This article traces some of the political and cultural implications of the use of popular music and popular musicians in British films of the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating different, and sometimes incompatible, facets of the British psyche in relation to identity, independence, nationalism, nostalgia, and exoticism. These divergent perspectives seem to have emerged and ruptured in the 2016 Brexit vote, but are in fact deep-rooted and central to the British circumstance. Using Adler-Nissen et al.’s concept of the performativity of Brexit, which works both as a promise of a different future and to establish a specific past, various interrelationships between culture, identity politics, stardom, and music can be determined. These are explored through three general typologies — ‘Discovering Europe’, ‘Defeating Europe’, and ‘Reappraising Home’ — in order to demonstrate that the decision to leave the EU in 2016 was not a flash in the pan, but rather a long and protracted journey reflecting conflicted notions of freedom and accountability.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit
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2018-10-01
2021-09-03
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Cinéma & Cie
Miguel Mera
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Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16218/16939
19
Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit
Miguel Mera, City, University of London




  Abstract

   This article traces some of the political and cultural implications of the use of
   popular music and popular musicians in British films of the 1960s and 1970s,
   demonstrating different, and sometimes incompatible, facets of the British
   psyche in relation to identity, independence, nationalism, nostalgia, and
   exoticism. These divergent perspectives seem to have emerged and ruptured
   in the 2016 Brexit vote, but are in fact deep-rooted and central to the British
   circumstance. Using Adler-Nissen et al.’s concept of the performativity of Brexit,
   which works both as a promise of a different future and to establish a specific
   past, various interrelationships between culture, identity politics, stardom, and
   music can be determined. These are explored through three general typologies
   — ‘Discovering Europe’, ‘Defeating Europe’, and ‘Reappraising Home’ — in
   order to demonstrate that the decision to leave the EU in 2016 was not a flash in
   the pan, but rather a long and protracted journey reflecting conflicted notions of
   freedom and accountability.

   As part of an expansion from six to nine members states, the United
Kingdom joined the European Union in January 1973. Just two years later in
1975, following legal provision provided by the Referendum Act, the UK’s first
nationwide referendum took place and determined that that UK would stay in
the European Economic Community, or the Common Market as it was then
known. 67% of voters supported the Government’s campaign to remain. Jump
forward 41 years to 2016 and 51.9% of the UK electorate (about 17.5 million
people) voted to leave the European Union, eventually triggering Article 50
of the Lisbon Treaty and enacting the Brexit process. The nature of the UK’s
relationship with the European Union had, apparently, split the country down
the middle.
   In this article, I argue that the Brexit division and the conflicted notions of
identity that surround it is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, ideological debates
about the “European question” assumed a central place in British political life
from the early-1960s onwards with rival factions appearing in both Labour and


                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 31, Fall 2018
                                         Miguel Mera


Conservative parties.1 I focus on a pivotal historical period to trace some of
the political and cultural implications of the use of popular music and popular
musicians in British films of the 1960s and 1970s. Although studies of both
cinema and popular music as political are numerous rarely is the use of popular
music in cinema considered within socio-political frameworks.2 For Street,
the boundary between music and politics is ‘largely illusionary’ and he claims
that ‘music does not just provide a vehicle of political expression, it is that
expression’.3 Street also notes that in order to be political, cultural outputs have
to be used collectively. I extend this idea and argue that there is an interactive
dependency between society, the films it makes, and the way that popular music
is used in them, even if this is not developed or intended to drive an overtly
political mobilizing movement. Films are closely related to what people feel
about the world around them, they demonstrate clear identity connections
and also shape the contours of social change by imagining new boundaries,
territories, and networks.
   I hope to demonstrate some facets of the British psyche in relation to identity,
independence, nationalism, nostalgia, and exoticism. In this sense, the various
interrelationships between culture, identity politics, stardom, and music show
that the decision to leave the EU in 2016 was not a flash in the pan, but a long and
protracted journey reflecting oppositional notions of freedom and accountability.
By exploring the road to Brexit various interrelationships between culture and
music emerge showing how popular music in film reflected wider political
deliberations. I propose to explore this through three general typologies which
I define as ‘Discovering Europe’, ‘Defeating Europe’, and ‘Reappraising Home’.
These should not be understood as representative of a teleological political
evolution but considered as interweaving parallel strands within which a range
of films from the period could be analysed. Space does not permit a broader
evaluation here and, instead, I examine a specific, provocative example of a
film within each typology. I hope, nonetheless, to be able to demonstrate the
potential for a framework that highlights the contrasting perspectives on the
UK’s relationship with Europe which have long been evident and did not simply
splinter at the point of the Brexit referendum.




