Media and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture

C. Bainbridge, C. Yates, C. Bainbridge, C. Yates, C. Bainbridge, C. Yates

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137345547
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book applies insights from the spheres of academic scholarship and clinical experience to demonstrate the usefulness of psychoanalysis for developing nuanced and innovative approaches to media and cultural analysis.

Part I

Psycho-cultural Approaches to Sport

1

‘Abide with me’: Mediatised Football and Collectivised Mourning

Barry Richards

Introduction

This chapter is about a ritual, the singing at FA Cup Finals of the hymn ‘Abide with me’. Like many of the best-known contemporary rituals, we can call it, using Simon Cottle’s term, a ‘mediatized ritual’ (Cottle, 2006)¹, partly because its audience extends far beyond its immediate participants in the physically present crowd, to what is now a vast and global television audience. Moreover, the way in which the event of the ritual is mediated to that audience will influence or even shape their experience of it. In the case of ‘Abide with me’, many members of that audience may feel themselves to be participating in the ritual in some way, or to be engaged witnesses of a meaningful and important event. Here we will explore the emotional experience of those who feel they are participating in or witnessing this event. Because of its focus, the chapter is primarily about football, though some of the ideas to be developed here might apply to other sports with a mass following, and indeed to other kinds of event.

We will start with a question about the nature and dynamics of the football-watching audience. What community or communities do we as football-watchers feel we belong to? This felt belonging need not be conscious, though the use of the term ‘community’ may imply a self-conscious membership of a sub-group of society. Since the football audience is so dispersed and diverse, that may be misleading; another way to put the question would be to base it on the concept of ‘identification’, which has a more psychological flavour and can connote unconscious as well as conscious processes. With what human collective (imagined or real) are we identifying when we watch football?

This very broad question will be approached here through a much more specific one. Why is a mid-nineteenth century hymn a fixed part of the FA Cup Final pre-match programme in the twenty-first century? In seeking an answer to that we will explore the power of football to provide an experience of containment by a community which is nothing less than society itself, in a general sense.

But firstly let us briefly review some more obvious answers to the question of what experiences of community are attached to watching football. The experience of belonging to a nation is clearly a major component of a lot of sport spectatorship. International competitions such as the football World Cup are often seen as the crowning spectacle of a sport (though in football, the major club competitions can also strongly challenge for that position). The hypothesis that sport is primarily a sublimation of aggression, and is an evolutionary descendant from or alternative to violent conflict between peoples, can easily find supporting evidence in the pageantries of national image and sentiment which often accompany international sporting events. And on a more frequent basis, the identities grounded in residence or association with a particular city, town or other locality traditionally provided the passion which feeds the ‘atmosphere’ at fixtures in many sports.

Throughout its history, professional football in Britain has enjoyed particularly passionate crowds. This is one of the factors which led to the Premier League becoming a focal point for the globalisation of football, because passionate crowds help to create more engaging television. The powerful bonds between football clubs and their working-class communities thus helped to facilitate the internationalisation of the Premiership. Ironically this process has led to many of its clubs being bought by foreign owners and developed as international brands, thus removing them even further from their local communities than would have resulted from commercialisation on the national stage alone. But the weakening of ties between geographic community and football club had begun some time before the Premiership began in 1992. The break-up of the industrial working class, the increase in televised football and the rise of celebrity culture were amongst the drivers of that process, which saw increasing numbers of young people becoming fans of clubs with which they had little or no geographical or biographical connection. Through for example an initial response such as liking their colours, or a particular player, an allegiance (usually to one or another of a handful of top clubs) develops, and a lifelong fan is created. Why make do with being a fan of your local team, say Darlington or Newport County, whom you will never see on television, when you can be a fan of a successful, even world-leading, club?

