If The Principle Dies, You Don't Have A Chance

There can be few groups more thoroughly, remorselessly forgotten than Easterhouse. This is especially ironic given that the title of their debut album was Contenders, although at the time of its release this name was far from anomalous. Having been endorsed by Morrissey, a dubious honour even back then, Contenders was released by Rough Trade in the same week in 1986 as The Queen Is Dead, and only The Smiths' release held it off the top of the independent charts. It was a record that embodied the band's deep contradictions, which were reflected in both their towering strengths and chronic weaknesses.

Easterhouse were as musically conservative as they were politically radical, their outspoken revolutionary socialism framed by what initially sounded like the most pedestrian strumming imaginable, like The Smiths without the cutting-edge effeminacy. On Contenders this was further immersed in multiple layers of production lacquer, such that you could almost smell the varnish when you cupped an ear to it. However, the record also showcased Easterhouse's tremendous strengths. The first of these was that although even at the time their politics verged on the anachronistic, their world-historical vision had an epic grandeur, such that their apparent muscial ordinariness could nonetheless evoke colossal vistas of torment and resolution. Perhaps the group's greatest boon was singer Andy Perry's voice, which I personally think was the finest male voice of the Eighties. Finally, their songs were just really, really, good, being ambitiously structured and featuring memorable and penetrating lyrics. Lenin in Zurich is, quite simply, a great, great song:

Easterhouse's weltanschauung hinged on two of the great revolutions that had convulsed the early part of the 20th Century, and their consequent impact on the British working class. The first of these was obviously the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, whose tenets the Perry brothers were still openly loyal to. Indeed, Get Back To Russia, the band's anthemic paean to the land of the Revolution, is remarkable in hindsight mainly for demonstrating just how much confidence the Western left still had in the USSR, just a few years before its demise:

The other land of revolution revered by Andy and Ivor Perry was Ireland, and Contenders was replete with Irish Republican folk songs and hymns to the Easter Rising. Perhaps the best song on the album that dealt with the travails of 20th Century Ireland was 1969, their chronicle of the genesis of the Troubles in the North, this again adopting an unashamedly pro-Republican standpoint:

However, these sentiments would also date quickly, as even at this time the fire within Irish Republicanism was starting to abate, as the movement inevitably became domesticated by moving further towards practical, pragmatic electoral politics. Furthermore, Easterhouse had strongly backed the recently defeated Miners' Strike, and had even featured Arthur Scargill on one of their record sleeves, so if the intention of Contenders had been to raise consciousness and inspire action, it instead resembled a lament for a worldview that was fully in retreat.

Nevertheless, if the revolutionary socialism that Easterhouse espoused is unlikely to again be the engine of global change that it had been at the beginning of the 20th Century, it has at least endured, and is in many ways in a healthier state than the various unlovely models of liberal capitalism that once threatened its complete annihilation. And, as the wheel has turned (almost) full circle, so too has Contenders aged surprisingly well, its incongruity to its era having been its greatest strength of all.

That was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

One of the persistent tropes of the late 1960's, along with "Flower Power", was the notion that the world was entering an "Age of Aquarius", which was to be a time of universal love and understanding, in which peace and harmony would reign supreme. This was famously given voice in The 5th Dimension's paean to the coming age, Let The Sunshine In, itself taken from the counter-cultural musical Hair, which celebrated the demise of the old era of organised religion, authoritarianism and racial oppression, and the immanent rise of:

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

All this suggests that these people actually knew very little about astrology, for whatever the zodiacal sign of Aquarius represents, it has very little to do with love and understanding. So what exactly does the Age of Aquarius represent? It is in fact a product of a natural process known as the Procession Of The Equinoxes, in which the Earth's axis of rotation gradually shifts over a 26,000 year cycle. Its astrological effect can be visualised by looking at the wheel of the zodiac, and imagining a horizontal line being traced from its centre directly left to its circumference. Where the line meets the circumference is our current position in time, and the wheel rotating anti-clockwise is the Procession of the Equinoxes. Each 30 degree portion of the zodiac that represents a specific sign takes 2160 years to pass our point on the circumference, this of course meaning that every astrological age, including the Age of Aquarius, lasts for 2160 years.

Each of these ages in turn takes on the characteristics of the zodiacal sign that governs that particular Age, while the signs themselves are influenced by what are known as their ruling planets. Aquarius is ruled by the planet Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus had previously been unknown as it is not visible to the naked eye, and the fact that it had to be observed by the artificial means of a telescope means that it is strongly associated with technology. It is also an unusual planet in that its axis of rotation is not longitudinal, as with all other planets in the solar system, but rather latitudinal. As such it rotates "horizontally" rather than "vertically", and is thus also associated with eccentricity and individualism. Finally, Uranus is considered by astrologers to be "Mercury at a higher octave", and so amplifies those characteristics already associated with Mercury, which include communication, deceit and theft. As a result, the Age of Aquarius can broadly be defined as the era of technology, mass communication, eccentricity, mass deception and globalised fraud.