1
  Anthony Forster, Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics: Opposition to Europe in the
British Conservative and Labour Parties Since 1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
2
  See for example: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997); Mike Wayne, The Politics of Contemporary European Cinema: Histories, Borders,
Disaporas (Bristol: Intellect, 2002); Ian Peddie, The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social
Protest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2013); Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics
(London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
3
  Street, p. 1.

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                        Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit


    Performing Freedom(s)

   The reaction to Brexit across Europe and in many parts of the UK was one
of complete shock, but history tells us that it should not have been quite such a
surprise. Brexit goes far beyond the wider phenomenon of a populist backlash
against globalization.4 The challenge of resolving Britain’s constitutional tradition
with the EU is a long-standing and deep-rooted aspect of the British mentality;
this means that the Brexit result was, in many ways, inevitable, especially when
unbalanced devolution had already poured fuel on the fire of an internal identity
crisis. As Allen and others have observed, British governments have often been
highly Europeanized but British politics has not, meaning that disputes over
government structures and wider notions of resistance to overseas “intrusions”
have been a constant battleground.5
   For British people, questions of freedom and of the democratic right to elect
and remove governments are, arguably, a preoccupation that is more forcefully
determined than in other European countries, as Anthony Smith and others
have identified.6 Sheila Lawlor discusses a range of historic motives for this in
her 2016 essay Ruling the Ruler: Parliament, the People and Britain’s Political
Identity. Here she cites the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who, even in
the 1930s evoked an image of inherited freedom passed on through generations.
His focus was on the importance of parliamentary government as a symbol of
resistance against power as well as the protection of ancient freedoms which
he considered a birth right. This freedom, Baldwin argued, had been ‘fought
for from the beginning of our history […] the result of centuries of resistance
to the power of the executive’ (my italics).7 Baldwin aimed to present British
freedom in opposition to continental systems emerging in the interwar years
and especially the authoritarian movements of fascism and communism. But his
main aim was to highlight British independence: independence of the individual,
independence of spirit, independence that continually challenged authority.
Whether this perceived view was accurate is, of course, an entirely different
question, but it is clear that Baldwin had touched on something appealing


4
  Craig Calhoun, ‘Populism, Nationalism and Brexit’, in Brexit: Sociological Responses, ed. by
William Outhwaite (London: Anthem Press, 2017), pp. 56–76; Kevin O’Rourke (2016) ‘Too
Much Market, Too Little State: The Brexit Backlash Against Globalisation Has Been a Long
Time Coming’, LSE Brexit Blog, 19 August, <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/08/19/too-much-
market-too-little-state-the-brexit-backlash-against-globalisation-has-been-a-long-time-coming/>
[accessed 3 March 2018].
5
  David Allen, ‘The United Kingdom: A Europeanized Government in a Non-Europeanized Polity’,
in The Institutions of the European Union, ed. by Simon Bulmer and Christian Lequesne (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 108–33; Helen Thompson, ‘Inevitability and Contingency:
The Political Economy of Brexit’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19.3
(2017), 434–49.
6
  Anthony Smith, ‘Set in the Silver Sea: English National Identity and European Integration’,
Nations and Nationalism, 12.3 (2006), 433–52.
7
  Stanley Baldwin, This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935/4th edn. 1937), p. 25.

