gulf separating young radicals from the trade-union politics championed by
British Labour. That the Stones’ audience interpreted a record which documented
Jagger’s rejection of politics as his most engaged moment seems further evidence
of what Jagger seems to have begun to suspect: that audiences and critics use
music in ways that those who made the music could not anticipate.
The expectation that the rally signified the beginning of a full-scale Left
offensive against the state was soon dashed by the protests of London workers
in support of Enoch Powell’s incendiary hate speech only a month later. Powell’s
infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech on April 20 played on white fears that Black
Britons were poised to outnumber white English and preparing to take over and
rule whites with an iron hand. When Powell was asked to resign from his position
in the Conservative shadow cabinet afterward, East End dock workers, as well as
laborers in the Smithfield meat market, took immediate strike action in Powell’s
support.
When Barry Miles interviewed Jagger in early May for the International Times,
the chief newspaper of the British underground, both Jagger and Miles seem to
have concluded that strike action and demonstrations are either beside the point or

Simon Basketter’s article “Enoch Powell and Racism” offers a helpful overview of
the working-class response to Powell; cf. Nigel Fountain’s Underground, 71.
worse, get in the way of a truly radical, anti-capitalist politics. The IT interview is
fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which is for its glimpse of a rising
intellectual current on the Left against the notion that organized labor and their
interests lie at the center of the socialist project. In it, Jagger speaks a great deal on
the widening gap between the Old and New Left, blaming Labour Party politics
for skirting the issue of working-class racism, thus leaving the problem to fester.
The result of Labour’s complacency is the generally conformist character of
British politics, in marked contrast with a post-Jim Crow America, which Jagger
can easily imagine “becoming just a blaze” (Miles). As Jagger puts it, “Everyone
knew about the white backlash in England, everyone forgot about it, but everyone
knew. It’s weird to see it, but you tend to forget, there definitely is this fantastic
split, and it even cuts across class, which shows how strong it is, because there’s
very few things in England that do transcend class.”
Most of the interview takes up the recent protest of British workers in support
of Powell, which Jagger believes endemic of the widespread racism of the British
working class. Miles: “It’s shown a lot of people that the left-wing wasn’t left-
wing for humanitarian reasons but for self-interest reasons. Everyone was on the
dockers as the great communists who fought fascism”; Jagger: “Of course they’re
not. They’re just totally self interested, they can’t see farther than their noses.”
Jagger explains working-class racism not as a residual aspect of working-class
life, but as a key component of working-class ideology. The root of working-class
racism, Jagger hints, lies in the pragmatic character of working-class politics
itself, politics that he scorns as vulgar and materialistic throughout the interview
with Miles. The vague and popularized notion of a cultural revolution popularized
by Mao Tse-tung which disassociated popular struggle from workers’ struggle
appears to lurk behind the high-minded social revolution imagined here by Miles
and Jagger, in contrast with the vulgar “Other” of working-class protest.10 Jagger
goes on to further insult English workers elsewhere in the interview, citing the
recent work by Arthur Koestler on the reptilian remnant of the human brain in
order to explain the survival of working-class racism and other sorts of clan
mentality in contemporary life.11

The dockworkers’ strike in 1888 was the key event that brought the plight of
London’s casual laborers in the century into the Victorian middle-class consciousness;
see Alan Palmer, The East End: Four Decades of London Life (Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers UP, 2004), 85-100.
10
The history of New Left and postmodernist attempts to substitute populist politics
for class struggle is both covered and critiqued in Ellen Wood’s The Retreat From Class.
11
Against the view that Powell-style racism was a residue of the past, Immanuel
Wallerstein and Etienne Balibar claim that modern racism is a structural effect of new
relations between the modern nation-state and the division of labor. Kobena Mercer
argues that Powell-ite racism anticipates postmodern thought in acknowledging race as a
constructed category (298).
Jagger seems to have chiefly identified with Tariq Ali’s student Marxists in
the demonstration; afterwards, he sent the lyrics to “Street Fighting Man” to The
Black Dwarf, the chief organ of the Young Trotskyites headed by Ali. However,
the IT interview suggests that both Jagger’s interest in organized political action
and a class-based understanding of social struggle were short-lived.12 The bigger
problem is the conceptual muddle that constitutes most of Jagger’s social analysis.
The attempt to consider the possible role of rock music in creating a socialist
culture does not preclude either Jagger or Miles from indulging in a kind of identity
politics where white workers get typed as selfish racists so that Jagger and Miles
can present themselves as the enlightened liberal alternative.
The contradictions of Jagger’s radical moment may be the logical outcome of
a politics primarily based on stylistic associations with “the outsider,” specifically
the identification of British suburbanites with character traits they associated with
Black America. As Simon Frith observes, “Mick Jagger didn’t have to apply burnt
cork (just slur his words); the underlying inspiration of the ‘subjective black man’
was obvious in the Rolling Stones’ music (and success) anyway” (123).13 The
commitment to empowering excluded groups is largely secondary to the main goal
of making British rock cool and relevant by associating itself with them. Similar
plans for social change by a sort of sonic alchemy are present in other musical
trends of 1968, mixing disparate genres in an attempt to forge a link between
music and radical politics. The Stones’ circus project was just one plait woven in
the fabric of the band’s 1968 projects. The end of the year saw the release of the
Beggars Banquet record, which signaled a renewed commitment to the American
blues at the same time that this specific aesthetic style was increasingly politicized.
A dedication to blues music over pop fare was what brought the Stones together
in 1963, but the blues had acquired a new relevance in ’68. No longer merely a
mark of distinction among cultists, young white student audiences now valued the
blues music for its primitivism: its blunt open style also seemed to characterize
the stanch revolutionary, evident in the more confrontational protest style of the
English Situationists or the American Yippies.
The new student ideology held that blues appreciation might have a
transformative effect on white middle-class students; immersion in the blues
habitus would help white middle-class kids evolve out of the ingrained habits
12
Jagger may have noticed that IT critiqued Tariq Ali’s organization efforts; an open
letter by John Hopkins criticizing Ali for what Hopkins calls a cynical ploy to encourage
students’ participation in protests without preparing volunteers to meet physical force by
the police was also published in the May 17 issue.
13
In “Playing with Real Feeling,” Simon Frith critiques the prevalent reading of
American pop music as liberating the British from Victorian values, instead arguing that
American sounds were interpreted by Britons in ways that reinforced the cultural authority
of suburban elites working in music and journalism. Specifically, Frith claims that “the
strange fear of being ‘inauthentic’” felt particularly by middle-class men framed the British
response to American sounds throughout the twentieth century (134).
of their class. This most recent attempt to politicize the blues was based on the
problematic assumption of a direct link between musical taste and personal
authenticity. Similar experiments, although differently inflected on account of
national cultural differences, were underway in America, with bands like the
Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers mixing rock with country music—then the
music of the conservative working class—in an attempt to return to a simpler rock
style, which signified greater authenticity in this context.14
There is much to be said for the consensus critical view that the Stones’ album
Beggars Banquet signifies a landmark in the band’s career: but it is also arguably
that its true significance resides in the Stones’ new relation to an emerging mode
of rock music production, rather than as a case of creative inspiration. Psychedelic
music dominated the British rock scene in 1967; yet by year’s end, a new, global
trend in pop music was clearly emerging. The popularity of Mod-inspired Dusty
Springfield, specifically her attempts to meld British pop with American soul in
records like “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” (1966) suggested that even
the more intense sounds of soul had secured mass popularity. New bands on the
British Underground scene like Fleetwood Mac also sourced American blues
music and early rock and roll, but in a cruder, more aggressive fashion than the
Stones had displayed on their own studio recordings.
Most important, almost every significant event in the global music scene in
1968 was organized around various sorts of rock “revivals.”15 It was well known
that Bob Dylan and the group which soon became known as the Band had been
busy during their retreat to Woodstock, New York recording in the basement of
the house they dubbed “Big Pink”; not officially released until almost a decade
later, these home recordings nonetheless circulated widely in bootleg release form
in both the US and UK. The so-called “Basement Tapes” were bootlegs and thus
low fidelity, often scraps of music as opposed to finished compositions. However,
in the context of psychedelic music, the loose, spontaneous feel, broad humor, and
overall air of musical high spirits seemed to suggest to listeners nothing less than
a fully developed alternative approach to rock music. The Basement Tapes mixed
Dylan originals with a highly eclectic choice of old folk, gospel, country, and jump
blues music. Even if the songs seemed raw and unrehearsed, the project seemed
to have definite musical ambitions: a principled reaction against the privileging of
musical expertise or polished studio song over spontaneity, toward a more pure
rock and roll that existed—paradoxically—in an earlier moment when rock and
roll itself was had not quite emerged from the broader stream of American pop
14
Ian Macdonald interprets American efforts at country rock as an effort by young rock
musicians to bring two politically opposed social groups together by means of music: the
conservative audiences of country music with the younger, presumably more progressive,
audience for rock music (250). The country rock experiment represents precisely the sort of
conflation of aesthetics with politics that I argue Jagger learns to reject by the end of 1968.
15
As Allan F. Moore observes, it was also around this time that “rock” became the
accepted term for the musical genre (4).
music. The songs on the Basement Tapes were predominantly acoustic, but they
were still recognizably rock music; the casual air of the performances and the
simplicity of most songs could not obscure the larger conceptual ambition behind
Dylan and the Band’s music, the endeavor to remake rock and roll by revisiting—
really, by conjuring up—the genre’s history.
The underground celebrity of the Basement Tapes and the release of the Band’s
first album in July 1968, Music from Big Pink, established the Band’s sound, built
on a no-frills but swinging rhythm section, and richly colored by guitar, organ, and
piano, as a new rock template. The Basement Tapes had pointed to a way out of an
increasingly complex psychedelic music, which had suggested a new division of
labor between the musician and audience, toward possibly more egalitarian future
relations between performer and audience. As Bill Janovitz observes, “From 1968
on, many groups and artists followed [their path] back to the folk, blues, soul, and
country roots of rock and roll: the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, the Byrds, Creedence
Clearwater Revival, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and the Flying Burrito Brothers”
(48). One could add many roots rock oriented bands to Janovitz’s transatlantic
roster: Traffic, Dr. John, and Taj Mahal (who describes the music on his 1967 self-
titled debut record as “blues-rock-gospel-country-funk”).
It is no a coincidence that all three of these artists were the first choices of the
Stones to perform on their late-1968 TV program. Beggars Banquet was perhaps
the timeliest record the Stones ever released. The band’s choice to “return” to
their blues-based hard rock roots was a stylistic decision with clear social and
political implications. Always shrewd observers of the rock music scene, Jagger
and Richards, now the creative core of the band, appear to have assessed the
novel character of global rock, and committed themselves to what seemed nothing
less than a global musical enterprise to return rock and soul to its musical roots
and, paradoxically given the massive profits to be had by playing rock music,
by implication back to a local, grass-roots audience as well. In one sense, the
writing and recording of Beggars Banquet had represented business as usual for
the Stones, who always insisted on making music on their own idiosyncratic
terms. However, the context around rock music had changed, and the Stones’
return to their blues roots now constituted a political decision as much as an
aesthetic strategy: as a collective endeavor by various rock musicians to make
music that somehow more directly represented rock’s grass-roots audience. The
band’s decision to return to blues-based rock was an discrete choice that, on
account of its context, necessarily suggested the Stones’ broader allegiance to a
music-based populism.
The attempt to redefine rock as an art form as opposed to commercial
entertainment characterizes all the Stones’ ventures in 1968, evident in the roots
music of the Beggars Banquet record as well as the Rock and Roll Circus movie.
Rock music critic David Dalton blurbs the DVD release of the Circus film as
documenting the “brief moment [when] it seemed rock’n’roll would inherit the
earth.” It would be more precise to say that we see Jagger acting on the premises
of rock’s artistic autonomy in the Circus film, in fact helping create the ideology of
rock art that Dalton implies pre-dated the film. The Jagger who showed up on the
set of the Rock and Roll Circus film in December of 1968 was arguably a changed
man, transformed by events of that year. No longer supremely confident about the
power of rock music as a force to politicize audiences, he provides abundant visual
evidence in the Stones’ Circus film that he had gained a new faith in the shaman-
like power of the rock artist.
From an existential perspective, Jagger’s acting debut in the Nicholas Roeg
and Donald Cammell movie Performance, which began shooting in September
1968, came at an opportune moment. In retrospect it seems that the Grosvenor
Square Demonstration changed, if not Jagger’s politics, than certainly his
interpretation of what rock music could do. Rock and roll alone would never heal
the rift between the Old and New Left that beset the Underground community that
had increasingly accepted rock as their music, because audiences and critics were
bent on understanding rock in terms of racial and generational conflict. Jagger’s
main response to the contradictions and uncertainties of activism that he expresses
in the IT interview was to focus on his art, while at the same time presuming that
his art would be interpreted in political ways by a mass audience.
Jagger’s experience of filming Performance in September 1968 constitutes the
turning point here. Jagger plays Turner in the movie, a rock star turned recluse,
living a secluded life in a pre-gentrified Notting Hill. The film imagines its artist
figure’s exile from social life as prompted by his utter contempt for bourgeois
society. The making of Performance, as Colin MacCabe, Peter Wollen, and
others have chronicled, was less a movie-shoot than a protracted counter-culture
happening, an intense, short-lived collective experiment in alternative lifestyles.16
Film writer and co-director Cammell was a serious occultist, and deeply versed in
the history of bohemian artistic traditions. From all accounts, Jagger’s involvement
in the film was total, which meant that he immersed himself in a heady brew of
counter-culture notions: in a plot inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s sophisticated
meta-narratives, then in vogue, and a film using the cut-method to sound and
image pioneered by Byron Gysin and William Burroughs. Performance not only
references these contemporary art experiments, but invokes the full gamut of radical
aesthetic ideologies, dating back to 19th-century modernism: the confrontational
stance to the well-heeled that was a hallmark of Baudelaire’s dandy, drug-fueled
Orientalism (visually represented in the film by the exotic, North African décor
of Jagger/Turner’s Notting Hill apartment) and, above all, Rimbaud’s search
for illumination through a systematic derangement of the senses, especially the
deliberate dis-organization of linguistic codes. Everything about Performance
was a calculated affront to middle-class values, although it made the struggle for
social transformation, still a live issue for Jagger and Miles in the IT interview
despite some disillusioned moments, beside the point. While more obviously anti-
16
Colin MacCabe’s BFI guide to Performance provides a detailed history of the
making of the movie; Peter Wollen elaborates on the history of the many decadent literary
motifs of the film.
bourgeois, the experience of Performance was more ambiguously anti-capitalist:

the emphasis on self or small group transformation and derangement of the senses
make the broader goal of revolution seem irrelevant. Instead, the central feature
of this mode of radicalism is a commitment to certain lifestyle options. Still, the
film’s vision of aesthetic transgression against middle-class norms is impressively
consistent, and in that respect, more coherent than the political muddle of Jagger’s
street-fighting moment.
Performance portrays the fatal encounter of gangster, played by James Fox,
and an effete, androgynous musician, played by Jagger, where a game of ritualized
role-playing ensues, and Jagger/Turner and Chas/Fox exchange identifies. Chas
shoots Turner; but a superimposed image of Turner’s face on Chas, just as Chas’s
gangster bosses take him on a ride to execute him intimates that Turner has in
fact become Chas, and consented to become a ritual sacrifice in Chas’ place.
Performance shared more with the contemporary art “happening” than the making
of a standard Hollywood film, even though it was made by Warner Brothers.17 The
plot of Performance turns on the thin line that separated artifice and imagination
from reality, and the sex and ritual drug intake of the cast and much of the crew
during the film shoot resemble the rites that accompany the initiation of a neophyte
into a new tribe in their attack on individual personality.
As a narrative, Performance explores the tension between ritual experiences
that tend to obliterate the ego and states of self-possession bordering on deification:
common themes to both magic and Borges’ fiction. The film promotes the power
of ritual to annihilate subjectivity; indeed, co-star James Fox experienced a
kind of ego-crash after the film, and both retired from acting for several years
and joined a religious cult. To Pete Townshend of the Who, the Jagger he met
during the shooting of the Circus film had just experienced something “strange
but empowering” while making Performance, and seemed to have carried this
experience over to the Circus movie (Townshend).
My argument here is speculative, but Townshend’s remarks support the hunch
that Jagger brought something specific from his work in the Cammell/Roeg
film into the Stones’ music movie: namely, a new confidence in the efficacy of
ritual practice. The connecting factor between the modernist, occult aesthetic of
Performance and the rock aesthetic of the Stones’ circus movie that same year
is the crucial role technique plays in both endeavors. For example, the poster
for Performance, with inset photographs of Jagger and Fox as traditional hard,
masculine types juxtaposed with more androgynous images of the men, suggests
the power of ritual gender inversion.
Androgyny has a specific referent in the film, aligning the movie itself to ritual
practices of magic that transgress reality, but believed to have real world effects.
Performance exalted aesthetics as a kind of heroic egoism, rigidly separating art
17
The sexual network of Performance included Jagger’s ménage with
Anita Pallenberg (then Keith Richards’ girl friend) and Michelle Barrett, screenwriter
Donald Cammell’s companion.
from its social use; it thus primed Jagger for the Stones’ circus film, where the
anomic artist hero of Performance is situated in the rock format.18 Jagger still
retains the dark-haired, epicene look of Turner in the Stones’ mini-concert at the
close of the Rock and Roll Circus: but resemblance between Jagger’s upgrade
of the front man and Performance’s Turner go even deeper. Like Turner, the
Jagger of the Circus film is a shaman, but with a twist: no longer revered for
their power to transform the world on behalf of the tribe, but valued instead for
their mastery of technique for its own sake, and their awesome self-possession.
Jagger thus appropriates gender inversion’s ritual force to the aims of aesthetic
professionalism, where it serves as a device in the new division of labor which
constitutes the rock band.
As a new convert to an extreme notion of aesthetic autonomy, Jagger is thus
“prepared” for the filming of the Stones’ Rock Circus movie in December 68. The
film dramatizes the split between the older notion of rock as quasi-folk music and
its more modern incarnation as a form of specialized labor, founded on Jagger’s
realization that art is not the same thing as politics, even if it is always political.
British rock had always made a virtue of its artifice, embracing its distance from
its source material in American sounds. The Circus program takes this tendency to
a new extreme; it displays the Stones’ growing talent for rock theater, effectively
deconstructing the link the program initially sought to establish between rock
music and egalitarianism.
The events of 1968 had taught Jagger how thickly contradictory the relationship
between egalitarian posturing and egalitarian life were, so it is impossible to
imagine that he could believe the program could make good on its initial aim of
reconciling the two. Nonetheless, moments in the program seem like bad faith
gestures to link rock music in a straightforward way with populist sentiment.
“Salt of the Earth,” a song originally built on the tension between its populist
chorus (“let’s drink a drink/to the salt of the earth”) and the jaundiced view of the
crowd expressed in the bridge (“when I see the faceless crowd/…they don’t look
real to me/oh don’t they look so strange”) is rewritten to serve as the upbeat and
uncomplicated close to the program; Jagger changes the distanced “they” to a less
confrontational “we.” John Lennon’s turn in the program also suggests the extent
to which both he and the Stones would go to prioritize political commitments over
aesthetics.19 The only Beatles track Lennon saw fit to record on the program was
“Yer Blues,” a choice that Macdonald attributes to the value that Lennon set on the
song’s confessional, disillusioned lyric (243). However, it seems just as plausible
that the choice is primarily formal, and the selection politically motivated; as
Macdonald himself argues, Lennon, along with Jagger and Richards, were the only
18
Townshend’s remarks on Jagger salute the singer’s new found professionalism
and immense “powers of concentration” and focus, not to mention Jagger’s ability to turn
the role of professional musician into something like a religious vocation. Performing,
Townshend asserts, is “just what (Jagger) does, like Picasso paints.”
19
Lyrics to “Salt of the Earth,” Beggars Banquet (Decca, 1968).
British rock superstars who had “spotted the parallel between this new musical
proletarianism [of the blues] and the rise of the revolutionary Left” (250). Lennon’s
contributions to the Beatles’ White Album also offered blues-based rock as the
privileged symbolic form of the reintegration of art and progressive politics.
Lennon’s role in the program also reveals the new, central aim of the Rock
Circus: not the rejection of art in favor of revolutionary directness, but about
revolutionary directness as bourgeois artifice. The Rock and Roll Circus program
otherwise suggests the Stones’ renewed commitment to a larger than life
theatrical style for rock centered on technique. This is especially true of Jagger’s
performance. The live set by the Stones which ends the Circus program highlights
the singer, in part because Brian Jones is visibly out of sorts during the show,
but primarily because of Jagger’s dramatic transformation into the archetypal
rock front man. During “Sympathy for the Devil,” Jagger takes off his red shirt
to reveal a new “Baphomet” tattoo, drawn specially for the occasion: suggesting
the band’s re-commitment to their project of transgression for its own sake, rather
than an attempt to bridge the distances between workers and students, or assert a
specific egalitarian ideal.20 It is difficult to recall now, but even as late as 1968, the
majority of rock bands merely stood still on the stage and played. The main event
on display in the Rock and Roll Circus program is the increasing professionalism
of the Stones’ live act, with Jagger taking an even larger role in the band as vocalist,
and showing a greater responsibility for making the band connect to an audience
regularly and with greater precision. Along with the destruction of instruments by
the Who at the end of their live shows, the Stones were one of the few rock bands
of the era that had created a distinct stage act for live performance (Jim Melly 75).
Jagger’s prominent role in the band represented an overall commitment of the
band to a theatrical live show that created an absolute distance between the Stones
and their audience at the same time as it established a format for rock spectacle.
Jagger seems to have been inspired during the making of Performance by fin-
de-siècle aesthetic notions of the shaman-artist, ideas with an elitist slant that would
seem directly opposed to the egalitarian politics that defined the contemporary
youth student movement. In particular, Jagger seems to have redefined rock vocal
singing as an activity that would somehow break with its previous sensible forms.
The rock singer would resemble a magus, whose performance would somehow
threaten the fabric of the received world; it would destabilize all meaning, political
meanings included.21 However, the Stones’ continued aesthetic allegiance to their
current-day rock revival necessarily tugged them in the opposite direction, toward
the populism implied in that collective musical trend.
20
Dalton notes that Jagger’s devil tattoo was a wash off (84).
21
My argument here on a fundamental tension between art and politics in terms of
signifying practice, with politics concerned with making a “meaningful spectacle” and
“aesthetic politics” seeking to “[transmit] meanings in the form of a rupture,” draws on
Jacques Ranciere; see The Politics of Aesthetics.
At the Stones’ first live show in two years, a free concert at Hyde Park in memory
of Brian Jones, the group shared the bill with several bands, chief among them
Blind Faith, another of Eric Clapton’s post-Cream attempts to produce simpler,
more relaxed rock music in the recent style of Dylan and the Band. The Stones
also chose to integrate the core group with African and West Indian musicians for
an extended session at the end of their set. The augmented Stones demonstrated
that hard rock had reached another milestone; no longer simply about sourcing
older black music, but an ongoing, transatlantic musical collaboration. At the time,
Richard Neville, publisher of the celebrated British Underground magazine OZ
interpreted the performance, as “street fighting man meets black power” (114)
with Rocky Dijon, whom Neville describes “in full jungle regalia, war-painted
and performing religiously to camera,” and a percussion ensemble of West Indian
musicians including Ginger Johnson, playing along with the Stones on a free-form
percussion orchestra version of “Sympathy for the Devil”. Yet while the decision to
play with Dijon and others offers itself to be read as a gesture of political solidarity,
it seems primarily motivated by the aesthetic politics of rock revivalism central to
both Beggars Banquet and the Rock and Roll Circus film: a politicization of art
inscribed within musical form. Arguably, these two “texts” developed according
to a primarily aesthetic logic, largely autonomous of the contemporaneous activist
politics of the Left.
The Stones managed to live out their bohemian dream of art for art’s sake in
the 60s, at the same moment that a prolonged post-War economic boom made the
bohemian lifestyle accessible to masses of young people throughout the US and
Europe.22 In the Stones’ case, the result was an unprecedented mutuality between
“progressive” trends in music, politics, and mass musical taste. Robert Christgau
neatly summarizes the exceptional place of the Stones in popular culture: “[The
Stones] lived the life of art, their art got better all the time, and, as it got better,
remarkably enough, it reached more people” (RS 246). The Rock and Roll Circus
film captures a precise moment in the artistic evolution of the band: but the band’s
subsequent 1969 tour of America suggests an unprecedented, and in retrospect
short-lived, synergy between the Stones’ specific mode of aesthetic politics and a
broader revolutionary politics.
The band’s 1969 tour will forever be associated with the death and mayhem
that occurred at their last US show, a free festival at Altamont Speedway. However,
22
Jagger’s remarks in the Peter Whitehead film, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London,
also from 1968, suggest he was keenly aware of the relation between student radicalism and
post-War surplus: “this isn’t the first generation to have questioned authority, but it is one
of the first generations which hadn’t had to worry about material things…if you’re hungry,
you don’t have time to worry over morals.” For this reason, he also predicts that since
“people will have less and less work to do as time goes on…it’s already happened with
machines,” that social unrest was more or less assured: “when you only work four hours a
day, [people] will have to do something else, … not swimming or going to movies because
you get bored” with leisure “very quickly.”
as Amy Taubin comments, the Maysles’ Brothers documentary that chronicled the
last ten days of the tour, Gimme Shelter, presented the group as “workaholics and
perfectionists” (DVD). True to their original identity as blues “specialists” with
an intellectual apprehension of musical style, the Stones constructed their set lists
for American audiences with a clear pedagogic intent. As Stanley Booth, writer-
in-residence for that tour observed, “the Rolling Stones’ audiences in 1969 did not
necessarily worship at that altar. But by stopping in midshow and turning off the
electricity—as they did on that tour—to sing a song by Fred McDowell and another
by Robert Johnson, the Stones showed where their hearts were” (Criterion).
Moreover, the counterculture audience that came to the shows on this tour
showed a new purpose about their interaction with the Stones’ music. It was not
only the Stones who worked: the mostly youth audience seemed to strive be more
than mere on-lookers. As Booth also observes, “The tour had been different from
any of their previous ones. Up until then, their performances in the U.S. had been
brief, incandescent explosions of desecration, attended almost exclusively by
shrieking adolescent girls. On the 1969 tour, they played longer sets than they had
since playing English clubs, and the American fans—people their own age, many
of them—listened” (Criterion). “1969 was the first time that an audience listened,”
recalls Bill Wyman: and also the first time audiences spent at least part of the time
sitting down (Ya-Ya’s). Lester Bangs’ review of the subsequent live record of the
Stones’ shows at Madison Square Garden expresses the new perspective of the
serious-minded rock listener to the tour, proposing that the Stones’ live performance
are not merely superior to the band’s studio recordings, but represent the summit,
an avant-garde moment, of rock (Liner note Ya-Yas). Bangs also emphasizes the
important collaborative effort of audiences in the larger art event, singling out
“Midnight Rambler” not only for Jagger’s “inchoate non-verbal vocalisms” in the
middle section, but the “audience roaring back” in response (Ya-Ya’s).
So: it is not a question of the post-68 Stones either engaging new ideas
regarding the politics of rock music, or abandoning previously held political
commitments. It is a more a matter of equilibrium, a precarious balance that
arose at a precise historical moment. Keith Richard remarked to Stanley Booth
during the 1969 tour that the Stones’ concert audience in America had missed the
point when they claimed the band as political leaders: “politics is what we were
trying to get away from in the first place” (True 269). However, the Stones had
been raising the question of rock music’s politics by their own musical evolution
throughout the decade. Despite appearances of an entente between politics and
art, the 1969 tour indicates that for a moment, the Stones and their audience were
part of a broad aesthetic consensus, not an essentially political one. Band and
audience were in “agreement” that rock music had evolved into a more expressive
art than had been hitherto been realized. For a brief time, the individualizing, anti-
collective art semiotic that Jagger had adapted for his persona from his experience
in Performance was irrelevant: the very idea of rock art was sufficient to suggest
that a new sort of communal consciousness had evolved.
The Rock and Roll Circus program was never aired, but the evolution of Jagger
the singer into Jagger the front man that was a highlight of the film would become
the main event on display during the Stones’ 1969 American tour. I have argued
that Jagger moved further away from the activist ideal he seemed to embrace in
early 1968 in the course of the year: but the fact remained that most of the Stones’
audience, in Britain and America, had yet to recognize this intellectual shift.23
Largely on the strength of “Street Fighting Man,” most of the Stones’ audience still
associated the band with radical political action, and underground groups in most
American cities used the Stones’ concert as an opportunity to organize and make
a showing for new recruits.24 Whether the changes in Jagger’s politics, it would
seem that his understanding of the relation between rock music and politics had
changed, which is not the same, however, as saying that Jagger was depoliticized
by 1968. In many important respects, Jagger seems ahead of the curve in realizing
that rock groups cannot themselves forge the link between music and politics,
because audiences do this, and according to constraints that performers cannot
control.25 It could even be argued the singer’s shift in attitude better apprehends
rock’s relation to politics in its moment.
Along with the focus on a more perfect musicianship in rock music, the
transformation of the rock show into structured license indicates the growing
“professionalization of rock,” which means a new set of work rules for rock stars.
This is not the same as claiming that British rock became bourgeois: British rock
was never not bourgeois, in that those who bought the music remained separate
from those who control and profit from its distribution. However, the new
professionalism of rock as evident in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,
also became a template for the stadium rock show, transforming rock into a large-
scale corporate enterprise.
It is also important to recall that the Stones alighted on the Rock and Roll Circus
project at a time when other British artist-activists were also looking for ways to
radicalize theater and performance art, and through the similar method of grafting
earlier British popular culture, especially working class entertainment, onto more
up-to-date artistic endeavors. The contemporaneous efforts of performance artist
Bruce Lacey, Jeff Nuttall, and the neo-vaudeville duo the Alberts all endeavored
23
Keith Richards’ response to Stanley Booth’s remark about young Americans who
made a clenched fist by way of answering Jagger’s onstage waves to the crowd: “I don’t
think they understand what we’re trying to do” or “what Mick’s talking about, like on
“Street Fighting Man.’ We’re not saying we want to be in the streets, but we’re a rock and
roll band, just the reverse” (269).
24
Neil Nehring notes that the Stones’ Madison Square Garden show was met by the
Mad Dogs group, who unfurled a National Liberation flag at the concert; other Stones’
shows on the tour were heralded by the Weathermen.
25
Jagger in the IT interview: “How can you understand a worldwide audience of God
knows how many millions? How can you expect a pop singer to analyze his audience or his
effect on anything?”
to reinvigorate poetry and painting by revamping the physical antics of the clown
or music hall comic. Nuttall’s concept of a revolutionary poetry that make us more
conscious of our physicality and short-circuit attempts to discipline and regulate
the body was largely inspired by the physical humor of music hall comic and
later Manchester movie star, Frank Randle; Nuttall hoped to recreate the ethos
of audience participation and sensory involvement fostered by older commercial
entertainments like music hall, the circus and Blackpool seaside amusement, with
the various happenings he staged in the mid 60s.26 Especially crucial for Nuttall
was how such forms privileged physical humor over cerebral, linguistic formality,
as well as how old time, ribald comedy appeared to reflect an organic relation
between working-class comedians and audiences, how music hall and circus
seemed part of the “identificatory style of the working class” (59).27
Nuttall and the Alberts were also social activists, involved in the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament from its inception, as well as other progressive causes. They
recognized the roots of music hall in interactive performance and community song
and believed it represented an aesthetic that countered bourgeois notions of art as
set apart from social being. They were also the latest in a long line of bourgeois
intellectuals interested in the aesthetics of working class entertainment, beginning
with Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm and persisting into the 20th century
with T.S. Eliot and George Orwell. The bourgeois avant-garde had long regarded
music hall as a quintessentially “English” practice that somehow stood apart
from commercial mass entertainments of the time. In contrast with these efforts
by 60’s avant-garde writers and artists to reformat the music hall experience for
contemporary audiences, the Stones’ rock circus project was both less sentimental
toward the past, and for that very reason, more radical. To Jagger’s credit, he came
to recognize something the poets and painters of the contemporary avant-garde
overlooked: that the gap separating artists from audiences had always been there,
and would never be counter-acted by putting the show in a tent—that representing
working class community would not suffice to create it.
The Rock and Roll Circus program suggests there is a specific historical
referent behind the concept of a rock and roll circus: the post WWII working
class community, and that the image of a rock circus was intended to resolve the
conflict between rock music as consumer culture versus rock as working-class
entertainment. Situating the program historically helps explain why the Stones’
intended realignment of rock music with working class politics was fated to fail.
British rock and the counterculture arrived on the scene at the same time, but the
aesthetic evolution of rock music moved at a different pace from the more gradual
26
See Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968) for more on
Nutall’s notion of the art happening.
27
The quote is taken from Nuttall’s sympathetic and insightful biography of music
hall star Frank Randle; the book makes a convincing argument that Northern film comedy
and Mancunian music hall were unlike other mass culture industries on account of their
unique dynamic.
evolution of the British counterculture and activist ideology. Compare also the
evolution of rock music into a genre with artistic pretensions and touchstones in
the three-year span from 1965 to 1968 with the twenty-year span of development
from swing to bebop to modal to free jazz, between 1945 and 1965.
The Rock and Roll Circus television program suggests that rock’s rapid
evolution into an art form partly explains the divergence of British rock and
radical politics at the close of the 60s. I have also attempted here to describe a
different kind of change, besides the transformation of rock from working class
music into bourgeois art. I have argued that rock performers like the Stones arrive
by the end of the decade at an understanding of rock music’s social effects which
distinguished that role from prior performance forms with which rock could be
associated, while at the same time, a political movement come into its own as both
“mature” and internally fractured. These phenomena are related in various ways,
but it would be a mistake to think that one causes the other. If this is right, the Rock
and Roll Circus project does not explain how rock and politics came to diverge
after 1968, but rather shows what makes the two different and lets us think about
what makes moments of convergence possible in the first place—certainly not the
commitment of the artists, their class or origins or philosophy, but a conjunction
between those things and other assemblages constitutive of social movements. In
that particular history, the Stones’ 1968 moment plays a crucial role.
Chapter 4
The Kinks Are the Village Green
Preservation Society and the Making of the
Rock Auteur
I have argued elsewhere in the book that the history of music-hall entertainment
also played a crucial role in British rock and the evolution of its specific aesthetic
in the 1960s and 70s, especially in those cases, and such cases predominate, where
rock groups had clear art aspirations. The music hall represented many things to
British rock bands: a sonic resource, a mode of music characterized by artifice
and theatricality, and a way to bind a national listening audience by telegraphing
Englishness. The post-WWII generation that eagerly embraced American music
and cinema, and increasingly the American consumer ethos, was especially eager
to redefine what Englishness meant in a post-imperial age. Sampling music-hall
sounds gave British rock bands a symbolic means to engage a broader national
history, and re-define their relation to that history.
Any study of music hall and British rock has to come to grips with the Kinks;
with the possible exception of the Beatles, the band was the one that most often
alluded to earlier music hall, often incorporating vocal styling, lyrical themes, and
its choppy rhythms in their own version of rock music. The record that Kinks fans
and rock critics tend to single out as their most important, and most consistent,
album, The Village Green Preservation Society (1968), not only draws on music-
hall styles, but champions, in its lyrics, antique English culture and quintessentially
English characters who live on the margins of modern life.
With this record, designated as The VGPS from here on in this chapter,
Ray Davies, the Kinks’ chief songwriter, further refines the pose of modernist
irony that almost immediately set his writing and his band apart from most of their
British Invasion peers. On the surface, the lyrical themes of the album suggest
Davies’ and the band’s full-bore retreat into nostalgia, apparently provoked by the
emerging link between rock music and a revolutionary student youth movement.
This appearance of the Kinks’ retreat from politics is not altogether misleading,
but as I argue here, it is finally too reductive. Despite the appearances of musical
and conceptual difference that would set The VGPS apart from the landmark
recordings made by the Beatles and the Stones in 1968, the Kinks’ album represents
an equally ambitious attempt to revise broader narratives about English national
identity and history.
More specifically, The VGPS represents rock music as a version of modernist
culture: a music that breaks with tradition and that rejects the past. I examine in
this chapter the various ways that Davies and the Kinks signify their own rejection
of a modernist conception of British rock, as a mode of music that breaks with
the authority of the past. But of course, the Kinks are a rock band: which means
that their critique of rock as a mode of cultural modernization comes from within
the genre; and takes the form of an auto-critique, that is far from disinterested.
Significantly for this study, The VGPS poses a characteristically modernist
question, aimed at modernist culture itself, instead of the more conventional target,
traditional culture.
Tim Armstrong sharply defines the modernist problematic which resulted from
perhaps the central claim made in its literature, that the past has become a burden,
or worse, a dead thing. When the modernist critique of tradition hardened into
an ideology, modernist writers inevitably faced the problem of “how long is it
before the ‘new’ is itself rejected?…If a generational model is applicable, must
modernists be attacked in their turn?” (10). Ray Davies would have been conscious
of this issues as part of his art school background; with The VGPS, Davies brought
these concerns into British rock, and I argue, subtly transforming the work rules
for music in the genre.
The dominant music style of the album is a mash-up of rock with the jaunty
rhythm, catchy sing-along-chorus that characterized music-hall song. The implied
author of the record, I will argue, is not the Kinks, but Ray Davies the auteur,
exercising tighter control than ever over the group’s recorded sound. The VGPS
may seem obsessed with the past, but it is Davies’ eagerness to signify his distance
from the rock music of his moment that led to the group making music largely free
of the clichés of British hard rock and psychedelic music, as if anticipating the
taste of a future, post-rock audience.
I will argue here that we need to pay less attention to the content of the record,
whether to Davies’ nostalgia for besieged Englishness or his references to music
hall, in order to grasp the significance of the record/text. The unique theme of The
VGPS distracts us from the record’s chief meaning. This is not to claim that the
record’s themes are unimportant, and certainly not to deny Davies’ talent and interest
in the craft of songwriting. Yet the notion that rock could serve as a fit medium
for the auteur is an idea that Davies played an important role in constructing, in
large part through this very album. Along with a few representative figures in
British rock, Davies’ work with the Kinks provides a model of how the auteur
might function in a popular music genre. I will argue here that Davies’ auteur
project was part of a broader attempt to return rock music to an idealized mode
of production, distinct from the mass-market model associated with popular
music.

Jon Savage’s excellent The Kinks: The Official Biography and Andy Miller’s
comprehensive account of the Kinks in the studio, The Kinks Are the Village Green
Preservation Society, published in the Continuum 33 1/3 series, were essential resources
in writing this chapter. Nick Baxter-Moore’s and Michael Mooradian Lupro’s essay
contributions to a special 2006 issue of Popular Music and Society also helped shape my
the kinks are the village green preservation society 107
In my view, how The VGPS was made, its mode of production, also comprises
what Fredric Jameson calls the text’s “ultimate relation.” Situating the record within
a broader set of relations requires that we avoid “[reifying] the text,” and a primary
means to reify music as texts is to read the reality “designated by those figures,” in
this case the lyrical content of the record in this case, “as primary contents in their
own right” (279). Admittedly, the subsequent reputation of the record has made it
difficult to avoid reifying its content; the celebrated “Englishness” of the Kinks,
and the explicit music hall thematic of the record, as crucial as they are, distract us
from the record’s chief innovation: its specific construction of the rock auteur.
In this regard, the modernist irony that dominates the lyric writing on
The VGPS obscures more fundamental questions regarding musical form. Nor
does it do justice to the existential predicament the group faced in 1968. Despite
Davies’ considerable talent, there was no way to adequately represent the content
of his negative experience with his mass audience, or the record industry. When he
and the group tried to portray the band’s troubled history as professional musicians
in the Lola versus Powerman vs. the Money-go-round, Part One (1970), the
narrative would end up rivaling the title he gave it for lead-footed humor. The
crude treatment of its main story, a narrative of a hapless pop group’s rise and fall
and their Manichean struggle against the numerous, greedy uber-capitalists in the
record industry, scarcely does justice to the Kinks’ own experience of estrangement
and alienation. The frustrations that Davies faced as he tried to make a career in the
music business culminated in a nervous breakdown and a near successful suicide
attempt. Davies’ particular way of striking back at the new rock industry takes
the form of ironic observations of contemporary outsiders living on the margins
of English life, a stylistic choice which represses the material circumstances and
work struggles behind making the record.
A brief comparison of the Kinks and the Beatles, a band with which the
Kinks start out on almost equal footing, illuminates the predicament the Kinks
had arrived at by 1968. By the mid 60s, the Beatles had come to exert greater
control over their careers as studio musicians, more or less turning EMI Studio 2
into their own private laboratory, and had successfully turned the labor-intensive
studio process into a highly aestheticized practice. That the Beatles recorded their
music in record studios like Abbey Road reflected rock music’s new status as a
large-scale capitalist investment; at the same time, the new work situation fostered
artistic risk-taking and enhanced the rock musician’s artistic autonomy. Like the
Kinks, the Beatles were contractually obligated to write songs, in order to release
records; but unlike the Kinks, the Beatles were fortunate enough to transform their
labor into a work mode that harkened back to the much older notion of vocation,
or musical “calling.” The studio was more than a place of refuge for the Beatles,
recently retired from the largely traumatic work experience of global touring: more
like a creative Never-Never land. The band had begun as apprentices to EMI’s
argument about the group’s relation to broader transformations in British culture during
the 1960s.
George Martin, their studio manager: but they were now giving orders to Martin,
and willfully going over the budget set by their record label. Studio recording had
become a participatory event, a collaborative mode of creative expression.
By the time the Kinks made The VGPS, rehearsing and recording songs did offer
a refuge from the frustrations of playing on a “package tour,” with more successful
pop bands. Yet the Kinks were recording songs without any encouragement from
the record company, or expectation that their work would be released. By 1966, the
band had mostly lost its transatlantic audience, while the Beatles had consolidated
theirs. Record sales had dropped significantly in Britain as well. Like many bands
of the era, the Kinks had become victims of a standard music industry practice,
of music publishers investing profits from sales into other companies as a tax
dodge, rather than pay songwriters up front. Legal wrangles over publishing rights
effectively kept Ray Davies from any royalties for early hit singles like “Till the
End of the Day” (Savage 63). At a time when a pop group like the Beatles engaged
pop music history from a position of equals, the Kinks were sinking to the bottom
of the heap. They had spent over a year recording songs in a low-rent studio, unclear
when their label, Pye Records, would release these tapes, and in what form.
The Beatles’ success as recording artists permitted them to take greater risks,
and underwrote their considerable artistic ambitions. In contrast, the Kinks’
faltering career also entailed the loss of artistic autonomy. The VGPS, the Kinks’
first concept album that would extensively treat the topic of English tradition
threatened by modernity, has come to represent the essence of what Davies and
his band was about. Yet not only does the current consensus judgment about the
record reify the record’s content, it also romanticizes Davies’ individual agency
in regard to the music he made. In particular, the Kinks’ American audience has
come to regard the self-reflective nature of the songs on The VGPS as expressing
Davies’ and the group’s ambition to become “archivists of some version of
English culture,” an idea supported by the brace of concept records scrutinizing
contemporary English life the group made in the late 60s and early 70s: Arthur
(1969), Muswell Hillbillies (1971) and Preservation, Acts 1 and 2 (1973).
Davies’ response to the demands made on him by his record label was to attempt
to create a more organic and individually satisfying mode of writing and recording
rock music. In the process, he rearticulated the meaning of rock music, away from
a group activity to the expression of an exceptional individual. The implied author
of The VGPS is the rock auteur. The supreme irony in this case is that Davies’
fundamentally conservative fantasy constituted a radical departure within the field
of rock music, transposing the image of the singular genius, common to post-
Romantic theorizing about great painting and literature, into popular culture.

The quote is from Nick Baxter-Moore’s extensive treatment of the Kinks’ Englishness
over the course of their career and in response to changes in British society, 145.

The notion of the rock auteur is of course anticipated by Truffaut/Bazin/Cahiers
in film criticism. In rock and the French new wave, the concept bridges the gap between
aesthetic theory and art practice. More specifically, the link between the rock auteur and
Also, as I will elaborate, the rock auteur as pioneered by Davies and select others,
is a savvy musical manager, distinguished by their eclecticism, their mastery of
many kinds of music. The rock auteur transcends the medium on account of their
superior taste. One becomes an auteur not by performing excellent feats within a
single medium, but by producing new hybrids of rock music with other, usually
long-established, music forms. As I will also make clear, the rock auteur was by no
means Davies’ sole invention, but implied in the work of a few other contemporary
rock artists, usually in response to similar exploitive labor conditions.
Like many of those who went to art college and later formed rock bands,
Davies’ approach to American rock was mediated by the categories of British
culture. At the risk of generalizing, Ian McDonald’s assertion that English rock
audiences have associated the music with “artifice and aesthetic adventure,” and
to “irony and bleakness,” rings true in Davies’ case (12). As John Baxendale notes,
it had been possible since the 1920s for intellectuals to value pop music provided
it expressed “qualities which went against the flow of modern cultural change”
(149). As an art-school student, Davies was a representative intellectual working
in a commercial music field: which meant he had a discriminating view of popular
culture. Early on, he seized on the notion that rock music could claim art status
as an expression of individual creativity in spite of being popular; as Baxendale
elaborates, the intellectual climate in post-WWII Britain was not characterized by
a wholesale reject of the popular, but the attempt to differentiate between “good”
and “bad” popular culture, usually referencing notions of authenticity, or less
frequently, technical virtuosity (149). The VGPS is essentially Davies’ manifesto
for the generative power of the rock auteur. It permits him to draw a distinct line
between art and entertainment within the medium, without the need to recourse
to the more conventional alibi of musical authenticity. The credibility of the rock
auteur pioneered by Davies is not based on the singer/songwriter’s authenticity,
but their talent for artful self-expression.
Finding the status quo of his dealings with the music industry intolerable,
Davies takes refuge in the fantasy role of the rock auteur. The fantasy was a
response to a work crisis with existential dimensions; it helped resolve Davies’ and
the Kinks’ particular career crisis, allowing Davies to assert his musical integrity
while also maintaining the status quo in regard to the record industry.
While The VGPS offers itself to be read as a statement on Englishness,
it is chiefly distinguished by various musical and formal strategies meant to
suggest Davies’ symbolic severance from the rock music of the moment, and his
eclectic taste is prefigured by the Cahiers’ idiosyncratic canon of movie auteurs like Howard
Hawks, Nicholas Ray, and Samuel Fuller. I owe the observation to Jackie Bitsis.

Simon Frith’s survey of the reception of jazz by middle-class critics in 20th-century
Britain supports Baxendale’s argument that these intellectuals were more interested in
discriminating between various kinds of popular music than with the wholesale rejection
of commercial music; see Frith, “Playing with Real Feeling—Jazz and Suburbia,” in Music
for Pleasure, 45-67.
revolt against a record industry that was about to fling them into the ash-heap.
Despite this, Davies anticipated the future: the record embodies what became an
emerging mode of music-making within rock, alternative to the dominant fads of
studio-based psychedelic or the long improvised, amplified improvisation that
came to dominate concert shows by groups like Cream or the Who. Partly by
necessity, Ray Davies and the Kinks rejected the current conventions of record
making, and the collaboration of hippie ideals with high commerce that quickly
became the dominant record industry mode in the late 60s. The longevity of
The VGPS is enmeshed with the group’s conscious negation of the hippie rock
hegemony. Along with the modernist irony that Davies turns on the British past,
the record also channels a utopian current, pregnant with a possible future that
could arise after the current run of British rock had run its course.
In contrast with the loud, amplified sound characteristic of British blues-rock
of the day, acoustic guitars occupy much the same place in the mix as the electric
instruments on The VGPS. Moreover, when the electric guitar can be heard,
it is usually played with a gentle touch, far removed from the heavy style that
guitarist Dave Davies pioneered in early Kinks songs. Keyboards are noticeable
in most songs, especially the mellotron, with its mechanically reproduced string
sound. Many songs feature simple, catchy major-key choruses that clearly seek to
reproduce the sing-a-long character of earlier music-hall song. The purposely dry
sound and narrow musical range of the record, a rejection of the crisp, compressed
studio sound of records by the Beatles or the Move also seems prophetic, looking
forward to the current day “lo-fi” recording pioneered by 90’s indie-rock bands
and still utilized in today’s “freak” folk music.
The VGPS makes clear, explicit links between British rock music and the earlier
music hall; for this reason, it merits alone inclusion, and perhaps special status among
the various rock texts analyzed in this study. However, there is another compelling
reason to reconsider this record at the current time. More perhaps than any single
record that I treated in this book, the Kinks’ album speaks to a contemporary
youth audience. Its nostalgia, carefully crafted character sketches, and mastery of
pop-song craft have warranted the album’s posthumous attention. The music too,
seems more intimate, and refreshingly free of bombast. Their 1968 record still
speaks to younger listeners, impatient with rock clichés. The VGPS is especially
esteemed in alternative media outlets like Pitchfork and Paste, who represent the
eclectic, even esoteric tastes, and the sophisticated, “knowing” sensibility of the
contemporary indie-rock community. The Kinks’ album idealizes regional culture,
championing the integrity of an earlier, more provincial brand of Englishness
against a modish cosmopolitanism, and the hip consumerism that emerged in
late-60’s rock culture. Davies’ rejection of the modish pop of his day seems to
anticipate the passionate regionalism of indie audiences, and the preference for
local culture over the increasingly bland monoculture of globalization. The Kinks’
music also seems the antithesis of both the psychedelic music newly fashionable
in the day, and even the aggressive, “classic” rock made by bands like the Who,
the Stones, and occasionally, the Beatles (“Helter Skelter”).
However, to grasp the existential content of The VGPS then, as well as its
significance now, we must first grasp how it represents a distinct mode of music
production, as well as the auteur concept that organizes the record. And to do this,
we must first recall some relevant details concerning the Kinks’ career up to and
including The VGPS.
The Kinks were a rock band, musicians working in a mass art form, and they
sought, and attained, success in conventional terms. Yet from the outset, Ray
Davies demonstrated an independent mind and sought to maintain his individual
autonomy as the group’s chief songwriter. Their first singles, “You Really Got
Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” big commercial hits, also represent
considerable innovations in pop music on account of the substantial violence,
lyrically and sonically, they enact on the conventions of the pop love song. Above
all, these records are distinguished by their blend of crude sentiment and the
distorted, trebly sound.
The Kinks also represented the general takeover of British rock by young
British males trained in art school. Initially high in aggression and noise, the
new pop music quickly turned experimental; in the case of the Kinks, this meant
chart hits that featured the disorienting noise of fashionable instruments like
the twelve-string Rickenbacker or the sitar, and incorporating feedback noise
into song structures. The group is credited with making some key innovations
within the field of rock: introducing the sitar in “Fancy” and drones reflecting
Indian musical style in “See My Friends,” both songs predating similar
experiments by the Beatles. As Jon Savage observes, Davies soon went even
further than most British rock groups, “breaking new ground with his social
observation” (57).
While most rock groups seem to have rejected the central program of the
British folk revival of the 1950s, pioneered by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger,
the Kinks tried to incorporate aspects of folk music in their rock. MacColl, Seeger,
and A.L. Lloyd, like Cecil Sharp at the turn of the century, sought to preserve
an older tradition of folk music, specific to the British Isles. These singers had
quite distinct criteria of what counted as authentic folk music: songs needed to
treat workers’ lives with realistic detail; politically themed songs had to express
a consistent working-class perspective. By largely rejecting a larger national
tradition of folk song, rock songwriters mostly avoided social commentary, or
narrative accounts of the English everyday. However, Ray Davies’ songs constitute
an exception; unlike most rock songs of the day, “A Well-Respected Man” and
“Dedicated Follower of Fashion” represent “the first post-rock and roll songs to
concern themselves with the details of English life” (Laing qtd. in Baxter-Moore
163). The prominent role of the acoustic guitar in “A Well-Respected Man” seems
an explicit attempt to evoke British folk music; the lyrics provide a meticulous
inventory of contemporary London life that suggests a folk/rock hybrid.
Yet arguably the Kinks’ chief difference from other British rock groups,
and the principal threat that the band posed to the status quo, was their camp
image. Their wardrobe and appearance—long hair, frilly shirts, straw boaters,
and Regency Dandy costume—put their masculinity in question, more so than

the collarless garb worn by the Beatles, or the suits-and-ties worn by the Rolling
Stones. Moreover, Davies was frank about the presence of queerness in English
culture. The Kinks’ 1965 single, “See My Friends,” took great risks, with a lyric
that pointed out the continuity between male friendship and homosexual desire. In
case its subtleties were lost on listeners, Davies explicitly claimed the song was
“about homosexuality” in interviews with the British music press (Savage 60).
The androgynous image of the Kinks may have been a mere stylistic preference,
but it posed real risks of alienating the mass audience that any pop group sought
after, a point that Davies acknowledges in retrospect in his quirky autobiography
X-Ray (1994). With a bit of creative license, he suggests that the American
Federation of Musicians ban in 1966 which kept the group from touring the US
for three years, a lifetime in the pop music industry, was payback for the band’s
camping on stage on American TV: “We conned the buggers…(the cameras) cut
to the Kinks as rehearsed to discover me and Avory dancing cheek-to-cheek. The
producer was outraged. I guess it was the first time they had ever seen guys acting
like queers on American television” (219).
The Kinks were among the first rock bands to write and record songs that
questioned the conventional, typically aggressive, heterosexuality that characterized
even the most notorious boy groups of the British invasion. Fans and critics insist
on the quietly subversive effect of Davies and the band’s turn to Englishness in The
VGPS: but its worth noting that the band’s new project could not accommodate
Davies’ previous radical androgyny. Subversive views of gender roles are generally
suppressed in The VGPS, with songs treating a mostly clean cut, familial, and
socially conformist set of characters, with the possible exception of the cliché
rebels celebrated in “Johnny Thunder” and “Wicked Annabella.” Davies seems to
lose all interest in the dissident aspects of gender performance in 1968, perhaps
reflecting his perception that, by this time, gender bending was itself complicit
with the new, hippie-derived notions of sexual liberation that Davies seemed to
dismiss as pseudo-liberation. Whatever the reason, the Kinks would abandon
camp poses until their classic hit single, “Lola” (1970). It is worth recalling that
in the context of that concept record’s storyline that “Lola” is not only a song but
a vital part of the narrative: it represents the archetypal hit single happened on
by a hapless rock band seeking success, chronicled on the album itself. In highly
conceptual context, “Lola” not only reintroduces but complicates the notion of
gender-bending through its wry acknowledgment that sexual ambiguity can now
literally be sold to a mass audience. In other words, the formerly taboo subject of

