I will be forever fascinated by the way Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Damon Albarn of Blur were presented in a half-remembered documentary on the Britpop years. Albarn, middle-class son of a prominent English artist, turned up in something like a pie-and-eel shop. Gallagher, working-class Manchester Irish, was sitting on what could reasonably be described as a throne. No castle was shown, but such a structure was implied.
It doesn’t matter if the film-maker chose the setting or not. The point is that, in music as in almost everything else, the British (by which I probably mean the English) just can’t escape the taint of class – in that case expressed through ironic juxtaposition. You’re either too posh or you’re too much of a prole.
Recent events concerning The Last Dinner Party, deservedly buzziest band of the year, will disabuse anyone naive enough to believe this conversation is over. Writing in the Times of London, Will Hodgkinson wondered if streaming habits and the sheer cost of getting started might do for the rock’n’roll band. Hodgkinson’s economic argument is irrefutable. “Unless you have rich parents it will be difficult,” Tim Perry, a busy booker, told him. No dispute there. It is equally tough for actors starting out in London. The Withnails do all right. The I’s do not.
Hodgkinson stirred the hornet’s nest when he quoted Abigail Morris, the Dinner Party’s lead singer, as saying: “People don’t want to listen to postpunk and hear about the cost-of-living crisis any more.” He noted that, having attended Bedales, a school that charges up to £43,000 a year, she would surely not find that crisis “a huge issue”. The writer had in fact been talking to Georgia Davis, the band’s bassist, who claimed (reasonably enough) the quote had been “removed of context, tone, and intention”. Hodgkinson apologised in admirably unequivocal fashion, noting that “they’re getting a load of grief about it. They don’t deserve it and I’m extremely sorry.”
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He wasn’t wrong. The initial story revitalised a resentment that had been lingering since, after The Last Dinner Party attracted attention last spring, the United Kingdom’s collective poshometer began bouncing in the red. Jokes about the posho food they eat. Jokes about their posho clothes. Jokes about their posho names (Abigail, Lizzie, Georgia, Aurora and, heaven forfend, Emily). We again heard how they might be that most tricky of things to define: an “industry plant”.
The phrase has connections with popular music’s wearing addiction to the knock-off holy grail that is “authenticity”. It doesn’t matter that Brian Epstein put The Beatles in neat suits and cut their hair. They were from ordinary bits of Liverpool, so they were real. Compare that with alleged industry plants such as Billie Eilish, Clairo, Phoebe Bridgers and the Isle of Wight rockers Wet Leg. Sense a pattern?
“There are all-male bands signed to the same label as us who have never faced any backlash,” Davies told Ed Power in The Irish Times last month. “In that way it’s so black and white – that it is a thing of misogyny.”
That misogyny is present in the United States and Ireland as well. But the obsession with social class in pop music is less blatant than it is in the UK. (Again, do I mean England?) It is not worth examining here where The Last Dinner Party went to school or what they have for dinner. The point is that they are perceived to be at the upper end of the middle classes. They code thus, just as, say, Sleaford Mods code as working class. American musicians will celebrate the heartlands. They will speak to social concerns. Commentators there will note the advantages bands such as The Strokes had in breaking through. But the sense of class running through every conversation – what clothes, accent and manners say about upbringing – is not there in music across the pond.
A whole genre was invented to accommodate the English upper-middle classes. If the average 1960s beat musician wasn’t properly proletarian – cough, John Lennon, cough! – then he made sure to act as if he was. That proved too much of a strain for the actual public-school boy who played the cor anglais to grade 5. Thus Genesis, educated at Charterhouse, helped develop the monster that was progressive rock. By the time of punk that movement had become the aged claret to punk’s brown ale. Rock “is about protest, unemployment, the welfare state”, Bill Bruford, drummer with Yes and King Crimson, said of the new-wave years. “I’m a nice middle-class boy, and I’m not a rock drummer if you define it like that.”
Twenty years later Blur and Oasis were fighting similar battles. Thirty years after that The Last Dinner Party have still not escaped that very British fixation. Sorry. Very English fixation.