The Age prior to Aquarius was the Age of Pisces, this being the 30 degree segment that abuts Aquarius in the anti-clockwise direction. Pisces is governed by Neptune, another previously unknown planet, which as its name suggests is associated with an endless oceanic formlessness. Neptune is also considered to be Venus, the planet of love, at a higher octave. As a consequence, Neptune is considered the planet of universalism, humanitarianism, helplessness, and addiction, amongst other things. Perhaps the archetypal expression of the Age of Pisces is Christianity, which emerged at the beginning of the Piscean era. Prior to the birth of Christianity the majority of religions were polytheistic, each with a pantheon of gods that competed and fought and loved and deceived each other, their struggles mimicking the chaotic forces of nature. As polytheistic religions innately fail to posit a single truth or litany of truths, religious strife in the polytheistic world was rare, and it was possible for faiths to live alongside one another, and for gods to "drift" from one religion to another. However, a monotheist religion such as Christianity, with its one God and single source of knowing, had by its very nature to be a universalist faith, banishing and destroying all those creeds that contradicted it. Equally harsh treatment had to be meted out to heretics and sinners as to infidels, as there could be no deviation from its edicts.

This in turn implied that the Age of Pisces was to become an era of totalising conflict over belief systems, and when Christianity encountered its first universalist rival in Islam, the result could only be war. Another by-product of universalising monotheism was that as a creed expanded it required an increasingly complex system of bureaucracy in order to maintain it, and thus it birthed ever more rigid hierarchies. As such, the Age of Pisces effectively became the age of universalism and hierarchy. This also applied to those conflicting Piscean civil religions that gradually supplanted Christianity following the Enlightenment, such as Marxist socialism, liberalism and conservatism. In each case Jehovah was superseded by a remote and unquestionable arbiter of godlike truth (Dialectical Materialism, "progress", "The Market") with sinning non-believers being subjected to such scornful of epithets as "reactionaries", "luddites", and "protectionists".

The actual start of the Age of Aquarius is disputed by astrologers, although the most commonly quoted commencement date is 1879, when it began to gradually eclipse the Age of Pisces, its establishment being heralded by those three clarions of atomisation: Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. One of the most fascinating insights into the emergence of the Age of Aquarius was during that great clash of universalisms, the Second World War, as recorded in the book The Magical Battle of Britain. This documented the symbolic battles against Nazism conducted by one of the 20th Century's greatest occultists, Dion Fortune, as she outlined in a series of communications to her magical group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light. However, Fortune's letters to her fraternity also contained her premonitions of the world that would emerge from that great conflagration, such as her Letter 77 of 15th June 1941, in which she commented that:

"The Piscean Age has passed and the Aquarian Age is drawing away from the phase that astrologers call the cusp, or sphere of mingled influences, and beginning to show its true characteristics. Not only are the conditions of life changing, but its moral standards also. This does not mean that there will be no standards of conduct in the Aquarian Age and that freedom will be extended into anarchy; there are certain standards that are eternal, such as truth and honesty, but there are others that change with the changing age".

This statement confirmed the principle that there is no "hard edge" between astrological ages, but that they gradually blend into each other. In her subsequent Letter 118 of 31st May 1942, Fortune expanded on her theme, as:

"I have stated that the old order has passed away and a new phase of evolution is already with us. That it is the Age of Aquarius is an astronomical fact, calculated mathematically. Basing my conclusions on the occult teaching concerning the nature of Aquarius, I have tried to indicate how the New Age may be expected to work out. When I say the old forms of social organisation will break up and everything will be in a state of flux, that racial and social barriers will be eroded and a general intermingling take place, I am not enunciating socialistic doctrines but astrological ones."

This mixing and intermingling would be a result of the breakdown of the racial hierarchies of European imperialism, and the cultures of deference that maintained class divisions in the metropoles. Fortune anticipated the erosion of the "colour bar" that denied positions of responsibility, or even entire careers, to non-whites both in the colonies and in Britain, and they would indeed disappear, although some would linger in place even up to the late 1970's. From the ruins of the old order, Fortune imagined a new economic order, governed by "neutral" trans-national organisations, and based on free trade, that would expand across the whole world, as:

"It is the men and women of the New Age who must make contact across national barriers as soon as the fighting is over, and they must meet as Aquarians, not as English, French or Germans. They must bring in the New Age for all men, not for their own people only because the New Age is an age of co-ordination of the whole earth, and it cannot be brought in piecemeal. Those who share our ideals are on our side, whatever language they speak, whatever may be the colour of their skins, or the shape of their skulls, or by whatever name they may call their God or gods or no-gods."

