Stuff Brits Like

by Fraser McAlpine

  Just something to bear in mind the next time you hear that tired old line about swearing being a sign of a poor vocabulary.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Five pounds for a pint of lager? Do you take me for some kind of wanker?”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Good afternoon, Lady Malmsbury. I see some sods have been buggering about on your lawn.”

  The Charts

  In an era of YouTube plays and constantly updated download figures it’s bizarre to think of a time when there was just one weekly marker of musical success that mattered. For people of a certain age, the British Top 40 singles chart—which counts sales alone, not radio play—used to matter like nothing else, to the extent that they can still recall chart statistics that are over thirty years old: the singles that went to number one in the first week of release; the bands or singers that had the longest run of chart toppers; the songs that should have got to number one but were elbowed aside by unworthy novelties; all indelibly etched on the brain.

  The national obsession with the chart was fuelled by two things: BBC Radio 1’s chart rundown on a Sunday night and Top of the Pops.

  Top of the Pops was at one and the same time the most elitist (you had to be popular to get in the door) and the most egalitarian music TV show ever devised. In theory, anyone could get on and perform. All they had to do was sell enough singles (in the right shops) to get their song into the Top 40. The higher the record, the louder the clamour to get them on Top of the Pops; and by the same token, no record sales: no chance. Music shows that were curated by the taste of the production team could not dream of the variety displayed on a weekly basis on Top of the Pops. You’d have some nonsense novelty tune rubbing shoulders with the latest pin-drop reverie from a critically adored artiste. Folk would happily meet metal, blues would meet pop, punk would meet hip-hop, and parents all over the country would tut and roll their eyes. It was a revolving snapshot of the week in pop music, devoid of all context because there simply wasn’t time to explain what was going on.

  Similarly, as an effort to keep up in prestreaming times, pop fans would make their own chart mix tapes by running the Radio 1 chart show through a tape deck and applying nimble fingers to the record and pause buttons. It’s somewhat romanticized now as a childhood rite of passage—no doubt similar things were going on all over the world anyway—and it’s a cliché even to mention it, but, my golly, it happened a lot. Personal music taste was curated out of capricious sales information. Songs would be rudely shorn of introductions and long fade-outs and jammed together simply because they were nearby neighbours in a list. Now that there are magazines devoted to raking over the past of music in forensic detail, and the ability to find any song whenever you want it, it seems unbelievably irreverent that anyone would do this, and of course that’s where the charm of the process lies. It’s pop music, not jazz.

  Simon Cowell rather spoiled it all, while providing the old charts with their final hurrah. During the early 2000s the drive to create spangled reality TV out of record company machinations revived flagging interest in the process of making singles, at a point when only committed pop fans—by which I mean teenage girls, ick!—were buying them. Everyone else bought albums. With the promotional push of a weekly TV show like The X Factor behind them, new singers could get that crucial first-week number-one status that had been the preserve of cultural phenomena like the Beatles, Slade, the Jam and, latterly, Westlife.

  This was a Penn & Teller moment. The X Factor and Pop Idol suggested that making pop music was like a Find the Lady street hustle: you let viewers in on the trick, point at the card, show the card, and still keep the money. The claim was that talent was being discovered—and that’s true to an extent—within the framing device of TV. In fact, a good percentage of the winners were decent singers with appealing faces but little of the charismatic charge of good pop stars. The one thing very few of them had, apart from divertingly batty sideshow acts like Jedward (if you don’t know, don’t ask), was any discernible X factor. But they dominated the national conversation around pop music for years, thanks in part to some great pop singles by Will Young, Girls Aloud and Leona Lewis, among the more usual victory lap mush that the format usually demands.