Richard Neville’s Play Power, a key participant-observer account of 60’s counter-
culture, suggests a possible context for reading the “Lola” single as an ironic comment on
the idea that coming out as a gay man was trendy, rather than subversive; Neville argues
that the “surfacing of male homosexuality” in Britain circa 1969 “was being marketed
everywhere like a new brand of petrol” (91).
camp, like the psychedelic rock Davies would distance himself from, had assumed
the commodity form, and was now aimed at a privileged class of consumers.
The VGPS was released at the end of 1968; arguably, our retrospective view of
that year as the last revolutionary period in European history, has contributed to
the notion that Davies’ nostalgia was politically motivated. 1968 was, of course,
a uniquely turbulent year in British history. It was the first year of an economic
downturn that would spiral into a crisis in the 70s; the Labour government
responded by launching the “I’m Backing Britain” initiative, encouraging Britons
to buy their goods from local manufacturers. Right-wing racism received national
attention when Conservative MP Enoch Powell proclaimed an imminent race
war in Britain unless the country’s African and West Indian immigrants were
repatriated. At the same time, the mass youth protest in Grosvenor Square in
March revealed a schism in regard to government support of the US war effort in
Vietnam. All the current issues of British politics reinforced the perception that
the nation-state itself was in crisis. Read against this specific political context,
key narrative themes of The VGPS, like Davies’ reverence for the countryside and
rural community, as well as his ironic championing of traditional values, seemed
to provide an explicit political manifesto.
Yet at the same time Davies was writing the songs for his concept album, he
was also chief music writer for the 1968 BBC television program, At the Eleventh
Hour. Only one of the songs that Davies wrote for the show was recorded by
the Kinks, “Did You See His Name”: but he wrote nearly 15 songs for the show.
They were sung by jazz vocalist Jeannie Lamb, and backed by a small orchestra.
At the Eleventh Hour was a late night show on BBC1, satirizing politics and
news events of the day, in the style pioneered by David Frost’s BBC broadcast,
That Was the Week That Was (1962-1964). Davies’ songs for the program reflect
the same ambiguous attitude to politics, especially revolutionary politics, expressed
in other key British rock songs of the year, like Lennon’s “Revolution” and
Jagger/Richards’ “Street Fighting Man.”
Davies’ time writing for At the Eleventh Hour marks a period of increased
involvement with contemporary theater, but primarily with British television.
In 1969, the Kinks would record and release Arthur, subtitled “The Decline and
Fall of the British Empire”; it was meant to serve as the musical score for an
one-hour TV drama on which Davies had collaborated with playwright Julian
Mitchell. Granada TV pulled out of the project, but Davies and the Kinks would
later return to the medium with Starmaker (1973), an ambitious TV musical about
the paradoxes of pop stardom, also filmed for Granada.
That Davies maintained interest in writing music for television given the
general indifference of the BBC for airing pop music programs throughout the
60s, and given the difficulties of working with TV studio crews more interested
in getting the visuals right than the sound mix, is significant. It reminds us that
Davies, with his art school background and art aspirations, shared a specific
classed perspective on politics of the university-educated elite that were becoming
the new establishment in British TV, especially TV comedy, in the late 1960s.
The chief writers associated with the new British satire were largely Cambridge
University graduates: Frost, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, etc. TV
programs like At the Eleventh Hour followed the lead of the Cambridge theatrical
group, Beyond the Fringe, almost of whose key players became writers and actors
in the new satirical comedy that became the new trend in BBC TV at the very end
of the 60s.
The new satire was irreverent to authority in general, and anti-Establishment;
however, the main thrust of its political critique of the British system is that there
was no longer any substantial difference between Labour and Conservatives.
In this respect, the new satire chiefly represented the view of a prominent but
disaffected segment of middle-class professionals, increasingly alienated from
politics. “We’re Backing Britain” is the title of one of the songs Davies wrote for
Eleventh Hour; we don’t have any record of the song or the TV program. But it
is not hard to imagine that the song, which referenced the new Labour initiative
to promote national industry, drew attention to the irony of socialists promoting
consumerism. Such irony would be in keeping with the post-partisan politics of
the new “Fringe” Satire.
Davies’ new involvement with TV would seem to contradict the notion that
The VGPS is the product of a politicized rock songwriter. It is more likely that Davies
reached the not-so-radical conclusion of “Fringe” Satire that professional politics
had lost sight of its core values, and that social change would come from other
sources, if at all. That Davies’ interest in working for the BBC would outlast both
At the Eleventh Hour and The VGPS suggests a comfort level with the media elite
in sharp contrast with most rock musicians of the period; it indicates, I would argue,
a close fit between Davies’ world-view and those of the middle-class professionals
who comprised the new TV bosses. A tighter bond linked Davies with the new
satire perhaps, than with his rock group peers. Davies’ concurrent work with TV
also seems to indicate the core liberalism, humanistic but apolitical, that lies at
the of The VGPS, unmoved by the more radical political currents that emerged in
1968. The record’s political content seems of a piece with the fashionable liberal
dissent of a growing segment of the London television and record industry elite,
and which struck a common chord in the TV viewing audience, to judge by the
immense popular success of the new British comedy in the 70s.
As I have already suggested, the real significance of The VGPS resides not in
its content, but in Davies’ attempt to reconstitute an organic mode of song writing
and recording in making the album. His scheme was a reaction to the group’s
dire predicament, and their growing powerlessness in the face of a domineering
record label. The band’s future as a commercial entity was in doubt. In Britain,
the Kinks had not had a top ten hit for nearly a year, an eternity in the short life

The view that all the major parties in British politics are irrelevant is at the core of
Peter Watkins’ more radical, aggressive satire, Privilege (1967), set in Britain in the near
future, ruled by a monolithic coalition government that comes into being “on account of the
complete lack of difference between the Conservative and Labour parties.”
span of pop groups, especially in the highly compressed 1960s. It had been even
longer, since the band had charted in the U.S. (“Sunny Afternoon,” 1966). Kinks’
records were increasingly difficult to find in the US; Doug Hinman, an American
fan of the group recalls, “For all intents and purposes the Kinks vanished here by
the beginning of 1967. I honestly can’t recall ever hearing a Kinks song on AM
radio from 67 to 69 or on FM until 69…You couldn’t find their 45s in the stores
after “Mr. Pleasant” (1966)…Most people assumed they’d broken up long ago”
(qtd. in Savage 111).
Interestingly given the Kinks’ later generally favored status among rock
critics, the British rock press had begun to turn against the band as well. “Autumn
Almanac,” the single the Kinks released since their 1966 record Something Else
by the Kinks was heard by Nick Jones in Melody Maker as a tired rehash of older
Kinks records: “Is it time Ray stopped writing about gray suburbanites going about
their fairly unemotional daily business?” (qtd. in Miller 15).
The VGPS, with various track listings, had three scheduled release dates in the
summer of 1968, but was held up by the Pye label until November that year. One
reason for the delay was a disagreement between the band and the record label
about which songs, and how many, could be included on a single record. Adding
insult to injury, while Pye and Davies fought over what to include on one album,
Pye refused to do for the group what they had done for Donovan, whose double
record box set, A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, was released by the label in
December of the previous year. Partly a response to Ray Davies’ own increasingly
fragile physical and mental health, the label also began promising sibling Kinks’
member and guitarist Dave Davies a solo career as a hedge against the increasingly
unpredictable elder brother. The VGPS hardly registered in the face of the late year
releases by the Beatles, the Stones, and Jimi Hendrix (Electric Ladyland).
The Kinks’ concert tour in Spring 1968 could only have added to the pressures
that Davies faced as a popular songwriter clinging to an art agenda. Pye had
booked the Kinks on a package tour of cinemas in the North of England, sharing
a stage with the older teen-beat group the Tremeloes, as well as the current youth
sensation The Herd (with Peter Frampton) (Savage 47). The Kinks’ position in
the rock hierarchy meant that live performance for the group entailed playing the
obligatory hits to screaming teenagers uninterested in the band, and indifferent to
most of the things that matter most to a band on tour: the sound mix in the theater,
the ensemble playing of the group, or general musical finesse. The Kinks’ live
concerts were a stark contrast to live shows by underground bands like the Pretty
Things or Pink Floyd, who played to attentive audiences at smaller, more intimate
venues like the UFO Club or the Roundhouse in London; it resembled more the
hysterical youth rally concerts satirized by Peter Watkins in Privilege. Despite the
aggravation with the record company, Davies’ experience writing and rehearsing
in a largely unsupervised environment would seem a positive safe haven compared
to the frustration of touring.
It is hardly surprising under these high-pressure circumstances that Davies
entertained escapist fantasies. Fantasy is at the core of the VGPS project.
Jon Savage claims the record sums up Davies’ long simmering “resentment at the
youth culture whose high wire he had walked for so long” (101). Davies’ own
account of the genesis of the record stresses how it quickly became more than a
set of songs, but a fantasy world that sustained its creator. “It all started off when
I wrote a song called ‘Village Green,’” Davies recalled. “It was my ideal place,
a protected place. It’s a fantasy world that I can retreat to” (qtd. in Savage 101).
Davies also emphasizes the personal character of the title track: “All the things in
the song are things I’d like to see preserved” (qtd. in Miller 48).
It is clear in retrospect that Davies sought to turn the work of writing and
recording into an escape from his and the Kinks’ career crisis as well. The tense
situation with the recording company meant that for a year, Davies had written
and recorded songs uncertain whether anything he and the band made would ever
be released. He developed a strategy that would turn the bleak situation to his
advantage, developing a specific work routine with the group for the album that
would allow him almost total control over every aspect of the group’s music. The
lack of interest by the record company in the day to day progress of the group
permitted him to take on the lion’s share of songwriting, arranging and producing,
for the first time. At a moment when it was still customary to think about pop
groups as a collective enterprise, Davies began to take on the more exalted role of
group auteur. In response to his growing alienation from the record industry, Ray
sought to reintegrate songwriting with an experience of community. The result
was ironic: a record that set Davies further apart from the band that he hoped to
reconstitute as his family.
Ray Davies wrote nearly all the songs for The VGPS record in the living room
of his white Georgian house in North London, just a few hundred yards away from
the semi-detached where he grew up with his brother Dave. Not surprisingly under
the circumstances, work came to be associated with specific images of the familial
past for both brothers. “Our neighborhood was like a village,” Ray Davies recalls,
“That part of London is still magical” (Miller 17). Dave Davies would comment:
“All the good stuff happened like that. The phone would ring and Ray would
say, ‘Dave, come around, I’ve got this idea.’ I’d get in the car, walk in the house,
Rasa (Ray’s wife) would make a cup of tea…You listen to ‘Sunny Afternoon’
(now) and you can see the light coming through the curtains in the morning, its
got that kind of magic to it because…[it] was like Ray’s front room” (Miller 19).
Rehearsing Kinks’ songs also became a family affair during the making of The
VGPS; drummer Mick Avory had a special practice drum kit made from foam pads
so as not to annoy the neighbors.
Family was also very much on Davies’ mind in this year, as he recalled in a
1969 interview with Jonathan Cott: “I think on The Village Green they were all
brothers and sisters. Nobody made love because it was all in the family. I don’t
think there’s a love song on it” (qtd. in Miller 18). In the same interview, Davies
hints at a specific link between family and music, admitting the considerable
influence of a music-loving sister, and especially his father, on the songwriter:
“Things that my father saw, the family knew. I never went to the music hall, or any
of that stuff. He went to see musical shows and used to go dancing…” (18). Davies
still refers to the 60’s Kinks as “another family to me” (19).
Unlike the neighborhood council celebrated in the title track of The VGPS,
Davies was not trying to preserve the past, but actively create a space for his own
artistic agency. His attempt to situate the practice of making music in a larger myth
about family leisure recalled an older world of autonomous artisans, working at
their craft. In this case, the family was extended beyond its organic bounds, to
include the other members of the band. Still, Davies’ relation to the Kinks differed
from other groups where one songwriter was mainly responsible for writing most
of the band’s material. A comparison between the Kinks and the Who, another
group with one chief songwriter, is instructive in this regard. Pete Townshend
had evolved a more democratic process of presenting his songs to his group: he
would record demos at home, while rehearsing and recording would take place in
the neutral ground of the recording studio. The other members of the Who were
not expected to replicate the playing on Townshend’s demos when it came time
to make the studio record. In contrast, Ray Davies would rarely make demos for
the band. The group rehearsed in the manner of family sing-a-longs with Davies’
clan, gathered round the piano in Ray’s front room while he led them through his
latest composition. But Davies often insisted the group rehearse songs without
knowing the lyrics, and repeat parts of a song by rote, without knowing the whole
song until the recording session. The Village Green idea came to Ray Davies
late in the project, but the group wasn’t let in on his concept until recording were
nearly complete.
Not surprisingly, Davies’ fantasy of the rock group as reconstituted family
did not appeal to everyone in the band. The recalcitrance of other band members
to the process, especially bassist Pete Quaife, highlights the ideological
character of Davies’ organic musical community, headed by the well-intentioned
songwriter-patriarch. Quaife became increasingly restless during the making of
The VGPS, leaving the group soon after its release. The conflict in part was due
to preexisting musical differences between Quaife and Davies. At a time when
bands like Cream were exploring free-form group improvisation, routine among
jazz players but still unique with rock, Ray Davies still wrote songs based on
rudimentary chords, and offered little space for instrumental interplay among
the band. Aside from Quaife’s frustration with his limited role in the band, his
fundamental quarrel is with Ray’s attempt to redefine how rock music was made:
as an individual project instead of as a collective practice.
The Kinks’ single, “She’s Got Everything,” recorded in Spring 1968, but not
never intended to be part of their album, seems with hindsight to represent a road
not taken, a snapshot of how the original group might have evolved where it not
for Davies’ growing tendency to exalt song craft over group performance. The
hard rock song is distinct from the less noisy, light songs included on The VGPS;
it also features an aggressive guitar, and an even more prominent rhythm section.
Most of all, it is perhaps the last time that a record by the original Kinks would,
with its mid-song tempo shift, highlight the dynamics of a rock ensemble.
Behind Davies’ dream of an ideal work situation lies a particular fantasy about
the family, understood as, in Fredric Jameson’s phrase, an “object of Utopian
longing” (145). The auteur role that Davies imagines for himself appears to be
distinctively modernist. As I elaborate, Davies’ songs on The VGPS embody a
new way of relating to rock music, highlighting his capacity to switch musical
idioms and thus avoid being categorized in a single genre. At core, Davies’ auteur
is eclectic, of a piece with his basic modernist outlook. Yet in other respects,
Davies’ fantasy auteur seeks to restore an older, almost feudal, notion of musical
community, more specifically, the unquestioned authority of the father that
characterized feudal order. Davies’ artistic triumph on The VGPS, then, cannot be
extricated from his attempt to exert greater control over his group, and the manner
in which they recorded their music.
***
The VGPS is replete with songs about looking back, and characters who long
to return to an earlier version of the national past. Yet under scrutiny, the music
on the record tells another story, and finally, a more significant one: about the
contradictions of the labor process that produced it. Although Davies was in a
rock band, on a major record label, with access to modern studio equipment, on
The VGPS, he attempted to recapture a mode of music-making more suited to a
pre-capitalist mode of production than the late-60’s moment.
The first three songs on The VGPS record introduce the record’s main themes:
“The Village Green Preservation Society” represents itself as a programmatic
statement of intent, proclaiming the band’s new project of “preserving” the old as
its passing. As Davies told Bob Dawbarn in Melody Maker, “somebody mentioned
to me that the Kinks do try to preserve things—we are all for that looking back
thing. I thought it would be a nice idea to try and sum it up in one song” (Miller 46).
Considered this way, the song seems a polemical counter-thrust to the message songs
put out by Davies’ more prominent peers, i.e., “Street Fighting Man.” However, as
I have already suggested, a good rule of thumb in regard to The VGPS is to try and
interpret the music and arrangement of these songs rather than the writer’s own
interpretation. As Andy Miller documents, the title track was hastily written, and
a relatively late addition to the record. Musically, the track is distinguished from
the other songs in the opening triumvirate by the more spontaneous playing of
the band, each musician responding to Mick Avory’s exuberant drumming in his
effort to push the song along; perhaps the speed with which the track was recorded
allowed the band more creative input in the performance than usual.
It is only with the second song on The VGPS, “Do You Remember Walter” that
we encounter the characteristic song type of the record. Here, unlike the title track,
the contributions of the group are pressed in the service of the vocal, especially the
lyric. The lyric, about a chance encounter with a lost friend, turns into a reflection
on what time does to human relationships. Once close friends, united in their desire
to escape social constraints, the reunion of singer and friend only discloses how far
the two have drifted apart. In Andy Miller’s reading, the upshot of the encounter is
that “Walter is bored by the singer’s reminiscing, while Davies scoffs at Walter’s
early bedtime and conformity” (53). The song slows down in order for the singer
to deliver the punch-line: “People often change but memories of people remain.”
The conversational lyric becomes a platform to display the singer’s major
insight, that he can always savor his memories. But even more important, the
music bed of the song has become a sonic monologue, with what Andy Miller
characterizes as a “single-minded arrangement,” where “every instrument
and production nuance has been made a slave to the lyric and the vocal” (54).
As Miller elaborates in regard to the record as a whole, every “arrangement,
performance, (and the overall) production” of The VGPS becomes “the servant
of the song” (59). “Do You Remember Walter,” then, is crucial thematically for a
record about the pleasures and pains that come from looking back: but even more
significant for what it suggests about the record’s mode of production. It highlights
the division of labor that constructs the song, as well as the new fetish nature of
the song, elevated above either musical performance, or the audio quality of the
recording. As I later suggest, the song as fetish will become part of the Kinks’
specific legacy to post-rock, where the conceptual songwriting of the auteur
represents a bulwark against more commercial music.
The hegemony of song over group then, constitutes the record’s most significant
musical feature. The next song on the record, “Picture Book,” presents another
legacy of the album for a later generation of indie-rock musicians; along with the
fetish nature of the song, there is now a corresponding fetish of the musical past.
“Picture Book” features lyrics directly inspired by Ray’s family life: of happy
memories of family outings to the British seaside, but also darker ones, with its
hint of the loss of Ray’s sister, Rosie, who died on the dance floor of the Lyceum
Ballroom after giving Ray his first guitar as a birthday present (cf. Miller 57).
Although the British music hall, or “variety,” is featured on the title track of the
record, part of the long list of endangered forms of Englishness defended by Ray’s
imaginary Preservation Society, music hall forms aren’t heard on the album until
“Picture Book.” As with the previous track, the music is interrupted at the end,
this time by the singer’s vaudevillian crooning, with assorted “yeah yeah yeahs,”
“na na nas,” and even a “Scooby Dooby Doo” (lifted from Sinatra’s 1966 hit,
“Strangers in the Night” (Miller 56). Bassist Quaife chiefly recalls the song as
providing Ray a pretext to force the band to multiple rehearsals in order to get the
song’s tricky tempo right, in his mind more evidence of Ray’s ideology that band
members must be sacrificed to the more urgent needs of the song. Ray’s vocal turn
in the song is one more indication of the distinctive musical feature of the record;
songs exist to showcase the singer, or the lyrics, never the group.
Like other Kinks’ songs from this specific period, such as “Autumn Almanac”
(1967) and the closing track of The VGPS, “People Take Pictures of Each Other,”
the sing-a-along chorus is the song’s central feature. Andy Miller rightly observes
that sing-a-longs are as much part of “family get-togethers as…the music hall
tradition” (19). In fact, the larger point of the song seems to be precisely that
family history and music hall are impossible for Davies to separate. And perhaps
not just for Davies: like many of his generation, a taste for rock music was laid
on top of an already established appreciation for early music, mostly learned from
contact with parents or older siblings. In the attempt to excavate family history,
Davies was bound to dig up the music hall.
The three songs that open The VGPS also set the precedent for the record
in that none of them utilize the special features of the modern recording studio.
They constitute bare-bones recording, without much sonic enhancement or much
multi-tracking. Again, the lack of studio effects can be attributed, but not fully
explained, by material circumstance: the low budget Pye allocated to the group,
and the not-very-well maintained Pye studios. Still, perhaps fancifully, Davies has
insisted in interviews that a bare-bones sound for the record was precisely what he
was aiming for. He also suggested that the record was meant to be an accessory of
a smaller community, rather than a mass audience: “I wanted a record that would
not necessarily get airplay but would be played for friends and at parties—just
play the record like playing a demo” (Miller 73). Davies’ intent in recording the
album seems to have been to produce a record for a larger public, although still
distinctly not mass in character: not a part, at any rate, of a mass media apparatus
like radio, or even the mid-size public of the club or disco.
The desire to somehow cordon off rock music listening from these other aggregate
uses insinuates another reason why music hall became central to Davies’ new
project. The form exemplifies what happens when the once-new popular is rejected
as part of the past. It is no surprise that the abject state of music-hall song keenly
interests Davies at this moment, in the midst of his own struggle with contemporary
culture. Identifying with music hall also provided him with a symbolic resource
that would help him distinguish Kinks’ music from the current trend of British
“hippie.” Improvisational blues-rock bands like Cream and Fleetwood Mac, even
the more experimental and free-form Pink Floyd, moved rapidly from cult status
among a small coterie to mass audience, with chart-topping singles on the pop
music charts. The hippie experience, rooted in marginal community and expressing
youth alienation from the status quo, was rapidly appropriated by an equally “hip”
entrepreneurial capitalism, with the result that rock music, even in its psychedelic
mode, swiftly became an accessory to the new hippie “lifestyle.”
With thirty years of hindsight, Davies concludes in X-Ray that “the sixties were
alike a carrot held up to youth to distract us so that we would not rebel against the
ruling classes… The countryside was being eroded and trees pulled up in order to
build motorways, factories were being closed, coal mines were being ear-marked
for the chop” (311). Yet the evidence of The VGPS suggests that Davies had
come early to equate the capitalist record industry, hippie idealism, and the new
psychedelic rock, concluding that all these forces were working together to a single
goal, of homogenizing and thus commercializing British rock. Davies appears to
have singled out the new psychedelic music as a prime example of the ambiguous
politics of rock; rather than providing an alternative to the musical status quo, it
helped foster a new traditionalism. Psychedelic music was the emerging musical
force at the same time that the Kinks stopping having hits. Consequently, it was
easy for Davies to associate the new music with the sort of coercive demands
made on him by his record company to write commercial hit singles once more.
For Davies, music hall referenced a specific family history, as it likely did for
many who grew up in Britain after WWII. But more important, as a rock musician
under pressure with his record company to be commercial, the antiquated music-
hall style presented a way for Davies to declare his musical autonomy in regard to
the psychedelic music now in vogue.
Music hall is given a specific function in The VGPS of signifying Davies’
and the group’s critical distance from the current moment of rock culture. In one
respect, Davies’ strong reaction against hippie, and its prevalent music form,
psychedelic rock, represents an insight attained by few of his contemporaries
in British rock: that there were whole worlds of otherness and difference not
encompassed by hippie individualism. Ironically, given the dominance of a
subtle, soft-rock sound on The VGPS, the darker, more disturbing outsider that
Davies imagined would soon emerge in a music closely related to the psychedelic
rock Davies maligned, in hard rock bands that came to prominence at the very
end of the decade such as Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull. Or perhaps it is not so
ironic, given that this Kinks’ album so fully imagines a sound and style opposed
to hippie culture.
Davies’ attempt to redefine rock music-making under the control of a
songwriter/auteur also allowed him to more freely incorporate non-rock music,
i.e., music-hall sound and its lyrical themes, within rock music itself. It also
represented a formal means of expressing Davies’ rejection of both “hippie”
ideology and the entire psychedelic rock brand. British psychedelic music was
obsessed with recapturing the joyful exuberance of a child’s perception of the
world (there is, some overlap between Davies’ obsessive interest in family and the
chief lyrical preoccupations of current psychedelic rock). Moreover, psychedelia
was not wholly ignorant of older music styles. At the start of the psychedelic
era, the English trad-jazz band, the New Vaudeville Band, scored a number
one hit in December 1966 with “Winchester Cathedral,” a song that layered
vaudeville crooning on top of a distinctive rock guitar figure. The psychedelic
music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and even Pink Floyd are replete with
musical nods to jazz improvisation or music hall. Sgt. Pepper and the Stones’
Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) utilize sound effects and found sound in
the fashion of the 40’s “novelty” records of Spike Jones and His City-Slickers.
The Stones’ sole foray into psychedelic music largely relies on sound-effects
to suggest the mind-altering quality of the music; for example, “Sing This All