This world would require the dismantling of colonialism, and so:

"The rightful owners will resume ownership but there will be strategic points all over the world which will be held by the United Nations for international commerce and international policing and they will be mandated. For the whole of the New Age turns on the concept of the ownership of the land by the people versus the ownership of the people by the land. So you will see a great many places hitherto under English ownership reverting to the original owners.

Dion Fortune's vision was remarkably prescient, and it indeed guided much of the self-declared "enlightened thinking" over the long post-war era. However, what was also notable about it was that in its positing of a single, peaceful, harmonised world of multi-cultural liberal capitalism, it was actually rather universalist. This in turn implied that the Piscean energies that she thought had already largely dissipated were in fact still strongly in force. As a result, what Fortune was predicting was not the forthcoming Age of Aquarius, but an interregnum in which the Aquarian energies were still constrained within a Piscean framework. This was the world that most of us grew up in, and mistook for the permanent shape of the future; a world in which a musical like Hair could erroneously be considered prophetic. The neoliberal unipolar moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union perhaps marked the zenith of this premature Age of Aquarius, before the real Aquarian energies pressed in with Brexit and the election of Trump. That the Chinese, on whom the hopes of a New World Order were effectively based, had not actually bought into the notion was perhaps the most unwelcome surprise of all.

The Age of Aquarius as it actually is, with its socially mediated mass deceptions, eccentric populist insurgents, fragmenting established institutions, and emerging civilisation states with incommensurable values, is not proving accommodating for the universalist idealists. But this is the future, and its most disorientating qualities are only going to intensify, because it was the utopian visions of a harmonious global order that had actually constituted the interregnum.

The Shadow of Aquarius

There's a fascinating (although annoyingly advertisement-heavy) interview by Aris Roussinos with the Cornish hotelier and QAnon advocate John Mappin below:

Mappin, a character I had never previously heard of, is one of a plethora of charismatic individuals from both right and left that seem to be constellating around a genuinely novel and perplexing worldview that not only refutes established political conventions, but also the consensus of what constitutes reality. Other figures either embedded, or being drawn into, this field include the likes of James Delingpole, Jordan Peterson, Piers Corbyn, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald and Joe Rogan. Perhaps the two great fathers of this tendency (I hesitate to use the word "movement") are David Icke and Julian Assange, while both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are the nearest it comes to having a political wing.

The most striking aspect of the interview from my perspective is Mappin's allusions to spiritual forces guiding his work. This tends to confirm my suspicion that we are witnessing the early stages of the breakdown of the materialist-rationalist-atheist model of reality that has guided politics for at least the last century, and it is fringe figures like Mappin who are leading the attack. One of the reasons the "radical" left are struggling so much nowadays is that their claim to be the ultimate refutation of the status quo is undermined by the fact that they are fully immersed in the current, but fragile, materialist consensus reality. This makes them particularly incapable of processing the weirdening that the collective Western worldview is currently experiencing, their only recourse being to plunge into ever more fanatical and abstract forms of identitarianism.

So what's going on? I've been meaning to explain this for a while, but alas I am very busy these days, and have not been able to devote the time to this blog that I had hoped. The short form, however, is that a 2000 year old pattern defined by the twin forces of hierarchy and universalism is coming to an end, and we are entering an Aquarian realm defined by individualism, eccentricity and synchronicity. That is to say that figures like Mappin, and the worldviews they espouse, are likely to become the norm, and that politics will become less about contested values and more about incompatible realities. This ultimately means that politics as we have known it, in which there are at least some shared assumptions that we all accept as a basis for contest and debate, will become impossible, with the result that it becomes increasingly ad hoc and geographically limited.

The Rock'n'Roll Years

The Rock'n'Roll Years was one of the most curious television programmes of the mid-1980's. Each half-hour episode was a mix of news footage and pop music from each individual year of the post-war era. The only "commentary" was the occasional subtitle to give context to a particular event, these being as mordantly non-committal as possible. The episodes were all shown at prime time on BBC 1, and no doubt constituted pretty cheap television as the BBC could compile the greater portion of them from their own archives. Despite this apparently unpromising formula, it was surprisingly compelling viewing, and still is so even on the scraped-from-videotape remains that have been loaded onto Youtube. The first series was aired in 1985 and started, naturally enough, in 1956:

The unspoken premise of the programme was that the Rock'n'Roll years were effectively over, and this is certainly how I interpreted it at the time - the era of tumultuous social change was over, and hey, this is what it was like. The comparatively pedestrian first series wound up at 1963, and it was in the second series, aired in 1986, where the meaty period of 1964 to 1971 was covered. The episode for 1968 is particularly exciting, as I'm sure you can imagine:

The funny thing is, this footage looked as ancient in 1985 as it does now. Perhaps more so. For me at the time, the clip of the Rolling Stones performing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was akin to watching footage of the D-Day landings. The sense of the past being irretrievable was much stronger in those days, before the pick'n'mix technologies of the digital era permitted it to haunt us. The years 1972 to 1980 were covered in the third series, which was aired in 1987, and 1977 starts off on exactly the right note:

This still felt old, old, old at the time though. It's impossible to express in hindsight how different 1987 felt to 1977, and watching this episode was like looking at the polaroid photographs of a party in the cold light of morning. This sense of disconnect was no doubt accentuated by the callowness of youth, as a decade feels like an eternity when you are still in your teens. One thing that comes across is how much more intense this period was than nowadays. For all the contemporary hysteria about populism and wokeism, I still think we live in a much calmer world. Perhaps it's the ghettoising effect of social media, where the different tribes of political obsessives can engage in endless symbolic battle outside the purview of the average person. At the Twitter coalface a person can feel that they are in a war for the future of civilisation, while offline the world plods on regardless. A fourth and final series of The Rock'n'Roll Years was aired much later in 1994, this covering 1981 to 1989:

This didn't make much sense at the time as almost nothing musically world-shaking happened during the mid to late eighties, and I don't think I even bothered to watch this series. That said, the big events had continued to occur, such as the miners' strike, Chernobyl, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; and there was the final tying of the post-war knot with the end of the Cold war. Also at this time Live Aid was very much a part of the official narrative of popular music; of Rock'n'Roll finally growing up and accepting its responsibilities. In hindsight, Live Aid was the release that signalled that the pressure was off, that history was already coming to an end, despite the tragic events that had prompted it.

That there was no fifth series of The Rock'n'Roll Years merely confirmed this.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 5

Perhaps the first victim of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power was Punk itself, which deflated at almost the precise moment of her infamous recital of St. Francis of Assisi's Prayer outside 10 Downing Street. Rather than offering a restoration of the old order of deference, the new regime intended to liquidate what remained of the old world to an extent that the punks had not even begun to comprehend. First to go were to be the old nationalised industries, which were deemed to represent an inefficient sop to socialism, and incubators for the trades union militancy that was anathema to the new economic order. The withdrawal of support for both public and private industry coincided with a worldwide recession, itself prompted by that familiar bugbear, a sharp rise in the oil price. The result was an alarming rise in unemployment, which was to reach a hitherto unprecedented three million. It initially appeared that Thatcher, her popularity plummeting amid vistas of urban riots and dole queues, was yet another dud, as the malaise contined much as before. Indeed events got so bad that the pulse of popular culture briefly revived, most notably in the form of The Specials' "Ghost Town", the most acute musical appraisal of the early Thatcher era. If the energy from Punk was still extant, however, it was confined to a rarefied form. Having failed to kick down the front door, the clarion call for many of the remaining punks was "entryism"; an attempt to package subversive content within an "aspirational" commercial form. This had very brief success in the pop charts, although most of the alleged subversion went over the punters' heads, and its very existence was a de facto acknowledgement of defeat. Although it is retrospectively viewed as forming a seamless continuity within a singular Punk moment, the New Pop was ultimately an inadequate response to an earlier failure.

Despite its apparent struggles, the Conservative government did have one asset that had been far less available to its predecessors, and that was the burgeoning production of its own source of oil, thanks to the exploration of the North Sea over the two prior decades. As the revenues from this source began to accrue from the beginning of the 1980's, they would form a stable floor on which all other economic policy could be built, and permitted a degree of risk taking not previously permissible. Initially, a good portion of this money would be spent mitigating the appalling levels of deprivation that the Government's parlous industrial policies had generated, as entire regions suffered economic devastation. The evisceration of domestic industry was also enabled by British membership of the European Economic Community, which had been negotiated by the earlier Heath government. This effectively allowed the relocation of the locus of south-east England's industrial supply from northern Britain to Germany, a scheme that would simply not have been possible if the UK had remained outside the bloc. As such, London and the south-east would become a consumer fringe of the greater Continental economy, rather than being the nerve centre of an industrial economy of their own, with all the effort and strife that implied.

Nonetheless, it was clear that two years into her premiership, Margaret Thatcher was no less vulnerable than her predecessors had been, and just as her policies were being viewed as unnecessarily harsh and extreme, so the opposition Labour Party were emboldened to combat them with increasingly radical proposals of their own. However, it was seven thousand miles away, in the South Atlantic that the critical event of the era would unfold. This would focus on a neglected imperial possession known as the Falkland Islands, which the British Government had been quietly attempting to cede to Argentina over the objections of its inhabitants. The latest attempt to palm off the islands to the Argentinians had been a leasing scheme, which had been rejected by the military junta in Buenos Aires due to what they perceived was its excessive length of 99 years. The Argentinians had been emboldened further by the British Government's 1981 defence white paper, which had recommended swingeing cuts to the Royal Navy's surface fleet in order to redirect spending towards shoring up the "main front" against the Warsaw Pact in Europe. The Argentinian junta, under the hapless General Leopoldo Galtieri, had at least as many domestic problems as Thatcher's administration, this intensifying their inclination to resolve the issue of "Las Malvinas" once and for all. As a consequence, on 2nd April 1982, Argentian forces seized the Falklands in an amphibious operation that appeared to all the world as a fait accompli.