  From 2005 on, download sales were included in the chart tally, and this started to show some strange anomalies that were once again attributable to the influence of TV. Old songs would enter the chart for a hot week, just because they had been featured in Britain’s Got Talent or The X Factor auditions. Adele’s “Make You Feel My Love” spent fifty-five weeks biffing around the chart, thanks to a weekly mauling by would-be superstars. The chart doesn’t care about any of this stuff, of course, but some of the obsession with pop statistics was starting to wear thin, possibly thanks to distortions of this sort.

  Time for one last showdown. The finale of The X Factor is always timed for the third week in December, so that the winner would release a single in the week before Christmas, thus ensuring a Christmas number one. This carries a certain prestige, albeit one that people only really started to pay attention to once it was clear someone wanted that prestige all to themselves.

  Which brings us to 2009, when an inspired Facebook campaign, started by Jon and Tracy Morter, suggested that “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine would be a worthy alternative Christmas number one to the winning song from an X Factor champion. This caught the public imagination in a big way (see: Cocking a Snook) and so, as a protest against the soulless industry of reality TV pop music, people bought a song they already owned, to get it to the top of a list they didn’t really feel that interested in any more.

  And the chart being the chart, it just absorbed this rude invasion, carried on counting, and moved on. Rage Against the Machine appeared on the Christmas Top of the Pops (stripped of their curses, naturally) and Joe McElderry, that year’s X Factor winner, got his number one the following week.

  WHAT TO SAY: “I got this tattoo to mark the day ‘Vienna’ by Ultravox was kept off the top spot by Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddap You Face.’ Some wounds never heal.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “Pop songs are for little girls. I prefer real music.”

  Coronation Street

  We find ourselves back in the same dingy meeting room as before (see: The Archers). It is ten years later; the shadowy man has recovered his composure and has lit a fresh cigar and once again the conversation is dominated by the need to find a new continuing drama. The desk and floor are still littered with the scrunched-up remains of pitch ideas. There’s one about a family who take over a country hospital, and another about a community that lives and works in and around a huge power station. None has been greeted warmly and once again the atmosphere is tense, and a little damp with feelings.

  A voice pipes up from the other end of the table, a voice ripe with elasticated vowels, betraying his northern roots (you’ll have to imagine the vowels, as they would probably die on the page).

  “Sir, what if we had a soap opera—”

  “Damn it, haven’t I told you we don’t call them that? Get this guy outta—”

  “A serial drama—my apologies—that simply tells the lives of the working-class residents of a street.”

  “A street? That’s it? That’s the worst idea I’ve ever—”

  “Not just any street, sir. This one will be in Manchester. In Salford, actually.”

  “What in the blue blazes is a Salford?”

  “Ah, Salford is a city, but also a borough of Greater Manchester, sir. I’m from Salford and I’m here to tell you that the working-class people of Salford, particularly the working-class women of Salford, have seen more drama than all of the actors of Shakespeare’s stage.”

  “Son, have you put too many sugars in your coffee? What could be more boring than a drama set in a normal street?”

  “But that’s just the thing, sir. It won’t be boring at all. All we need to do is get the dialogue right—and we will—and we’ll have a drama that can play calamity and farce at the same time. The S
alford wit is one of the sharpest in the world and we’ll use it, by golly! We’ll create a set of characters who are used to dealing with hard knocks and more than capable of picking themselves back up again. I know these people. I grew up around them: the tough old battle-axes going to war over the garden fence in their hairnets and curlers; the free and easy glamour-pusses trawling the pubs looking for some excitement, anything to raise the spirits after a dreary day; and the stuck-up madams who consider themselves a cut above. And the men! Randy chancers, put-upon husbands, would-be tycoons and pretentious college puddings . . . we’ll take the lot! Our characters won’t be able to stop themselves from bickering before we’ve even got the cameras rolling.”

  “So it’s a show about women arguing over a fence?”

  “No, sir! Let’s say the whole community lives in a street in a made-up district we’ll call . . . Weatherfield. All the houses are redbrick terraces, small and poky, and back-to-back so everyone is in each other’s business all the time. Then we’ll put a pub at one end of the street—let’s call it the Rovers Return—and a shop at the other. That way they’ll have to talk to each other in the open and in front of other people.”

