9. Toasting the English (2000)

According to astute cultural observers such as Paul Gilroy or Simon Gikandi, imperial melancholy of the sort which enmeshed the popular reception of Sara Baartman in Romantic period London (as discussed in the previous chapter) turned into a fully fledged “postcolonial melancholia” when Britain saw the mass immigration from its (ex)colonies during the 1950s and 1960s. In Gilroy’s diagnosis, “Victorian melancholy started to yield to melancholia as soon as the natives and savages began to appear and make demands for recognition in the Empire’s metropolitan core” (Gilroy 2004, 99). At the heart of this new melancholia fundamentally lies “an English identity that is split between an imperial positivity (which thrives on nostalgia) and a post- imperial negativity projected onto the immigrants” (Gikandi 1996, 70) in a perverse logic which “allocate[s] a large measure of blame for the Empire to its victims and then seek[s] to usurp their honored place of suffering” (Gilroy 2004, 103). The most radical political creed of this discourse emerged as ‘Powellism’ in Britain, named after conservative Wolverhampton MP , most infamous for his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech which vividly painted the apocalyptic scenario of “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre” (Powell 1969, 283) through unregulated black and Asian immigration. Powell’s iconic status, however, should not deflect from the fact that Powellism has been more than just the “enunciation of a specifically defiant politics about race and the black population by a single person,” as Stuart Hall emphasised, but indeed denotes an official policy that has been “at the heart of British political culture” (Hall 1978, 29-30). A rhetoric of “moral panic” directed at the immigrant population notoriously pervaded ’s election campaign of 1978/1979 and has arguably re- mained a hallmark of Tory politics; and while New Labour’s strategic “rheto- ric of multiculturalism” (Balasubramanyam 2008) strikes a seemingly differ- ent overall note, Blairite populism has repeatedly shown its uglier face espe- cially in dealings with asylum and immigration. The British mainstream music scene saw itself confronted with widely publicised manifestations of outspoken postcolonial melancholia at the latest since 1976 when a drunk and loose-lipped Eric Clapton used a Birmingham concert to pledge his support to the Wolverhampton MP, expressing that Britain is about to become a “black colony” and that he wanted “the foreign- ers out” (Tyler 2007). The press coverage of Clapton’s gig predictably harped down on the blatant irony that this should come from the mouth of someone whose music was half black (and who had just had a major hit with Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”), and the indignation led more or less directly to

216 Reading Song Lyrics the formation of Rock Against Racism. Clapton himself in fact never felt propelled to step back from his ravings and still in 2004 told Uncut magazine that he found Powell “outrageously brave” (ibid.). The latest Powellite stunt at the time of writing, however, was (re)performed by (Steven Patrick) Morrissey, singer of The Smiths until their disbanding in 1987 and since pursuing a solo career, in an interview in New Musical Express (NME) in November 2007. Professing that “I don’t have anything against people from other coun- tries, [but] the higher the influx into , the more the British identity disappears. […] If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won’t hear an English accent,” and affirming in a follow-up inter- view that “[t]he gates of England are flooded. The country’s been thrown away” (qtd. in Byrne 2007), Morrissey basically all but announced the ful- filment of Powell’s apocalyptic prophecies – in his Biography of a Nation, Powell predicted that “whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-de- scended population [with] shattering effects on the lives of many families and persons” (Maude and Powell 1970, 222-23). The fact that Morrissey, who chooses to live in Rome, responded to the ensuing furore by suing NME for indemnity and (again) insisted on his well-documented anti-racism (“Racism is beyond common sense and I believe it has no place in our society” qtd. in Byrne 2007) does rather confirm the larger pathological pattern of postcolo- nial melancholia than deny it. “[M]elancholic Britain can concede that it does not like blacks and wants to get rid of them,” Gilroy writes with unremitting pungency, “but then becomes uncomfortable because it does not like the things it learns about itself when it gives vent to feelings of hostility and ha- tred” (Gilroy 2004, 114). Morrissey’s twisted performances of Englishness are indeed full of para- doxes which he to some extent deliberately stages, as Nabeel Zuberi high- lights in a close reading of the most notorious Morrissey scandal of which the 2007 NME interview was indeed just a bizarre reprise. Opening for the ‘Mad- stock’ reunion concert of legendary ska-formation Madness – a band with an established fan base among National Front skinheads – at Finsbury Park (North London) in August 1992, Morrissey felt inspired to tantalisingly wrap himself in a Union Jack flag before a huge photographic backdrop of two 1970s skinhead girls, only to be basically howled off the stage – partly by anti-racists in the audience who revolted against the white nationalist iconog- raphy, but mostly by macho skinheads who found the same iconography in- appropriate in the hands of someone with a reputation for asceticism, androg- yny and an obsession with Oscar Wilde (cf. Zuberi 2001, 17-19). The subse- quent press coverage of Morrissey’s 1992 Madstock debacle was a similarly polarised affair: most reviewers sided with the view taken by the NME