Once again, it appeared that a British prime minister was being presented with a humiliating ejection from an imperial possession. However, on this occasion the defence chiefs were surprisingly optimistic that the situation could be reversed, and, for once, they found themselves serving a Prime Minister who was prepared to countenace an unusually high degree of risk. A naval task force was accordingly assembled, and the islands were retaken by what would subsequently be recognised as the narrowest of margins, as the operation had faced disaster on numerous occasions. But far more notable than the military aspects of the Falklands campaign was the symbolism. This was addressed in a remarkable essay by the US naval historian Norman Friedman, who observed that:

"In 1982, many in the Soviet leadership believed that the West had lost so much of its morale that its end was inevitable, and perhaps even near. The Soviets themselves were in trouble, but they thought they could survive. The Argentinians clearly thought much the same thing about the British. Initially many in Britain seem to have assumed that Argentinian seizure of the islands was just another unavoidable step in the slow decline of the British Empire."

Although small in scale, the Falklands War was probably the most consequential and far-reaching conflict of the second half of the 20th Century, simply because it demonstrated an apparent resolve that had previously been considered lacking. As Friedman further explained:

"The Soviet leadership was shocked. The West was still a serious threat. The Soviets found themselves taking Western initiatives, such as Reagan’s “Star Wars,” very seriously indeed. Thatcher’s was not, of course, the only demonstration of Western resolve; at about the same time, the Russians found it impossible to intimidate NATO governments that had decided to accept the deployment of U.S. Pershing and Tomahawk missiles on their soil. They, in turn, were probably much encouraged by Thatcher’s example."

The Soviets' appreciation of declining Western resolve had been partially based on its popular culture, which they had assessed as being both the source and the product of its demoralisation. The famous aversion of the Soviet authorities to the music of The Beatles was believed in the West to be due to its potential to grant Soviet citizens a tantalising glimpse of Western freedom. In fact, the opposite was the case, as the Soviets believed that the music was just one more avenue for social and cultural dissolution; that it was as effective a route to demoralisation as opium. If the Soviets could take some satisfaction from what Punk demonstrated about the wretched psychological conditions in the West, they were absolutely determined that it would not be allowed to affect life behind the Iron Curtain. However, if, contrary to all cultural indications, the West was not as weak as it appeared, then the fate of the Soviet Union was sealed.

However, the Soviets had essentially been correct. The explosion of British popular culture had been totally dependent on the collapse of national morale and the consequent malaise within the ruling class. Post-war popular music was like a flourescent lichen that could only grow on rot. And in its display of incontrovertible ruling class competence, the Falklands War effectively broke the back of post-war popular culture, and it would never fully recover. Following the Falklands, the last big punk bands, The Clash and The Jam, would split up, along with numerous of their peers. Those bands that stuck around invariably softened and slicked-up their sound, in anticipation of the unsympathic commercial environment that they would soon find themselves in. The result would be the infamous musical desert of the mid-Eighties, in which commercial brashness would contrast with the feyest and most colourless "indie" music, with little of sustenance inbetween. The sense of danger, revolution and infinite possibility present in the beat boom and Punk would never fully return. For her part, Thatcher would take the antinomian energy of Punk and direct it against her internal enemies. If the Queen could be dismembered then so could the National Union of Mineworkers. If the Union Jack could be torn up, then so could the regulations that restrained the City of London. What the punks had failed to understand is that once the most sacred national symbols are defiled, then nothing is sacred and anything goes. All Margaret Thatcher ultimately did was confront the rebels and revolutionaries of pop culture with the logic of their own desires.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 4

"The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that 'Britain is never so properous as when a Queen is on the Throne': it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country, not a Father Land - a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete - and that the King's prime function is to be the Queen's consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education."