Allan F. Moore’s study of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (1971) situates the record as a
specific response to the end of counterculture idealism in the UK, reflected in the lyrics
Tull’s chief songwriter Ian Anderson wrote for the group, expressing in the “title” character
the perspective of social outcasts far more alienated from the mainstream than the relatively
pacific “hippie.”
Together (See What Happens)” mixes comedy sound effects with a collective
jam, chiefly characterized by its jagged rhythm, suggesting the influence of the
trance music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka that Jagger, Richards, and
Brian Jones had come upon in their travels to Morocco, at the suggestion of poet-
painter Byron Gysin.
Above all, British psychedelic music utilized the sound of an amplified rock
combo, and featured extended instrumental musical passages that gave individual
instrumentalists room to shine. The contribution of a guitarist or keyboard player
can make a song, even when specific parts of the song are not especially memorable;
in this context, instrumental finesse and expressiveness trumps songwriting. In
some cases, a carefully selected studio effect (backward tape loops on the Beatles’
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” the vocal phasing on the Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park”)
can function as the central “hook” of the song. The ensemble playing of a band in
psychedelic music frequently overshadows the contributions of the lead vocalist,
as is often the case with the songs featured on Pink Floyd’s debut, The Piper at the
Gates of Dawn (1967).
The music made by the Kinks on The VGPS represents the antithesis of all this.
Studio and sound effects are largely absent, and rarely put to expressive purpose
(would the Beatles have been able to record a song like the Kinks’ “Animal
Farm” without adding animal noises onto the studio track?). Instrumental playing
provides some color to songs, but they never constitute a texture, let alone a hook.
Ray Davies overdubs vocals, but little else; there is little harmony singing on the
record, except on the title track. It is difficult to make out the distinct contributions
of each band member on up-tempo songs like “Picture Book” or the album’s title
track; Davies’ mellotron is crucial to the distinctive sound of “Animal Farm.”
Nothing is allowed to detract from the presentation of the distinct part of each
song. In this more than anything, the Kinks’ songs on this record not only invoke
the music hall, but vividly recreate it: with its purposely narrow musical range, and
conflation of song with a crisply enunciated vocal.
First music-hall, then British blues-rock serve as a means for Davies to explore
a distinctly modernist paradox within rock music—namely, how long is it before
the new itself must be rejected. One of the record’s few up-tempo rock songs,
“Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,” functions in like manner to the explicitly
vaudevillian songs on The VGPS, signifying Davies’ principled distance from the
contemporary rock scene. “I’m the last of the steam-powered trains,” Davies sings
to a tune clearly derived from blues singer Howlin’ Wolf, “Smokestack Lightning.”
The song’s unabashed hard rock derives not only its vocal melody but arrangement
and main groove from the Howlin’ Wolf recording. Although the Wolf song was
not taken from the “Rockin’ Chair” record (released 1962, and the source of most
of the Wolf songs covered by UK blues rock bands), Davies’ allusion has a special
resonance in the historical context of British rock. Choosing to have the Kinks
play a song that evoked their recent past, and a broader blues-rock trend in the
UK that was either largely over by 1968, or had assumed a far different form than
note-perfect reproductions of US blues records, is in keeping with the album’s
general bent of willful obsolescence. This, Davies implied, is how all serious
British rock musicians sounded a few years ago; how does it stand up now? In
this context, it also serves as a reminder that, like the sound of the earlier music
hall, the most up-to-date popular music can quickly become dated, and a minority
passion: a humbling lesson for any of Davies’ contemporaries who take pride in
their place at the musical cutting edge.
The song challenges the very idea of an essential distinction between music hall
and rock in regard to their social relevance: all pop music is made in history, and
subject to ruin or degradation. The song also poses the question how long before
the new is rejected, for something even newer? The music of the track insinuates
all these questions, and more. In the lyric of “The Last of the Steam-Powered
Trains,” Davies seems content to make do, even celebrate, his own version of
the fetishized past, the music suggests the ease with which the musical past can
become a fetish.
My reading of the Kinks record would not seem to account for songs like
“Wicked Annabella” and “Phenomenal Cat,” with their undeniable psychedelic
touches of distorted guitar, harpsichord or mellotron, and some phased vocals.
However, the chief signifier of psychedelia on “Phenomenal Cat” is the mellotron,
and the decision to use the instrument once again points us to the auteur function at
the heart of the project. A keyboard designed in the early 60s in Birmingham, one of
England’s principal industrial cities, the keys activate a playback head for a tape of
pre-recorded sounds, including brass and string instruments, but also sound effects
like train whistles and barking dogs. While the instrument quickly became linked
with early psychedelic records like the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and a
key element in the signature studio sound developed by “progressive” rock bands
like the Moody Blues (also from Birmingham), the mellotron was the opposite
of the prestige instrument like the sitar featured on early Kinks’ records; it was a
cost-cutter for record companies. The musical instrument was chiefly a new tool of
studio technology. Using it allowed the English Deram Records label the chance
to re-brand the R&B Moody Blues as a progressive band, without overtaxing the
label’s budget; similarly, Pye Records promoted using the instrument as a cut-rate
alternative to hiring string and brass players for the band, as it had done for the
commercially disappointing previous record, Something Else. However, Davies
had sparred with the orchestra arranger on that record, and the tape-operated
instrument actually permitted Davies to exercise greater control over the actual
arrangements of songs on the Kinks’ next album (Miller 26). The use of mellotron
on The VGPS provided another outlet for Davies to transform his conflict with
the record industry into an opportunity to exert leadership over his group. What
might at first seem to be Davies’ concession to the new style of group music then

The mellotron here seems to parallel the function of the “camera-stylo” in the film
criticism associated with the Cahiers school: a technology that nonetheless allows the auteur
to put a personal stamp on their work, and reproduce an organic aesthetic in a technological
age. (I am grateful again to Jackie Bitsis for the observation.)
prevalent in British rock in fact correlates to Davies’ more general project on the
record of exorcizing group activity from the band, and reinforcing the hegemony
of the songwriter auteur.
Songs like “Wicked Annabella,” with their creative instrumental flourishes,
are at any rate far outnumbered by rock songs that fundamentally depart from the
rock music the band once played: full of crashing guitar chords, tight harmonies,
and an aggressive back-beat. (Not surprisingly, this is the only song on the album
featuring Dave Davies on lead vocal—perhaps a way of further isolating this
spooky, quasi-novelty song from the rest of the album?). Here again, Ray Davies’
intent on recreating a more organic mode of writing and recording rock music
conflicted with his efforts to be the band’s chief auteur.
***
The VGPS represents Davies’ attempt to recapture an idyllic space of creativity

for himself and his band. In the process of making the record, Davies’ new aims
had the practical effect of enforcing a tighter control over the band. The Kinks’
idyll was also localized, to the record studio or the band’s rehearsal space. An
unintended result of Davies’ new mode of control was that it inhibited the band’s
ability to evolve a musical style that encouraged spontaneous invention or group
improvisation, in the manner of their contemporaries. This meant the Kinks never
evolved a performance style that included the kind of ensemble playing, and
improvisational skill, that now distinguished live concerts by their peer groups,
the Stones and the Who.
Warner/Reprise, the band’s record label in America, gave the Kinks a new
lease on life after The VGPS was released, to little acclaim and poor sales. Most
important, the American company resolved the band’s longstanding problem with
the AFM, and lifted the US tour ban. The Kinks played with the Who on their ’69
tour, but the results were hit and miss. Time had passed, and the band had evolved
into a studio unit that was used to working under Davies’ specific instruction and
oversight. Moreover, rock audiences now had higher expectations for live rock
performance; the mass audiences, and therefore the profits, went primarily to bands
with improvisational skills. Such bands could vary song arrangements every night:
a difficult task for a group that had come to subordinate instrumental technique or
spontaneous group playing to the exigencies of the pop song. The contrast with the
Who was especially conspicious. After nearly three years of touring America, as
well as being veterans of Festival shows at Monterey and Woodstock, the Who now
had evolved a uniquely theatrical, highly physical live show, replete with the kind
of larger-than-life gestures that resonated with large concert audiences. In sharp
contrast, as a witness to these early US concerts recalls, the Kinks made do with
older equipment in shoddy repair, more suitable to small theaters (Savage 111).
The Kinks’ low-tech, bare-bones stance toward live performance mirrored
their minimalist approach to studio recording. The new problems posed by live
performance also underscored the group’s more fundamental identity crisis as to
whether it was a collective enterprise or merely Davies’ backing band.
Warner/Reprise had developed a new way to sell the band to American
audiences: turning the band’s cultish, terminally un-hip Englishness into a selling
point for American audiences. The promotional copy for Arthur, the Kinks’
follow-up to The VGPS, used words like “raunchy” to describe the group’s early
music, and “nostalgic” for their current sound; it also utilized a “God Save the
Kinks” bumper sticker (Savage 71). The device of selling the Kinks via a treacly
Englishness was first utilized on the sleeve note to Something Else by the Kinks:
“Welcome to Daviesland, Where all the little kinklings in the magic Kinkdom
wear tiny black bowlers, rugby boots, soldier suits, drink half pints of bitter, carry
cricket hats and ride in little Tube trains.” Such branding did little for that record:
but the explicit English thematic of The VGPS and Arthur provided Warners with
another opportunity to sell the band, this time to a growing cadre of “serious” rock
listeners, many of them writers for magazines in the new American rock press
like Crawdaddy and MOJO Navigator, who found Davies’ themes of a shrinking
Britain appropriately cerebral, and in the American context, intriguingly exotic.
In this way, Davies’ most concentrated effort to regain artistic autonomy
over his music was captured by ideology, including the ideology of rock music
journalism. The VGPS is still primarily associated with other late-60’s rock records
that were commercial failures but subsequently regarded as landmarks by the first
generation of rock critics in both the US and UK: Pet Sounds (1966) by the
Beach Boys, Forever Changes (1967) by Love, and Astral Weeks (1968) by
Van Morrison. These are the records that will chart high in Anglo-American
Critics “Best Of” lists beginning in the late 70s.10 They also serve as a template
for post-rock music, on account of what is perceived to be the intensely personal
character of each record as expressed in its lyrical content, comprising a singular
world-view. The New Musical Express writer Keith Altham would recognize that
The VGPS was “a solo album in all but the name” when he first heard it, perceiving
Davies’ prominent role in this specific art product (qtd. in Miller 39).

Savage cites Kinks’ fan Doug Hinman’s account of seeing the group play
the Fillmore East late 1968: “Sitting reasonably near to the stage, I could see the old
metallic-sparkle drum kits still with their old logo. Up class I noticed what a beat-up little
trooper of a kit it was, and how small it was by comparison with the huge kits used by the
opening acts” (111).
10
Paul Gambaccini’s List of “Greatest” Albums, published in the late 70s, set the
mold. For a fascinating analysis of the ideas of aesthetic value that lead to canon-formation
in rock music, see The Rock Canon: Canons of Value in the Reception of Rock Albums, by
Caryn Wyn-Jones (Ashgate, 2008).
There are crucial musical and cultural differences between these various
versions of auteur rock. Brian Wilson’s particular vision of sonic nirvana was
largely machine made; as we have seen, Davies’ songs, and thus Kinks’ records,
mainly underplay their provenance in the studio. He never seemed to regard the
studio as his personal laboratory, or his songs as experiments in recorded sound.11
Still, a common thread links Pet Sounds and Astral Weeks with The VGPS. In
all these cases, the rock auteur sought a greater autonomy in proportion to the
degree that they found themselves exploited by their band, or record company,
or both. Van Morrison recorded Astral Weeks for his new label Warner Brothers,
after an intense, two-year period of writing and recording music under the tight
control of manager Bert Burns, who forced his selection of session musicians onto
Morrison. Brian Wilson depended on the support and advocacy of the seasoned
session players backing up the Beach Boys, in order to be able to experiment on
the new Pet Sounds album, and resist the pressure exerted by record executives
and other members of the Beach Boys to simply repeat his winning formula for
writing hit songs.
The auteur not only seeks a musical freedom denied to them in their current
work conditions, but by genre itself. Van Morrison’s confession to a new band
member just prior to recording Astral Weeks, that he seeks to “play jazz music and
escape electric rock,” suggests that Morrison had come to find the restrictions of
playing within a genre nearly as onerous as the dictates of record companies and
managers (Rogan 33). The rock auteur was impatient with the musical authority
of rock itself. Rock critics would seize upon these records in part because they
validated a conventional notion of music as self-expression by a heroic, single
individual. The failure of all these records in the marketplace served as retroactive
proof of their cultural importance.
All this is to say that the notion of the auteur is deeply ideological. Ironically,
ideas of auteurship did not fly above the more conventional strategies of pop
music marketing. As we have seen, Davies’ self-conscious song-craft could be
interpreted as expressing nationalist themes that were easily commodified. As
Johnny Rogan details in regard to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the idea that it
11
When David Bowie turns from folk-rock or pop to hard rock music made in the
context of a band, The Man Who Sold the World (1970), he will invert Davies’ process in
The VGPS, pretending what in fact is the work of a highly distinctive auteur is essentially
no different from other hard rock music currently popular on the record charts. Bowie’s
attempt to pass as a band member attempts to capitalize on an opportunity specific to this
moment in rock: as Julian Cope reminds us, 1970 was also the year when even chart hits
were informed by “heavy” rock: Frijid Pink’s “House of the Rising Sun” (#6 in the BBC’s
Top 40 in May 1970), Fleetwood Mac’s “The Green Manalishi” (#10 in July 1970), Black
Sabbath’s “Paranoid” (#4 in October 1970), Deep Purple’s “Black Night” (#2 in October
1970), the recently deceased Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” (#1 in November 1970), and
Alice Cooper’s breakthrough hit, “(I’m) Eighteen” (released November 1970) (see Cope,
Head Heritage).
was “concept album” was arrived at after the fact by Morrison’s record label rather
than Morrison; the singer was not responsible for the narrative tags placed on the
album cover, explicit echoes of the various modes of poetic self-presentation made
in the “Preface” to William Wordsworth’s epic poem, The Prelude (Rogan 44).
The auteur figure behind Astral Weeks was as much a construct of a record label
and promotion department as the “honest, angry, and authentic” image constructed
around Them, Morrison’s former R&B band (78).
I can now summarize my main arguments. Ray Davies sought a specific kind
of work satisfaction in the making of The VGPS. The record works to conceal
its mode of production by a surface thematic. Davies’ search for a mode of work
to compensate for his lack of industry success produced a version of the auteur
in the field of rock music production. The auteur figure implied by the record is
not only the artist producer, but a connoisseur, a ‘man’ of sophisticated eclectic
taste. The auteur’s claims to artistry are based on “his” (common with conventions
of the time, the auteur gendered role) compelling mastery of various styles and
broad musical taste. The “rock” auteur also treats rock in a new way: as but one
musical style that the artist has mastered. Although the notion of the rock auteur
is linked with ideas of virtuoso ability in line with middle-class tastes, it also
suggests a desire to evade the standardization of rock music, by returning to an
older, more organic mode of music production. The final result is that the rock
auteur is exalted, not only over their group, but above the rock genre. The system
presumes a postmodern condition of cultural eclecticism, where rock is a music
genre among others.
The irony is that Davies’ attempt to transform the rock group into a version
of the organic family helped reinforce the concept of the rock auteur, capable
of assuming the role of critical observer of family, rock music, and even history
itself. As a result, The VGPS represents an early, but central attempt within British
rock to deny rock music’s social character, legitimating the genre instead by
recourse to individualistic ideas.12 But perhaps the greater irony here is that, by
helping create the rock auteur, Davies forged a new link between rock music and
an older discourse of musical authenticity. The mode of conceptual songwriting
developed by Davies has become a refuge, perhaps the last refuge, for people to
take in the face of the obvious commercial nature of pop music, including rock.
For indie and post-rock, Davies’ mode of rock auteurism has become perhaps the
most important way to insure musicians of the legitimacy of what they are playing
or writing.
12
While Pete Quaife resented Ray Davies’ assertive leadership over the band,
drummer Mick Avory regarded it as warranted, even natural, given Ray’s flair for concept
and songwriting talent: “Everyone had different ideas about the way we should go, but Ray
was the one steering the ship, so he was the one you had to go with” (Miller 22).
Chapter 5
Modernist Nostalgia:
The Sex Pistols’ Music-Hall Revival
Good Art seems ancient to its contemporaries, and Modern to their descendents.
– Plutarch
The musicians who formed rock bands in the 1960s were part of a post-WWII
Welfare State generation, one which had the chance to get more and better
education than the working or lower middle class kids before them. Many young
people continued their education beyond secondary school, and went to the new
regional art colleges. This meant in effect a new chance to delay entry into the
workforce, and perhaps also the chance to cultivate a bohemian identity. Most
of all, it allowed time for a would-be musician to develop proficiency playing
an instrument. Art school curriculums varied, but most provided a version of
art history that emphasized a modernist tradition critical of institutionalized art;
students learned about an avant-garde tradition that attempted to break down
barriers between art and everyday life. These various modernist art ideologies
helped shape how rock musicians thought about music-making. Rock music was
always a commercial art, but most British rock musicians received an education
that taught them to regard their moment as a unique one, when the barriers that
separated commercial and high art were eroding, and a new relation between art
and commerce was emerging.
With new social groups gaining the opportunity for advanced education, and the
growth of public institutions like the art gallery and museum that also reproduced
middle-class ideas of art, including dissident ones, the evolution of British rock
music in the 1960s into bourgeois culture was pretty much a given, and not solely
because of the exponential growth of a music industry centered on selling rock
music. The Beatles began writing and recording songs that were inseparable from
the new complex of studio recording, especially multi-track recording techniques.
While the emphasis on studio experiment in rock music constituted a new evolution
in British rock, residual notions of rock music as a performing art rather than a
studio one, and of the music’s greater emotional authenticity on account of its
origins in African American or southern working-class culture, still dominated

Richard Hamilton’s lectures at the Fine Art Department at Newcastle University in
the late 50s offer one celebrated case of an artist who explicitly theorized the collapse of
strict boundaries between commercial and high art in the period; see Bracewell.
popular conceptions of rock music in the British context. The tension between the
notion of rock authenticity and the developing rock aesthetic resulted in the making
of hybrid cultural product, like The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus TV
movie, which presented the Stones as both accomplished aesthetic professionals
and as minstrels in an older tradition of “folk” culture. The Stones’ music in that
era also constituted a complex blend; Beggars’ Banquet album, released November
1968, was a mix of American country and English folk songs along with the band’s
increasingly streamlined new brand of British hard rock. As the same time, as I
have argued, the Beatles’ records had achieved a stylistic eclecticism that carefully
composed, arranging and juxtaposing past and present pop style to ironic effect.
Their TV program Magical Mystery Tour signified their new self-conscious identity
as modernist-style innovators in the new world of art rock.
This chapter deals with the genesis of the British punk movement. The story
that we still tell about punk rock is that it restored authenticity to British rock at
a downtime for rock music, in Britain and the US. “Prog” rock, with its
ambitious musical structures, incorporated the technical devices associated with
19th-century orchestral music. These bands were the new successors of an art
rock tradition beginning with the Beatles: but for the Sex Pistols and the many
teenage bands that followed in their wake in the UK, the ascendancy of Prog
rock, with its accompanying cult of technical virtuosity, revealed how ill-advised
the British art tradition in rock had been from the start. Bands like Genesis and
Yes were damned by a new generation as pretentious and affected. In contrast,
punk rock, especially the Sex Pistols, brought a no-nonsense attitude rooted in
the common sense of the British working class, back into rock music, offering a
genuine alternative to the contemporary rock scene in Britain. Punk rock also broke
with the posturing and self-importance, not to mention the moneyed irrelevance,
of the 60’s British rock bands who preceded them.
Or so the story goes. In contrast with the Beatles, who ironized the pre-rock pop
music of the past, the Sex Pistols made music rooted in a received, authoritative
version of the national past. The autobiographical discourse of the members of
the band, now in their 40s, usually invokes non-rock, but very British, cultural
touchstones. Malcolm McLaren, Art college trained fashion designer, first of
Teddy Boy clothes and later fetish gear, had plans to design a band that would
shake up the current music scene. In August 1975, a 19-year-old London Irish
teenager with a hunchback and bright red spots named John Lydon auditioned to
become the group’s lead singer; he recalls that it took his memories of pop culture
from the pre-rock past to get over his stage fright. “I die of nerves before I go
onstage,” Lydon recalls in his memoir, “I’d have to just pull things out from deep
inside” (qtd. in Double 48). What Lydon had inside were his memories of music-
hall comics with funny walks, odd wigs, and droll stage patter: Arthur Askey, Ken
Dodd, and Norman Wisdom.
The story is interesting largely for the missing element in Lydon’s cultural
reserves: there is no mention of Mick Jagger or the Who’s Roger Daltrey, or any
British rock singer as inspiration or role model. Given that Lydon was auditioning
modernist nostalgia 131
for the job of a rock singer, his constant citation of the earlier music hall seems
more than a little counter-intuitive. However, from the start, Lydon vehemently
denied that generation of 60’s British rock had any impact on his music, in a
typical statement declaring, “I never liked those 60’s bands” (Reynolds blog).
Here and elsewhere, Lydon refuses to be identified with a British rock tradition,
preferring to reference the pre-rock pop culture of music hall.
It is not surprising that music hall passes muster here instead of the Beatles or
the Stones. The chief cultural work of stories like these is to mark Lydon’s affiliation
with a residual form of folk culture, nudged aside by a more commercialized
rock culture, or by new communication systems like television (though that last
point seems especially dubious, given that Lydon likely became familiar with
his favorite music-hall comedians from low budget variety TV shows like the
Des O’Connor show or Morecambe and Wise, programs that remained BBC
Saturday night family fare well into the 70s). Privileging the national past over
60’s British rock is a constant in Lydon’s discourse on himself and his account of
the genesis of the Sex Pistols.
This will not be the last time we will see a member of the Sex Pistols conflate
aesthetic choices with extra-aesthetic matters, or judge music-making according
to criteria of their greater or lesser authenticity, reflected in the distance separating
art from commerce. At core, the Sex Pistols’ music constitutes an attempt to
modernize British rock music in a way that engages the history of the form, and
incorporates self-reflexive approach to the conventions of rock music, in a manner
comparable to the late-60’s music made by the Beatles and the Stones. Malcolm
McLaren, the Pistols’ manager, would often make explicit in interviews the critique
of the forms of rock and the conventions of rock fandom that was embodied in the
Pistols’ phenomenon. His critique of rock music’s role in a more encompassing
culture industry, rooted in a modernist tradition of artistic self-overcoming by
purifying the means of artistic representation by complicating them, constitutes
a radical advance in the conceptual vocabulary of rock music, compared to most
60’s bands. However, most music and cultural histories of the period still overlook
the obvious: that the transition from 60’s rock and 70’s punk in Britain constitutes
in key respects an unbroken development of the ideas of aesthetic modernism in
the context of rock music production. Instead, most accounts of British rock still
separate British rock music into periods loosely based on decades, and represent
British punk as a break with the 60’s status quo.
There are material reasons for the misleading interpretation of punk as cultural
history that still dominates most of the received narratives of the music. From the
start, with the band swearing on prime time television, the Sex Pistols were the
object of national media frenzy unique in the history of British rock. The furor
perhaps reached its height with the release of the band’s anti-monarchy song, “God
Save the Queen” coinciding with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and that resulted in
physical attacks on band members. Yet media scrutiny of the band provided the
Pistols with at least one benefit, as Stewart Home observes: the press came to treat
the band Sex Pistols as they once had the Beatles, as “the leading representation
of contemporary music” (www.stewarthomesociety.org). The media circus that

the band partly blames for their demise after only three years also provided the
members of the band and McLaren with a platform where they could circulate
their own exclusive interpretation of the Sex Pistols’ story, in effect managing the
discourse around the meaning of punk rock. Lydon repeatedly proclaimed punk
rock’s authenticity and deeper social relevance in the press, insisting on the greater
“honesty” of the Sex Pistols compared to all the bands that preceded them, as well
as most of their contemporaries.
The media frenzy around the Sex Pistols was unique at the time because it was
comparable in size to the Beatles, but far more ambivalent—people bought the
records, and the band is the target of violent assaults. Such a reaction seems to be
the point of the band—an anti-Beatles in this sense perhaps more than in any other.
The outcry in the British media publicized the Pistols, and unwittingly provided
the band with greater autonomy, perhaps more than any other rock band, to fashion
their image. By intervening in their public image, the band to an unprecedented
extent got to shape what punk rock history was, and how it would be told.
In the last decade alone, there has been a flood of history and memoir, not to
mention two documentary films, all emphasizing the Pistols’ own story as told by
the members of the band, emphasizing the roots of the band’s music in working-
class experience, and the superior authenticity of Brit punk. Rock music emerged
in a mass media age, and musical and social histories of British rock have tended
to privilege the discourse the Sex Pistols produced in response to media attention,
overlooking the Pistols’ specific mode of rock-music production. This chapter
goes against the grain, and makes the argument for the Sex Pistols phenomenon as
part of the modernist art trajectory of British rock beginning in the 60s. The band
was intuitive modernists in spite of their own self-representations in the press.
More specifically, the band appears to have sought to reproduce what Fredric
Jameson describes as the situation of “classical modernism,” where a modernist,
oppositional art shocked the bourgeois by attempting to confront the public with
the perception that traditional morality and middle-class morality and its art
traditions were now obsolete (1973). On stage and on their only studio record, the
Sex Pistols demonstrated a unique ability to disorient listeners, and confound what
had become the traditional modes of signifying within the British rock tradition.
As I explain later, the tension between Lydon’s unorthodox vocals and the rest
of the group sounded a new dissonance in British rock, and created a legacy in
post-punk groups as musically disparate as the Gang of Four, Magazine, and
the Raincoats. Even though none of these groups sound like the Sex Pistols, it is
impossible to imagine them without the Pistols’ precedent. The musical tension
between Lydon’s vocals and the band became a formal parameter in the music,
distinguishing it from the previous vocal/band interplay that characterized Roger