                                                                                                79
                                          Miguel Mera


because Britain’s engagement with mass politics, from the 20th century onwards,
has been framed by a very particular form of popular scepticism. By choosing
to characterize an independent British spirit, then, Baldwin was engaging in a
speech act, a deliberate attempt to make (not just describe) a specific form of
Britishness. These attitudes were amplified following the Second World War,
where Gifford argues that Euroscepticism increasingly became a national
movement for British exceptionalism.8
   Extending the concept of the speech act, Adler-Nissen et al., following
J. L. Austin and Judith Butler, argue that Brexit signifies far more than
the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the
European Union.9 It works performatively both as a promise of a different
future and to establish a specific past. As such, Britain’s notion of freedom
is also closely tied to nostalgia. I would argue that it reflects a fascinating
example of what Svetlana Boym described as ‘restorative nostalgia’.
Restorative nostalgia stresses the idea of home and attempts a transhistorical
reconstruction of the lost home: it attempts to patch up collective memory
gaps.10 Restorative nostalgia presents itself as truth and tradition. Indeed,
Boym has argued that restorative nostalgia ‘appears to be a longing for a
place but is actually a yearning for a different time […]. A rebellion against
the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’.11 Adler-Nissen
also implicitly identifies the same point:

        the discourse of Brexit does not express some “true” nature of British identity,
     geopolitics or economy. Rather, it creates that which it seems to represent: namely,
     a post-Brexit Britain and post-Brexit world – and in doing so, it also constructs a
     particular past. Overall, understanding Brexit as performative assumes that the very
     language of Brexit does something politically.12

   Considering Brexit as a performative act blanketed by restorative nostalgia, it
becomes possible to see the usefulness of examining cultural texts such as films
of the 1960s and 1970s. Film does not simply reflect or describe a given reality, it
also constructs it. From this perspective, we may consider the representation of
the Other, and the boundaries that demarcate inside and outside, domestic and
foreign, leave and remain.




8
   Chris Gifford, The Making of Eurosceptic Britain: Identity and Economy in a Post-imperial State
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
9
   Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Charlotte Galpin, and Ben Rosamond, ‘Performing Brexit: How a
Post-Brexit World is Imagined Outside the United Kingdom’, The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations, 19.3 (2017), 573–91.
10
   Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001) pp. 41–9.
11
   Boym, p. xv.
12
   Adler-Nissen, p. 575.

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                      Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit


     Discovering Europe

   In the early 1960s, British cinema was in transition. Of the former dominant
studios, only Associated British at Elstree and Rank at Pinewood had survived the
postwar era. The funding and infrastructural gap was partly filled by American
studios which invested heavily in British films. A number of government-
sponsored mechanisms attempted to animate the ailing domestic film industry
and to draw people away from their television sets. These included the National
Film Finance Corporation (NFFC); the Eady levy, a tax on exhibitors named
after the Treasury official who set it up in 1954; and British Lion, a government-
sponsored umbrella for film production and distribution.13
   In this context, a film such as Summer Holiday (Peter Yates, 1963) is a
productive case study, as it moves away from the socially-aware working-class
new wave, e.g. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), towards
the increasingly confident mid-decade celebration of music and fashion in
swinging London, e.g. The Knack (Richard Lester, 1965). Summer Holiday was
made by Associated British at Elstree Studios and distributed by Warner-Pathé,
and it consciously aped the Hollywood film musical. American Herbert Ross
was brought in to choreograph and film the musical numbers and the dialogue
scenes that surrounded them. Summer Holiday featured the artist Cliff Richard
and it was primarily responsible for his transformation from rock star into family
entertainer. A significant aspect of the film was its extended and integrated
marketing campaign. The Daily Cinema identified it as ‘one of the most ambitious
and far-reaching exploitation campaigns planned for a British motion picture’.14
It worked not only as publicity but also as a cross-promotional drive towards the
youth market that embraced the British music, fashion, and travel industries.
Two singles from the film were released before Summer Holiday reached cinemas,
followed by an LP of the entire soundtrack. The women’s costumes designed
for the film were made available in a range of identical high street versions. An
elaborate press book identified numerous strategies for marketing the film.15 This
type of marketing is usually attributed to the Hollywood “high concept” films
of the 1980s, but the evidence regarding Summer Holiday suggests an earlier
integrated marketing approach.16
   The film’s blunt narrative device is that the central characters are bus
mechanics working for London Transport who decide, during a miserable, rainy
lunch break, to convert a double-decker bus into to a mobile holiday home and
drive across continental Europe, eventually ending up in Greece. It is a film that


13
   Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British
Government 1927–1984 (London: BFI, 1985).
14
   The Daily Cinema, Wednesday 9 January (1963), 6–8 (p. 6).
15
   Mathew Kerry, The Holiday and British Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
16
   Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1994).

