#1 - But the Gentry Must Come Down and the Poor Shall Wear the Crown
Visions of England 1391 - 2019
Liam Clancy: Well this is a sort of a rebel song but eh, we’ll get into the rebel songs in a while. Sure the night is young. This is an unusual kind of a rebel song…would you…?
Tommy Makem: This is an English rebel song!
(laughter)
These few lines introduce When We Were Under the King, the fifth track from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s 1966 album Freedom’s Sons. Makem’s interjection is met with massive gales of laughter, from the crowd and from his band. Maybe there was something funny about a song in exaggerated English tones appearing on the same set list as a rake of tunes about Irish republicanism on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. But more than that, there is something faintly silly about the idea of English protest music to begin with. The English, surely, are something to be protested against.
As a fairly young kid I used to fall into what I’d now call my “historical obsessions”. These were typically sparked by the Horrible Histories series of books, mostly written by legendary curmudgeon Terry Deary and branded “history with the nasty bits left in”. My pattern was to read one of these books and then hike to the local prefab library to find whatever else I could on the subject. Invariably these were dated tomes, stuck together with crumbling tape or left to fall apart. In an anglophone culture, these obsessions tended to be English. Robert Falcon Scott, the Victorians, Churchill, Henry VIII and his wives. They were English books, by English historians. The one I remember the best was Cromwell. Oliver Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Cambridge, Lord Protector of England. God’s Executioner.
I studiously avoided British history in my undergrad degree, decolonizing the mind and all that, so most of my knowledge of that isle and it’s ill past comes from stray learning, Wikipedia holes, the odd podcast. But on the rare occasions I’m expected to display a knowledge of the English Civil War (which is not that often, as you’d imagine), a surprising amount comes from my eleven year old self leafing through accounts of Cromwell, Sir Thomas Fairfax, the flight of Charles II and the short, long, rump and Barebone’s parliaments. In none of these books did you find much criticism of the mass killings Cromwell carried out in Ireland, but I can still faintly see a stark line drawing of the victims from Oliver Cromwell and His Warts.
(The Siege of Drogheda, British Museum)
My other great childhood love was a series of books by an English country vet, writing under the pen name of James Herriot. I discovered a dusty copy of It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in my grandmother’s house and, despite my aversion to rural Ireland, somehow became fascinated by the Yorkshire dales of the 1950s. I loved the gentle mishaps of a city doctor in the sticks and his flock: kind, uncommunicative farmers who would stay up all night washing the udders of a beloved sick cow. Mostly published in the seventies, the books are a soft, whimsical look at Britain in the middle of the century, from war to welfare state. They are repositories of some idea of quiet British decency, a story that Britain loves to tell about itself.
But the most significant English art of my teenage years was something profoundly different. In July 2004, four months after the UK had invaded Iraq, an unknown animator from Doncaster, Yorkshire under the name of Doki66 (real name David Firth) released Salad Fingers on then popular flash cartoon site Newgrounds.com. There are to date, eleven episodes of the work, and taken together they make one of the most significant pieces of outsider art of the last twenty years. They follow the titular Salad Fingers, a nightmarish specter with the voice of a frightening child, as he navigates a desolate world inhabited only by madmen, cadavers and imaginary friends. In an age where extreme violence is easily available in prestige television format, his work is genuinely horrifying in a way that defies easy description. A 2013 interview with Firth shows him traipsing through ruined buildings, taking photos of their damp, rotting surfaces. Firth puts these textures directly into his animations. The landscapes of his dystopias are literally taken from the industrial decay of the cities of Yorkshire, that same Yorkshire of spoiled cows and decent farmers. As the Magistrate admits at the end of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.”
(Salad Fingers 4, David Firth)
Much of Firth’s work is soundtracked to the ambient music of Warp Records artists like Aphex Twin1 and Boards of Canada, British musicians without a media presence who make unsettling, nostalgic soundscapes from sampled breakbeats and scraps of found material. Boards of Canada, a Scottish duo whose track Beware the Friendly Stranger serves as the backing music for the first Salad Fingers, frequently build their music from a bed of old public broadcast documentaries from the National Film Board of Canada.2 Like Firth’s textures of decay, they take the remnants of a mid-century industrial welfare state and present it transformed, now equal parts yearning and alienating.3 These are not protest songs. They are not songs to be sung together against Empire, the elites, the capital owners or the gentry. They are strange, sad, dreamlike things, the troubled nightmares of a fearful country.4
For protest music, you must turn elsewhere. In 1988, the English anarcho-communist punk group Chumbawumba released English Rebel Songs 1381 - 1984, a departure from their earlier punk offerings. The record was an attempt to unify the various disparate English dissident traditions into one unbroken line stretching from Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt of 1381 (The Cutty Wren) to the Luddite Rebellion of the early 19th Century (The Triumph of General Ludd) to pacifist movements of the First World War (Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire). The record was created in the wake of the last great British working class revolt of the 20th century, the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85 (Coal Not Dole)5 and rerecorded in 2003 as the UK was invading Iraq. Two bitter defeats giving the chance to commemorate a few more. The centrepiece of the album is The Diggers Song, written directly by Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the True Levellers, a radical group that arose from the ranks of Cromwell’s New Model Army. Seen today as early anarchists or perhaps proto-socialists, they organised for common ownership of land and were suppressed like every other group on the list.
