From Suez to the Falklands - Part 2

While the Profumo affair had been focusing prurient attention on the pecadillos of the ruling caste, a spectacle that was intensified as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were being dragged through the courts in the vindictive establishment persecution of their svengali Stephen Ward, an underground revolution had been fomenting beneath the attention of the nation's media. This was overwhelmingly a working class and lower middle class phenomenon, as teenagers, inspired by the initial supernova of rock'n'roll that had arrived from America, sought to emulate it. The original rock'n'rollers were by this time in abeyance, either dead like Buddy Holly, brought low by scandal such as Jerry Lee Lewis, or had had their careers diverted by shady managers in the manner of Elvis Presley. However, these stars, as well as their lower wattage British impersonators, had also been stymied by their own limitations, being dependent as they were on professional songwriters and lacking the imagination and musical breadth to enhance their artistic vision, which in any case tended to be minimal. In many ways the first rock'n'rollers, like so many of the itinerant musicians of the era, had simply been glorified versions of that classic American archetype, the salesman; they, like so many of their compatriots, were effectively no more than trappers drifting from town to town in the dollar hunt.

However, the new generation of British musicians represented something entirely new and unprecedented. Although it is invariably posited that the chief lure of American music to the callow, knock-kneed British teenagers of the era was its libidinal excess, the really deep attraction was in its spirituality; the residual echo of gospel in soul music and the devilish voodoo undertow of the Blues were the sense-deranging effects that really mattered. These cast a magic spell on a social cohort who had been primed to undertake mundane work, in a mundane environment, within a mundane society. If the Profumo affair had revealed how the other half lived, then popular music at least offered the potential to sample a small portion of it. However, one of the key differences that marked the new British musicians from their American inspirations was in their organisation. Whereas the American rock'n'rollers had been individuals, or at least clearly identified frontmen, the Britsh ones were agglomerated into tightly-knit bands. If the Americans were salesmen, then the British groups were gangs, and this had an important ramification in that the gang structure inherently precipitates competition to be top dog. This in turn manifests both internally within the gang itself and externally against other gangs. As the ultimate marker of status within the music industry was the quality and innovativeness of creative output, the hierarchical gang structure encouraged the members of a group to attempt to musically out-compete each other. It also paradoxically encouraged intense collaboration within each group in order to creatively out-compete their rivals, these two processes being the source of a potential chain reaction that would initially lie dormant, as groups like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones learned their chops with covers of songs from Motown, the Brill Building and the old Blues masters.

The Beatles' first top ten hit, "Please Please Me", arrived on the heels of the Ward trial, and the following year, 1964, the new music broke its bounds by dominating the domestic pop charts. It was immediately both innovative and familiar, based as it was on established American forms, but carrying its own distinctive fervour, the reaction it induced in British teenagers far exceeding the excitement elicted by the original rockers. It was also unprecedentedly well received across the Atlantic, in an America that was reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and which had its own need for ecstatic oblivion. One of the most fascinating peculiarities of the "British invasion" was the awkward manner in which straight-laced American television presenters atempted to interview the British musicians. This invariably included the basic mistake of singling out individual group members for questioning, the expectation clearly being a helpful response as both interviewer and artist collborated in a clear, coherent sales pitch. The Americans have always derived great amusement from British dentistry, but their own predilection for immaculate pearly whites is ultimately derived from their atomised sales culture; the notion that their smile is the foot in the door to greater prosperity. Salesmen have always been dismissed as vaguely disreputable in Britain, and unfortunately for the avuncular American presenters, the likes of The Animals and The Who were not salesmen. The first thing that becomes clear is that as insular gangs, the British groups have evolved private languages pitted with nuanced gaps and sentences that need the input of several members in order to be completed. In this environment, even the most basic questions ("so when did you guys meet?") generate embarrassing hesitations and lacunae, there being no desire on the part of the musicians to please the interviewer or his audience. There isn't even a basic aspiration to generate a good impression, the result being a kind of polite mutual incomprehension that nonetheless carries an undertow of hostility.