                                                                                          81
                                           Miguel Mera


has often been thought of as charming and highly innocent. Melvyn Hayes, for
example, refers to Summer Holiday as ‘a family picture which you could take
your granny to and no one would be offended’.17 At the same time, it is important
to acknowledge that the film also has a clear exoticist stance. According to Cliff
Richard’s biographer Steve Turner, ‘the idea of filming Cliff in an exotic location
was inspired by the boom in foreign travel in the early 1960s’.18
    An early sequence presents the film’s title song. It has a cheery, repetitive
harmonic pattern (I-vi7-ii7-V9) and features Richard’s lilting voice in well-defined
question and answer phrases. In stark contrast to the scenes in Britain — filmed
in black and white and showing a downcast English beach — the scenes in
France are bright and sunny, with happy people waving from the roadside. This
is the promotion of foreign travel as a desirable leisure activity for young people,
a reflection of the postwar affluence and higher disposable income that resulted
in increased charter flights and opened the way to mass tourism in the UK. The
song defines the journey abroad as both exotic and relaxing: we’re going where
the sun shines brightly and the sea is blue. Indeed, the film asserts its “touristic”
subject position by expressing not only a desire for but the British right to a
European summer holiday: ‘everybody has a summer holiday, doing things they
always wanted to.’ Here the foreign holiday is presented as utopia.
     Some of the French people are represented wearing berets. This could only
be more ethnically essentialist if they also wore a string of onions round their
neck while singing the Marseillaise. And there are also a range of unacceptably
jingoistic comments such as: ‘you know what they say about French drivers’.
In his book The Holiday and British Film Matthew Kerry is right to highlight
some of the problematic imperialist perspectives that the film presents. He
discusses some of the blatantly racist and primitive representations of the former
Yugoslavia, for example. The film also celebrates an icon of British culture, the
red double-decker bus, increasingly imposing itself throughout Europe. Indeed,
at the film’s conclusion, Cliff Richard’s enterprising spirit results in a message
from London Transport saying he can go ahead with his idea of introducing two-
hundred holiday buses to Europe.
    In several important ways Summer Holiday seems to outline the kind of
relationship Britain really wanted to have with Europe. It wanted to enjoy the
exotic pleasures but also to keep them under control. It wanted access but with
cultural distance; a connection without connecting, to savour without being
reciprocally influenced, to visit Europe but also to enjoy home comforts, even
if these were only represented by a London bus. This, of course, maps onto the
stereotypical and tainted image of Brits abroad. Karen O’Reilly for example, in
her ethnographic study of expat communities on the Costa del Sol reports how
the British neither showed interest in the local way of life or of learning the local


17
     Howard Maxford, ‘Call Sheet: Summer Holiday’, Film Review, 549 (1996), 44–7 (p. 45).
18
     Steve Turner, The Bachelor Boy (London: Carlton Books, 2008), p. 102.

82
                         Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit


language.19 So, in this sense, the innocence of Summer Holiday is only partial. It
reaches out to Europe only at the surface level and it does so through a shallow,
exoticist, and touristic engagement.


     Defeating Europe

   At the outset of The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969) there appears to be
a similar touristic perspective. The song, ‘On Days Like These’, sung by Matt
Monro, is influenced by the lyricism of Neapolitan Song and is designed to
represent 1960s European “chic” as we see a car make its way through beautiful
mountainous landscape. The song’s lyricist, Don Black, referred to it as ‘a
gorgeous, sunny-tinted song’.20 Black also explained that his sister (apparently a
fluent Italian speaker), helped him translate the first few lines of text so that some
of the last verse could be sung in Italian. However, both the translation and Matt
Monro’s pronunciation leave a lot to be desired. ‘On days like these when skies are
blue and fields are green’ is translated as ‘Questi giorni quando viene il bel sole’.21
Inaccurate syllabic stresses throughout, as well a curious French/Italian hybrid
on the word sole (which is sung as soleil), are disrespectful: Questi giorni quando
vieni il bel soleil. But as the function of the song is to be generically “foreign” and
to present the hypnotic and attractive exoticism of Italy, the actual meaning of the
words is clearly irrelevant to the filmmakers and the intended audience.
   This song is then immediately undercut by an explosive murder and we
gradually become aware of the movie’s underlying structure and agenda. The
Italian Job is not just a charming crime caper about a gold bullion robbery in
Turin. The film’s producer Michael Deely has freely admitted that The Italian
Job is a Eurosceptic film. He stated that the film was ‘about us kicking European
ass’.22 Indeed, in the scenes of planning, preparation, and execution The Italian
Job conforms closely to the genre conventions of the war movie. Other critical
commentators have also suggested that the film’s subsequent cult status owes
something to the symbolism of independence that it flaunts. Paul Elliott wrote:

         The Italian Job details a post-colonial Britain desperately renegotiating its place on
     a world stage. No longer was it the Empiric power it was in the nineteenth century
     nor was it the symbol of stoicism that it became during the Second Word War and
     it was certainly far from the apex of cultural cool that it had presented itself as five
     years earlier.23


19
   Karen O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
20
   Don Black, The Making of The Italian Job (Mathew Field and Lancelot Narayan, 2003).
21
   A literal translation could be ‘In giornate come queste, quando i cieli sono azzurri e i prati verdi’.
22
   Michael Deely cited in York Memberry, ‘Fans of Italian Job Angered by Remake of Caine Classic’,
The Telegraph, 14th April (2002), <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/
usa/1390861/Fans-of-Italian-Job-angered-by-remake-of-Caine-classic.html> [accessed 12 March 2018].
23
   Paul Elliott, Studying the British Crime Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 65.

                                                                                                      83
                                        Miguel Mera


    If the film aims to reclaim or reinvigorate a sense of British identity, how does
it go about it? The climactic scene is an extended chase where the thieves set up a
traffic jam in Turin, but then escape with the gold bullion in red, white, and blue
Mini-Coopers, humiliating both the Italian police and the Mafia in the process.
Noel Coward, as the camp criminal mastermind, Mr. Bridger, celebrates from
inside prison and this is cross-cut with the gang executing the final stages of their
escape. The song that accompanies this, performed by the cast, is called ‘Getta
Bloomin’ Move On’. It is punctuated by instrumental versions of Thomas Arne’s
patriotic hymn ‘Rule Britannia’ with scenes in the prison obviously drawn from
the chanting of football terraces, with repeated cries of ‘England’ incorporated
into the musical structure.
    One other striking feature is that Quincy Jones’ and Don Black’s song uses
Cockney rhyming slang. A Cockney is normally considered to be a person from
London’s East End but more broadly (and certainly in the late 1960s) it implied
someone from a working-class background. Cockney rhyming slang has roots
that go back to the 1840s but was reputedly used by prisoners to converse
without their guards understanding what they were saying. The construction of
rhyming slang normally involves replacing a common word with a phrase of two-
or-more words, the last of which rhymes with the original word. The secondary
rhyming word would then usually be omitted from the end of the phrase, which
makes the meaning of the phrase elusive to anyone who is not in the know.


     Getta Bloomin’ Move On

       This is the self-preservation society
       This is the self-preservation society

       Go wash your German bands, your boat race too
       Comb your Barnet Fair we got a lot to do
       Put on your Dickie Dirt and your Peckham Rye
       Cause time’s soon hurrying by

       Get your skates on mate, get your skates on mate
       No bib around your Gregory Peck today, eh?
       Drop your plates of meat right up on the seat

       This is the self-preservation society
       This is the self-preservation society

  In the song ‘Getta Bloomin’ Move On’, German bands in the verse means
hands, boat race means face. In Cockney rhyming slang you would say: “go wash
your Germans and your boat” which would mean wash your hands and face.
Dickie Dirt would mean shirt, Peckham Rye (which is an area in the borough of
Southwark) means tie. You would say “put on your Dickie and your Peckham”