McLaren made his own contributions to the anti-art, but typically avant-garde
discourse, the band popularized in the press; witness his statement that the Sex Pistols
frighten audiences “because they are more spontaneous than all the rest” (NME 1977).
Daltrey in the Who, Jagger in the Stones, or even Captain Beefheart from the
Magic Band. From here on out, rock music will dramatize the clash between voice
and the instrumental bed, until indie rock, particularly Kurt Cobain and Nirvana,
try to make music that re-integrates the two sonic realms.
If Simon Reynolds is right to assert that the ideological foundation of British
post-punk was the rejection of the various notions linked to “rock’s dream factory”
as ideology, and of a “leisure industry that channeled youth energy and idealism
into a cultural cul de sac while generating huge amounts of revenue for corporate
capitalism” (8), the foundation was laid by Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm
McLaren. It was McLaren who introduced a Situationist-inspired critique of
rock’s commodification into the increasingly historicist-minded, art college
atmosphere of the British music press in the early 1970s, in particular the New
Musical Express.
In their self-presentation in the press, the Sex Pistols often evoked symbols
of the British national imaginary, implying that the band’s authenticity and social
relevance mattered as much or more than their music, and that, moreover, British
rock should be judged solely on whether or not the music expresses working-
class values. The Pistols’ attack on the ideology of modernist rock was itself
ideological, based on an essentialist notion of working-class identity, and a
reified concept of the folk. Yet on stage and in the recording studio, the Pistols
proceeded as if they were modernists. In fact, growing tensions between the band
and Malcolm McLaren were in part the result of a clash between the Pistols’
growing commitment to an oppositional, modernist aesthetic, and their manager’s
evolution into a postmodernist view of art that bracketed off the social. In the wake
of ’68, with the failure of the student radical movement, McLaren seems to have
modified his philosophy; instead of politicizing rock music by attempting to sever
any link between the music and bourgeois aesthetic values (in this case, tasteful
musicianship or musical expertise), he endorsed a stylized notion of revolt for its
own sake, no longer explicitly linked to anti-capitalist politics.
The Sex Pistols challenged the rock music of their day, derived from the
music made by British rock bands that preceded them, who they claimed were
dinosaurs, no longer relevant to British youth. They questioned the musical
and moral legitimacy of the previous era of British rock by injecting the idea of

The relationship between vocal performance and instrumental bed is defined as
foundational for rock music in Joe Carducci’s account: see Rock and the Pop Narcotic.

Nick Kent (briefly at the University of London and Oxford) provides a brief account
of the NME in its early-70’s heyday as the sophisticated, edgy alternative to the more
conservative Melody Maker, in the preface to the US edition of The Dark Side. Kent was
later singled out by McLaren as an emissary of a corrupt music industry, and famously
attacked by Sid Vicious: but earlier, Kent frequented McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s
SEX shop and was even briefly a Sex Pistol himself before Lydon joined the band: a sign
of the immense fluidity as well as heterogeneity in terms of class and age that characterized
emerging UK punk culture.
rock authenticity, rooted in class, into rock music discourse; this allowed them
to critique “bourgeois” rock from a disinterested or adversarial position relative
to the dominant form of music capitalism. However, the Pistols’ central strategy
as musicians, of putting the past to instrumental use in order to combat a rock
language they regarded as commodified, is hardly contrary to the project of artistic
modernism; rather, it describes a characteristic modernist art strategy. The Pistols
did not de-rail the project of rock modernism as practiced in British rock since the
60s, but they kick-started a discourse about punk music and its authenticity that
has persisted. This discourse of musical authenticity still dominates most accounts
of punk rock, in Britain and the US, enough to make my claim here, that the Pistols
and British punk constitute another step in rock’s modernist evolution, seem to
counter common sense.
The Sex Pistols was an ideological as well as musical phenomenon (another of
the band’s modernist innovations), and much of the band’s oppositional ideology
can be traced back to their manager. In the press, McLaren promoted the notion
that rock music itself is the commodity that keeps the commodity system going.
McLaren’s critique of rock as a commodity was old form in radical art student
circles, but in the record industry, it acquired a genuine novelty, and a radical edge.
The notion that an appreciation of rock music’s form constituted bad faith, indeed,
bad politics, and that a politically progressive rock band must first deconstruct
the form of the music is the foundation of post-punk rock music; it explains, for
example, the radical approach to guitar playing in most post-punk, away from an
aggressive, “masculinist” style into more ambient, often atonal sounds. The post-
punk deconstruction of rock form is impossible to imagine without McLaren’s
trenchant critique of rock music as a mere spectacle of youth rebellion that
functions to neutralize real dissent.
McLaren had little input on the band’s live show, and seems to have played no
role in the making of their studio record. Yet the Pistols’ music is impossible to
imagine outside the enabling context McLaren and another ex-Situationist, Jamie
Reid, provided as intellectual mentors. To understand McLaren’s role as mentor
and to some extent, mid-wife to the Pistols, we must first trace the genesis of
British punk in the ideas of the radical English Situationists of the late 60s. At a
time when pop music and activism remain largely segregated from each other, it is
worth recalling that McLaren learned a critique of music capitalism new to British
rock from his participating in a radical, anti-capitalist political group.
Elaborating on English Situationist Chris Gray’s idea in 1968, that the
revolution needed an “anti-Beatles,” a pop music group that stood for the negation
of the dominant order and that would be a lightening rod for popular unrest,
Malcolm McLaren found a blueprint for his idea for a new kind of rock group.
Building on another Situ idea, that state capitalism generally opposes changes
in the mode of artistic production, McLaren’s band would have revolutionary
potential. Gray’s idea also extended an argument about the death of art in the 20th
century, after its co-optation by the bourgeois and institutionalization as part of
state capitalism, an anti-art artist trope familiar in high culture, into pop music for
the first time. Gray’s notion implicitly rejected the British rock icons of the decade,
taking their art pretensions as evidence of rock’s new status as the foundation for a
new but equally repressive form of bourgeois authority. The anti-Beatles idea also
served as a rebuke to the more cerebral approach to pop music championed by the
hippies; it stood the newly forged link between rock music and progressive social
change on its head, by insisting that rock played a role in forging the latest form
of middle-class hegemony. The concept of an anti-pop pop group, another version
of the Situationist ideal of the anti-art artist, who would overcome the practice of
art and politics as bourgeois specializations, inspired McLaren; more important, it
offered him with a political critique of the counterculture that would become the
ideological underpinnings of British punk.
Briefly, the Situationist International began as a small, loose affiliate of
painters and intellectuals committed to revolutionary change and critical of
bourgeois art, especially with the institutionalization of bourgeois art. Criticizing
contemporary artists from the Surrealists to the Beats for making art that denied
the revolutionary becoming of the proletariat, The SI were uncannily prescient
about the capacity of state capitalism to co-opt dissent, including the most radical
art works. Even avowedly anti-capitalist art could be routinized by the logic of
the market. As the SI’s chief theorist claimed, the world we live in is largely a
construct, and freedom of choice itself an illusion that perpetuates the routines
of consumerism. Debord’s deepest insight, however, and the notion that laid the
groundwork for the later punk rock movement, was the new role of culture itself
as the chief commodity responsible for creating consent among the masses for
state capitalism: “In the second half of this century, culture will hold the key role
in the development of the economy,” and must “turn into the star commodity of
the spectacular society” (107).
Situationist ideas played a role in student uprisings at the provincial universities
in Nanterre, and eventually at the University of Paris. Situationist slogans such as
“Never Work” and “Under the pavement, the Beach,” were sprayed on Paris Walls
during the events of May ’68; as news of the student riots in Paris, first at the
Sorbonne, and then spreading throughout the Latin Quarter, crossed the Channel,
thousands of young people from all over Europe made for Paris. Among them
were John Barker, Anna Mendelson and Christopher Bott, who would return to
England to form the militant Angry Brigade, as well as two art students, Fred
Vermorel and Malcolm McLaren.
For McLaren, the special appeal of the SI was their reputation as the real
inspiration for the student uprisings in May. Soon after, McLaren sought out the
“pro-Situ” faction centered in London’s Notting Hill, known as “King Mob,”

A capsule history and timeline covering English Situationism and the links between
the French Situs and the armed militant movement, The Angry Brigade, as well as to
McLaren and the Sex Pistols is provided by Tom Vague in The Great British Mistake,
75-89. In this chapter, I mainly reference Vague’s later, expanded overview and chronology
of the English Situationist movement, King Mob Echo.
and sided with them when the group tried to seize control of a student take-
over of the University of London Student Union in January 1969 (Vague 48).
McLaren recalls: “I have to say in those days I was really impressed by them.
They were so much older than I was and they just had a better line of rhetoric…It
was a new way of looking at the world. You would grab whatever bits you could,
like crumbs falling off a table…For us the Situationists were revolutionary artists.
That’s what they represented” (49).
Chris Gray, King Mob’s chief organizer, is credited with coming up with an
idea in late 1968 that was the seed of McLaren’s project of a revolutionary rock
band. Gray was a founding member of the English SI, editor of King Mob Echo,
the SI journal; there is no evidence that Gray followed up on his plan to create “a
totally unpleasant anti-music group,” although one could see “Chris Gray Band”
graffiti on the way to the Victoria Coach station into the late 70s (Vague 50).
Gray’s idea may seem merely odd now, at a time when rock music is largely
commercial music, with attenuated ties to either an underground or subcultures.
However, in the 1960s, a time when rock music and music-making had strong
ties to regional scenes and alternative culture, and appeared an organic part of the
potentially revolutionary explosions of alienated youth in the 60s, Gray’s notion
was scandalous. Situ thought was profoundly removed from the peaceful, utopian
expectations of the counterculture. Rock was not a topic of the mainstream press
outside of music newspapers like Melody Maker and New Musical Express, which
both had the primary function of serving as trade papers for music aimed at the
record charts. Only Barry Miles’ underground paper, IT, ran unedited interviews
with rock musicians, and treated rock music as serious artists. Gray sensed that
these initial signs of rock’s acceptance by young liberals presaged the music’s
inevitable, total commodification, pending an intervention in the mode of rock
music production. Culture, even the anti-authoritarian culture of rock music, could
not bring about change without revolutionary struggle.
Gray’s target is not just 60’s rock, but the larger notion of the artist as expert, a
specialist in the aesthetic, an identity category that even most modernizing youth of
the era seemed to assume would exist in the new revolutionary society. The notion
of an anti-Beatles was an implicit critique of British rock and its ties to hegemonic
commercial interests, as well as an attack on the false idols of the new Left. In
the SI view, youth audiences seemed blissfully ignorant of the extent to which the
entire hippie scene had extended beyond one or two underground papers and art
student enclaves into a larger society while in lock-step with the record industry.
After the critical and popular acclaim received by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album,
not to mention the commercial success of the first British underground bands, like
Pink Floyd, on the UK singles charts, the record companies exerted pressure on
other bands to become “psychedelic” versions of themselves in a frantic effort at
re-branding (Melly 118).

Melody Maker still catered to a readership that bought jazz and pop crooners into
the early 1970s; see Kent, iii.
Beyond the ease with which bourgeois society seemed to accommodate

rock “rebellion,” the fact that the new rock fan still believed in ideas of a higher
aesthetic order seemed to the radical modernist another roadblock on the path
to revolutionary change. In contrast, Gray would praise the Black Hand Gang, a
North England Situationist group that formed in the wake of 1968, the “best critics
of Hippiedom” on account of their central insight that “the ‘underground’ is just
another range of consumer goods” (Gray 38).
Gray’s notion of an anti-pop ground marked a turn in English Situ thought,
toward ever what Situs called “active nihilism” (Wise and Wise 78). King Mob
and the members of the Angry Brigade were anxious to redefine the cutting edge
of radicalism, and differentiate themselves both from the old Left and a new
centrist position on the left. Gray and the rest of King Mob became obsessed with
what the Wise Brothers, also English Situs, dubbed “the praxis of deviants.” They
championed acts of child killer Mary Bell and 50’s Notting Hill Serial murderer
John Christie. Their obsession extended to an interest in the new skinhead youth
subculture, which they claimed comprised “the working class avant-garde.” Such
posturing was even reflected in the name the English Situs took for their group,
King Mob; the source for the name was Christopher Hibbert’s 1958 book on the
Gordon Riots in late-18th-century London, a popular unrest nearly preceding the
French Revolution. The name of the group paid homage to a “hidden moment of
British history, [reclaiming] a disordered, anarchic British context to the rumblings
of discontent,” as Jon Savage observes (33).
As Nigel Fountain notes, the new rhetoric of King Mob was especially
attractive to those like McLaren, searching for a “route out of the hippy enclave”;
in this context, the English SI “promised involvement [and] dramatized outcast
status, and offered the possibility of action” (45). Like most radical youth, the SI
was energized by the Maoist cultural revolution of 1966. The success of Mao’s
revolution suggested that new social movements could skip the preliminary steps
of revolutionary movement as theorized by Lenin, and that merely taking to the
streets might spontaneously generate a mass insurgency (Macdonald 28). In this
context, Gray’s idea of an “unpleasant anti music pop group” had the effect of
consolidating different strands of radical critique aimed at the Underground itself.
At a time of social unrest, Malcolm McLaren became the go-between between
the rock music industry and a revolutionary critique of culture. His theory of
musical situationism was the genesis of the punk movement. Even if one dismisses
McLaren as an opportunist, or like the Sex Pistols would after their bitter break with
McLaren and years of legal wrangles, condemn his exploitation of others, it seems
undeniable that his experience with the Situ armed him with the most revolutionary
critique developed in the late 60s, conceptually far ahead of his generational peers
in regard to an overall theory of the history and social function of British rock.
Following the lead of Situ thinkers like Phil Cohen, whose radical sociology
of post-War British youth subculture groups like the Teds and Mods predated
Dick Hebdige’s Subculture by a decade, McLaren had a historical grasp of British
rock as a social phenomenon far ahead of his peers in the rock field. At the end
of the 60s, McLaren’s chief rock passion was for Teddy Boys and rockers, that
is, for the first generation of young rock fans in Britain, largely because these
working-class fans and their children were alienated and often openly antagonistic
to British rock bands like the Beatles and the Stones, as well as the young art
student audiences for these bands.
McLaren seems to have discovered something else in the Teddy Boy
phenomenon: a marginal style that the new British art rock had rejected as a minor
episode given the main trajectory of British rock, from dance music to art music.
He seems to have discerned in the Teddy Boy a blueprint for remaking rock culture
on anti-bourgeois lines. By reviving the Teddy Boy, McLaren also thought he was
reclaiming the residual, primitive, and still disruptive elements of rock culture,
and that one might overturn the notion of rock’s progressive, linear, evolution into
art. The closest parallel, is with Bertolt Brecht, who arrived at a theory of political
theater through a process of fragmenting and mixing genres, especially those
minor genres specific to the history of theater production in his day, such as music
hall, puppet theater, and children’s entertainments. A more immediate analogue,
though anathema to McLaren, is with the Beatles, whose claims to modernism
also involved a formula for fragmenting and re-assembling the different parts of
British pop music, from music hall to “heavy” rock.
McLaren’s experience with the Situs left him a radical modernist. His interest
in the Teddy Boy phenomenon was less about admiration for American rock
music of the 1950s than for the way a segment of British working class fans
retained their devotion to rock music while at the same time opposing to the hippy
consensus.
The impact the Sex Pistols had in the mid 70s was the result of a relatively
brief moment when McLaren and the band he formed to embody his radical art
project were at one in rejecting previous rock music on both aesthetic and political
grounds. McLaren had modernist training, but a radical vision. He was interested in
politicizing rock, thus saving it from becoming part of the establishment, including
the art establishment. Toward this goal, McLaren endeavored to provide rock with
a different pedigree: re-emphasizing the origins of the music in now outmoded
fashions, unsocial attitudes, lurid sex, and especially working-class violence. The
implication is that the bourgeois art experiment of bands such as the Beatles, or the
progressive rock of bands like Pink Floyd, stood for the co-optation of rock music
by the music industry, and not an autonomous aesthetic evolution of the genre.
The Sex Pistols too, rejected the rock music establishment, largely on aesthetic
grounds. As member Glen Matlock puts it, “there just wasn’t much British [music]
around that had an edge and at the same time looked good” (26).
However, the Sex Pistols soon became a flashpoint of controversy in Britain,
for extra-musical reasons, as a symptom of social crisis. Perhaps as a result of this
media construction of the band, the first line of defense taken by the band was to
justify themselves and their music in terms of their ethos, or their social relevance,
rather than reference art ideas. The musicians in the band began to identify their
revolution in rock in extra-aesthetic terms, terms that contradicted both McLaren’s
politicized notion of the band as musical situationism, and the band’s own
sophisticated ideas of a rock aesthetic. Matlock and Lydon spoke instead of the
band’s authenticity, rooted in their unusual “honesty.” “We’re the first honest rock
band ever,” Lydon would proudly claim in interviews, suggesting the Sex Pistols,
and the new punk rock bands they inspired, were returning rock music to its roots
in community, and expressing a British working-class perspective that had been
lost, or repressed, in the 1960s.
However, Robert Christgau’s insightful account of the Rolling Stones describes
the young men in the Sex Pistols as well, perhaps more so. “Youth like the Stones,”
he writes, “—who had never known a non-electric culture, and who were no more
wary of distribution and exposure in the modern media bath than they were of
their own amps—automatically assumed what older artists formulated with such
difficulty” (243-244). Unlike the slightly older McLaren, the Sex Pistols never
seemed to have commodification as an insuperable problem in regard to rock music.
As we will see, they proceeded on the assumption that it was possible for rock music
to reflect a working-class ethos without significant compromise; for Matlock, the
Faces had already done this. Rather than theorize the commodity relationship,
the Pistols simply got on with it. Later McLaren, in his version of the Pistols’
story represented by the Julien Temple high concept mockumentary of the Pistols’,
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, would moot the whole idea of punk authenticity,
and class struggle along with it. For the Pistols, commodification per se was not
the problem, as long as the rock commodity expressed working-class values, or
had use value for the punk community.
This is not to say that McLaren and the band shared no common ground in
their thinking about rock. The band seems to have held in common with McLaren
a largely critical view of rock music and its history that itself owed a great deal
to the modernist rejection of consensual views of tradition. Yet McLaren appears
to have interpreted Gray’s anti-pop pop group as primarily meaning a “bad” rock
band. The Pistols never appear to have bought into this, especially with the actual
studio records, so the commercial aspect of the band (their singles and LPs sold
far more units than the mere handful of shows that the band was allowed to play)
contradicted the original Situationist gesture. As I will note, McLaren seems to
have shifted his ideological ground, moving from revolt into a fascination with the
notion of a “revolting” band, a transformation that only inflamed tensions between
the Pistols and himself, who would insist on making a “proper” studio album, with
a high prestige producer and engineer, Chris Thomas and Bill Price. For a band
who came of age in the rock era, selling lots of records was fine, provided they
were good rock records, while for McLaren, selling lots of records was OK, as
long as the records were truly “awful.”
The members of the Sex Pistols were all either patrons, hangers-on, or part
time workers at McLaren’s fashion and bondage shop in Kings Road, Chelsea, the
infamous SEX shop; they came from working-class neighborhoods that may have
been spatially proximate to King’s Row, but were far removed culturally. The class
divide between the Sex Pistols and their manager is reason enough to explain the
growing distance between the accounts each would offer explaining the meaning
of the band and of their music to the press. Yet, at the precise moment in the
mid 70s when the band were insisting on the political roots of their brand of
rock music, and invoking working-class culture in the mainstream press, British
working-class culture was at an advanced state of dissolution. Many of the old
working-class communities were being broken up as the new housing estates, or
council flats, were built and people were forcibly moved out of the slums. Traditional
working-class areas were now being gentrified, and workers were encouraged to
own homes rather than rent from the local council. Less discernible, but deeper
changes in working-class community included the erosion of the traditional value
systems of thrift, hard work, and frugality that had sustained the working class.
There was a breakdown of extended family, and the apparent disintegration of the
nuclear family: Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones and Paul Cook came from broken homes.
Before they were a band, the Sex Pistols were working-class teenagers: in 1970’s
Britain, this meant that, Matlock excepted, they were all unemployed, and likely to
remain so, with little experience outside of their family of existing social networks
for laboring people within the workplace.
Although the Sex Pistols brandished their working-class credentials in
interviews, they were in fact no longer connected to a working-class mode of
production, and had little experience of traditional employment. The recent memoirs
of both Matlock and Lydon make it clear that neither was the simple product
of working-class community. Instead, they were closer to critical spectators of
proletarian life, with a distanced, largely aesthetic grasp of the culture they inherited.
In their own accounts, working-class culture is not the complex and various “way
of life” described by the anthropologist, but a more paltry affair, mostly comprising
a few resonant “signifiers” of working-class life. Bassist Glen Matlock was born
and raised in Kensal Green, which he describes “as an old-fashioned, tight-knit
working class community, the kind that survived through thick and thin since
Victoria was on the throne and that nowadays only exists in sociology textbooks
and TV soaps”—a description that suggests the extent to which Matlock as a
post-war working-class youth only came to know and recognize the pure, Victorian
community where he belonged in terms set by television and modern media (20).
In I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, Matlock recalls meeting McLaren and beginning to
work for him, when McLaren’s SEX shop still sold Teddy Boy clothes. Matlock
viscerally responds to his first glimpse of the shop, and its carefully constructed
spectacle of nostalgia: “I walked inside and it was just like my granny’s sitting
room. Not only did it sell Teddy Boy clothes but there was also a fifties radiogram
and fifties wallpaper. It was all put together with really good attention to detail” (17).
Matlock praises McLaren for the latter’s talent in recreating working-class culture,
implying that Matlock, whatever his background, was capable of the same distanced
view of his “native” culture as McLaren with his privileged, quasi-ethnographic
perspective on the working class.
The high regard for the Faces Glen Matlock also expresses seems rooted in
class-based identification with another London rock band that rejected artifice and
the eclectic style that typified the bourgeois modernist moment in British rock.
“Without the Faces there would have been no Sex Pistols,” Matlock acknowledges
(Five Guys). In a recent interview, Matlock reveals a deeper connection between
the Faces’ music and working class experience, commenting on his favorite Faces’
song, “Debris,” written by East End born Ronnie Lane. The song opens with a
specific reference to the ancient tradition of market day, buying and selling your
“debris,” and goes on to invoke tensions between the union hierarchy and workers
in calling a strike. “One of the reasons I dig [the song is] because at the tail end of
the 60s, I remember my dad, who had always done manual work, coming home
from work telling me his colleagues had voted him in as their Shop Steward.
A few months later there were a lot of redundancies and the first ones to be laid off
were the Shop Stewards. So that line, ‘there’s more trouble at the Depot with the
General Workers Union,’ that really comes home to me (Hellier 22).
Matlock presents powerful testimony here that working-class people share a
common way of life, or struggle. It is also worth noting the important role of
memory, cultural and personal, in his account of a defining rock moment. Memory
seems more central to Matlock’s rock aesthetic than cultural intervention or a
redefinition of cultural values; as we will see, much the same could be said about
Lydon’s attempt to redefine rock by a mash-up of the genre with the distinctly
different cultural expression of music hall and rock. Still, Matlock’s identification
of the Faces as a working-class band unwittingly discloses the constructed aspects
of working-class culture in 1970’s Britain: culture as a set of signs, discernible
and arbitrarily related, characteristic of a postmodern age. The Faces’ music
and on-stage performance style were distinct from many of their generational
peers, especially their most celebrated late-60’s British rock bands. Lead singer
Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood, with their sartorial flash and Mod-style
bouffant hairdos may have shed most of their plebian costume, but the band
proudly blazoned their class roots in other ways. BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel
recalls that, “as a very serious hippy, I felt absolutely shocked when [meeting
the Faces] when they stumbled out of their dressing room, loud, vulgar, and very
cockney” (Melly 155). The band famously brought a mini-bar and bartender
onstage, scandalizing a stalwart of the British underground hard rock scene, Edgar
Broughton, who introduced the band to the crowd as “drunken, East End yobbos”
at an early gig (139). Perhaps the most highly charged act of the Faces’ career
was their choice to take a football onto BBC music program, Top of the Pops, in
1972, at a moment when football and working-class hooliganism were the source
of moral panic. The Faces choose to take a “symbol of the working class…into the
homes of everyone owning a television,” and stop their lip synch performance of
“Maggie May” to kick and throw the ball around (178). Like the members of the
Sex Pistols, the Faces seem less “pure” working class product than canny about
how working-class culture and character could be signified, or represented.

