The dancers were young, around sixteen or seventeen, and not one of them would have seen the Pink Fairies at the Roundhouse in 1968 from where their light-show had been lifted. As I leaned against a wall drinking, it seemed that this was more of a parody of the 1960s than a real impulse connected with rebellion. The 1960s and its liberations were blown to bits but its fripperies had reemerged as style, as mere dressing-up. Nonetheless, few of the kids looked as if they’d willingly endure a spell in Peregrine Worsthorne’s house listening to him discuss the hideous spectacle of people sprawling on the Northern line with their legs apart.
The next day Thatcher’s fans took their seats early for the Empress’s big speech. They had their Thatcher mugs, spoons, thimbles, teacosies and photographs in their laps. I’d been in and out of the hall all week but most of the audience had been there all along, listening to speeches for about thirty hours. Now the front bank of seats was occupied ninety minutes before Thatcher was due to start. The blue flags, the Union Jacks were unfurled; some people held up Thatcher/Bush posters. There was jigging and dancing in the aisles. ‘Jerusalem’ was sung. I must have heard the phrase ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ at least three times a day in the past week.
The cabinet marched on to the platform. Thatcher was introduced. A curtain moved; she and Denis came on; the crystal voice of the Empress began. She recited her speechwriter’s jokes without smiling, as if she were reading from the Critique of Pure Reason. There was some Dickens, everyone belonged to them now: ‘Fog, fog everywhere.’ I’d heard that America’s finest speechwriter had been flown in to assist. The Empress’s speeches were cobbled together like American films, by four or five people. There was much baby-language. ‘All elections matter. But some matter more than others.’ ‘We are all too young to put our feet up.’ ‘Yes, our children can travel to see the treasures and wonders of the world.’
None of it mattered to the fans. It was the old familiar songs they liked best. They chanted: ‘Ten more years.’
On the way out I heard one woman lamenting to another: ‘I wish there’d been balloons. Next year they’ll have balloons because I’m going to write to them about it. Thousands of balloons, falling all over us.’
Eight Arms to Hold You
One day at school — an all-boys comprehensive on the border between London and Kent — our music teacher told us that John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t actually write those famous Beatles songs we loved so much.
It was 1968 and I was thirteen. For the first time in music appreciation class we were to listen to the Beatles — ‘She’s Leaving Home’, with the bass turned off. The previous week, after some Brahms, we’d been allowed to hear a Frank Zappa record, again bassless. For Mr Hogg, our music and religious instruction teacher, the bass guitar ‘obscured’ the music. But hearing anything by the Beatles at school was uplifting, an act so unusually liberal it was confusing.
Mr Hogg prised open the lid of the school ‘stereophonic equipment’, which was kept in a big, dark wooden box and wheeled around the premises by the much-abused war-wounded caretaker. Hogg put on ‘She’s Leaving Home’ without introduction, but as soon as it began he started his Beatles analysis.
What he said was devastating, though it was put simply, as if he were stating the obvious. These were the facts: Lennon and McCartney could not possibly have written the songs ascribed to them; it was a con — we should not be taken in by the ‘Beatles’, they were only front-men.
Those of us who weren’t irritated by his prattling through the tune were giggling. Certainly, for a change, most of us were listening to teacher. I was perplexed. Why would anyone want to think anything so ludicrous? What was really behind this idea?
‘Who did write the Beatles’ songs, then, sir?’ someone asked bravely. And Paul McCartney sang:
We struggled hard all our lives to get by,
She’s leaving home after living alone,
For so many years.
Mr Hogg told us that Brian Epstein and George Martin wrote the Lennon/McCartney songs. The Fabs only played on the records — if they did anything at all. (Hogg doubted whether their hands had actually touched the instruments.) ‘Real musicians were playing on those records,’ he said. Then he put the record back in its famous sleeve and changed the subject.
But I worried about Hogg’s theory for days; on several occasions I was tempted to buttonhole him in the corridor and discuss it further. The more I dwelt on it alone, the more it revealed. The Mopheads couldn’t even read music — how could they be geniuses?
It was unbearable to Mr Hogg that four young men without significant education could be the bearers of such talent and critical acclaim. But then Hogg had a somewhat holy attitude to culture. ‘He’s cultured,’ he’d say of someone, the antonym of ‘He’s common.’ Culture, even popular culture — folk-singing, for instance — was something you put on a special face for, after years of wearisome study. Culture involved a particular twitching of the nose, a faraway look (into the sublime), and a fruity pursing of the lips. Hogg knew. There was, too, a sartorial vocabulary of knowingness, with leather patches sewn on to the elbows of shiny, rancid jackets.
Obviously this was not something the Beatles had been born into. Nor had they acquired it in any recognised academy or university. No, in their early twenties, the Fabs made culture again and again, seemingly without effort, even as they mugged and winked at the cameras like schoolboys.
Sitting in my bedroom listening to the Beatles on a Grundig reel-to-reel tape-recorder, I began to see that to admit to the Beatles’ genius would devastate Hogg. It would take too much else away with it. The songs that were so perfect and about recognisable common feelings — ‘She Loves You’, ‘Please, Please Me’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ — were all written by Brian Epstein and George Martin because the Beatles were only boys like us: ignorant, bad-mannered and rude; boys who’d never, in a just world, do anything interesting with their lives. This implicit belief, or form of contempt, was not abstract. We felt and sometimes recognised — and Hogg’s attitude towards the Beatles exemplified this — that our teachers had no respect for us as people capable of learning, of finding the world compelling and wanting to know it.
The Beatles would also be difficult for Hogg to swallow because for him there was a hierarchy among the arts. At the top were stationed classical music and poetry, beside the literary novel and great painting. In the middle would be not-so-good examples of these forms. At the bottom of the list, and scarcely considered art forms at all, were films (‘the pictures’), television and, finally, the most derided — pop music.
But in that post-modern dawn — the late 1960s — I like to think that Hogg was starting to experience cultural vertigo — which was why he worried about the Beatles in the first place. He thought he knew what culture was, what counted in history, what had weight, and what you needed to know to be educated. These things were not relative, not a question of taste or decision. Notions of objectivity did exist; there were criteria and Hogg knew what the criteria were. Or at least he thought he did. But that particular form of certainty, of intellectual authority, along with many other forms of authority, was shifting. People didn’t know where they were any more.
Not that you could ignore the Beatles even if you wanted to. Those rockers in suits were unique in English popular music, bigger than anyone had been before. What a pleasure it was to swing past Buckingham Palace in the bus knowing the Queen was indoors, in her slippers, watching her favourite film, Yellow Submarine, and humming along to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. (‘All the lonely people …’)