RED DAYS Popular Music and the English Counterculture 1965-1975
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RED DAYS Popular Music and the English Counterculture 1965-1975 John Roberts Red Days: Popular Music and the English Counterculture 1965-1975 John Roberts ISBN 978-1-57027-364-3 Cover design by Haduhi Szukis Interior design by Margaret Killjoy Released by Minor Compositions 2020 Colchester / New York / Port Watson Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] CONTENTS Acknowledgments ...........................5 Introduction: English Exceptions ............... 7 1: ‘New Folk-Tinking’ and the English Pastoral ...33 2: Irony and Post-Imperial Defation............71 3: Feminization and Trenody ...............111 4: Extensity and the Song-Form .............. 141 Conclusion .............................. 183 “Although our songs are frail, they belong to the life we want.” – Friedrich Hölderlin “We leave unachieved in the summer dusk. Tere are no maps of moon- light. Tings stand further of. We fnd peace in the room and don’t ask what won’t be answered. We don’t know what we see, so there is more here. More. Here.” – R.F. Langley 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been long in the thinking if not in the making; in some sense I’ve been too close to the material to write about it, too re- sistant to its charms and afects to make proper use of it. Tis is because there are, inevitably, philosophically, politically, adolescent passions, res- onating in, even coursing, through these materials, and so one should be careful. Yet, in the end one can be too careful, too protective. Tis book is the outcome. Tere are a few scattered people I would like to thank: John Cage, who once, graciously signed a copy of Finnegan’s Wake’s for me after Silvia- Panet Raymond and I had interviewed him, and whose exemplary music and passion have always haunted the things I have most wanted from music, at least when refection is most needed; the many bands I mention in the book and who I saw at their height such as Henry Cow, Robert Wyatt’s Soft Machine and Van Der Graaf Generator; Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) a book of forensic magnifcence in its dissection of the national spirit under Tatcher and the postpunk settle- ment, and that has always stayed with me as a guide to the English past and future; the artist Matthew Cornford who I have spent endless hours talking about the incomparable generosity of the 1960s English art school; Marc James Léger and Cayley Sorochan for their insightful comments 5 6 • Red Days on the manuscript; to Colin Beckett, Mark Harris, and James Hellings for their support and interest in the project; to Stevphen Shukaitis at Autonomedia for his editorial work and support; and to the artist Chris Riding, whose pre-I-player CD compilation Mad as a Badger’s Armpit: A Partial Gazetteer To Te Pastoral Sounds of Old Albion (1965-2004), from 2004, uplifted and humoured me, and then coaxed and stirred me into thinking again about what was so transformative about those years; and why England, of all places, in post-imperialist decline, and still mired in a public culture of high-cultural condescension and populist, rebarbative sentiment, could produce so much, with so much intensity. Introduction ENGLISH EXCEPTIONS Between 1965 and 1975 English popular culture underwent an extraordinary and rapid process of change, particularly in the area of pop- ular music. Tis history of course is much celebrated, historicized and mined, in an endlessly repeated incantation of what was so special, so transformative, and so creative about the 1960s. Indeed, it was popular music that very much defned and shaped these changes – and changed horizons – as a new kind of popular experience smashed its way through what remained of Tin Pan Alley versifcation, Edwardian show tunes and ‘light entertainment,’ and postwar United States-derived crooning and balladeering. And, therefore, popular music, understandably, has come to represent these changes in the popular, more broadly, for good reasons – it opened up an unprecedented space for new kinds of subjective ex- periences that other cultural forms were unable to accomplish, certainly with the same range of afective power. In addition, in England this is not just about the assimilation of rock ‘n’ roll as the lingua franca of a new popular cultural exuberance, as if, after Bill Haley in the late 1950s England suddenly ‘gets’ rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll in the late sixties in 7 8 • Red Days England is soon and comprehensively moved beyond in an act of criti- cal and creative assimilation and displacement. Compare the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Van Der Graaf Generator’s even more extraordinary H to He Whom am the Only One (1970) to Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis, who by 1965, seems as relevant as Dean Martin. Ironically between 1965 and 1975 popular music in England not only dismantles and ironizes the legacy of light entertainment and Edwardian cultural sentiment (the after-life of which is best exemplifed by one of the big hit flms of 1968, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang),1 but US rock ‘n’ roll itself. For every one Ten Years After and Groundhogs paying homage to US guitar-based blues, there were fve bands trying to defate its legacy (Te Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, early Pink Floyd, Kevin Ayers, Soft Machine), or seeking an exit point into a new refective, even pastoral space and post-blues jazz dynamic for ‘rock’ (Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (1968), Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Tird Ear Band, Jack Bruce’s impres- sive post-Cream Songs for a Tailor (1970), and, of course, Te Incredible String Band, who in a sense reverse the process by exiting from rock into folk. Tus, the entry of English folk traditions, as much as jazz, electronic music, nascent noise music, new modernist poetry, and modern-classical atonal forms, all play their part in this shifting panoply of entrances and exits. One might say, then, that the expansion of ‘rock culture’ (as the de- fning popular form of the emerging counterculture) is what frames this period, not the arrival and acceptance of rock ‘n’ roll as a popular form. Te causes and impetus for these changes in the boundaries and meaning of the popular in music during this period are multiple and complex. Of primary importance, however, is the massive and collective entry of the working class and lower middle class after the 1950s into the production and active reception of an industrialized popular culture, in ways that reshape the expectations and horizons of both classes, and the meaning of popular culture itself. Tis is the defning shift of the period, and it takes various forms across Europe and North America, as young work- ers and lower middle-class workers and students and intellectuals begin to capture spaces from the post-1950s mass cultural spectacle, that the 1 Indeed, at the height of the counterculture, conservative popular taste is awash with nostalgia for Edwardian sentiment, refected in the revival of interest in the Music Hall song, on the spurious grounds of a lost intimacy between singer and audience, and the passing of the cultivation of ‘wit’ as opposed to ideas.