The sense of having "conquered" the home of rock'n'roll, and its accompanying vast commercial market, opened up a potentially boundless field in which the British bands could explore their creativity. However, the sense-deranging acceleration that would effloresce over the following four years, which essentially created a new art form and which has never been equalled, was also dependent on a couple of other factors. The first of these was that despite the British bands' professed veneration of their American progenitors, British rock music was essentially a strip-mining operation, drilling as it did into the deep wells of spiritual force, of mana, that lay both apparent and latent within American music. These forces were particularly deep in African-American music, having been built up over decades, or even centuries, of adversity and its corresponding fortitude. Their extraction would be ruthlessly undertaken with characteristic imperial thoroughness, the long hair of the British musicians effectively functioning as latter day pith helmets. However, this had the corollary that the British bands were in a race against time, as they had to wring as much value as possible from the source before it was used up. As such, it was not long before the dwindling reserves of mana available had to be artificially enhanced, and there were two means employed for doing this. The first was by studio experimentation, with a gallimaufry of techniques being adopted, from multi-tracking to tape manipulation, to the use of exotic instruments and synthesizers. The second, simpler, and ultimately more effective method was to literally boost the mana-effect via heightened amplification, with bands becoming focused on increasing the mass and heft of their sound. This was initiated with the assistance of amenable amplifier manufacturers such as Hi-Watt and Marshall, who gave every impression of having been providentially founded for this moment.

The other major stimulus for the accelerating musical and cultural derangement was the continuing degradation of the ruling class, which only accelerated as the Sixties proceeded. Having come to power promising the "white heat of revolution" in 1964, by 1967 the Labour government of Harold Wilson had been forced by global market pressures into devaluing Sterling, a humiliating moment that carried echoes of the Suez crisis of ten years before. Wilson's pathetic assurance to the public that "the pound in your pocket" had not been debased evoked derision, but also intensified the impression that nobody within the upper strata of society was capable of getting a grip. The social reforms undertaken by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, which relaxed the legal restrictions on such concerns as homosexuality, abortion and divorce, were opportunistically portrayed as marking the advance of enlightened "progressive" standards. However, they were also tacit admissions that the ruling class could no longer regulate the public's private behaviour, as their moral authority was shot. This absence of authority facilitated the almost open drug culture that was essential to the development of popular music, as it simultaneously rushed towards nirvana and into the void. A half-hearted rearguard action was attempted by the authorities to circumscribe "the permissive society" with the arrest on drugs charges of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at the latter's Redlands home in 1967. However, the attempt to gaol the pair was undercut by the ruling class itself, with The Times newspaper sanctimoneously pleading "Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?". The sheer pathos of this sentiment was ultimately another manifestation of the phenomenon that had first materialised at Suez; that although the ruling class may not have liked the new world that was emerging, they liked the idea of reclaiming authority and responsibility over it even less.

If there were any remaining vestiges of the old values of duty and deference, they lay in the last lingering outposts of the Empire, and would briefly emerge in the form of one of the most extraordinary characters of the era. Colonel Colin Mitchell, the commander of the British garrison in Aden, in the present day Yemen. This port had been the first major British base east of the Suez canal, although it was now beseiged by Arab nationalist insurgents inspired by that perennial bane, Gamel Abdul Nasser. Mitchell would be accorded the epithet of "Mad Mitch" due to his anachronistic devotion to his imperial duties and his tendency to wax dolorous on the state of Britain, like a legionnaire in the Teutoberger Wald lamenting the decadence of Rome. His Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders insouciantly swaggered around Aden, intimidating all and sundry and dishing out torture and punishment beatings, as though it were still the high Victorian era. Nonetheless, Mitchell's quixotic endeavour to impose a measure of national will garnered strong approval among many sections of the public. To a British Government devoted to decline and retreat, however, he was simply an embarassment. One suspects that for such arch-technocrats as Harold Wilson and Denis Healey, their objection to imperialism was not that it was immoral, but that it was out of date. Mitchell's real crime was not that he was oppressive or brutal, but that he was old fashioned, in an era that celebrated the novel and the sensational. The Labour government's 1966 Defence White Paper had already announced the withdrawal of all British forces East of Suez, and the following year Aden would be evacuated despite, or possibly even because of, Mitchell's efforts. Unusually for a British imperial withdrawal, a sympathetic government had not been arranged in succession, and Yemen would briefly experience the Arab world's first, and only, experiment with socialism, complete with its own KGB interrogation centre. During a 1967 television interview Mitchell had perceptively linked drugs and devaluation, imparting that:

"I believe that this is the national malaise, isn't it? I mean nobody really knows what they're on back home and we watch ourselves going from being a first, second, third and how far down rate power. And it's all mixed up with everything you read about, the LSD, both sorts of LSD, and the lack of leadership".

In this at least, he wasn't wrong.