Britpop and the English Music Tradition

Jon Stratton, Andy Bennett, Andy Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317171218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.

SECTION 1
History and Context

Chapter 1
Music Hall and the Commercialization of English Popular Music

Dave Laing

In 2009, the music journalist Paul du Noyer wrote that the Sex pistols were London’s ‘last great music hall act’.1 Other writers have linked such pop and rock acts as the Beatles, the Kinks and Madness with ‘music hall’. However, the consensus of historians of popular entertainment is that music hall as an entertainment medium and a song genre was in terminal decline as early as the second decade of the twentieth century. One aim of this chapter is to explain how it has been possible to argue that a defunct area of British popular song can ‘live again’ in the pop music of the late twentieth century. The other principal aim, to which the first part of the chapter is devoted, is to establish the distinguishing features of music hall as both an entertainment medium and a genre of British song and to analyze its demise as a dominant form of popular culture.

Origins and Development of Music Hall

There is a consensual view of the main elements of the origins of music hall in the literature on nineteenth-century popular music in Britain, for example in the works of Pearsall (1975), Russell (1997), Lee (1982), Kift (1996) and Bailey (1998).2 According to these authorities, music hall was a form of commercial entertainment for the urban lower classes introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. The forerunner of the music hall was the ‘glee’ or singing night held in London taverns.3 It took its name from the specialist venues that were built or adapted to provide an evening’s show by up to a dozen separate acts, ranging from singers and dancers to trick cyclists, jugglers, magicians and animal acts. To this extent it was similar to the contemporaneous vaudeville scene in the United States.

The consensus was summarized neatly by Jeffrey Richards in a book dealing only in passing with the music-hall system:

The music hall became the prototype of the modern entertainment industry, rapidly commercialized as capital was invested, advertising techniques were developed to promote stars and a hierarchy of stars and supporting acts was evolved. By the 1870s many music halls were mounting shows twice-nightly to maximise returns on investment. Initially, music halls were independent operations, normally set up locally by enterprising publicans. But the railway system made touring possible and circuits developed with artists touring regularly. By the 1880s and 1890s there were several nationwide circuits.4

Music Hall as a Song Genre

Jeffrey Richards, again, provides a summary of much of the received wisdom about songs written to be performed in music halls:

The writers of songs had to take into account the mixed nature of the audiences, the need for escapism, a catchy tune and sentiment, for it was the audience who made songs and stars. So songwriters sought to dramatize general attitudes, and songs strongly reflected a set of regular themes: love (treated as romance), marriage (treated as a trap and disaster), work (and how to avoid it), city life, food and drink, clothes and holidays.5

Some additional features might be adduced here. The first is that the ‘regular themes’ of the songs should include topical political subjects and double entendre and sexual innuendo that were distinctly different from the themes of romantic love or unhappy marriage. Secondly, music-hall songs were structured to include audience participation. Their refrains or choruses were designed for communal singing by singer and audience together.

The most important addition to Richards’s list is that music hall’s greatest stars were the vocalists, notably Marie Lloyd, who drew admiration from a wide range of observers including George Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot, a figure not renowned for his devotion to popular culture. He wrote of Lloyd’s ‘capacity for expressing the soul of the people’.6 He may not have been thinking of Lloyd’s reputation for what a more recent scholar has called ‘knowingness’7 in such songs as ‘She’d Never Had Her Ticket Punched Before’.8

Individual songs were indelibly linked with specific vocalists, for whom they were written by an industrious cohort of specialist songwriters. A typical and successful music-hall composer was George le Brunn, who died at 42 in 1905 having written over 1,000 published and performed songs, of which only ‘Oh Mr Porter’ (for Marie Lloyd) is likely to be familiar to anyone in twenty-first-century audiences. Le Brunn was claimed to be able to write melodies in three or four minutes and to compose up to thirty of these a week, something even Elton John in his heyday might have struggled to equal.

After a new song had been chosen by a star singer, its music publisher would attempt to enforce the performance ‘ownership’ of the song by naming and often portraying the relevant singer on sheet music, adding such minatory rubrics as ‘this song may be sung anywhere without fee or licence with the exception of the various Music Halls where the [artist name] has the sole right’. Even if such a ‘sole right’ was not so strictly defined, the original artist could aggressively pursue other professional singers who performed a certain song.

The primary source of income for songwriters and publishers was sales of sheet music for the domestic piano market, and the link with star vocalists was a key marketing tool. Classical music pieces reduced for the piano and parlour ballads for the middle classes were sold through musical instrument shops for comparatively high prices. In contrast, printed copies of music-hall songs were sold at street markets for sixpence by popular music publishers like Francis, Day and Hunter, while from 1898 the working-class Sunday newspaper News of the World included the words and music of a current hit song each week. Publishers additionally brought out annual collections of some of the biggest-selling titles of the previous year.

As well as acquiring an exclusive repertoire, many of the most famous singers enacted characters or social types recognized by their mainly working-class audience. There was the upper-class ‘swell’ portrayed by such ‘lion comique’ singers as George Leybourne (‘Champagne Charlie’), Charles Coburn (‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’) and the proletarian ‘coster’ with exaggerated Cockney accent created by Gus Elen (‘If it Wasn’t for the Houses in Between’) and Albert Chevalier (‘My Old Dutch’).