The Faces’ “project,” if one can use the term in relation to a genuinely unpretentious
band, known for their unpredictable, spontaneous character on and off stage, closely
Of all the members of the Sex Pistols, John “Rotten” Lydon was perhaps the
most vocal about stressing the social relevance of the band, as well as his ties to
Englishness, including English high art. Despite his Irish roots, Lydon has been
open about basing his distinct vocal and performance style on a bricolage of art
codes, cobbled together from the choice, dark bits of a largely English literary
and theatrical tradition. He cites the Lawrence Olivier film of Richard III as
offering a key visual influence for his special style of on-stage menace. Lydon
brought his own conceptual agenda to the band; precociously, this agenda was as
ambitious, and more theatrical, than McLaren’s. Lydon’s project was to bring a
spirit of negation into the traditionally affirmative culture of pop music; his style
models were Shakespeare’s brooding monarch and Pinkie, the blaspheming, guilt-
ridden Catholic gangster in Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock. The “Rotten”
persona was heavily laden with art codes that predated rock music, suggesting a
search for a more “authentic,” and ritualistic, style of performance.
Lydon himself characterizes his rock singer persona in terms of popular
theater, and is typically more extreme than Matlock in consciously refusing any
link between his music and 60’s British rock. Instead, Lydon aligns the Pistols
with archaic entertainment; he describes the Sex Pistols as “musical vaudeville”
and “evil burlesque” (Lydon 114). Ever the contrarian, Lydon insists that his
real antecedents lay in the music-hall tradition, in performers like Max Wall and
Arthur Askey, who were comedians as much as singers, going as far as claim that
“what England didn’t understand about the Sex Pistols is that we are music hall”
(Filth).
Lydon began identifying his style with English music hall and music-hall
performers ever since the 90s, when the members of the Pistols began to take an
active role in retelling the story of the band in a way that cut McLaren out of the
narrative. Giving the Pistols’ side of the story is the central aim of Julien Temple’s
The Filth and the Fury (1999), the counterpart, and would be antidote, to Temple’s
first Sex Pistols film in 1978, scripted by Malcolm McLaren, which glossed the
Pistols as a swindle of the music industry spearheaded by a situ-style provocateur,
played by McLaren himself.
resembles the Pistols’, and contrasts with McLaren, in attempting to make aesthetic
commerce more multi-vocal in terms of class. That said, the central message of Lane’s
cleverly titled “Debris” seems to be that true working-class culture was dying, and that
any rock music that tried to thematize class was compelled to assume a preservationist
posture.

In retrospect, Jamie Reid would claim that the film, scripted by Reid and McLaren,
represented the apex of the Pistols as a subversive project, on account of it being the most
explicit and popular statement of Situ ideas presented to the British public up to that time.
Reid characterizes the movie as a “a loud and blatant statement about consumerism and
who buys pop records and what a pop group is—just a factory churning out things to buy”
(Vague 71). Needless to say, the Pistols’ own self-presentation as rock artists, albeit the
people’s kind of rock artist, clashed with the Situ’s anti-capitalist insight that pop groups
constituted another form of “factory” labor.
Like Matlock, Lydon too is interested in cultural memory and invisible

histories. That Lydon himself would be attracted, even obsessed, with history is
a paradox only to those who took punk rock’s rhetoric about destruction at face
value. Understood as Lydon’s attempt to instrumentalize the past for the sake of
art praxis in the present, his rhetoric reveals itself for what it is: a modernist art
strategy. Lydon appears to have intuited that the claims of British rock to cultural
authority in the late 60s had come to rely on the repression of the pre-rock British
pop of the past, and in particular, of the music hall roots of rock. In this context,
music-hall’s archaic quality, its status as non-art entertainment, could provide rock
music with a subversive edge if it were somehow reintegrated into the music.
Once Lydon had identified—and constructed—music hall as folk culture, it could
then be pressed into the service of rock music, where its symbolic mix would
effectively re-galvanize what Lydon had diagnosed as a moribund art form. In this
manner, the Sex Pistols’ singer reproduced the classic formula of the ambivalent
yet interdependent relation between modernist and “folk” culture in the world of
70’s British rock.
Lydon’s ideas of an explosive musical hybrid between rock and music hall;
Matlock’s passionate fandom for the Faces: both seek to legitimate the Pistols
by linking their music to a working-class ethos. Yet Matlock’s notions of
working-class community, if it ever existed in something like a pure form, was
certainly disappearing by the late 1960s; the Faces were not able to “express” it,
only to suggest it by means of a particular visual style. John Lydon was born in
1956, and his chief access to music hall was black and white television shows on
Saturday night. Although Lydon wants to contrast his music hall vocal styling
with commercial rock, as if the former was somehow rooted in folk culture, the
comparison he draws is one that requires us to equate television with the world of
pre-technological communication that TV displaced.
Whatever their personal ideas of a rock exceptionalism based on the music’s
ability to express a working-class ethos, Matlock and Lydon, like McLaren, were
artists working in a postmodern age; even as the two engaged their working-class
heritage, certainly by the time that they reflected upon it, the ground had shifted
from under them. Their remarks on working-class culture express a fragmented,
hybrid view of that culture characteristic of postmodernism; working-classness
constitutes an identity part organic, part social construct. Their accounts also
suggest that working-class community is largely a matter of signs; it relies on

As Tim Armstrong explains, because the complete rejection of the past is
unsustainable, even modernist artists who believed aesthetic and religious tradition to be
obsolete tended to search for and idealize earlier periods that they believed more conducive
to artistic creativity (10). More specifically, Lydon’s formula for a hybrid rock that drew
upon an older music-hall tradition brings to mind those modernists who, critical of mass
culture, nonetheless insisted on common ground between modernist art practice and what
they considered to be authentic folk culture: e.g. the Mexican modernist painting of Diego
Rivera and Frida Kahlo, T.S. Eliot and music hall (see Chinitz).
secret codes, shared gestures, and other rituals of performance. Whatever their
differences, McLaren and his young protégés shared a postmodern cultural milieu,
facing the predicament of making art in a world where the master narratives of
class solidarity the band often invoked had lost much of its authority, and where
the sheer stylistic variety of artistic genres turns most art into a commentary
on its mode of production. By the mid 70s, McLaren and the group he formed
were working in a postmodern medium. They had arrived at this practice from
different vantage points, with diametrically opposed responses to the postmodern
regime.
The British police crackdown on the Angry Brigade also sent most of the
members of King Mob out of politics, and in retreat. McLaren remained more
faithful to the Situationist imperative of “never work” than other Situs, who
entered the academy or, like Chris Gray, became “new age” spiritual guides.
McLaren eked out a living by selling goods in bad taste, first marketing Teddy
Boy fashion in the shop Let It Rock, and then sado-masochistic gear to those who
could afford it, in the SEX shop. McLaren’s conception of rock music also seems
to have undergone a transformation during this time. The Teddy Boy phenomenon
he esteemed as a rebel subculture was now presented as a mere period style that
one could champion, and market, without reference to its links to social unrest,
or to politics at all, for that matter. Increasingly, McLaren’s version of the anti-art
art stance of the SI meant championing deliberate, highly stylized “bad taste;”
the hyper-vulgar style of early John Waters films seems the relevant touchstone
here. McLaren’s first choice of movie director for a Sex Pistols’ film project was
American sexploitation director, Russ Meyer: and the chief idea that McLaren
recalls inspired his album cover design for the Pistols’ only official record was
that “it absolutely had to be ugly” (Classic Albums). Perhaps the path taken by
McLaren was inevitable, since it was always unclear as to how Gray’s idea would
actually work out in practice.
McLaren was still a provocateur when the Sex Pistols, his second attempt (late-
era New York Dolls was the first) to create an anti-music group in the performative
manner of contemporary art theory, burst on the national scene in 1976. Chris Gray’s
original idea of an anti-Beatles presumed that an attempt to demystify the role that
rock music played in maintaining the capitalist status quo would inevitably incite a
broader rebellion, and that a struggle within popular culture would prefigure a total
transformation of society. McLaren may have agreed with Gray’s political vision,
but he brought his own unique sensibility to his work with the Sex Pistols: in
particular, an obsession with history, both national and personal, and not surprisingly,
a self-conscious regard of art history, and of his own place within it.
I have already mentioned McLaren’s personal fascination with the 50’s
Teddy Boy subculture. A powerful image that McLaren designed as a flier for
what would turn out to be the Pistols’ last concert in Britain, a Christmas show
in Huddersfield (1977), suggests not only a obsession with history, but an artful
scheme to construct a subversive link between past and present. McLaren’s flier
plagiarizes, or “detourns” George Cruickshank’s illustration of Fagin’s gang,
from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The image is intended as a portrait of the
Pistols; underneath it, McLaren wrote a text that has the band, in Andrew Wilson’s
words, “playing out a latter-day Situationist fantasy” of teenage anarchists running
amok in the city, wreaking havoc on the rich, for the sake of the poor and outcasts
(Wilson 72; Figure 5.1). The scrawled, block-written note under the picture,
exhorting us “to escape the twentieth century,” is also plagiarized, taken from Guy
Debord, the source of much of the ecstatic prose in the print message. The flier
amounts to a manifesto on McLaren and the group’s part, mashing-up words and
images that span a century to create a new meaning. The collage culminates in
the closing signature of the “author” of the communiqué, “Oliver Twist” himself,
granted an agency that Dickens denied him.
The attempt to construct the link between the Pistols and Fagin’s gang is more
importantly an endeavor to materialize a dark, still invisible history of national
rebellion. Yet the more you stare, the more the icon becomes a riddle. Set in the
frame of a postmodern pastiche of Cruickshank, the hot words of McLaren’s punk
manifesto become icy, even monumental. Is the pastiche self-mocking: an admission
that nothing separates punk revolution from a Victorian middle-class writer’s mode
of representing the outcast poor? This vision of the Dickensian Pistols quickly
becomes about our inability to read it, to place either the group or the image within
a paradigm. The difficulty the icon poses to someone who tries to read it seems the
main point: of a piece with a postmodern art practice without a center.
The “Oliver Twist” proclamation had a clear use value as promotional material
for a band under pressure by the record industry, banned from playing by local
councils, and the subject of violent attack in public. Yet the flier in its design is
already a consciously contrived art work. Even in 1977, when punk rock was the
subject of heated national debate and demonized by many, McLaren’s illustration,
with its raw language (“Fucking the Rich up the arse”) inscribed in a stylized,
at times impossible to read script, would have seemed more appropriate for
the gallery than the rock club.10 Just as McLaren walked a razor-edge between
agitating against capitalism, and making a successful career within the system
by selling fetish gear, or branding the punk rock that he helped invent, the Twist/
Pistols image embodies the question at the heart of Situ-inspired Punk, of whether
one could re-purpose the commodity in order to subvert the commodity system.
McLaren’s picture and script play with the expectations of an imagined middle-
class audience, scandalously mixing high and low art. At the same time, it seems
to anticipate, and perhaps accelerate, the moment when the establishment will
commandeer the troubling image as an art object.11
10
The style extends to the manner in which McLaren produced the manifesto: with
“a sharpened length of dowelling dipped in ink” (Wilson 39).
11
That McLaren would use the “Oliver Twist Manifesto” as a design for a muslin
t-shirt sold at his Seditionaries shop after Lydon had left the band seems to support a reading
of the object as produced with a mind to its later cooptation by the bourgeois, artists and
merchants (cf. Wilson 72).
Figure 5.1 “Appropriating History.” By permission of the Hospital Group
In stark contrast with McLaren, who seems to have lost his interest in rock
politics at the same moment when the Sex Pistols were exciting a furor in the
press, the band seemed more determined to assert themselves as musicians. They
sought to make music that made an impact on the real world, and that challenged
the status quo. Although young men, and in spite of their press rhetoric, which
protested too much about the working-class character of the band, the Sex Pistols
had in fact attained, like many in their generation, a postmodern distance from
their roots. Again, Lydon is a touchstone here. Even as a teenager, his taste in
music includes artists as disparate as Alice Cooper, the German rock band Can,
and fusion-era Miles Davis: a textbook case of the cultural eclecticism that
supposedly characterizes postmodern taste (No Irish 81). Yet the Sex Pistols came
to postmodernism, alienated from a working-class culture that could have been
their birthright on account of structural changes in British capitalism, specifically,
a vicious downturn in the British economy in the early and mid 70s that resulted in
wide-scale youth unemployment, with little prospect for change. While the band
vehemently rejected the establishment bands of 60’s British rock, they sought to
recreate the situation of high modernism, and create an oppositional art that would
scandalize good taste and common sense. “I don’t understand it (why people don’t
like the band,”) said Lydon in 1977, “all we’re trying to do is destroy everything”
(qtd. in Marcus). It is debatable whether destroying everything in Lydon’s manner
aligns at all with Gray’s original idea of anti-pop group. Did Gray imagine that his
subversive group would say as much in the press? Yet in practice, Lydon’s notion
of rock as a destructive form amounted to a collage of resonant images taken from
the past, and that seem all the more seductive on account of their remove from the
present.
Lydon was not the only performer of his generation interested in a hybrid
between rock music and music-hall style song: Ian Dury and his band Kilburn and
the High Roads, preceded Lydon, and the Pistols frequently attended Dury’s shows
(Double 32). Yet where Dury and later punk bands like the Radio Stars mined
music-hall forms primarily to make “novelty” records with risqué lyrics, Lydon’s
lyrics for the Sex Pistols were inevitably weighty, usually touching on politically
charged topics such as political anarchy, abortion, alienated relationships, and
broader social unrest.
If McLaren’s response was to retreat from the social furor caused by the
band, or reiterate that the band was in “bad taste,” Lydon and the band seemed to
have a more straightforward, contentious response. Despite an underlying school
sensibility, Lydon was not above incorporating political polemic and social realism
in the band’s musical modernism, if it meant recreating the oppositional social
force associated with classic modernist art. This would seem to be the context
for writing “God Save the Queen,” after the Pistols were already public enemy
number one for public indecency on account of swearing on the Bill Grundy show,
and releasing the song during the Jubilee Year: hardly an irrelevant act, given the
prestige and privilege that the monarchy and aristocracy continued to possess in
Britain.
Punk rock contained many contradictions, but perhaps the largest one was
the disconnect between the Pistols’ claims to musical legitimacy, based on easily
contested notions of their relevance and authenticity, and their artistic practice,
which incorporated what amounted to a musical “critique” of rock from within the
form, reminiscent of the anti-generic experiments of an earlier artistic modernism.
While denying the claim that a previous generation of British rock groups had
elevated the music into an art form, the Sex Pistols, with the exception of McLaren,
seemed profoundly nostalgic for a modernist art that would at the same time, find
a popular audience.
Neither McLaren nor the rest of the Sex Pistols quite knew what they took on
board when they hired John Lydon for the role of front man. While the rest of the
Pistols may have been disgusted with the current state of rock music, dominated
by “dinosaur” bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, Lydon’s discontent
extended further, into an impatience with the idea of musical convention itself.
As Simon Reynolds notes, the demo in which the Pistols invent their own unique
version of anti-rock rock has been preserved, a cover of Chuck Berry’s, “Johnny
B. Goode,” compiled on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, released after Lydon
had left the group. Chuck Berry, via Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, is
the key resource for punk rock guitar, and the rest of the band sound comfortable
going through the motions of rock wood-shedding, of finding your sound by trying
to reproduce the “classics.” Yet things go awry: Lydon can’t remember the lyrics
to the song, and interrupts it to groan, “Oh fuck, it’s awful; stop it, I hate fucking
songs like that”: a sign of Lydon’s disgust with the notion of classic rock, and
with rock music conventions. Not surprisingly, Lydon tries to steer the band in a
more arty direction, away from playing Chuck Berry, and suggesting instead that
the Pistols play Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” a cult
American rock band’s self-aware, highly idiosyncratic take on that staple of 50’s
rock, the automobile song.
Typically, the story of the rock singer who hates rock would have ended
without much notice, likely in the quick dismissal of the would-be performer.
However, in this particular context, and given the art-damaged sensibility of the
band’s manager, Lydon’s sense of humor and frustration with generic rock were
regarded as valuable assets. The Pistols’ group sound was not that far removed
from most typical hard rock, though distinct from the burgeoning “metal” sound
of Black Sabbath; a decade after the Pistols imploded, their music had become a
touchstone, and a formula, for American hair metal bands like Guns N’Roses and
Motley Crue. However, the Pistols’ music incorporated a dissonance that most
hard rock, now and then, lacked: a built-in discord between a rock sound and a
singer who sounded uncomfortable with the conventions of rock music itself.
The opposition of singer to music represented a huge step forward in rock, with
few antecedents. Lou Reed’s vocals with the Velvet Underground, at least on that
band’s first two records The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967) and White Light/
White Heat (1968), represent the beginning of an opposition between the rock
singer and the musical bed. Even here, the comparison between Reed and Lydon
is a bit strained: the former’s relatively uncontrived vocal, in the unmannered
style of American folk music, hardly resembles Lydon’s much more aggressive,
flamboyantly theatrical delivery. With the Sex Pistols, the opposition between the
singer and the instrumental backing would become central to the rock sound.12
The group represents, after Reed, and then the Bowie of the Berlin trilogy (Low,
Heroes, Lodger), the actualization of this hybrid sound as an aesthetic, where the
singer/band struggle becomes a primary aspect of the music.
The Sex Pistols made rock music that could be recognized as such, while at the
same time flouting rock music conventions in significant ways. Lydon’s vocals,
while highly expressive, provided none of the melodic pleasures or pleasing
assonance that characterized most rock vocals, including hard rock singing, rooted
as that singing was in blues-based harmonies. His vocals were rhythmic, but without
reproducing the call and response dynamic between band and singer that defined
American soul. With Lydon in the band, the Pistols made rock music based on
an inherent contradiction: rock and anti-rock, simultaneously. Jacques Rancière’s
recent writing on the politics of aesthetics helps us identify the Pistols’ specific
contribution to the rock genre; he describes a kind of art that delivers a “perceptual
shock” by repeatedly refusing to signify within the dominant contemporary regime
of pre-existing art forms (63). By building songs around the contest between band
and singer, and featuring a vocalist who broke with the blues-based tonality already
formalized in most hard rock singing, The Sex Pistols discovered a musical formula
that both reproduced generic conventions, reassuring listeners by presenting
them with the familiar, and destabilized them. At least initially, the Pistols’ music
recreated in most listeners the initial polarizing effect of classical modernist
art. Lydon’s vocals represented the dissonant element in the Pistols’ music that
resists signification, that is, a vocal style that resisted being fully assimilated into
the normative regime of rock singing. It rendered the Pistols’ music uncanny: for
Rancière, a chief attribute of a genuinely political art (63).
The reputation of the Sex Pistols for galvanizing the members of their audiences
to form their own bands is partly explained by the Pistols’ talent for reproducing
a version of their sonic discovery, the incorporation of hard rock with a dissonant
element that escaped the conventional pattern of rock, into their on-stage look.
Bruce Gilbert of Wire, one of the many punk groups formed in the wake of the
Pistols, attributes the shock of seeing the band the first time to their anachronistic
appearance: “They were so dangerous looking, these boys. It wasn’t contrived,
they looked like Dickensian urchins. They had shoes on but no socks, and they
looked like they couldn’t have got that way without being alcoholics, but they
were young boys. They were perfect” (Vague 63). Likewise, Julien Temple, who
would later made two documentary films about the band, ascribes the shock of
seeing the band to their incongruous mix of modern and ancient Englishness: “it
12
Thinking about the band/singer tension as a unique way of signifying in punk
rock reveals interesting contrasts and tensions in the genre: consider how the Ramones do
not resemble the Sex Pistols at all in this respect. Yet the Talking Heads do, in a subtler,
less central way that is not pure opposition. In this respect, the Heads’ more ambivalent
relationship between singer and band evokes late-70’s David Bowie recordings rather than
Reed and the Velvet Underground.
was apparent at the time that the Pistols had roots in an English tradition older than
rock and roll, in vaudeville and music hall and even before that…[it was clear] that
John had that instinctively in thinking about himself…they were Lords of Misrule,
part of an older, English tradition” (Filth). It is as if the Pistols so exceeded generic
bounds that their audience has difficulty locating them in history at all.
The Pistols’ invention of a hard rock sound that integrated a formal
dis-equilibrium, Lydon’s vocals, had clear parallels with other modernist efforts to
both utilize and fragment artistic forms. Temple’s response to the Pistols suggests a
structural likeness between the Pistols’ punk rock modernism and the earlier attempts
of the Beatles, whom Lydon especially despised, to legitimate their modernist
experiment in rock by mashing-up rock with the music of the pre-rock past.
Conclusion
Punk rock emerged in the mid 1970s, and would inspire many would-be teenage
musicians to form their own rock bands. For this new generation, punk rock
de-legitimated most of the nearly twenty years of British rock that preceded it.
Although punk rock won the day, and most histories of pop culture still assume a
rupture in rock music occurred in the mid 70s, I have argued here against the idea
that punk rock broke with the modernist aesthetic that served as the rationale for
music-making by the late-60’s Beatles and Stones. The mid 70s marked the rise
of fully developed aesthetic ideologies in rock music-making, and the structural
congruence between the Sex Pistols’ approach to rock and the Beatles was obscured
in part by the media circus that surrounded punk rock, and which gave the Sex
Pistols a greater autonomy in creating their own account of the band and of UK
punk unique from other rock bands. The story the Pistols told about their music
stressed the “authenticity” and relevance of punk rock, and repressed other details
perhaps more relevant to the Pistols’ specific mode of music production, such as
Lydon’s brief stint studying English literature at Kingsway College, and a musical
connoisseurship that made him restless with musical convention and authoritative
tradition, especially rock “tradition” (Reynolds 17).
The other side of the punk rock story is detailed in Simon Reynolds’ history
of post-punk music, Rip It Up and Start Again. As the book recounts, the teenage
bands inspired to form groups in the wake of the Pistols either rediscovered the
modernist ethos of 60’s bands, or reinvented it for themselves. The notion that the
Pistols were more relevant than the Beatles may have initially inspired Siouxsie
Sioux and Severin to form Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1977; yet it was not too
long after they began their recording career that the band re-discovered a love of
artifice and theater for its own sake. As Severin recalls, “That’s what appealed
about the intelligent side of glam, the fact that there was not some kind of theater
going on, a drama was being represented” (Reynolds 356). The Banshees made
peace with rock artifice; they also broke with the egalitarian attitude to music-
making which accompanied the rise of punk rock, the belief that any kid who
feels the music, can and should form a band and make a go of it onstage. Compare
Severin in a 1981 interview: “You think of all your favorite people, such as the
Doors, and you can’t imagine them being the blokes next door,” and, regarding
Punk’s DIY ethos: “Anyone can’t do it” (Reynolds 356). Siouxsie and the
Banshees, Magazine, and other post-punk bands, like John Lydon’s own post-
Sex Pistols’ band, Public Image Ltd., also revived the modernist notion that more
difficult, harsh, atonal sounds could be a means to combat the commodification of
rock by advertising and other media, making music more difficult to mainstream,
or serve as background music. The deconstruction of rock in post-punk further
distinguished the music from the hooky, melodic sound of most “classic” rock.
Since the Sex Pistols’ acrimonious break with McLaren, they have been in
denial not only about the influence he may have exerted on their rock music, but
about their own modernist art ambitions. Yet without modernism, whether in the
form of an opposition to generic “rock,” or in the radical critique of bourgeois art
developed by the Situationists and carried over into rock music by McLaren, the
Pistols have little to add to what they did in the 1970s. More than most reunion
bands, they are locked in the past. Today, on the various reunion tours of the Sex
Pistols that begun in 1996, the Pistols’ roots are showing. The band’s musical
ties to the 1970s, to contemporary pub rock guitar bands like Kilburn and the
High Roads and R&B revivalists Dr. Feelgood, and even the more established
tradition of catchy, melodic rock music popularized by the Beatles and the Small
Faces, seem more prominent than any musical dissonance, especially to younger
audiences, weaned on the far more elaborate techniques of musical dissonance in
rap music and techno. Lydon’s music-hallisms are more apparent than ever, with
his funny walks, a venerable part of music-hall comedy continuing through Monty
Python’s Flying Circus, and a constant stream of audience banter in between songs.
But now Lydon’s patter, as evidenced in the band’s most recent reunion shows in
Brixton filmed for the Pistols’ There’ll Always be an England DVD (2008), mostly
affirms the preconceptions of their audience rather than challenging them. From
the start, so much of the Pistols’ music and image was rooted in memory, even as
the band’s music utilized various means of symbolic violence against the social
referents of their songs. The Pistols’ reunion shows are still about memory: this
time about preserving it.
The disconnect between Lydon’s archaic, anti-rock vocals and the band’s hard
rock sound still remains.13 Yet even if his music-hallisms are apparent, the reunion
largely seeks to reconcile the musical tension between the band and singer, thereby
ending the Pistols’ ability to defamiliarize rock. Onstage and in interviews, Lydon
emphasizes the deep accord between band and audience on account of their shared
London roots (even though half of the band, Lydon and guitarist Steve Jones,
now live in Los Angeles). Traces of the old discord remain in the lyrics, in the
13
Lydon at times evokes the even more dissonant, affect-less vocal that characterized
the more emphatically post-rock sound of PiL at some points in the Pistols’ 1996 Finsbury
Park reunion concert: on “Bodies,” for instance.
angry anti-monarchy sentiment of “God Save the Queen,” and the anti-capitalist,
Situationist subtext of “Holidays in the Sun,” an indictment of tourism that also
targets Western consumerism. The concepts expressed in these lyrics were forged
in a crucible of revolutionary activity, but, although Situ-inspired writers such as
Stewart Home and Tom Vague have recently emerged on the British literary scene,
the band makes no effort to reestablish links between their music and Situationism,
Lydon representing the band in dismissing McLaren’s “bourgeois student” ideas
(Simmons 78). Yet without these links to modernist practice, it is not a surprise
that a BBC reviewer dismisses the Pistols’ Bristol show as “good clean fun,”
“a proper old-fashioned night’s entertainment,” and “an evening that owes more to
music hall than the MC5” (9 November 2007).
It is hard to avoid concluding that the Pistols, and UK punk, have become
commandeered by media industries that have been able to re-brand Englishness,
even the more aggressive Englishness of punk, as a spectacle that moves product at
home and abroad. The spectacle of working-class London linked to the band from
the outset, largely their own making, has come to represent the urban counterpart
of the pastoral England marketed to American audiences in Merchant/Ivory films.
Although they helped create rock music with a progressive, modernist edge, the
band’s own discourse on their working-class roots had obscured the links between
the Pistols and UK punk, and experimental trends in other modern music. Partly by
choice, the Pistols have turned into a version of the stereotypical, flash working-
class entertainer associated with music hall, praised, and recuperated, as national
heritage ever since T.S. Eliot mourned the passing of Marie Lloyd in the 1920s.
Conclusion
I have argued that British rock groups in the 60s and 70s, in contrast with early
American rock, constructed a modernist identity for their music though an
ironic, stylized sampling of rock with the British music-hall past. However, the
appropriation of earlier music-hall style was not the only link between British rock
groups and the modernist artist: there were shared aesthetic strategies, as well as
common ideas held in regard to the nature of modernity, specifically about the
relation between the modern subject and the past.
Another aim of the book has been to describe broader continuities within
British popular music in the 20th century, through lines that remained between
British rock and earlier British music, and that persisted even in UK punk rock, a
music that rejected rock music of the past for its artifice and pretension. The effort
to think about British rock in terms of a broader musical and cultural evolution is
partly prompted by the aim to push the discourse about rock in a different direction.
Even in our supposedly more jaded age, most serious-minded attempts to place the
music in a historical framework, to historicize the music, routinely deploy the
rhetoric of revolutionary change. A chapter from The DA CAPO Book of Rock and
Roll Writing covering rock of the 1967-1977 era as one “regularly rent asunder by
abrupt shifts in the music” (vi). The notional link between rock and revolution was
already present in the first cultural histories of rock music; Jeff Nuttall’s important
account of post-WWII British culture and avant-garde writing, Bomb Culture,
situates the birth of rock in the pre-rock moment of skiffle music in Britain,
because the folk-music form signified the first popular music that “broke with
the adult-commercial completely,” representing a ground zero moment for British
teenagers, grounded in a new economic reality of rising teenage wages and state-
provided student grants, and anticipating a radical future where “parental control
was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people”
(38). Moreover, fewer of these young people will become parents themselves for
quite some time, or if they do, they won’t necessarily reproduce their parents’
lifestyle. “Youth” itself comes to designate an increasingly larger social group,
both a demographic and an identity category. As rock and roll became “rock” by
the mid 60s, the music became more completely identified with the possibility of