So while the nation is still a meaningful object of identification for the spectator of international football, the ‘community’ to which a spectator of top-level club football now belongs is perhaps less clear. The emergence of the accidental fan, more oriented to a brand and its transient celebrities than to a geographically-defined club, is hard not to see as a deterioration, part of the same broad commodifying development that has brought us the ‘prawn sandwich’ spectators in the hospitality suites whose interest in the match may be slight. To these can be added the image of the delinquent ‘fan’, primarily interested in exchanging hateful abuse and sometimes on the edge of violence, who degrades the clubbased community and who also at times disrupts the national identity, for example with attacks on players from rival clubs who are playing for the national team. We can build a picture of alienation of various kinds, in which a ‘good object’, psychoanalytically speaking, is hard to find – a stable and positive entity with which passionate but mature and prosocial identifications are made, whether that object is lodged in nation or club.

However, it may be too pessimistic to focus on such phenomena. Whatever problems may exist in connection with the ownership, business models, governance and fan behaviour of football clubs, and however internally fractious a nation may be, the innocent fervour of many fans and the capacity of football matches to embody and promote the values of effort, skill, teamwork, virtuosity, resilience and so on is undiminished. Also the major football events draw in, via television coverage, many of the otherwise uninterested, and in its place at the heart of popular culture, the game is able to dramatise much beyond itself. Too often this may be the mania and amorality of excessively marketised culture, but it can also be something more reparative and responsible.

In this context we shall examine a very specific phenomenon: a few minutes in the pre-match programme of the FA Cup Final, the singing of ‘Abide with me’ (see Appendix). An analysis of why the incorporation of this particular music into the Cup Final became traditionalised, and has persisted for so long, will point towards an answer to the question of what unites the football audience, of what underlying identification is performed by the televiewing crowd and its proxies in the stadium.

The Development of a Ritual

The singing of ‘Abide with me’ before each FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium is one of the oldest rituals, and arguably the most poignant one, in the British football calendar, having been introduced at the 1927 Final between Arsenal and Cardiff. Four years earlier the FA had decided to distribute larger numbers of tickets for its major annual event across the whole country (Russell, 1997, p. 115), thus reducing the number of partisan supporters present and so increasing the numbers of those in the crowd more likely to identify with the national community represented by the occasion rather than with the local community of either club involved. Led in recent decades by a soloist on a platform on the Wembley pitch, the performance of this nineteenth-century hymn is widely experienced as a moment of great pathos, when the partisan passions of the day are suspended and the stadium is united in a celebration of the occasion. The massive global television audience is also part of this emotional drama, which brings a ‘lump in the throat’ to many viewers as the cameras pan the crowd. Many of those captured briefly on screen over the years are seen mumbling half-known lines; some look slightly baffled, while others are barely restraining themselves until the moment when they can shout and wave their arms again. Yet the music prevails, and people either acquiesce or immerse themselves in this spectacle of shared sentiment.

It is a very impressive ritual, a revered part of the Cup Final, and an expected ingredient of this annual televised narrative of the British football experience. It is when the focus is on the majesty of the crowd, not on that of either team, nor of the football match itself. (The literal ‘majesty’ of whichever member of the royal family is in attendance is no longer a very significant part of the occasion, though as we will see it has some historical importance.) It is majestic, but it is also mysterious. What is the sentiment that is shared? Why do twenty-first century crowds and audiences in all their post-modern diversity find this moment so compelling, based as it is on the words of a Christian hymn written by a Victorian clergyman? And why has this particular hymn acquired its key place in the build-up to a national sporting event, when sport is so clearly an affirmation of the life of the body, and the hymn in question is a sustained meditation on death?

Henry Lyte, who was an Anglican vicar at All Saints’ Church in Brixham in Devon, wrote the poem ‘Abide with me’ in 1847 when seriously ill with tuberculosis. Within months of completing it he had died. Across its eight verses (of which only the first and last are sung at Wembley²) there is a gradual movement from profound melancholy to a triumphant fusion with God, albeit one achieved in the shadow of death. It is a resonant expression of a kind of assisted fortitude, which in one form or another is a staple of most religions. In this case, strength is to be gained from the mercy of a gentle and forgiving God: ‘Come not in terrors … But kind and good … Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee’.