84
                       Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit


which would mean put on your shirt and tie. In this song both the contexualizing
primary word and secondary rhyming word are included.
   This localized cockney rhyming slang is used as a clear nationalist symbol.
Cockney is not explicitly deployed anywhere else in the film and the use of
the song is delayed until this point where it celebrates ingenuity in defeating
the unsuspecting enemy. In his seminal text Imagined Communities, Benedict
Anderson suggested that even though most members of a single nation
do not know each other they can be brought together by the image of their
communion.24 This is one reason why displays of nationalism at sporting events,
and indeed why national anthems, are so important. ‘Getta Bloomin’ Move On’
is a classic example of an attempt to shape cultural nationalism. The music, with
a unique defining local characteristic based on Cockney song in musical style
and genre, is presented as cultural symbol of the whole Nation and is then pitted
directly against an “Other”. ‘Getta Bloomin’ Move On’ is also, therefore, a direct
structural response to the “Italianate” song that opens the film and is a striking
assertion of British victory and dominance.
   Normally, this kind of explicit cultural nationalism would be a form of
resistance against a dominant Other. But what would have prompted this attitude
in the late 1960s, beyond historic British geopolitical insularity? Northern Italy
of the 1960s had, of course, transformed its economic fortunes thanks to what
has been dubbed il miracolo economico, a prolonged period of strong economic
growth and significant social change.25 In the UK, on the other hand, there were
several sterling crises between 1964 and 1969. In 1967, for example, the pound
was devalued (by 14%) because of a trade deficit, a weak domestic economy, and
pressure from external creditors. Some authors have suggested that the sterling
crises were, in fact, decisive in forcing prime minister Harold Wilson towards
the European Economic Community.26 Within these broader contexts a film like
The Italian Job is more than just a mild satire on the state of the nation in the late
1960s, as some commentators have suggested. It is, arguably, more akin to what
Raymond Durgnat described as a ‘mirror for England’.27
   Don Black himself thought that the lyrics did not really mean anything and
were just a random collection of rhyming slang. But the often-repeated line: ‘This
is the self-preservation society’ seems significant in this respect. It clearly refers
to the group of criminals engaged in a process of financial self-interest. As the
song is also designed narratively to represent the British Nation, one also has


24
   Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(New York: Verso, 2016).
25
   Valerio Castronovo, L’Italia del miracolo economico (Roma: Editori Laterza, 2014).
26
   Helen Parr, ‘A Question of Leadership: July 1966 and Harold Wilson’s European Decision’,
Contemporary British History, 19:4 (2005), 437–58; Catherine Schenk, ‘Sterling, International
Monetary Reform and Britain’s Applications to the EEC in the 1960s’, Contemporary European
History, 11.3 (2002), 345–69.
27
   Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London:
Faber and Faber, 1970).

                                                                                            85
                                           Miguel Mera


to wonder why it was grasped by the British public with such enthusiasm. Paul
Elliot interprets it in the following way:

         The subtext of The Italian Job seems to be, despite all of its red, white and blue
     flag waving, that Britain was fast becoming more self-preservation and less of a
     society. All of this is at odds with how the film has been reinvented and revisited in the
     popular arena, where is has come to stand for a form of nostalgic Britishness in TV
     commercials, pop videos and on the football terraces.28

   However, I do not think the subtext Elliott refers to was particularly intended
or is how this film has been widely received in the UK. Indeed, the afterlife of
the song that Elliot alludes to highlights its continued cultural relevance as a
staunch British symbol. It has been used in a British-only Martini V2 Vodka
Advertisement from 1999, in adverts for the gas and electricity company EDF
Energy (‘The Smart Installation Society’), for Cuprinol, a company that creates
wood-coating products (‘The Wood Preservation Society’), and in perhaps the
clearest example of its nationalist sentiment and function, for the Euro 2012
championships as the anthem for the English football team. The Italian Job,
therefore, clearly attempts to assert a sense of British pride, even if its tongue is
firmly in its cheek.


     Reappraising Home

   Before looking at one specific example from the late 1970s, it is first useful
to note that there are some recurrent tropes in British pop music films of the
1970s. The cultural context is significant. This was a fractious decade marked by
economic decline. The 1973 oil crisis lead to a three-day working week. Despite
a brief period of calm negotiated by the Labour Government of 1974, known
as the “Social Contract”, this did not prevent widespread strikes by public
sector unions and a complete breakdown of the Government (both Labour and
Conservative). The year 1978 was dubbed the “Winter of Discontent” and the
UK was consistently referred to as the sick man of Europe.
   Allen suggests that the response to growing national pessimism in the 1970s
was to look backwards with both popular music in song and on film searching
for ‘greater innocence, simplicity and familiarity in two different ways: offering
either the comfort of nostalgia, or the earnestness of “authenticity” in the roots
of American blues and country or British folk.’29 Allen’s notion of a comforting
look back, however, seems to understate a common trope of the period which


28
  Elliot, p. 65.
29
  Dave Allen, ‘British Graffiti: Popular Music and Film in the 1970s’, in British Film Culture in the
1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, ed. by Sue Harper and Justin Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press 2013), pp. 99–111, Loc2155.

