âNight Nurseâ would be enough. If itâs true that music does, as Iâve attempted to argue elsewhere, serve as a form of self-expression even to those of us who can express ourselves tolerably well in speech or in writing, how much more vital is it going to be for him, when he has so few other outlets? Thatâs why I love the relationship with music he has already, because itâs how I know he has something in him that he wants others to articulate. In fact, thinking about it now, itâs why I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because thereâs something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. Itâs the best part of us, probably, the richest and strangest part, andDannyâs got it too, of course he has; you could argue that heâs simply dispensed with all the earthbound, rubbishy bits.
23 âThe Calvary Crossâ â Richard and Linda Thompson
You could, if you were perverse, argue that youâll never hear England by listening to English pop music. The Beatles and The Stones were, in their formative years, American cover bands who sang with American accents;the Sex Pistols were The Stooges with bad teeth and a canny manager, and Bowie was an art-school version of Jackson Browne until he saw the New York Dolls. But youâll never hear England by listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams, either: too much has happened since then. Whereâs the lager-fuelled violence? Whereâs the lip, or the self-deprecation, or the lethargy, or the irreverence? Where are the jokes? Whereâs the curry? You may not want to think about any of that when you lie back and think of England, but itâs all undeniably there, and if youâre English, the odds are that youâll eat a curry more often than you see an ascending lark.
You couldnât really find anything more American-sounding than the music Ian Duryâs band the Blockheads play on âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ: chicken-scratch James Brown guitar, a sax solo which quotes from the theme to A Summer Place  . . . except, right there, in that odd combination of late-fifties American kitsch and early-seventies American funk (and âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ is funky enough to bring on a patriotic, we-can-do-it-too glow), there is something uniquely English: Duryâs generation was not afraid of the past, nor of popular culture outside the rock and blues tradition. (Compare The Beatles or The Kinks to just about any American band of the same era,and you can only conclude that our bands liked their parents more.) âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ is, as its title implies, a list, and in the way the list consists of a great many things that are not English, it is as curiously representational of a certain kind of post-war Englishness as the music. Stephen Biko, for example, the black activist who was murdered by the South African authorities, was an integral part of our liberal-left political landscape of the early eighties â it was an English singer, Peter Gabriel, who wrote a song about him. And the trombonist Rico is Jamaican, but our 1970s obsession with reggae wasnât shared on the other side of the Atlantic, and Rico was a reason not only to be cheerful but also why The Specials sounded so distinctive (and, at the time, so distinctively un-American). Iâm not attempting to claim British credit for any of these people or their achievements, merely pointing out that they are meaningful to us, that they are part of what being British has involved in the last few decades.
The more I listen to âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ, the more it sounds like the best kind of national anthem, one capable of inspiring pride in those of us who spend too much time feeling embarrassed by our country. In fact, if Tony Blair has any guts, he should explain to the Queen that, because none of us cares about her any
23 âThe Calvary Crossâ â Richard and Linda Thompson
You could, if you were perverse, argue that youâll never hear England by listening to English pop music. The Beatles and The Stones were, in their formative years, American cover bands who sang with American accents;the Sex Pistols were The Stooges with bad teeth and a canny manager, and Bowie was an art-school version of Jackson Browne until he saw the New York Dolls. But youâll never hear England by listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams, either: too much has happened since then. Whereâs the lager-fuelled violence? Whereâs the lip, or the self-deprecation, or the lethargy, or the irreverence? Where are the jokes? Whereâs the curry? You may not want to think about any of that when you lie back and think of England, but itâs all undeniably there, and if youâre English, the odds are that youâll eat a curry more often than you see an ascending lark.
You couldnât really find anything more American-sounding than the music Ian Duryâs band the Blockheads play on âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ: chicken-scratch James Brown guitar, a sax solo which quotes from the theme to A Summer Place  . . . except, right there, in that odd combination of late-fifties American kitsch and early-seventies American funk (and âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ is funky enough to bring on a patriotic, we-can-do-it-too glow), there is something uniquely English: Duryâs generation was not afraid of the past, nor of popular culture outside the rock and blues tradition. (Compare The Beatles or The Kinks to just about any American band of the same era,and you can only conclude that our bands liked their parents more.) âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ is, as its title implies, a list, and in the way the list consists of a great many things that are not English, it is as curiously representational of a certain kind of post-war Englishness as the music. Stephen Biko, for example, the black activist who was murdered by the South African authorities, was an integral part of our liberal-left political landscape of the early eighties â it was an English singer, Peter Gabriel, who wrote a song about him. And the trombonist Rico is Jamaican, but our 1970s obsession with reggae wasnât shared on the other side of the Atlantic, and Rico was a reason not only to be cheerful but also why The Specials sounded so distinctive (and, at the time, so distinctively un-American). Iâm not attempting to claim British credit for any of these people or their achievements, merely pointing out that they are meaningful to us, that they are part of what being British has involved in the last few decades.
The more I listen to âReasons To Be Cheerfulâ, the more it sounds like the best kind of national anthem, one capable of inspiring pride in those of us who spend too much time feeling embarrassed by our country. In fact, if Tony Blair has any guts, he should explain to the Queen that, because none of us cares about her any
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