Female singers were less ‘actorly’ in their personae, although many of the large number of cross-dressing male impersonators chose to simulate upper-class males rather than plebeian ones, notably Vesta Tilley (aka Algy the Piccadilly Johnny with the Little Glass Eye) who, possibly coincidentally, married into the aristocracy.9 There were also some proletarian character types embodied, for instance, by Jenny Hill. she portrayed the Coffee Shop Gal, the Landlady, the Servant Girl and the Costerwoman.

All of these singers were London-based (where the first music hall opened for business in 1850) as was much of their repertoire, and histories of music hall have sometimes taken a metropolitan bias. But there were halls all over Great Britain and Ireland and many regions and nations had their own distinctive features. The specifically local character of songs, performers and even trade magazines are described, for example, by Dave Haslam for Manchester,10 Dave Harker for Tyneside11 and Frank Bruce for Scotland.12

Scotland, in particular, was notable for its intensely local and national singers and songs. There the key figure was Harry (later Sir Harry) Lauder. He was the acme of the ‘Scotch comedian’, ‘speaking English with a Scots accent’13 to reach international audiences, and presenting a caricature Scot on stage with kilt and tam o’shanter and mixing comic numbers (‘Stop Your Ticklin’ Jock!’) with sentimental love songs (‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’) and, at the time of the First World War patriotic ballads (‘Keep Right on to the End of the Road’).

Lauder belonged to the nineteenth-century construction of Scottish identity known as ‘tartanry’, and while there may be superficial resemblances to later comedians who presented as Scottish, the style of Lauder’s act brought criticisms that he was a self-hating Scot. Bruce quotes the view of a ‘middle-class patron’ on the Lauder era that ‘it was then, I suppose, a sort of convention that Scottish comedians should present Scottish life at its lowest, and Scotland really owes something to its laughter-makers of a later day, who had the genius and courage to smash the convention’.14 This comment is a rare example in recent times of a clear rejection of music-hall conventions and a celebration of the fact that that these no longer haunt the work of Scottish identity-formation through popular culture carried out by such late twentieth-century figures as Stanley Baxter, Chic Murray and Billy Connolly. It should equally be noted, though, that there were a considerable number of twentieth-century inheritors of tartanry in popular music and dance, who included a number of Lauder’s songs in their repertoire and performed regularly (and, it seemed, interminably) in the 1960s and 1970s on the BBC television show The White Heather Club.

The Politics of Music Hall

It is notable, but not often noticed, that music hall thrived in an era of political quietism for the British working class, following the upsurge of Chartism in the 1840s and preceding the outbreak of strikes at the end of the century by unskilled workers and the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, the immediate forerunner of the Labour Party. It was during the interim period that part of the leisure time of plebeian elements in society – sections of the working class and the artisan class — became commercialized, just as middle-class leisure had been commercialized differently in the eighteenth century.

The role of music hall as an institution in relation to the ‘disciplining’ of the Victorian working class has been a preoccupation of social and political scholars of the late twentieth century.15 Music hall provoked fierce opposition from the proponents of ‘rational recreation’ for the working classes, as well as from evangelical moralists. Nevertheless, music hall thrived, reaching its peak in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.

Scholars of music hall have also commented on the political implications of the songs in terms of working-class ideologies in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Writing only about the metropolis, Gareth Stedman-Jones paradoxically concluded that ‘music hall appealed to the London working class because it was both escapist and yet strongly rooted in the realities of working class life’.16

The views expressed in the lyrics of individual songs show a mixed and sometimes conflictual political consciousness. Much emphasis has been placed on certain pieces that put forward strongly pro-imperialist views, in particular the Great MacDermott’s highly popular version of ‘Jingo’, a song of 1877 whose chorus began ‘We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do, / We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too’. On the other hand, while there were no pacifist hits in the music-hall repertoire, there were several topical pieces in support of, or in sympathy with, the working-class heroes of strikes and victims of industrial accidents.

This broad political background is also relevant to the non-commercialized dimension of popular music in this period, including the brass band movement and amateur choirs. In an implicit rebuke to the emphasis placed on the glamour and bawdiness of music hall by other historians, Dave Russell devoted over 100 pages of his standard history to such ‘community’ music but only 70 pages to what he called the music of ‘capitalism’, i.e. the music halls.17

Decline and Fall

The music hall maintained its importance for plebeian audiences into the first quarter of the twentieth century, when some of its greatest performers flourished – for example, Marie Lloyd and Harry Lauder. However, it was gradually superseded as a leading popular entertainment form. There were three important developments that transformed the music sphere between about 1920 and 1940, both in Britain and elsewhere in northern and western Europe.

The first of these was social dancing, centred on a new institution, the ballroom, dance hall or palais de danse. The first purpose-built dance hall in Britain was the Hammersmith Palais in London, opening in 1919. The business was rapidly commercialized by the owners of dance-hall chains such as Mecca, founded by Carl Heimann, a Danish immigrant. Almost 11,000 dance halls and night clubs were opened in Britain between 1918 and 1926.18 In one working-class district of Manchester (Hulme) there were 12 dance halls.

The second development was the cinema. Originally, short films were shown as part of the entertainment mix in music halls or variety theatres, but by the end of the First World War the cinema ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Musical Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 History and Context
• Section 2 Britpop
• Section 3 Post-Britpop
• Bibliography
• Index