86
                      Popular Music on Screen and the Road to Brexit


is a high degree of critical revisionism or what Matthew Kerry refers to as ‘grim
nostalgia’.30 For example, the films That’ll be The Day (Claude Whatham, 1973)
and Stardust (Michael Apted, 1974) show the rise and fall of a rock n’roll artist,
Jim Maclaine (played by David Essex) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Maclaine
escapes home and school and runs away to the seaside, undertakes a series of
depressing jobs, and engages in several scenes of unpleasant sex in holiday camp
chalets. In one particularly disturbing scene Maclaine rapes a schoolgirl under
a tree. His predatory partner in the film, astonishingly, is ex-Beatle Ringo Starr,
and through the film’s tawdry narrative, Kerry observes that Starr ‘destroys any
mystique he may have had in the previous decade as a Beatle’.31 The sequel,
Stardust, shows Maclaine rising to prominence as a rock artist, but abandoning
his family and friends, and finally becoming a reclusive drug-addict in a castle
in Spain. It is a painful and dark reappraisal that disintegrates classic rock
mythology. In other bleak nostalgic films from this period we can also point to
the rock-opera Tommy (Ken Russell, 1975) which reconsiders the 1950s in what
Glynn calls a ‘miserabilist mise en scène’,32 and Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam,
1979) which takes a social-realist perspective on the battle between mods and
rockers of the early 1960s, exploring the importance of music in working-class
identity formation. In these films, we can see Britain trying to come to terms
with the rose-tinted idea of “swinging 60s” and the contrasting severe reality of
the 1970s.
   One of the most striking examples of this critical revisionism can be found
in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). The title refers to the Silver Jubilee of Queen
Elizabeth II in 1977. In this high-art film Queen Elizabeth I is transported from
the 16th century forward in time to witness the shattered Britain of the 1970s.
The episodic structure is heavily influenced by punk aesthetics and it provides a
powerful vision of chaos, urban dystopia, and social disintegration. It featured
several punk performers including Toyah Wilcox, Adam Ant and Sioxsie Sioux.
Jarman called it ‘a determined and often reckless analysis of the world which
surrounded us’.33 It was critically acclaimed, but it also outraged many members
of the punk community who felt it misrepresented them. The fashion designer,
Vivienne Westwood, was famously vicious about the film and made an open
T-shirt to Jarman outlining her criticisms. She called it ‘the most boring and
therefore disgusting film’ and accused Jarman of being ‘a gay boy jerk[ing] off
through the titillation of his masochistic tremblings’.34 Jarman was certainly
ambivalent about punk as an ideology and just two years earlier had described its
instigators as ‘… petit bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David


30
   Kerry, p. 164.
31
   Ivi, p. 168.
32
   Stephen Glynn, The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond (Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), p. 172.
33
   Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet, 1984), p. 176.
34
   Vivienne Westwood, V&A Collections (1978), T.104-2002.

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Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes — who’ve read a little art history and adopted
some Dadaist typography and bad manners, and who are now in the business of
reproducing a fake street credibility’.35 Jubilee therefore venerates punk’s bold
attack on the establishment, but is somewhat doubtful about its binary politics.
An important scene that engages with some of these contradictions is when
the powerful impresario, Borgia Ginz, introduces performer Amyl Nitrate as a
possible UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. Her performance is a punk-
rock re-arrangement of ‘Rule Britannia’ with hyperbolic melismas and agitated
repetition of the word Britannia. Forward-momentum is maintained by the off-
beat strumming of distorted guitars. Nitrate is dressed as a satirical version of the
goddess Britannia complete with Corinthian helmet, trident, and a feathered fan
which acts as a proxy for a shield. Britannia as the personification and emblem
of British power and unity is undercut by the spirited musical performance as
well as the inclusion of goose stepping and the superimposition of recordings
of Hitler’s speeches. Obviously, at one level this grotesque scene equates British
patriotism with fascism, as the Sex Pistols had done with ‘God Save the Queen’,
but Roland Wymer argues that: ‘Although Amyl Nitrate’s performance is a camp
parody of patriotic sentiment, the look on her face is one of tragic intensity
rather than that of an irreverent clown,’ and he notes that the published script
describes her as ‘shellshocked’ and her performance as a ‘vision of disaster’.36 In
this sense, Wymer thinks the film helps to ‘expose contradictions within punk
itself’ as much as to provide a critique on 1970s British culture.37 Even in what
is an extreme version of a representational strategy targeting concepts of nation
and nationhood at a deeply troubled point in British recent history there is a
conflicted and conflicting outlook.