Simon Frith and Herbert Horne’s Art into Pop (1987) was the first study to suggest
that punk rock was art-school inspired, though without addressing the disparity between
sociological reality and the rhetoric of punk rock groups. Glen Matlock’s disparaging
remark on the rock music scene in Britain before punk is typical: “Anything that was
slightly exciting was a very contrived, very poseurish way of going about things, very arty”
(Vermorel and Vermorel 15).
revolutionary social change. By this time, as Allan F. Moore notes, rock music had
become “enthroned as the medium of rebellion,” the chief “embodiment of the
newly-coined ‘generation gap’” in Western society (4).
But more recent accounts of British rock have begun to suggest quite another
perspective on the music. Not so long ago, the critical consensus on punk rock
was that the music embodied a radical departure from 60’s British rock, an
angry rejection of the earlier music’s core values of technical virtuosity and
high concept. John Robb’s Punk Rock: An Oral History (2006), however, offers
substantial evidence for a more gradual, evolutionary perspective on the music.
The testimony from the most important London punk groups of the day flatly
contradicts the notion that the genre constituted an anti-genre that made a clean
sweep of previous musical history. As the perceptive review of Robb’s book in the
south London music and culture blog, Transpontine, maintains, “most of the key
players [of punk] were obsessively involved, if only as fans, in all kinds of pre-
punk scenes—not just Bowie and pub rock (the ‘approved’ influences), but also
the 70’s underground of Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies.”
Robb’s documentary history also suggests that a far more significant break
occurred in the 70s between British and US rock audiences than within British
rock itself. In contrast to a growing segment of the American rock audience
post-1970, who made the music of introspective singer-songwriters such as
Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and James Taylor massively popular, British rock
became more tribal. However, within the context of a more fragmented audience,
a growing proliferation of subgroups for the music, it was still possible for
bands that played a noisy, aggressive kind of rock music that also incorporated
free-form musical improvisation to survive, occasionally even garnering mainstream
attention. Bands like the Edgar Broughton Band, Mighty Baby, and the Deviants
would remain an organic part of the Notting Hill alternative community of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, working in solidarity with the Underground Press by
means of ongoing benefit concerts for community activists. Moreover, the anti-
authoritarian self-presentation of these bands, as well as the lyrical content of their
songs-about drugs, social unrest, and delinquency—epitomize a kind of punk rock
before punk.
The notion of a complete rupture between 60’s and 70’s British rock turns out
to originate in the repeated efforts of major punk bands to deny their own previous
identities as fans, and their art school origins as well. Art college training provides
another point of continuity between British rock groups of the 60s and 70s. The
Sex Pistols’ first show was at St. Martin’s College of Art on Charing Cross Road,
where bass player Glen Matlock attended school for a short time (Matlock 64). As
Simon Reynolds notes, John Lydon’s notion of a radical new kind of rock singer
were derived in large part from the singer’s “brief forays into higher education,

“Punk in South London—John Robb.” In Transpontine (December 15 2006).

Hawkwind’s single release of “Silver Machine” reached no. 3 on the UK charts in
June 1972.
conclusion 157
studying English literature and art at Kingsway College” (17). But mere historical
fact was powerless to resist what would soon become a perfect storm of conditions
that promoted mystification: young men from working-class backgrounds (the Sex
Pistols) as well as suburban kids (Siouxie Sioux, Billy Idol, Mick Jones) keen to
closet their aesthetic tendencies; a record industry eager to embrace punk as a
spectacle of revolution at a period—the mid 70s—when rock music had seemed
to reach an aesthetic dead-end. Filmmaker Derek Jarman conducted his own
investigations into the emerging punk phenomenon in order to make the 1977 film
Jubilee, starring notable punk groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits;
he quickly discerned that the “working class myth” of punk was a charismatic
legend that contradicted sociological reality. The “instigators of punk,” Jarman
acidly concluded, “are the same petit bourgeois art students…who’ve read a little
art history and adopted Dadaist typography and bad manners, and are now in the
business of reproducing a fake street credibility” (Peake 244).
With punk, a closer examination of the new uncovers the old, slightly
refashioned; it seems part of a project to uncover a hidden or marginalized past,
not to mention in keeping with the performative stress that absorbed art theory in
a time still dominated by the notion of multi-media “happenings.” Both exist in a
larger continuity of modernist art strategies.
My larger point here however, is not the Preacher’s “nothing new under the
sun”; the more significant convergence between British rock, including punk, and
an earlier artistic modernism lies in the common approach of the disparate groups
to history. Both parties approach the aesthetic after asserting that an early mode
of art practice has now become obsolete. As was the case with modernist writers
ranging from W.B. Yeats and H.D. to T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, the search
for an imagined past that could be used in the present as a means to establish the
authority of their art becomes urgent: not in spite of the artist’s rejection of history,
but because of this disavowal.
British Rock emerged in a period when a post-imperial Britain was in transition
from post-war scarcity to a new, and it turned out, precarious, economic upturn.
The rock imaginary also reflected the new economic optimism; the music became
a site where artists and audience tried to imagine a utopian future. The proud

That said, Jarman’s comment is both an insightful view of the time, delivered in the
heat of the moment, and misleading as a full explanation of the complex relation between
punk and art school training. In the Sex Pistols’ case, Glen Matlock’s brief stay at art school
did not seem to have a lasting impact on his career, to judge from his memoir: a reminder
of the obvious, that one should not over-emphasize the impact of schooling. In the instance
of John Lydon, it does not seem to have been vitally important for him to deny a particular
part of his education. His reveal that he likes high art and rock of a conceptual sort in
No Irish is not so much about letting the cat out of the bag, but about discovering new ways
to combine varied interests over the course of a career, with the Sex Pistols as Mach 1 of
his career, and his post-Pistols’ group, PiL, Mach 2. Both groups are different modes of a
recognizable, coherent musical project.
self-assessment of rock groups that their music broke with the past, a credo
shared by some rock historians, reproduced the revolutionary rhetoric produced
of modernist artists. As Tim Armstrong notes, the strong affective bond between
readers and modernist texts was initially forged because the rejection of tradition
was constitutive of the modern subject (10). Yet as Armstrong elaborates, since
“the complete rejection of the past is unsustainable”—for without it “there can be
no identity or intelligibility”—modernists inevitably went on to “idealize” earlier
periods as a possible means to overcome “modernity’s flattening of experience.”
In other words, the modernist rejection of the past is not about liberation, but a
preliminary step of the artist to constructing their own highly artificial version of
history. In similar fashion, even as British rock groups insisted on the music as a
rupture with the past, referencing the earlier music hall style mainly to dramatize
rock’s aesthetic distinction, the rock genre also inevitably produced its own
neo-modernist version of the past.
In 1968, Ray Davies and the Kinks wrestled with a textbook modernist dilemma
of achieving the proper balance between tradition and innovation. Taking seriously
the idea that the emergence of art college bands in Britain made the old music
obsolete, Davies turns modernist ideology against itself. He imagines rock’s future,
when it becomes as obsolete as Englishness itself in a post-colonial age. The songs on
The Village Green Preservation Society record all address a central question: how
long before the new itself must be discarded as merely a part of the past (Armstrong
10). The record amounts to Davies’ critique of rock modernism, from within the
movement. Although there is little musical resemblance between the Kinks’ music
on this particular record and later punk rock, Davies’ keen insight into the limits
of the genre on account of its close ties to a specific generation of youth, and
of counterculture exceptionalism more generally, anticipates the critique of rock
modernism advanced by UK punk.
In the case of the artists and groups from the British Invasion, the link between
rock music and modernism is evident in their shared aesthetic strategies. From the
vantage point of the late 60s, Jeff Nuttall asserted that the Beatles single-handedly
“robbed the pop world of its violence, its ignorant self-consciousness, its inferiority
complex” (136); George Melly echoes this observation, remarking on the “didactic
aura” that surrounded the Liverpool group, in contrast with the bohemian outsider
image cultivated by the Rolling Stones (92). These comments recognize that the
Beatles’ world-wide success represented a dramatic shift in popular culture. As I
argue in regard to Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles’ 1967 film became a way for
the band to express their identification with both the counterculture and current
movements in avant-garde art. The movie represents the band’s experimental turn
as an effect of their growing emancipation from provincial Englishness, specifically
the Liverpool of their childhood. Yet the Beatles’ musical eclecticism expressed a
modernist art style grounded in the band’s privileged place within the structures of
pop music capitalism. Post-1965, the Beatles were liberated to become more-self-
consciously “arty.” And despite the Beatles’ self-presentation in MMT as a band
that had gone South (London) and become enlightened, their musical approach
conclusion 159
remained rooted in the nonconformist North, in a Liverpool art scene that, as

Jeff Nuttall notes, rejected the pretension and high seriousness traditionally linked
to art projects (136). The Liverpool art scene was a vibrant, polyglot mix of painters
and poets, including some like Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten, and
Mike Evans who were pop music performers as well (as the group, “The Liverpool
Scene”). These artists participated in a pop culture that was still largely regarded
as the domain of working-class teenagers.
The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour reflects the band’s own contradictory
experience of Liverpool as well as London. Living and working in London, the
Beatles became aware both of their ties to a global audience, rooted in no specific
place, and to other competing rock groups working in the metropolis. The group’s
secure position in a hegemonic music capitalism centered in London licensed the
Beatles to transmit the style of the Liverpool avant-garde to their mass audience.
Magical Mystery Tour outs the Beatles before a large televised audience as
card-carrying members of the counterculture, the group in turn expressing and
disavowing their Northern roots.
The Beatles were quickly assimilated within a London-centered pop music
industry. In contrast, British women singers of the 60s mostly struggled throughout
the decade to maintain their economic foothold, and in rare cases, define their own
aesthetic niche in “swinging London.” A residual ideology of the northern woman
as popularized by Lancashire comedy and song still set limits to the art aspirations
of a new generation of women performers. The success of earlier Lancashire
singers like Gracie Fields and later London singer Alma Cogan hardened into a
set of work rules and expectations rooted in ideologies of working-class character.
It is no coincidence that Dusty Springfield, the chief exception to the rule was
also the only singer with a woman manager, Vicki Wickham, who worked hard
to preserve Dusty’s artistic autonomy. Springfield was unique in liberating herself
from class and gender boundaries through the creation of a soul music that relies
as much on her ability to negotiate the specific pop landscape of the 60s as on
her vocal talent. This formidable achievement suggests the incredible amount of
cultural work performed by the collaboration of Dusty and Vicki Wickham. As
Bernard Gendron notes, the key elements of Soul music—rhythm, expressive
vocals, and the call and response between band and singer—were ideally suited
for a subversion of the traditional pop song (31). Springfield, however, did more
than simply adapt the singing of Black American artists; she constructed a new
vocal performance that could be identified as both British and soul. In this respect,
the Dusty in Memphis record stands for an achievement so ahead of its time that
it continues to reverberate everywhere, Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, and Duffy
being merely the most recent avatars of the singer’s epochal re-definition of soul
as a truly transatlantic flow. What perhaps has changed in the passage from Dusty

Jeff Nuttall insists the Beatles’ Revolver (1966), with its “influences of Indian music,
electronic music, chamber music, and brass-band music” and overall “collage technique” is
“borrowed completely from Liverpool pop art and happenings” (137).
to these later singers is the ambitious attempt to collage disparate musical styles
that Dusty pioneered in British music. The later women artists seem less concerned
with making “Art” than a musical product that is suitably expressive. They have
discarded the practice of constructing soul “authenticity” in favor of creating a
persona that can be linked to the singer, in effect branding them.
From the start, the Rolling Stones made R&B music with a modernist edge:
with a brusque attitude to the musical past. Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Keith
Richard “were in it strictly for the art” (Christgau 238-239), devoted to music for
its own sake rather than as a primary means to commercial success. As Robert
Christgau explains, the creative trio of the Stones related to R&B in a manner that
recalled the American folk-music devotee of the late 1950s, valuing the music
for its emotional directness and greater existential authenticity, though, as one
might expect given the still-dominant British class hierarchy, without the utopian
expectations for social change that distinguished the American folk scene. This
point of view maintained that American R&B had more integrity than any music
that preceded it, including—especially—the music hall; not surprisingly, middle
of the road music of this sort dominate the band’s campy mid-60s records like the
neo-vaudeville Between the Buttons (1967).
The Stones pursued their own special art agenda, viewing the rest of pop music
from a distance that reflected their avant-garde posture. No one, least of all the
band, could have anticipated what would happen next: the world, especially the
world of youth culture, transformed around them. Mick Jagger’s interviews in
1968 suggest the singer’s growing political awareness, as well as a rising interest
in avant-garde art, partly the result of the reading lists given to him by his
impressively well-read, upper middle-class current girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.
Yet the more significant story here regards the Stones’ amazing luck: they had
managed to pursue an art program without being relegated to cult status (as would
happen to the Kinks). The opposite occurred: by the late 60s, the group’s global
audience, which was increasingly taking rock music more seriously, would also
credit the band with more political significance, or agency.
Jacques Rancière’s account of “aesthetic politics” aids us in understanding the
particular cultural significance of the Stones during the late 60s. Although art and
politics cannot be separated, Ranciere claims, there is no fixed formula for their
“appropriate correlation”: rather, it is “the state of politics that decides” whether art
of any sort “appears to harbour a political outlook or appears, on the contrary, to be

George Melly is unique for his clear view of the in-bred cult status of the Rolling
Stones: “without Jagger…it’s possible that Rhythm and Blues might have remained a
minority interest, a rather pedantic British homage to a certain aspect of the music” (91).
The popularity of the Stones in the US came relatively late compared to other British
Invasion bands, and was only possible in the pop music world of the early 60s, where the
commercial and the underground scenes were almost interchangeable, as evidenced by the
bill on The T.A.M.I. Show (1964).

See Faithfull: an Autobiography (1994).
conclusion 161
suited to an apolitical outlook [signifying] the irreducible chaos of human affairs”

(62). To the band’s good fortune, and their lasting popular success, the central point
of the Stones’ musical agenda in the late 60s, their contribution to a broader hard
rock and soul “revival” within global pop music, was interpreted by the band’s
youth audience as expressing the Stones’ revolutionary political intent.
As I have already established in regard to UK punk rock, images of the past,
especially the national past, are central to the music, in spite of the loud disclaimers
by punk bands that history is obsolete. The Sex Pistols rejected the received version
of history, including rock history: but their singer, John Lydon, forged a persona
cobbled together from a dark visionary strain in British literature, and archaic
images of working-class outsiders, ranging from the Diggers to music hall comics
like Max Wall.10 As manager and concept broker for the band, Malcolm McLaren
worked to the same end as Lydon, calling up ghosts from the past: of revolutionary
youth struggle in 1968, or the aggressive 1950’s Teddy Boy, who represented a
pre-Beatles past when British popular culture was still identified with youth
violence. John Lydon’s efforts to inject music hall performance into rock music cast
the earlier entertainment as a folk-music form, a component of a larger, “authentic”
Englishness. Lydon and bassist Glen Matlock shared with McLaren an interest in
memory, both cultural and personal. McLaren and Vivienne’s Westwood’s SEX
shop was first called Let It Rock and devoted to British clothing and fashion of
the 1950s—another indication of his interest in a exotic, and thus subversive, past.
Whatever the various tensions that led to Lydon leaving the band and suing McLaren,
both the group and their manager were deeply involved in a project of spirit raising:
conjuring up the specters of the past, in various shapes of working-class otherness.
One must imagine it being difficult for the artist to harness history for their own
special use without also consolidating the hegemony of the past over the present.
The attempt of punk rock to construct a usable past was as rigorously selective,
and stylistically eclectic as the earlier poetic projects of Pound, Lawrence, and
Yeats, with their idealized images of the court of Malatesta, pre-Columbian
civilization in Mexico, or the pagan Celts. Like these writers, the Sex Pistols’

In his Continuum 33 1/3 book on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Bill
Janovitz quotes a 1971 interview with Mick Jagger that seems to signal the end of the
Stones’ conscious attempt to revive American-style roots rock: “(Exile’s) very rock and roll,
you know. I didn’t want it to be like that. I’m the more experimental person in the group…
I think rock and roll is getting a bit…I mean, I’m very bored with rock and roll. The revival.
Everyone knows what their roots are, but you’ve got to explore everywhere” (48).

As Tom Vague relates, Lydon would soon be compared with “Graham Greene’s
Catholic boy-gangster, ‘Pinkie’ in Brighton Rock, …Steerpike (from Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast), and Richard III” (King Mob 62).
10
The Sex Pistols seemed as excited at having a singer with edgy ideas and a
conceptual bent as their front man as art-college graduate McLaren. Drummer Paul Cook
would recall hiring Lydon in these words: “That’s what we was after: a front man who had
definite ideas about what he wanted to do, and he’s definitely got them” (Vermorel 16).
attempt at historical reclamation also, in Tim Armstrong’s words, “[isolates]

particular moments and sites in history, separating them from their place in a
broader historical dynamic,” thus “fetishizing” the past (10). Writer and music
group also work to a similar end, in an attempt to construct a useable past for
the artist. In the case of McLaren and the Pistols, the past times that matters is
comprised of isolated, and therefore exotic, fragments from the history of class
struggle in England. Their obsession with the past goes so far as have the group
stage shows that appeared to be interventions on behalf of the British working
class, with the Pistols standing in for those on the social margins in a sort of
ritualistic-cum-séance embodiment. Although the moments when that happened
were brief—perhaps culminating in the Huddersfield Christmas Day show (1977),
where McLaren designed a flyer with a “detourned” image of Fagin’s gang by
Cruickshank as the band’s doppelganger—the Pistols’ power to ignite the cultural
imagination was so legendary that the group, unable to survive even twenty
months, is still the subject of books.
Still, the recovery project at the core of the Sex Pistols demanded that the
group actively deny the authority of the recent past, in particular the legacy of
art-school inspired British rock. Although McLaren sought to revive the chaos and
violence linked to the Teddy Boy, or to the struggles between warring tribes of
Mods and Rockers on Brighton beach in the early 60s, both he and the Pistols took
for granted a heavily-aestheticized idea of rock music. They treated the medium as
one that could communicate radical ideas, and a sophisticated critique of ideology,
consumerism, and the media: a notion of rock that was the direct legacy of the
art-student pop groups of the 60s. Yet the Pistols’ attempt to resurrect a youth
culture more directly connected to violence, real and symbolic, compelled them
to mis-recognize the aggressive elements bands like the Stones, the Beatles, and
the Kinks, with “their louder, more violent music, their cultivated hysteria, their
painful amplifiers,” brought to the pop culture mainstream (Nuttall 31).
My book is deeply indebted to the path-breaking work of Simon Frith and his
sociology of popular music. Frith’s criticism in the early 70s and 80s focused on
rock music as a privileged example of a commercial music rooted, unlike most
popular music, in self-conscious, art-derived discourses. Much of Frith’s critical
analysis of rock music challenges the notion of its greater authenticity compared
to other genre music, to deflating the myth that, as he puts it, “rock was a special
sort of popular culture” (iv). Similarly, in a study of the uneasy relation between
literary intellectuals and post-WWII British subcultures, Neil Nehring disparages
the late-60’s incorporation of the concept of “pure art” à la Kant, into popular
culture. In contrast with rock and roll, the new rock music, Nehring claims,
utilized “deliberative, intellectual, literary effects,” thus establishing “a distinction
of mental from bodily experience” (263). Even worse, rock music’s “bourgeois
aesthetes”—many of whom, from the Beatles to Dusty Springfield, are the subject
of this book—were antipathetic “to any sort of ideology,” instead “preferring a
Romantic individualism to the point of self-indulgence” (263). Nehring’s remarks
repeat a change frequently directed against modernist art more generally: that its
conclusion 163
preoccupation with style and form represents a bourgeois solipsism, a projection

of the artist’s specific alienation from the working class, into the realm of values.
Frith’s criticism has modeled a post-rock approach to the music; he has also
pioneered a theory of aesthetic value based on the affective response of social groups
to popular music, a mode of analysis that brackets off the normative values associated
with modernist art (i.e., complexity, self-reflexive use of a medium, experimentation).
Currently Frith emphasizes that “what matters now” for the study of popular music
is an account of “how music matters” for different audiences (v).11
I have tried to follow Frith’s model as best I could, trying to avoid the temptation
to romanticize the modernist moment in rock music that I have described. My
claim that British rock in the 60s and 70s replicated key aspects of an earlier
aesthetic modernism is not intended to provide rock music with greater cultural
capital; nor is it an attempt appropriate the lowbrow for the cause of high art. It
is rather an effort to measure the long history of modernism in the 20th century,
and more accurately describe a specific kind of vernacular modernism. However, I
admit that I find it hard to contemplate the era’s achievements without some feeling
of nostalgia. From the perspective of our more managed and totally administered
age, it is dazzling to imagine a time when the line that separated commercial pop
and an experimental, underground scene was so thin that the two crossed over.
British rock modernism was hugely ambitious in musical terms: but contained
within its art ambitions was the progressive concept that advances in pop music
and broader social transformation were intertwined. Regarded in the light of the
general “death of affect” that dominates so much art discourse in late capitalism,
British rock modernism seems to have acquired a new significance and timeliness,
as utopian vision. Like any such vision, it is easy to dismiss. The ambitious aspects
of rock modernism alone are enough to ruffle contemporary sensibilities, confident
that there can be no essential difference between art and entertainment. The fate
of British rock modernism will depend not on whether the music continues to be
sampled, or on its prolonged existence in re-mediated forms like The Beatles Rock
Band TM, but on whether there remains an audience for a popular music that is
both popular and experimental. The legacy of British rock modernism will depend
on whether the notion of aesthetic inventiveness is able to survive as viable criteria
for pop music among a mass audience.
11
As evidenced by Performing Rites: on the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998).
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Index
References to illustrations are in bold
Addey, Malcolm 58 didacticism 158

