Crisis? What Crisis?

by Alwyn Turner

  The fear of union power was also the central theme in Anthony Burgess’s novella 1985, published in 1978. Inspired by Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia, Burgess conjured up a vision of a Britain dominated entirely by the unions, where the closed shop has become compulsory for all citizens and where loss of union membership condemns a worker to a life as a virtual outlaw. There is, though, still work to be done if the revolution is to be completed, as a government official spells out: ‘The time’s coming, and it won’t be long, it may well be before 1990, when every strike will be a general strike. When a toothbrush maker can withdraw his labour in a just demand for a living wage and do so in the confidence that the lights will go off and people will shiver and the trains won’t be running and the schools will close. That’s what we’re moving to, brother.’ Meanwhile the massive growth in state ownership of industry has created an economic paradox, whereby workers going on strike are in effect striking against themselves with the result that ‘all wage demands are met and inflation flourishes’.

  Our hero in this totalitarian bureaucracy is Bev Jones, who rebels against the system after his wife dies because a firemen’s strike has allowed the hospital in which she was a patient to burn to the ground. ‘Is justice old-fashioned? Is compassion? Is duty?’ Jones rages. ‘If the modern way approves the burning to death of innocent people with firemen standing by and claiming their workers’ rights, then I’m glad to be old-fashioned.’ Seeking hope from any quarter, he visits his MP who can only offer him bland assurances that this is the inevitable process of history, adding a warning aimed squarely at the ’70s: ‘What’s happened in Britain has not happened through bloody and wasteful revolution. We’ve gone our democratic way and not, in the process of changing, seen any violent signs of change. And then one morning we wake up and say: The Rule of the Proletariat is Here.’

  A similar portrayal of the same year came in ‘Letter From London, 1985’, the opening chapter of Robert Moss’s The Collapse of Democracy (1975), typical of many doom-laden books of the period. In this version of the near-future, the tipping point had come when a Labour prime minister, clearly based on Wilson, allowed himself to be turned into a stooge by the secret machinations of communists. Having engineered a general strike, the communists mobilized their parliamentary support to devastating effect: ‘The old weasel’s nerve was broken. He was urged to set up a National Government with the Tories, but he was scared of what he described as “doing a Ramsay MacDonald”. He accepted our terms . . .’ The remainder of the book is a non-fictional discussion of the present trends that will lead to this ‘drab Utopia of a minor civil servant, ruled from Moscow’, and pays particular attention to ‘the growth of trade union power in Britain – and the challenge that it presents to the country’s economic and political system’.

  Looking further ahead, Prince Philip shared his thoughts on what Britain would look like in the year 2000, in a speech broadcast on independent radio in 1977: ‘We can expect to see an increasing bureaucracy,’ he warned; ‘bureaucratic involvement in almost every aspect of the lives of individual citizens.’ And though he just stopped short of an overt denunciation of socialism and militant unions, there was little doubt about his underlying message; it was, Benn commented, ‘an absolute party political on behalf of Mrs Thatcher’.

  This panic over the alleged march of the proletariat was matched and mirrored by a loss of faith in the artistic avant garde. In the 1960s British musicians and artists had played their part in boldly going where none had gone before, the results of which were satirized by John Summers in his novel The Rag Parade (1972), with its description of Parodia No. 3, a piece of music by the wonderfully named MacAuley Entwhistle, featuring ‘sudden leaps on frantic piano keyboards and the distant foghorning of bassoons’. By the mid-’70s, however, it was becoming clear that this was not a vanguard as such, since there were so few prepared to play follow-my-leader. As the cultural cavalcade paused for breath, it cast a glance back and found, to its horror, that the ranks behind were pitifully thin; furthermore it appeared to be leading its handful of adherents down a blind alley. One response to this painful discovery was shown by the composer Cornelius Cardew, who had become a cutting-edge cult hero in the ’60s by following John Cage’s experiments with chance, and by developing – as was then de rigueur – a new system of musical notation. In the ’70s he abandoned what he had come to see as self-indulgence, denouncing himself as having been ‘a servile ideologist of the bourgeoisie’ in a book with the splendidly uncompromising title of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. Instead he now buried himself in a group called People’s Liberation Music, and wrote a series of explicitly political songs that were aimed at expressing the struggle of the working class, and that reflected his membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Regrettably, songs such as ‘Revolution Is the Main Trend’, ‘Nothing to Lose But Our Chains’ and ‘Smash the Social Contract’ failed to capture the people’s imagination, even amongst those on the left. Nor did a cover version of Paul McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ fare any better.

