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Greg Walker Selling England (and Italy) by the Pound: Performing National Identity in the First Phase of Progressive Rock: Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and PFM1 This paper will look at the performance of national identities in one particular sub-field of late twentieth-century popular culture: a genre of popular music usually seen as idiosyncratically English: progressive rock.2 It will look in particular at the various forms of Englishness encoded in the works of two of the most significant English progressive groups, Jethro Tull and King Crim- son, and their reception and translation in Italy, most obviously in the work of the leading Italian progressive group, Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), and then at the ways in which the Italianness of this most ‘Mediterranean’ of Italian groups was in turn received and translated (in part quite literally) in England and America.3 I shall begin, however, with a glance at a concert that unites all three bands vicariously in the birth of the progressive project in Italy. It is October 1971, and PFM, the quintessentially Italian progenitors of the ‘Mediterra- nean’ progressive sound (a band after all named after ‘The Award-Winning Marconi Bakery’ in Chiari, a small town near Brescia) are playing in Milan. 1. I am very grateful to both Kevin Jacklin and Dr Orietta Da Rold for their help with mat- ters musical and linguistic during the writing of this paper. 2. For progressive music’s Englishness see, for example, Paul Stump, The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (London: Quartet, 1997), pp. 5 and 10; Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 91; and especially the extended, stimulating discussion of the is- sue in Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), pp. 104–112. The ‘archetypal’ Englishness of Jethro Tull in particular has long been a theme in critical discussion of the band, especially since their overt adoption of rustic themes and folk idioms in the Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses albums of 1977–8. As early as January 1970, however, a New Musical Express journalist wrote that ‘there are few bands more intrinsically English than Jethro Tull’ (NME, 19 January 1970, p. 20). 3. For PFM’s ‘Mediterraneanness’ (a concept helpfully problematised in Claudio Visentin’s essay in this volume), see a number of the articles on the PFM website: http://www. pfmpfm.it/eng/main.htm (in particular under the link ‘curiosities’ in the ‘anni 70s’- section; accessed 23 February 2007), the comments of drummer Franz Di Cioccio re- corded at http://www.gaudela.net/pfm/index2.html (accessed 23 February 2007), and Paulo Barotto, The Return of Italian Pop, 2nd English edn (Milan: Vinyl Solution Music, 1998), pp. 4 and 121–24. The key elements would seem to be the prominent use of warm acoustic guitar sounds to texture the songs, the deployment of motifs from vernacular folk songs and classical music, and, primarily, singing in Italian. 288 Greg Walker Their set, however, consists of few of their own songs: its highlights are cov- ers of English progressive classics: King Crimson’s abrasive rants against modernity ‘Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man’ and ‘Picture of the City’ and Jethro Tull’s ‘Nothing is Easy’, ‘Bouree’, and ‘My God’. The stark, staccato imagery of Pete Sinfield’s lyrics for King Crimson might not seem too out of place in this new context, drawing as it does on European surrealist and mod- ernist traditions as well as echoing the concerns of the contemporary British Poetry Revival.4 But ‘My God’, released on the Aqualung album only months earlier, seems a more curious importation, given that it is a very English ru- mination on the hypocrisies of organised religion, and the social roles of the Anglican church, school system, and class structure in Britain.5 Quite what Italian audiences made of it (somewhat mangled as it was in delivery) is difficult to tell from the surviving recordings. Similarly, one can only specu- late about how much of the jaunty, idiomatic articulacy of a song like Jethro Tull’s ‘Nothing is Easy’ (taken from the Stand Up album of 1969), with its casual allusions to the austerities of the Harold Wilson government’s eco- nomic ‘squeeze’, and its deployment of banal English vernacular expressions such as ‘worse things happen at sea’, survived the various translations in- volved in the live performance. What is perhaps more significant for our purposes, however, is not so much whether either the musicians or the audience fully understood the nu- ances of the songs being performed, but the fact that PFM saw the need to play them at all. Here, seemingly counter-intuitively, was an Italian band performing indigestibly English material as a means of becoming better known in Italy. It could, of course, be objected that this was no more than countless British groups had done in the past, as when the Rolling Stones or Jethro Tull themselves had established reputations in England by playing covers and adaptations of American soul and blues material. But the situation here was rather different, for this was no stereotyped or clichéd image of Englishness that PFM were performing, but a version of national identity as carefully and recently constructed in its basic elements as it was idiosyncrati- cally vernacular in its expression. And an understanding of how this came about reveals much about the nature of progressive rock itself and its rela- tionship to the other culturally-approved forms of musical self-fashioning available to English and Italian performers at this time. 4. Pete Sinfield’s lyrics for both King Crimson and PFM can be consulted on-line at http://www.songsouponsea.com (accessed 23 February 2007). 5. The lyrics to all of the Jethro Tull songs cited can be consulted on-line at http://www. cupofwonder.com (accessed 23 February 2007), or in Jethro Tull: Complete Lyrics, ed. by Karl Schramm and Gerard J. Burns (Heidelberg: Palmyra Publishers, 1993). .

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