- Robert Graves, "The White Goddess"

The long hot summer of 1976 was notable for two particular events, the first being yet another currency crisis, with a dip in the value of Sterling and an incipient budget shortfall precipitating the Labour Govenrment, now under the unsteady stewardship of James Callaghan, to ask the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Although in itself a relatively prudent measure, this was perceived by the public and press as a further national humiliation, as the United Kingdom plied the global financial circit for alms. The parade of fumbling that had characterised the leadership of a series of almost identikit leaders in Heath, Wilson and now Callaghan had led to a general impression of a confederacy of grey men, all equally lacking in vision, ability and nous. The second noteworthy occurrence of that summer was the stealthy but irrepressible emergence of the latest model on Hebrew trickster Malcolm McLaren's Golem production line, the Sex Pistols. This extraordinary group specialised in a kind of incendiary vapidity, its singer and lyricist Johnny Rotten (née Lydon) having an uncanny ability to find exactly the right national taboo to point and shriek at, without saying anything profound or useful in consequence. However, this very incoherence was the source of their brief but efflorescent power, as it ensured that their grievances could barely be comprehended, let alone reconciled or resolved. Whatever the Sex Pistols may or may not have wanted, it was non-negotiable. Equally impossible to assuage was their music, which was the most conventional riff rock possible, but so insistently single minded that it adventitiously sounded explosive.

As the year progressed, the band gradually built up accolytes and notoriety by word of mouth, and racked up their first television appearances, while their debut single, "Anarchy In The UK" grazed the Top 40 at the end of the year. This record would be the template for their subsequent output, being both shocking and invigorating as long as you didn't look at it too closely, and realise how silly it was. Despite the tremendous effort that went into this recording to shock, the Sex Pistols would burst into the public consciousness accidentally, and in the most quotidian format possible. A cancellation by EMI labelmates Queen led to their invitation onto the Today show, a normally staid teatime television programme hosted by Bill Grundy, who was the kind of mildly dissolute but avuncular host that was typical of the era. Apparently inebriated, and obviously not briefed on his substitute guests, his attempted inteview with the band and their cohorts quickly degenerated into puerile name calling, which appalled the show's more delicate viewers, as well as the wilting violets of the tabloid press. The result would be sensational, with the band being catapulted into a maelstrom of media controversy that wouldn't fully abate until years after they had split up. In truth, the scenario was one that most younger viewers would have recognised instantly; that of the out-of-depth supply teacher employing increasingly desperate bonhomie as they lost control of the class.

The controversy around "Anarchy" and Grundy would be eclipsed in the spring of 1977 by the release of their second single, "God Save The Queen", which their latest record company, Virgin, decided to release on the eve of the Silver Jubilee that marked the monarch's 25th year on the throne. The release would be accompanied by a characteristic McLaren stunt, when a boat was chartered on the Jubilee weekend to cruise down the Thames so that the band could play the song in front of the Houses of Parliament. This intiative was duly intercepted by the police, producing another avalanche of publicity. Nonetheless, in impugning the current Queen, the Sex Pistols had, advertently or inadvertently, identified the epicentre of Britain's post-war malaise, and that was the failure of the monarch herself, Elizabeth II. As Robert Graves had noted, the Queens who had preceeded Elizabeth Windsor had been extraordinarily powerful matriarchs who had inspired their subjects to exploration and expansion. In particular Elizabeth I, Anne and Victoria had been icons, the former and latter even being instantly recognisable to this very day. Elizabeth II, however, was a mousy, modest figure who dressed like a suburban housewife and who had presided over an era of retreat and retrenchment. As a result, the current Queen was a present absence, the void at the heart of the British establishment. The Pistols' "God Save The Queen" is usually misunderstood as a modernist excoriation of a deluded Ruritanian idyll, of the refusal of a nation to recognise its true station in the modern world. In fact, it is a personal attack on the vacant occupant of the throne, and on the notion that such a vast celebration could be accorded to such a non-entity.

There is an unthinking prejudiuce held among atheist, secular humanists that the monarchy is an outdated remnant from a bygone era, an inconvenient anachronism that has somehow, temporarily, escaped the inevitable fate of being swept away by progress. Nothing could be further from the truth of course; monarchism is one of the most durable human institutions, and the world will be full of monarchs long after our scrappy, decaying liberal democracy has been forgotten. There can also be no doubt that despite their separation from the levers of government, the current British monarch holds enormous moral, spiritual and political power. If Elizabeth II had voiced any public doubts about the intervention at Suez, say, how could the government of the day have done anything except stay their hand? Elizabeth's reign was marked by excessive political caution, as it was her belief that the monarchy rested on such fragile foundations that it could not afford to embroil itself in the slightest political controversy. She was so fixated on the long term survival of both herself and her family, that absolutely no political policy or social trend, no matter how disastrous, could draw from her the slightest public comment, let alone disapproval. If the Government had mandated the compulsory eating of babies, Elizabeth Windsor would not have piped up. All her subjects could expect was a few bromides once a year at Christmas. She had even failed the most basic prerequisite of being Queen, which was the capacity to look formidable, to inspire fear and devotion by her very appearance.