     Conclusion

   What I hope to have demonstrated is that the divergent opinions that seem
to have ruptured in the Brexit vote in 2016 were evident long before. They
are, in fact, a deep-rooted conflict that has been, over an extended period, an
important characteristic of the British people and the British circumstance. By
examining the use of music in filmic texts associated with British popular culture
of the 1960s and 1970s we can see some of the ways that these issues have played
out and fed back into society. The films highlighted here are, of course, very
different in terms of budget scale, target audience demographic, style, genre,
and so on. While they can be understood as interesting analytical examples of
different aspects of the constantly shifting opinions on British relationships with


35
   Derek Jarman cited in Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art Into Pop (London and New York:
Routledge, 2016), p. 20.
36
   Roland Wymer, Derek Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 59.
37
   Wymer, p. 59.

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Europe, they also represent a fascinating self-reflection on the internal challenges
of reconciling the past with changing “youth” culture, on the desire to reach out
beyond borders, and on the challenges of closing the drawbridge. If we accept the
central thrust of the argument, then we should also see relevant examples of this
kind of conflict in our current audiovisual environment. Is the spirit of Summer
Holiday really so different from what is presented in the programme Top Gear
(BBC, 2002–), or its sequel The Grand Tour (Amazon, 2016–), which consistently
use music to emphasise the exotic as the presenters drive across various locations
asserting a sense of mildly-jingoistic superiority? Is it not significant that a film
like Mamma Mia (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) is financed, developed, and made by
a British production company, featuring an exoticist and, in narrative terms,
weakly-justified pseudo-Greek location? Is the song ‘Getta Bloomin’ Move
On’ so very different from the climactic sequence in the first Kingsman movie
(Matthew Vaughn, 2014), where the heads of the complicit elite explode in a
“fireworks” display that is perfectly timed with Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance
March No. 1’? How many Bond films assert the independence of British spirit,
the absolute necessity of the maverick individual to solve the world’s problems?
Even when these films are critical of this kind of perspective they also present it
as a clear phenomenon and as a site of celebration. I wonder, then, how we might
come to re-evaluate these texts as well as earlier ones in the fullness of time and
in light of the journey towards and away from Brexit?
   At the end of The Italian Job, the gang of criminals have brilliantly managed
to escape and are high on their success, but as they wend their way around the
looping roads of the Swiss Alps the driver loses control of the bus and it is left
teetering over a cliff edge as the stolen gold slides towards the rear doors. It is,
quite literally, the film’s cliff-hanger. To me this seems a surprisingly powerful
metaphor for a pro-Brexit ideology. An audacious and maverick plan led by
charismatic figures with the determination to assert free-spirited isolationism,
but at the end future prosperity hangs over a precipice. For all the jubilation and
comic misadventure there is also a harsh reality. As far as Brexit is concerned,
however, the principal of self-determination, of independence, and of freedom
is far more important for many than the risks and potential dangers. This
independent character is simultaneously one of Britain’s greatest strengths and
one of its biggest weaknesses.
   It is my personal view — not least as a someone with both Spanish and British
heritage — that Brexit is a serious mistake, but the outcome of the 2016 vote
should certainly not be a surprise. Britain was always divided on this issue.
Brexit does not primarily represent an increasingly active or aggressive form of
nationalism, nor even the decline or emergence of particular political movements.
It reveals a fundamental identity conflict that, for better or worse, has long been
central to the British imaginary.




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