  Other figures on the radical wing of the arts also struggled to be heard. The dramatist Arnold Wesker found that his play The Journalists, which had been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, provoked outright hostility from the actors in the company. Complaining that it had ‘no climaxes, emotional relationships, human contact or throughlines’, and exercising their rights as workers, they simply refused to stage the piece, and Wesker was ultimately obliged to sue for breach of contract. The days were passing that had produced the kind of playwright parodied in Les Dawson’s character Peregrine Gaynor: ‘a controversial figure in the arts, his film script based on the book Maria Monk had been banned in most English speaking countries, and his modern play, Queer Times, includes a scene where two fellows masturbated a bull’. Now much of the trend in radical drama was away from the big-name playwrights of the ’50s and ’60s and towards performances that were improvised in workshop environments by companies such as the Joint Stock Company and 7:84. The name of this latter referred to the statistic that 7 per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the nation’s wealth, a fact which the company’s founder, John McGrath, once explained to a curious petrol pump attendant, who saw the name painted on the side of McGrath’s Volvo and asked after it. Having heard the explanation, the attendant looked back at the car and replied with withering contempt, ‘No need to show it off though, is there?’

  Inevitably, as the politically motivated end of the arts became ever more marginalized, there was a reaction towards the mainstream. In 1973 Laurence Olivier gave his last performance with the National Theatre in the role of a Glaswegian communist, John Tagg, in Trevor Griffiths’s play The Party, and Kenneth Tynan exulted: ‘His long speech at the end of the first act will be the most inspiring call to revolution ever heard on the English stage.’ That call, however, was not answered, and by way of symbolic contrast the first critically acclaimed hit of Peter Hall’s new regime at the National was a 1975 revival of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, which starred that other veteran actor Ralph Richardson as a former bank manager. And the new work that finally provided the National with a massive financial success was Peter Shaffer’s decidedly non-political Amadeus (1979). Freed from the requirement to see theatre-going as a display of radical commitment, audiences, it appeared, would flock to be entertained and to enjoy themselves.

  The last outpost of the avant garde was to be found in the art galleries, which could still whip up a tabloid storm on a quiet news week, as demonstrated by two successive shows at the ICA in London in 1976. The first, Mary Kelly’s ‘Post-Partum Document’, included soiled nappies; the second, ‘Prostitution’, by the group COUM (out of which would emerge the industrial noise band Throbbing Gristle), featured, amongst other items, extracts from commercial pornography, starring group member Cosey Fanni Tutti, and used tampons. The ensuing press storm mostly centred on the issue of public money for such work a
t a time of governmental belt-tightening – already Arts Council funding for drama had been frozen – but a somewhat overwrought Daily Mail article also found space for Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to denounce COUM as ‘the wreckers of civilization’, an epithet that they cherished ever after. Elsewhere he was to be found thundering against what he curiously referred to as ‘sadistic exhibitions of used Tampax’. (Fairbairn himself, it might be added, was no stranger to giving offence – towards the end of his life, he was reprimanded by the Speaker, and by the chairman of his own party, when he drunkenly interrupted Tony Blair during a Commons debate to express his view that ‘putting your penis into another man’s arsehole is a perverse act’.)