The result was that John Lydon would now accuse her of being an imposter ("Our figurehead/is not what she seems") whose timidity had turned her family and nation into a voyeuristic tourist attraction ("'cause tourists are money"). However, Lydon was not the only person who had noticed the gaping void that Elizabeth II had opened up with her diffidence. The new leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, had become increasingly regal as she consolidated her position as leader of the opposition. She had begun to style her hair in an extravagant bouffant that emulated, and indeed mocked, the style of Elizabeth herself. Thatcher's voice had also become increasingly lofty and regal; she no longer spoke but declaimed, as though like a true monarch she was receiving her instructions directly from God. It was clear that if Elizabeth Windsor could not be an imposing Queen, then Margaret Thatcher would be. This granted the Conservative leader access to an almost bottomless reserve of power, because the archetype of the female monarch not only encompassed Elizabeth II's none-more-illustrious predecessors, but also the very deepest national archetypes of Britain, notably the chariot-riding warrior queen Boadicea, and the very protector of the nation herself, Britannia. What Thatcher's political opponents failed to realise was that when they attempted to refute her, or point out the harmfulness of her policies, they were not debating with a mere person; they were confronting a 2000 year old archetype. In turn, this meant that she was to all intents and purposes unbeatable.

And so, when Margaret Thatcher inevitably came to power in the spring of 1979 after a Shakespearean Winter of Discontent, the British public had not elected a Prime Minister, but annointed a Warrior Queen: icy, formidable, decisive, divisive, and destructive. If "God Save The Queen" had been the symbolic execution of the monarch, then the election of Thatcher was a symbolic rebirth. And in the elevation of Thatcher, the movement inspired by the Sex Pistols had played no small part. In many ways Punk had been conceived by Malcolm McLaren, and accomplices such as Bernie Rhodes, as the consummation of the counter-culture, as "one last heave" to unseat the old order and produce the conditions for a new society to flourish. However, in trashing the monarchy and amplifying the sense of decay, they had merely paved the way for a new and unprecedented revolution that would be unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and her advisors, for she was not like the hapless Butskellite leaders of old. As such Punk, far from being the voice of the street, and the clarion call of liberation that its proselytisers liked to depict it as, was merely the birth pangs of Neoliberalism. Punk was ultimately a total social, cultural and political disaster, and its protagonists would witness the full scale of the resulting devastation in the decade ahead.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 3

The controversy and media swirl that surrounded "Mad Mitch" and the withdrawal from Aden was in many ways deceptive, as it helped to obscure a far more important and consequential conflict further to the east; one that was being prosecuted by a character who was very different in temperament and style to Colin Mitchell. This was the secret war against Indonesia that was colloquially known as the Konfrontasi, after the strategy of brinkmanship implemented by the Indonesian leader President Sukarno to destabilise Malaysia, which itself was an amalagamation of former British colonies, and which Sukarno viewed as a British puppet state. Major-General Walter Walker had commanded the Brigade of Gurkhas in the long, grim campaign to eradicate the communist insurgency in Malaya, and his response to the Indonesian infiltrations into Malaysian territory from the beginning of 1963 was charaterised by both its unobtrusiveness and its restraint. Like Mitchell, Walker understood that the Western media were as much of an enemy as the people he was fighting, but whereas Mitchell had attempted to overcome this by sacrificially offering himself up as the charismatic focus of attention, Walker instead kept a low profile and shrouded his operations in a cloak of secrecy.

The most notable example of this was the two year long Operation Claret, in which Walker turned the tables and authorised the British Army to cross into Indonesia and break up enemy troop concentrations by ambush before they could penetrate into Malaysia. The anti-Western character of the mass media, although pervasive, had many forms. In some, albeit relatively rare instances, journalists and reporters were overt or covert Marxists whose deliberate agenda was to expose and therefore implicitly condemn what they saw as imperialist or colonialist depredations. Somewhat more commonly, journalists simply embodied or reflected the antinomianism and rejection of deference and duty that pervaded the wider popular culture, this being expressed in a general sympathy for what was popularly known as the Third World. However, the most prevalent case was that the very structure of the media tended to generate a passively condemnatory account of Western actions, even when journalists attempted to be sympathetic towards them. The sight of bristling, well-armed Western soldiers brushing through villages marked by abject poverty brought home to the nation's living rooms the uncomfortable reality of a harsh and brutal world that existed beyond the horizons of Western affluence.

Nonetheless, Walker's strategy would pay off, and by the middle of 1966 the Indonesians had agreed to end the confrontation at the negotiating table, this in itself being facilitated by the removal from power of Sukarno by the right-wing Suharto, after an extraordinarily bloody purge that had in part been facilitated by the British. From the domestic point of view, the most important lesson of the Konfrontasi was that it demonstrated, for all the apparent evidence of terminal decline, that there were still elements within the ruling class and the British state that were capable of acting effectively and decisively. Indeed, it supported the view held by more sceptical observers on the Left that the British Empire, rather than disappearing, had merely transmuted, its form having changed from one of territorial governance to one of networked influence; a "skeletal" empire for the communications age. This was, coincidentally, one in which the "soft power" of its delinquent popular culture might even prove to be useful.