Adorno, Theodor 82 films
African American music 10 A Hard Day’s Night 48, 50
Alberts, The 101, 102 and English class system 66
Ali, Tariq 90 MMT, comparison 65-6, 67
Altham, Keith 125 Ringo’s key role 66-7
Andrews, Julie 6, 27 see also Magical Mystery Tour (film)
Angry Brigade 135, 144 Kinks, comparison 107-8
Antonioni, Michelangelo, Blow-Up 48 MBE awards 33
Apple Records 63 modernism 53-4
Armstrong, Tim 106, 158, 162 and music capitalism 57-64
art music, British rock as 9 musical eclecticism 54-5, 158
art scene, Liverpool 159 recording studio mastery 59-60, 61,
art school ideology 70, 107
and British rock 10-12, 55, 109, 156-7 Rolling Stones, comparison 83
and Englishness 56 songs
Askey, Arthur 5, 142 “A Day in the Life” 53
At the Eleventh Hour (TV show) 113, 114 collage 61-2
Avory, Mick 116, 118 “Back in the U.S.S.R” 54
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”,
Band, The, Music from Big Pink 94 music hall pastiche 53
Bangs, Lester 100 “Blue Jay Way” 15, 51, 67, 70-71
Barnes, Horace 4 “Eleanor Rigby” 53
Barrett, Syd 63 “Happiness is a Warm Gun” 62
Bart, Lionel 79 “Helter Skelter” 54, 110
Baxendale, John 109 “I Am the Walrus” 3, 14, 15, 51,
Bay Area rock bands 78, 79 52, 67-8
Beach Boys, Pet Sounds 125, 126 development of 69-70
Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” 54
90s revival 19 “Penny Lane” 14, 19, 51
albums “Revolution” 51, 89, 113
Let It Be 8 “Revolution No.9” 54
Magical Mystery Tour 1 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Revolver 14, 51, 53, 75 Band” 9
Rubber Soul 53 “Strawberry Fields Forever” 14,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club 19, 51
Band 2, 6, 48, 51, 74, 121, 136 technology 60-61
White Album 54, 98 “The Fool on the Hill” 72
musical styles 54 “Tomorrow Never Knows” 53, 60,
collage experimentation 61-2 122
“When I’m 64”, music hall perspectives on 156

pastiche 53 Situationist ideology 135
“Yellow Submarine” 14, 53 British R & B 81
“Yer Blues” 97 British rock
“Your Mother Should Know” 52, aesthetic form 3
72, 73-4 as “art rock” 9
The Beatles Rock Band, video game 163 and art school ideology 10-12, 55, 109,
working class, perceived as 80 156-7
Beerbohm, Max 4, 102 authenticity claims 9, 162
Bell, Madeline 37 as destructive form 148
Springfield, collaboration 39, 41-2 Frith’s model 162, 163
Beyond the Fringe 114 McLaren’s critique 134
Bhabha, Homi 49, 56 music hall, hybridity 105, 143, 148
Birt, John, on Cilla Black 30 revolutionary rhetoric 157-8
Black Atlantic music 22, 31, 32, 84 and violence 57
Black, Cilla 21, 28-9, 40 British rock modernism 13, 155
Birt on 30 gender hierarchy 18
songs as “heritage” culture 18
“Abyssinian Secret” 30 imperial turn 15
“Anyone Who Had a Heart” 29 Sex Pistols 143-4, 151
“You’re My World” 29, 31, 39 utopianism 163
TV career 30 VGPS, as critique of 105-6, 158
Black Dwarf, The 92 British rock stars, identity crisis 7-8
Black Hand Gang 137 British Underground rock 62, 95
Black Sabbath 121, 149 Britpop 18-19, 21
“Black and White Minstrel Show” 6 Broughton, Edgar 141 see also Edgar
Blake, Peter 74 Broughton Band
Blind Faith 99 Brynner, Yul 26
blues music, politicization 92-3 Burroughs, William 48, 95
Bonzo Dog Band 72 Buzard, James 64
Booth, Stanley 35-6, 46, 100 Byrds 93
Borges, Jorge Luis 95
Bracewell, Michael 11, 58 Cammell, Donald 95
Brecht, Bertolt 138 Charles, Ray 81
Brill Building 31 Christgau, Robert 9, 81, 83, 99, 139, 160
Britain, race problem, denial of 42-3 Clark, Petula
British beat boom 21 child star 27
British Invasion 4, 8, 21 cosmopolitanism 28
as reverse colonization 23 “Downtown” 7, 27, 28, 32
women singers 25, 30, 33, 37, 46 “I Know a Place” 7, 27, 28
British Nationality Act (1948) 42 “San Francisco” 28
British pop 24, 35, 39, 40, 42 These are My Songs 28
and consumer tastes 32-3 Cobain, Kurt 133
British popular music, derivative of Cogan, Alma 8, 21, 23, 24, 25-6, 35, 159
American music 80 celebrity soirées 26, 40, 79
British punk rock 130 Dreamboat 26
authenticity claims 132 “Half as Much” 26
Jarman on 157 musical decline 26-7
index 175
Cohen, Phil 137 Eliot, T.S. 4, 15, 102, 153

Colls, Robert 2, 9 on Marie Lloyd 5
Cook, Paul 140 Emerick, Geoff 59, 70
Cornyn, Stan 28 EMI record label 23, 58-9
Coronation Street 15, 24 Englishness 3
Costello, Elvis 75 and art school ideology 56
Cott, Jonathan 116 MMT 64
Coward, Noel 26 of music hall 5
Crawdaddy magazine 125 VGPS 109
Cream 63 Epstein, Brian 26, 28, 48, 73, 79
cultural identity, working class 16 Eurovision Song Contest 31fn12
cultural memory, Lydon 143
Cultural Revolution, Maoist (1966) 137 Faces
Cutler, Ivor 67 “Debris” 141
“Maggie May” 141
Dalton, David 94 Matlock’s praise for 140-41, 143
Daltrey, Roger 133 see also Small Faces
Davies, Dave 110, 115, 116, 124 fairground
Davies, Ray as heterotopia 87
At the Eleventh Hour (TV show), songs Lane’s memories of 87
for 113 Faithfull, Marianne 160
rock auteur 44, 106, 107, 108, 109, Farren, Mick 86
116, 118, 121, 127 Fellini, Federico, La Dolce Vita 72
television work 113-14 Fields, Gracie 5, 7, 8, 23, 159
X-Ray, autobiography 112, 120 iconic status 25
see also Kinks; Village Green mass appeal 24
Preservation Society as model northern-woman singer 24
Davis, Sammy, Jr. 26 “Sally in Our Alley” 24-5
Dawbarn, Bob 118 Fleetwood Mac 93
Debord, Guy 135, 145 Flying Burrito Brothers 93
Deviants 156 folk culture, music hall as 143
Diamond, Neil 31 Formby, George 23
Diggers 58, 88, 161 Fountain, Nigel 137
Dijon, Rocky 99 Fox, James 96
Dixieland band music 82 Frankfurt School 82
Donovan 31 Franklin, Aretha 35, 36, 44
A Gift From a Flower to a Garden 115 Fraser, Robert 69
Dr. John, Gris Gris 13fn17 Frith, Simon 24, 92
Du Noyer, Paul 30, 40 analysis of rock music 162, 163
Duffy 18, 36, 159 Frith, Simon & Herbert Horne, Art into
Dury, Ian 148 Pop 11, 155fn1
Dylan, Bob 14 Fury, Billy 5, 6
“Basement Tapes” 93
Gang of Four 132
Ed Sullivan Show 6 Gendron, Bernard 17, 159
Edgar Broughton Band 156 see also Genesis 130
Broughton, Edgar Gerry and the Pacemakers 40
Education Act (1944) 20 “How Do You Do It” 34
“I’m the One” 33 Janovitz, Bill 94

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” 34 Jarman, Derek
Gilbert, Bruce 150 Jubilee 157
Gilliam, Terry, Jabberwocky 48 on punk fakery 157
Goon Show 11 jazz
Gordy, Berry 40 influence, psychedelic music 121
Gould, Jonathan 65 trad 81, 82
Grateful Dead 65, 78 Jefferson Airplane 65, 78
Gray, Chris 134-5, 136, 137, 144 Jethro Tull, Aqualung 121fn7
Grosvenor Square demonstration, London Jimi Hendrix Experience 43 see also
(1968) 89, 113 Hendrix, Jimmy
Guns N’Roses 149 Johnson, Robert 100
Gysin, Byron 48, 95, 122 Jones, Brian 81, 84
arrest 69
Hall, Stuart 4 Jones, Spike and His City-Slickers 121
Handley, Tommy 51 Jones, Steve 140, 152
Harpo, Slim 55
Harrison, George 8, 14, 15, 59, 61, 67, 70, Kesey, Ken 65
71, 72, 80 King Mob 136, 137, 144
Hawkwind Kinks
“Psychedelic Warlords” 69 albums
“Silver Machine” 156fn3 Arthur 108, 113, 125
Hebdige, Dick, Subculture 137 Lola Versus Powerman 107
Hendrix, Jimmy 6, 63 Muswell Hillbillies 108
Electric Ladyland 115 Preservation, Acts 1 and 2 108
see also Jimi Hendrix Experience Something Else by the Kinks 115,
Hepburn, Audrey 26 125
Hewitt, Paolo 40 see also Village Green
Hollies 31 Preservation Society
Home, Stewart 131, 153 androgynous image 112
Hopkins, John “Hoppy” 69 Beatles, comparison 107-8
Horne, Herbert see Frith, Simon camp image 111-12
Howerd, Frankie 5 dress 111-12
Howlin’ Wolf 84 songs
“Smokestack Lightning” 122 “A Well-Respected Man”, folk/
“Human Be-In”, San Francisco 12 rock hybrid 111
Humperdinck, Engelbert 6 “Animal Farm” 122
“Autumn Almanac” 115, 119
International Times 53, 90 “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”
IT paper 69, 91, 92, 136 27
“Did You See His Name” 113
Jagger, Mick 10, 55, 83, 89, 90 “Do You Remember Walter”
arrest 69 118-19
Performance (film) 78, 95-6, 100 “Fancy” 111
on working-class racism 91 “Johnny Thunder” 112
see also Rolling Stones “Last of the Steam-Powered
James, Elmore 84 Trains” 122-3
Jameson, Fredric 59, 107, 118, 132 “Lola” 112
index 177
“People Take Pictures of Each Lydon, John (Johnny Rotten) 16, 17, 19,
Other” 119 132, 139
“Phenomenal Cat” 123 cultural
“Picture Book” 9, 119 eclecticism 148
“See My Friends” 111, 112 memory 143
“She’s Got Everything” 117 music hall
“Sunny Afternoon” 115, 116 memories, TV 130-31, 142
“The Village Green Preservation stage performance 152, 161
Society” 118 musical career 157fn4
“Till the End of the Day” 108 performance style 142, 149, 150
“Waterloo Sunset” 51 see also Public Image Ltd.; Sex Pistols
“Wicked Annabella” 112, 123, Lynne, Shelby 35
124
“You Really Got Me” 111 MacCabe, Colin 95
Starmaker (TV musical) 113 McCartney, James 51
Who, comparison 117, 124 McCartney, Paul 30, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 65,
see also Davies, Ray 70, 72, 73, 74
Kureishi, Hanif, on the Beatles 3fn1 MacColl, Ewan 111
MacDonald, Ian 10, 48, 50, 73, 85, 109
Lacey, Bruce 101 McDowell, Fred 100
Lane, Ronnie 86, 141 McGill, Donald 22
fairground memories 87 McKenzie, Scott, “San Francisco” 28
Larkin, Philip 10 McLaren, Malcolm 10, 83, 130, 131, 133
Led Zeppelin 149 critique of rock music 134
Lennon, John 10, 13, 55, 57-8 fashion/bondage shop 139, 144, 161
in Rock and Roll Circus 97 influence of Situationist ideology
“Working Class Hero” 16 135-6, 137
Lester, Richard 48 “Oliver Twist” proclamation 144-5,
Levy, Shawn 79 146-7
Lindsay-Hogg, Michael 15, 77 Sex Pistols, cultural divide 139-40
Link Wray, “Rumble” 57 Teddy Boy phenomenon, interest in
Little Richard 57 138, 144, 161
Liverpool, art scene 159 Magazine 132
Liverpool Sound 34 Magical Mystery Tour (MMT) (film) 1, 14,
Lloyd, A.L. 4, 111 47, 64-76, 130
Lloyd, Marie 4, 7, 24, 153 agenda 50
Eliot on 5 anti-Establishment 64
Logue, Christopher 55 “Blue Jay Way” segment 70-71
London Englishness 71
artistic space for rock musicians 12-13 British popular leisure references 49
Grosvenor Square demonstration British rock as cultural hybrid 56
(1968) 89, 113 bus tour
as “transatlantic soul” center 40 excursions reference 52
Love, Forever Changes 125 “happenings” reference 65
Lulu 22, 30, 40 childhood memories 51, 64
“Boat That I Row” 31 concept 48-9
“Boom Bang-a-Bang” 31 counterculture, identification with 158,
“Shout” 31 159
English countryside 52-3 Monck, Chip 88

Englishness 64 Monty Python, The Meaning of Life 48
modernist transcendence of 65, 85 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 152
“Fool on the Hill” segment 72 Moore, Allan 69, 156
Hard Day’s Night, comparison 65-6, 67 Morrissey 34
Hollywood ending 75 Most, Mickey 31
key musical sequences 67-8 Motley Crue 149
legacy 76 Motown sound 40-41
pastoralism 52 music capitalism, and the Beatles 57-64
reception 65, 75-6 music hall
and Rock and Roll Circus, comparison American view 4
78 and East End life 87
as text 64 elite patronage 5
utopianism 63 Englishness of 5
“Walrus” segment 68-9, 71 as folk culture 143
anti-pastoralism 69, 70 Lydon
working-class culture 57 stage performance 152, 161
“Your Mother Should Know” segment TV memories of 130-31, 142
72, 73-4 and national identity 3-4
Mancunian Films studio 23 origins 4
Marowitz, Charles 79 and post-WW II generation 5, 6
Martin, George 30, 58, 59, 61, 68, 70 and psychedelic music 121
Marwick, Arthur 80 revival attempts 102
Master Musicians of Joujouka 122 rock, hybridity 105, 143, 148
Matlock, Glen 16, 138, 139, 155fn1, 157 as rock music’s Other 1
I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol 140 songs, unifying function 14
praise for Faces 140-41, 143 styles, VGPS 105, 119-21
media frenzy, Sex Pistols 131-2, 151 transformational role 3
Melly, George 11, 54, 65, 80, 81, 82, 83, 158
Melly, Jim 11, 87 Nehring, Neil 162
Melody Maker 118, 136 Neville, Richard 83, 99
Merry Pranksters 65 New Musical Express 125, 133, 136
Metzger, Gustav 56 New Orleans jazz 82
Meyer, Russ 144 New Vaudeville Band, “Winchester
Mighty Baby 156 Cathedral” 121
Miles, Barry 53, 54, 55, 65, 69, 90, 136 New York Dolls 144
Miller, Andy 118, 119 Nirvana 133
Miller, Max 22 Nuttall, Jeff 22, 82, 101, 102, 158, 159
Mitchell, Joni 156
Mitchell, Julian 113 Oasis 19
Mitchell, Mitchell 43 Oldham, Andrew Loog 79, 81, 83, 89
Mods Onkey, Lauren 42
fashion 38 Orientalism 95
soul music 37-8 Orwell, George 4, 102
style 32-3 Owen, Alun 48, 65, 66
Dusty Springfield 38 OZ magazine 99
Mojo 18
MOJO Navigator magazine 125 Palmer, Tony, All My Loving 63
index 179
Peel, John 141 as rebellion 155-6

Pickett, Wilson 35 roots-oriented 94
Pink Floyd 63, 115, 136, 149 rock auteur
pop concert, critique of 86 albums 125-6
popular culture, northern 22-3 characteristics 109
Powell, Enoch 90, 91, 113 concept origins 108fn3
Pretty Things 115 Davies 44, 106, 107, 108, 109, 116,
Priestley, J.B. 10 118, 121, 127
Procul Harum, “A Whiter Shade of Pale” 68 rock festivals 63
psychedelic music 120-22 Altamont 99
instrumental contribution 122 rock populism 89, 98
jazz influence 121 Rock and Roll Circus (film) 1, 15, 101,
and music hall 121 103, 130
VGPS 123 concept origins 85-6, 87-9
Public Image Ltd. 17, 152 see also Lydon, Lennon’s segment 97
John and MMT, comparison 78
narrative, lack of 85
Quaife, Pete 117, 119 rock show as circus 77
Quant, Mary 32-3 rock theater 97, 98
and working-class identity 80, 102
racism, working-class, Jagger on 91 Roeg, Nicholas 95
Radio Luxembourg 10 Rogan, Johnny 29, 126
Raincoats 132 Rolling Stone 35
Rancière, Jacques 150, 160 Rolling Stones
Randall, Annie 35, 39, 42, 43, 45 albums
Randle, Frank 22, 102 Aftermath 80, 84
Rank Organization 23 Beggars Banquet 14, 89, 92, 93, 130
Ready, Steady, Go! 32 roots music 94
“Sound of Motown” program 40-41 Between the Buttons 80-81, 84, 160
Reed, Lou 149 Exile on Main Street 161fn8
Reid, Jamie 134 Their Satanic Majesties Request
Reisz, Karel, Saturday Night and Sunday 84fn4, 85, 121
Morning 65 Altamont festival 99
Reynolds, Simon 133, 149, 156 Beatles, comparison 83
Rip It Up and Start Again 151 cultural significance 160-61
Richard, Cliff 5 films
Richards, Keith, arrest 69 Gimme Shelter 100
Richardson, Tony, Loneliness of the Long see also Rock and Roll Circus
Distance Runner 65 Hyde Park concert 99
Richman, Jonathan, “Roadrunner” 149 intellectualism 82
Robb, John, Punk Rock: An Oral History Madison Square Garden show 100
156 musical styles 84
rock songs
artistic pretensions 103 “19th Nervous Breakdown” 80
commodification 101 “Back Street Girl” 81
country 93fn14 “Goin’ Home” 80, 84fn4
professionalization of 101 “Have You Seen Your Mother
prog 130 Baby” 19
“High and Dry” 80 Sharp, Cecil 111

“I am Waiting” 80 Shaw, Sandie 30
“Lady Jane” 80 “(Always) Something There to Remind
“Midnight Rambler” 100 Me” 31, 32
“Play with Fire” 27, 80 “Girl Don’t Come” 32
“Salt of the Earth” 97 “Hand in Glove” 34
“Sing This All Together” 84fn4, “Puppet on a String” 32
122 TV career 32
“Something Happened to Me Shotton, Pete 68
Yesterday” 9, 81 Simpson, Mark 7, 24, 25
“Street Fighting Man” 89, 101, 113 Sinatra, Frank, “Strangers in the Night”
“Sympathy for the Devil” 98 119
“What to Do” 80 Sinclair, John 79
“Who’s Been Sleeping Here” 81 Siouxsie and the Banshees 151, 152, 157
see also Jagger, Mick Situationist International 135, 137
Rotten, Johnny see Lydon, John Situationists 58, 88, 90, 92, 134
Roxy Music 11 ideology
British punk rock 135
satire, on television 114 influence on McLaren 135-6
Savage, Jon 19, 61, 111, 116 Slits 157
Seeger, Peggy 111 Small Faces
Severin, Steven 151, 152 albums, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake 2
Sex Pistols 16, 17, 130 music hall influences 6fn7
album, Never Mind the Bollocks, songs
Here’s the Sex Pistols 1 “Itchycoo Park” 51, 122
as anti-Beatles 19, 132, 144 “Lazy Sunday” 2
authenticity claims 133-4, 139, 151 “Rene” 2
effect on audience 150 see also Faces
Englishness 150-51 Smiths, “Hand in Glove” 34
Fagin’s gang image 144-5, 146-7, 162 soul music
films Dusty Springfield 36-7
The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle 149 Mods 37-8
There’ll Always Be an England northern 45-6
20, 152 transatlantic 40, 46
legacy 149, 151 Springfield, Dusty 21, 22
McLaren, cultural divide 139-40 aesthetic legacy 37, 45
media frenzy 131-2, 151 album
past, obsession with 162 Dusty in Memphis 18, 28, 35, 45
reunion concerts 20, 152 achievement 46, 159
rock modernism 143-4, 151 canonical status 45
rock/anti-rock performance style 150 critique of 36, 43
songs making of 45
“God Save the Queen” 131, 148, artistic autonomy 159
153 auteur practice 44
“Holidays in the Sun” 153 Bell, collaboration 39, 41-2
“Johnny B. Goode” 149 “great white soul singer” 35
Temple on 150-51 influence on music scene 41
working-class identity 140 Mod style 38
index 181
reinvention 43 Village Green Preservation Society (VGPS)

songs 1, 15, 17
“Sun of a Preacher Man” 45 and British rock modernism 105-6
“Wishin’ and Hopin’” 41 critique of 158
“You Don’t Have to Say You Love concept origins 116
Me” 39, 44, 93 Davies’ auteurship 106, 107, 108, 109,
soul style 36-7, 38-9, 159 116, 118, 121, 127
TV career 41 as Davies solo album 125
working process 43-4 Englishness 109
stadium rock 14fn18, 17, 63, 101 legacy 125
Steele, Tommy 5, 26 music hall styles 105, 119-21
Stewart, Rod 141 musical range 110
Stone, Joss 159 psychedelic music 123
Sunday Night at the London Palladium 6, rock/music-hall mash-up 106
31 songs 118-20, 121
Symons, Arthur 4, 5, 102 utopianism 110
violence, and British rock 57
Tarantino, Quentin, Pulp Fiction 45
Taubin, Amy 100 Wall, Max 5, 142, 161
Taylor, James 156 Watkins, Peter, Privilege 86, 114fn6, 115
Technicolor Dream Show, Alexandra Westwood, Vivienne 161
Palace 12 Wexler, Jerry 43, 44
Teddy Boy phenomenon, McLaren’s Who, Kinks, comparison 117, 124
interest in 138, 144, 161 Wickham, Vicki 37, 40, 41, 159
Temple, Julien Williams, Raymond 12, 73
on the Sex Pistols 150-51 Williams, Richard 10
The Filth and the Fury 19, 142 Wilson, Andrew 145
The Great Rock and Roll Swindle 139 Winehouse, Amy 18, 36, 46, 159
That Was the Week That Was (TV show) Withcard, Anne 61
113 Wollen, Peter 95
Thomas, Irma 36 women singers 7
Townshend, Pete 19, 56, 63, 86, 96 of the 60s 21-2, 159
Tunstall, “KT” 18 British Invasion 25, 30, 33, 37, 46
Wood, Ellen 88
Uncut 18 Wood, Ron 141
utopianism Wordsworth, William, The Prelude 126
British rock modernism 163 working-class
MMT 63 communities, break-up 140, 143
VGPS 110 values, erosion 140
Wyman, Bill 100
Vague, Tom 135fn5, 153
Van Morrison, Astral Weeks 125, 126 Yardbirds 42
vaudeville 4 Yes 130
Velvet Underground Yippies 92
Velvet Underground and Nico 149 Young, Neil 156
White Light/White Heat 149
Zappa, Frank 63

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British Rock Modernism,

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ISBN 9781409411901 (hbk)

General Editor’s Preface  vii

2 Modernist Rock Constructs the Folk: The Beatles’

3 New Left in Victorian Drag: The Rolling Stones Rock and

5 Modernist Nostalgia: The Sex Pistols’ Music-Hall Revival  129

Professor Derek B. Scott

often by rediscovering the objectives of modernist artists, concerned with achieving

John Lennon suggests a continuity of experience between metropolitan London

nineteenth century, sport and entertainment played a paradoxical role in British

Rampant youth unemployment; the relocation of working-class neighborhoods,

The passionate attachment of Mods to American soul was motivated at least in

generation, embedded in the Englishness that it represented. The immediate

The Beatles’ Pastoral

youth-oriented form, lacked intellectual seriousness, by presenting a coded

The Beatles and Music Capitalism

managed to change circumstances to their advantage, developing protocols that,

Despite the remarkable novelty the Beatles represented as a massively successful

then, that “Walrus” was the product of Lennon/McCartney’s new-found practice

also suggest the heightened awareness accompanying an exalted state of mind.

Historicizing the Stones’ film allows us to grasp the changing definitions of

multi-layered musically, especially considering the band’s musical roots in

bourgeois, the experience of Performance was more ambiguously anti-capitalist:

and Regency Dandy costume—put their masculinity in question, more so than

The VGPS represents Davies’ attempt to recapture an idyllic space of creativity

of contemporary music” (www.stewarthomesociety.org). The media circus that

Beyond the ease with which bourgeois society seemed to accommodate

Like Matlock, Lydon too is interested in cultural memory and invisible

Figure 5.1 “Appropriating History.” By permission of the Hospital Group

remained rooted in the nonconformist North, in a Liverpool art scene that, as

suited to an apolitical outlook [signifying] the irreducible chaos of human affairs”

attempt at historical reclamation also, in Tim Armstrong’s words, “[isolates]

preoccupation with style and form represents a bourgeois solipsism, a projection

—. Liner notes. Dusty in Memphis. Perf. Dusty Springfield. Atlantic, 1969.

MacCabe, Colin. Performance. London: BFI, 1998. Print.

Williams, Richard. Long Distance Call. London: Aurum, 2000. Print.

References to illustrations are in bold

Addey, Malcolm 58 didacticism 158

“When I’m 64”, music hall perspectives on 156

Cohen, Phil 137 Eliot, T.S. 4, 15, 102, 153

“I’m the One” 33 Janovitz, Bill 94

English countryside 52-3 Monck, Chip 88

Peel, John 141 as rebellion 155-6

“High and Dry” 80 Sharp, Cecil 111

reinvention 43 Village Green Preservation Society (VGPS)

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General Editor’s Preface vii

5 Modernist Nostalgia: The Sex Pistols’ Music-Hall Revival 129