  “Ah! A pub! That’s something I can relate to.”

  “Well, quite so, sir. Actually, that’s a big part of the appeal of the show. It won’t feel provincial to Manchester because most of our audience know what goes on in a pub. The Rovers will become part of British iconography, a place where beloved characters will live and fall in love and fall out of love and fight and argue and make up and sometimes even die. Most of the time they will just gather and shoot the breeze. And because we’ll have got the dialogue right, it’ll be like a window into ordinary lives.”

  “Yes, but who is going to want to watch ordinary lives?”

  “Everyone! Florizel Stre—no, wait—Coronation Street will become the longest-running TV serial drama in history. It will make commercial television a viable success in Britain and become one of the most—if not the most—watched TV shows in the country for over fifty-five years. Even the theme music will become iconic. We’ll get a mournful little jazz tune with an optimistic flourish at the end and it will become an integral part of British cultural life for decades. There will be reggae versions, polka versions, you name it.”

  “I’m not even going to ask what ‘reggae’ is.”

  “It will all become clear in the fullness of time, sir. The point is, this will be a continuing drama in which ordinary people are finally given the dignity to be the heroes in their own Greek tragedy, while being constantly undercut by vicious asides from the chorus. It’s going to be full-blooded, stiff of backbone and wholly ripe. Our street will be so vibrant it will make these black-and-white television sets look like Technicolor.”

  “Colour TV? Not in my lifetime, sonny . . .”

  And with that, there’s another long pause, broken only by the gentlest hiss of embers slowly tumbling down a straining shirt.

  WHAT TO SAY: “What time is tea? It’s just I don’t want to miss Corrie. Ken Barlow is going to give Tracy what for.”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “What is this so-called ‘ot pot they sell at the pub? Is that even food?”

  Movie 3: Trainspotting

  Had Trainspotting been made two years earlier, or two years later, it would have been a very different film tonally, and it would probably not have carried the moment in the way that it continues to do to this day. It’s a film that still dares the viewer to ask how on earth it ever got made, what can have been going on in popular culture at the time that it would be considered a good idea to make something that heartwarming from such a blood-freezing topic.

  It arrived in the middle of Britpop; a moment of intense celebration for British culture. Having spent a good portion of the 1980s working out how to make their own entertainment, thanks to the decline of British industry and spiralling unemployment—espe-cially in the industrial cities in northern England, Scotland and Wales—a generation of British bands and designers and filmmakers suddenly appeared in the mainstream, as if fully formed, with a homegrown aesthetic inspired by their favourite moments of the past. It was a parallel breakthrough to that of Nirvana and alternative culture in America a year or two earlier, one in which a creative, mutually supportive arts scene suddenly became swamped with attention. But the emphasis was different. Never mind slacker ennui in ripped jeans, the Britpoppers dressed smarter, more colourfully, and appeared determined to live out their fantasy of re-creating 1960s Swinging London in the 1990s. It may have taken a certain amount of cocaine confidence to carry this off, but there was no shortage of that.

  As a mission statement, it all looks a smidge boastful and empty with the benefit of hindsight, but the great thing about enhanced confidence of this sort is that it creates a sense that things are possible. Things that have been unsaid can be said; artists and performers who would normally struggle to get any kind of attention can find themselves with an actual audience, of a decent size too.

  Irvine Welsh was one of the beneficiaries of the times in this regard. An uninhibited writer, with particular affinity for street-level grot and a good ear for transcribing Scottish slang and idioms, he wrote the book Trainspotting as a series of lost stories from heroin addicts in Edinburgh. Lost because, while their tales contain all the horrors associated with the drug in the usual media narrative—health lost, opportunities wasted, lives taken—there’s a defiant edge, in which the characters not only describe the reason people take drugs in the first place (spoiler: they really like them), they defend the lifestyle as an open rejection of the kind of naff inspirational guff you find littering up people’s Facebook feeds nowadays. The character Mark Renton, who took the lead role when the book made the jump to the screen, opens and closes the movie musing on the 1980s aspirational slogan “Choose Life”—a two-word exhortation for people to behave.