You noble diggers all stand up now, stand up now
You noble diggers all stand up now
The wasteland to maintain, seeing cavaliers by name
Your digging does maintain and persons all defame
Stand up now, stand up now
Your houses they pull down stand up now, stand up now
Your houses they pull down, stand up now
Your houses they pull down to fright your men in town
But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown
Stand up now diggers all
The unifying factor in all these songs is not necessarily a coherent ideology. Across seven hundred years, that would be impossible, absurd.6 Rather, what unites them is their perspective. They are songs of the masses against the elites, be they king, gentry, general or government. They are songs of anger and desperate hope. But within the imperial core, anger always contains an element of self loathing. This violence, after all, is being done to some extent on your behalf. There is a readily identifiable type of British person who has seen the reality of the horror of the British Empire, and they are capable of producing more splenetic and polemical anti-British art than even the peoples the empire subjugates. No Irish director would have gotten away with a film as seethingly anti-British as Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley. But few are able to live with such contradictions for long. Anger in the absence of hope tends to fade and become a bland, liberal quietism, a sense that yes, everything is bad, but what can you do? That, or it curdles into reaction. Think of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s journey from anti-imperialism and support for the Provisional IRA all the way to the inner circle of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, and Boris Johnson’s government. George Galloway, the arch critic of Tony Blair’s wars, recently announced that in the next election he was going to vote Tory, even ahead of himself. Don Valley in Yorkshire, home of some of the coal pits that hung on to the bitter end in ‘85, elected their first ever Tory MP in 2019. Some credit must be given then, to radicals like Loach and the disbanded members of Chumbawumba, for simply keeping on.
(London, 2017, Jack Sheehan)
The most prominent of these, of course, is Jeremy Corbyn. My interaction with the Corbyn movement in the UK Labour party was glancing - I canvassed for a couple of days before two elections7 - but it was something I felt deeply, perhaps disproportionately, invested in. More than the fact that the movement fought back against austerity and laid some precarious groundwork for a genuinely radical future, it was Corbyn’s obvious distaste for the British Empire that moved me. Every time a tabloid accused him of supporting the IRA it reminded me that he was one of the only MPs to campaign to free the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four. Here was someone who did not view a British life as more valuable than any other. Someone who refused both the jingoistic imperial nostalgia of the right and the sanitised story of basic British decency that the liberal centre preferred. That, perhaps, is what really doomed him.
(Jeremy Corbyn, 2014, by Lewishamdreamer)
Those two stories, ostensibly in conflict but really nothing but different versions of each other, are the only acceptable ones to tell in Britain today. The Tories are riding high in power and James Herriot’s vet has been resurrected for a new TV series. Any music, art or politics that exposes the rot is, for the moment, marginal, destined to be expressed only on the fringes, in polemics and nightmares. Perhaps the most violent and disturbing of David Firth’s animations is a reverse chronological series called Spoilsbury Toast Boy that ran for three episodes (0, -1, -2) in 2004 and 2005. It follows an unfortunate boy working for a group of psychotic beetles who torment and eventually kill him. The level of extreme violence led Firth to admit in an interview that it was perhaps the one time in which he had gone “too far”. The beetles have rich, plummy upper-crust English accents and joke and laugh with one another as they commit their cruelties. Far from showing any hesitation or remorse, they want thanks at the end of their work. As the boy is killed by their machines, a beetle brightly says the final lines of the series.
“I expect you feel much better after that.”
Like his fellow outsider artists Blindboy and Gerry Hannan, Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) was born in Limerick.
This is an artistic choice he shares with cult BBC documentarian Adam Curtis, and the two both contributed small parts to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe series.
I am trying my very best not to use the word “Hauntology” here.
Firth himself is now an accomplished musician in the same mould, usually recording under the name Locust Toybox on Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder.
With the possible exception of the 1990 Poll Tax riots.
Eight hundred years would be much easier.
The 2018 local elections and 2019 general election, the first of which was a disappointment, the second more like a solid kick in the face. Canvassing in London is nice, though, no one ever questions your Irish accent. Whether that’s because they assume you have a right to be there or they’re unaware that Ireland isn’t part of the UK, it’s best to keep happily ambiguous.