  Those ICA shows became a journalistic shorthand for the monstrosity of modern art, so that when, for example, the Daily Telegraph was attempting to defend the Queen against charges of being a philistine, it could ask: ‘If she would rather go to Ascot than peer at a lot of dirty nappies in the Institute of Contemporary Arts, what is wrong with that?’ But even they paled by comparison with the controversy over ‘Equivalent VIII’ by the American Carl Andre. This was a 1966 piece of minimalism, comprising 120 firebricks neatly arranged in a long, low cuboid, and it was bought by the Tate Gallery in 1972, a fact which passed without comment at the time. Nearly four years later, a photograph of the work was used in the Business section of the Sunday Times, illustrating a story about the gallery’s purchasing policy, and within a couple of days the Tate’s bricks (as they were now known) were being denounced on all sides, as the media thundered against public funds being thus wasted, and demanded to be told whether this was what now passed for art. It was, in truth, a somewhat tame attempt at being outraged – even when the bricks were attacked with paint – but it did briefly make the piece the most famous work of art in the country. Its only serious rival to emerge in the ’70s, in terms of public recognition, was Canadian artist Liz Leyh’s group of three Friesian cows and three calves in Milton Keynes. Commonly known as the Concrete Cows (though they were not actually constructed in concrete), the piece was intended to satirize the popular perception of new towns, and to draw attention to the inaccuracy of that perception in regard to Milton Keynes; inevitably it had precisely the opposite effect, particularly after Radio Two disc jockey Terry Wogan began to mock.

  Despite the nappies, tampons, bricks and cows, however, and in sharp contrast to the extraordinarily fertile period over the preceding fifteen years that had produced the pop generation, the most – perhaps the only – significant new artists to make their name in Britain in the ’70s were Gilbert & George. Their first major work was ‘The Singing Sculpture’, created in 1970, which saw the two artists, their bodies painted gold, miming to Flanagan and Allen’s Depression-era hit ‘Underneath the Arches’, an early indication perhaps of the mood of nostalgia that was to dominate the culture of the decade.

  For this was primarily a time for looking back, even for self-proclaimed iconoclasts. The arrival of punk in 1976 seemed to offer a slash-and-burn alternative to the endless revivals that were consuming rock music, but while much of the style was borrowed from downtown New York, it was overlaid in Britain with a powerful awareness of the past that belied its claim to a Year Zero ideology. The musical debt to mod (the Sex Pistols covering the Small Faces, Generation X hymning Cathy McGowan on ‘Ready Steady Go!’, the entire output of the Jam) was accompanied by a visual referencing of historical symbols, from the Union Flag to the swastika, even if these were ironically inverted in a spirit of confrontation. The desire to cause ‘what shock it is still possible to cause’ (in the words of a Daily Telegraph leader column) had at least a temporary effect, causing distress to decent-minded folk everywhere, though its long-term impact was more doubtful. The Sex Pistols’ biggest hit ‘God Save the Queen’ provided an alternative perspective for Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee, a rallying point for those opposed to the official festivities, and it was sufficiently challenging that it led to violent assaults in the streets upon band members; it also, however, tied the group so closely to the institution of monarchy they were attacking that come the Golden Jubilee in 2002, they seized the marketing opportunity with glee, playing reunion gigs and releasing a three-CD box set. The long-known ability of the British establishment to assimilate and neutralize its critics was evidently still intact.

  The first film to document the career of the Sex Pistols was the posthumously released The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, shaped according to the agenda of their manager Malcolm McLaren and purporting to locate the band within a dissident political culture. The movie opened with scenes of the 1780 Gordon Riots (though the connection with punk was never satisfactorily explained), and thus shared with Derek Jarman’s earlier film Jubilee an evident need to look back to English history. Set in a version of Britain that is at least partially recognizable as the present – an Evening Standard news-stand poster is seen with the headline HEALEY’S BUDGET STRATEGY IN RUINS – Jubilee featured Elizabeth I transported by the magician John Dee to modern London, and wandering through a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland, where boredom is punctuated by random acts of violence. The soundtrack included versions of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’ rendered in collages of mock-operatic singing, new wave guitar riffs and samples of the Nuremberg rallies. ‘It’s all fucking nostalgia,’ reflects Bod (Jenny Runacre, doubling up as Queen Elizabeth). ‘It’s the only way they can get through the day.’

  In both films, it appeared, nihilism was not sufficient in itself; it demanded also to be set against a vision of what Britain had been. To this extent, they – and the punk movement from which they grew – can still be seen as part of a wider post-colonial cultural tradition, juxtaposing the inadequacies of the present with a more heroic past; more violent perhaps than The Goon Show’s lampooning of the imperial heritage in stories such as ‘The First Albert Memorial to the Moon’ (1953), but nonetheless related to it. Even though it held up a distorting mirror to mock the drowning figure of Britannia, as she desperately clutched at the straws of past glories, punk was itself still dependent on that selfsame past if it was to have any meaning. Or, as Johnny Rotten sang: ‘God save history, God save your mad parade.’