  Danny Boyle, the film’s director, was also the right person for the moment. He had already turned heads with his first movie, the thriller Shallow Grave, in which three flatmates’ lives are turned upside down by the discovery that their new lodger has died and left a huge sum of money in his room. One of the stars was Ewan McGregor, and he would become Danny’s Mark Renton: a skinny reprobate with a big face and a broad, open smile.

  In the retelling of these dark tales—crammed with moments of disquiet and disgust—some of the triumphant Britpop atmosphere seeps into the story, like a wonky curtain failing to stop the day invading a room. In fact, the poster for the movie remains an iconic image of the times, endlessly parodied. Renton’s gang of rotters are shown as being huge fans of the Lou Reed/Iggy Pop end of the musical spectrum, as is practically mandatory among Scottish music fans of a certain vintage—and there is an astonishing overdose scene that makes great use of Reed’s “Perfect Day”—but rather than sinking too heavily into that decadent ‘70s drug cliché, the movie incorporates the arrival of dance music and a shift in drugs from snoozy old heroin to lively, bright ecstasy.

  Underworld’s song “Born Slippy .NUXX” appears at the end of the film, just as things are starting to look up for Renton. And while the song was originally intended as a larky approximation of a drunkard’s internal monologue, those saturated, forgiving synths—arriving as dawn breaks and Renton finally leaves his past behind—act as a form of musical redemption for all the perfectly horrid horrors that have preceded it. It is a baptism of sound.

  Consequently the soundtrack of the movie became as integral to the times as the film itself, and that song in particular became an instant anthem of this superconfident, up-for-it Britain. This was the kind of Britain that could remove a sitting Conservative government from office after nearly twenty years, a Britain in which great things got done by the least likely of people. It wasn’t just post-Oasis braggadocio; weirder things were happening too. Just as Nirvana’s success opened the doors for unlikely stars like Beck and Eels, in Britain we had Pulp and the Divine Comedy. The entirely left-of-centre Gorky’s Zyg
otic Mynci came really close to having actual Top 40 hit singles; British artists were putting animals in fish tanks and messing up their beds and there were superclubs offering a Miami raver lifestyle in freezing northern backstreets. Stuff was going on.

  Naturally, it couldn’t last. A creeping paranoia began to set in during 1997 as the bouncy castle of Britpop began to develop the stone ramparts and deadly earnestness of empire building. Suddenly you couldn’t have it all; you couldn’t live forever; you were stuck in a bittersweet symphony, chained to an okay computer. Things could only get worse.

  For Danny Boyle, though, that same confident sense of possibility amid trying times has gone on to inform his most celebrated achievements to date: not just his films, like Slumdog Millionaire or 127 Hours, but the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games, in which he roped in the queen to pretend to skydive into the stadium from a helicopter in the company of James Bond. If you were looking for a better example of great things done by the least likely of people, it might take a long search.

  WHAT TO SAY: “Hey, is that Jonny Lee Miller?”

  WHAT NOT TO SAY: “So are there no trains in it at all?”

  The Great British Fry-Up

  Just one potential fry-up (L to R: hog’s pudding, bacon, fried slice, sausage, egg, mushrooms, tomato, chips and beans).

  The anatomy of the fried breakfast—henceforth known as the “full English” or “fry-up”—is one that can be tailored to suit almost any taste. Granted, the two principal players in this particular gastronomic drama are bacon and sausages, but great lengths have been taken to try to re-create their essential qualities so that British vegetarians can join in with everyone else. Vegans will have a tougher time of it, but the marvellous thing about the modular nature of the full English is that, given the right ingredients, cooked in the right way, no one is entirely excluded.