Lyte also wrote some music to go with his words, but in 1861 the tune to which they have ever since been famously set was supplied by the composer William Monk, organist at St Matthias’ Church in Stoke Newington, London. Monk was editing the collection Hymns Ancient and Modern, which was to become a classic English hymnal. Lyte’s own music was for some reason deemed to be unsuitable for the hymn book, and Monk took upon himself the writing of a new piece for it, which he called ‘Eventide’. Monk’s three-year-old daughter had recently died. His wife is reported to have recalled his composing the music thus:

This tune was written at a time of great sorrow – when together we watched, as we did daily, the glories of the setting sun. As the last golden ray faded, he took some paper and pencilled that tune which has gone all over the earth. (Cyberhymnal, 2013)

Monk’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has this to say of the piece:

Although this tune, the one for which Monk is best remembered, has been derided for its supposed sentimentality, its expressive warmth and directness of appeal typify the best of high Victorian hymnody. (Blezzard, 2004)

The late nineteenth century was a time when, as Marx (2012) describes, the requiem as a musical genre (the setting to music of the standard Latin text of the mass of the dead) was moving out of its use in church as a consolation for the bereaved to become a work played in concert halls for the public, engaging them in a more abstract discourse about death. A musical language expressing and reflecting upon death was therefore in explicit development, and was being consumed by the cultural elite. A musicological analysis would be needed to tell us how Monk’s composition might have been related to any components of the expanding requiem genre, or what relation it bore to other musical evocations of death. But in any event it is possible that the popularity of the hymn as a narrative of approaching death rests as much on the music as on the words.³ The simplicity and steady mournfulness of the tune are arresting.⁴

However, there is also evidence that the words are important, especially in relation to the use of the hymn at sporting events. The words were set to different music by the composer Samuel Liddle for the singer Clara Butt in 1896; she made several recordings of this ‘Abide with me’ between 1910 and 1930 (Midgley, 2012). It is a much more complex tune than Monk’s, but this version of it was also extremely popular (Russell, 2008, p. 132, Note 4). And arguably the words of a song are likely to be of significance to its listeners, even if their meaning is only subliminally registered. Moreover, Russell (2008, p. 131) notes that ‘Abide with me’ (this would probably be the version with Monk’s score) became a popular choice at funerals, especially amongst the working class. So by the time it was sung at the Cup Final it would have been well-established in popular consciousness, by its tune as well as through its words, as music of death and mourning.

In order to trace the path of this music to Wembley we must turn to the social history of the 1920s, and to the phenomenon of ‘community singing’ as it came to be defined in that decade. The historian of popular music and football Dave Russell (2008) has described the emergence and development of this phenomenon. It was briefly a ‘national craze’, from the foundation of the Community Singers Association in April 1925 to the end of 1927 by which time it was fading as an element of cultural life. The Association’s slogan was ‘Set Britain Singing’; ordinary people mostly with no musical knowledge or experience came together to sing, led by a conductor and some experienced singers. In a time of increasing competition between national press titles, the Daily Express⁵ saw in community singing an opportunity to strengthen itself in its struggle with the rival title the Daily Mail. In 1926 it began to sponsor community singing events, identifying itself with the burgeoning public enthusiasm for this activity (which led other newspapers, especially provincial ones in the North, to get involved in organising community singing events). A core repertoire for these events developed, comprising folk songs, songs associated with World War I, carols and hymns including ‘Abide with me’, which was to become the centrepiece of the movement’s legacy. An affinity started to develop between community singing and football matches, beginning at the 1926 Boxing Day match between Fulham and Reading at Craven Cottage. This was the first...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture
• Part I: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Sport
• Part II: The Emotional Work of Cinema
• Part III: Television and Paranoia
• Part IV: Social Media and Digital Narcissism
• Index