  10

  Europe

  ‘This year we’re off to sunny Spain’

  It’s all these holidays abroad. Too many people go over there these days, bring back Continental ideas – you wait, once we’re in the Common Market there’ll be revolutions every other Sunday.

  Peter Van Greenaway, The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing (1968)

  BASIL FAWLTY: We’re all friends now, eh? All in the Market together, old differences forgotten and no need at all to mention the war.

  John Cleese and Connie Booth, Fawlty Towers (1975)

  I’d rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of fucking foreigners.

  Alan Clark (1975)

  At the turn of the 1970s a group of Scottish musicians, centred on singer Sally Carr, found themselves working in Italy. Formerly Los Caracas, a band specializing in Latin pop songs, they adopted a new name, Middle of the Road, and soon established a successful career backing various local artists – including Sophia Loren – but it took a song by another British expatriate, Lally Stott, to break them on the international market. ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ was a lightweight piece of bubblegum pop that was among the most inane, and insanely catchy, hits of the decade, as the band recognized from the outset. ‘We were as disgusted with the thought of recording it as most people were at the thought of buying it,’ remembered drummer Ken Andrews. But the song was already doing well in Italy, and the band’s record company thought it had a wider potential, so the session went ahead, in a suitably hazy atmosphere: ‘We did it our way, with two bottles of bourbon, because we would only record it if we had something inside us. And at the end of the day, we liked it.’ The record rapidly became a huge success in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, and in the summer of 1971 it finally e
ntered the British charts, where it spent thirty-four weeks including five at #1, selling 10 million copies worldwide.

  The band went on to enjoy a sequence of hits, both at home and more widely in Europe (Agnetha Fältskog recorded a version of their ‘Union Silver’ before joining Abba, a group whose early work owed much to Middle of the Road’s brand of Euro-pop), but their greatest significance was that initial success. For ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ was the first single to break into the charts as a result of British tourists returning home with a record discovered on their travels, and, followed by songs like ‘Una Paloma Blanca’, ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Y Viva España’ (the latter by the inappropriately Swedish singer Sylvia Vrethammer), it offered an early indication that British popular culture might be affected by changing patterns of holiday-making.

  In 1970, reported the publication Social Trends, some 6 million overseas holidays were enjoyed by Britons and the most popular destination, above Ireland, France and Italy (in that order), was Spain, where many found a sense of order and decency that they felt had been lost in the UK. ‘I have recently returned from Spain,’ wrote a reader to the Daily Mirror that year. ‘There were no aggro boys, no vandalism, all the telephone boxes were clean and the phones worked. It was hardly necessary to lock up cars and little children could go anywhere unmolested.’ Another reader sought to set the record straight: ‘I appreciate that he did not see any aggro boys, but did he notice the armed police, the censored press, the jails crowded with people who merely expressed their dislike of the Franco regime?’

  By 1973 the figure for foreign tourism had risen by 50 per cent, with 9 million Britons now holidaying outside the UK. The growth was partially prompted by the relaxation in January 1970 of the limits on taking currency abroad: previously British travellers had been restricted to a maximum allowance of £50 a year to be taken out of the country; now that was amended to £300 in foreign currency and £25 sterling per overseas trip. The resulting explosion in tourism was significant enough to be mocked by the film Carry On Abroad, in which the comedy team most closely associated with the British seaside was let loose in a Spanish resort, Elsbels (though the sunbathing scenes were actually filmed in a car park in Pinewood). Here they ridicule the foreigners who cater for the travel industry, and are ridiculed in turn: ‘I feel I should point out that we are all British subjects,’ explains tour organizer Stuart Farquhar (Kenneth Williams) to the Spanish police chief who has arrested him and his party; ‘You have my deepest sympathy,’ he replies gravely. Later variations on the same theme included the movie of Are You Being Served? (1977), which saw the staff of Grace Brothers vacationing on the Costa Plonka, and the TV series Don’t Drink the Water (1974–75), in which Blakey from On the Buses retired to Spain (‘one of the most excruciatingly poor ITV sitcoms of them all’, noted the leading historian of television comedy).