However, by the time the last substantial British forces had withdrawn from Malaysia, this popular culture had effectively imploded. After the giddy optimism of 1967's Summer of Love, the counter culture had been subsumed in a deluge of violence and paranoia, most famously iterated in the twin horrors of Altamont and the murders conducted by the Manson family. The dream of a new world was further eroded by the deaths of such luminaries as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and by the arrival of essentially cynical conservative governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas the most daring and visionary music of the Sixties had been imbued with an almost spiritual sense of new possibilities, the emergent music of the new decade of the Seventies would be marked by three characteristics - bombast, glamour, and nihilism.

The bombast was most apparent in the music that had directly evolved from the beat music of the first wave of British rock bands. This was the hard rock of groups such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Free, which was ultimately an over-amplified and frenzied version of the Blues that was marked by its technical accomplishment and high standard of musicianship. Although this music would give birth to perhaps the most durable of all popular music genres, Heavy Metal, it was incapable of embodying or transmitting the intertwined utopian and antinomian sentiments of the Sixties counter culture. Led Zeppelin were particularly characteristic of this predicament; their music was vast and yet remote, gargantuan yet hollow; devoid of any yearning except perhaps for individual self indulgence. The characteristic that would erupt most evidently within the public sphere would be glamour, as evidenced in the emergence of Glam Rock. In many ways this was a retrograde movement, as it looked back to the "heart throbs" of the late 1950's, and indeed in the form of Alvin Stardust it literally facilitated their return. However, the more sophisticated proponents of Glam also drew energy from the sexual revolution, with gay liberation and feminism being subsumed within a miasma of double entendre and gender confusion. Glam was also partially a response to the introduction in Britain of colour television, which warranted the gaudy, glittery clothing and pancake make-up that were so essential to its disorientating shock effect. Nonetheless Glam, with its artificial teenage rampage, suffered from the same drawback as bombast in its lack of sincerity and spiritual content, in its inability to give political voice to the tumult of the times.

This was because the vertiginous sense of national decline had, if anything, accelerated as the Seventies had progressed. The Conservative government of Edward Heath was engulfed in economic turmoil which culminated in 1973 with an oil crisis, as the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed those countries, including Britain, that had supported Israel during its victorious Yom Kippur campaign. The resulting surge in an already perilous inflation rate spurred calls for industrial action from workers who were experiencing an effective cut in their purchasing power. Most critical of all were the miners, and at the end of 1973 Heath implemented a disastrous "three day week" policy in order to conserve coal stocks ahead of an anticipated strike, and to ensure that any available oil was diverted to transport stocks rather than power generation. The ensuing Miners' strike duly commenced at the beginning of February the following year, this being the third major episode of industrial action that the increasingly powerful and successful National Union of Mineworkers had undertaken in five years. In turn, Edward Heath called a General Election in order to obtain what he could declare as a public verdict against the strike, but the result was inconclusive and allowed Labour's Harold Wilson to instead form a weak minority government.

The sense among some elements of the ruling class was that the accumulating power of organised labour represented only one tendril of a nebulous "enemy within", which was being organised and directed by professional Soviet agitators. The intimation of impending collapse was only intensified by the increasingly violent and chaotic campaign of the Provisional IRA, whose Balcombe Street Gang would cause mayhem in central London. As a result, a number of disquieting right-wing pressure groups began to come to prominence, these having an explicit anti-communist and anti-trades union stance and nebulous links to the military. Such groups included the Freedom Association, the Economic League, and Civil Assistance, the latter of which was founded by none other than Walter Walker. Ostensibly conceived as a strike-breaking organisation, Walker's idle boast of it having 100,000 members sparked one of the more notable anxieties of the era, in the rumours of the mobilisation of private armies. As British politics appeared to be heading inexorably to a febrile climax, so the third major characteristic of Seventies popular music would come to the fore. The nihilistic response to the collapse of the counter-culture had hitherto been confined to a handful of cult American bands such as the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and to the most proletarian and unfashionable strand of British heavy rock in the form of Black Sabbath. However, by the mid-Seventies some of the sharper minds in the British music industry had started to conceive of the possibility of packaging nihilism for the mass market. Most prominent of these was the agitator and entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who had attempted a trial run with the prematurely clapped-out New York Dolls.

The Conservative Party was also in the mood for experimentation. Walter Walker had formed Civil Assistance as a substitute for what he saw as the gaping absence of leadership within Britain's political class. This chasm would be filled to his great satisfaction in February 1975 by the accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher. Carefully nurtured by the party's most fervent economic ideologues, the icily determined Thatcher would prove to be a marked contrast to any of her predecessors. The stage was therefore set for the denouement of the post-war era.