‘Homecoming Scotland’, 2009

This TV advert was commissioned by the The Scottish Government (who also posted it on YouTube). As is explained at the end of the advert, 2009 has been designated Scotland’s ‘Year of Homecoming’.

– Who do you think this advert is aimed at?
– Were you aware that 2009 is the year of ‘Homecoming Scotland’?
– The events of the ‘year’ run from 25th January to 30th November. Do you know why these two dates are culturally significant for Scotland?

The Proclaimers, ‘Letter from America’ (1987)

‘Letter from America’ by The Proclaimers (twins Craig and Charlie Reid, from Auchtermuchty in Fife) reached number 3 in the UK singles chart in December 1987. Here are the lyrics.

– Could you summarize in a couple of sentences what this song is about?
– Can you find out why the line ‘Linwood no more’ was particularly resonant in the Scotland of the 1980s?

‘It’s Austin Powers!’ (and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’)

Part-time fashion photographer and full-time International Man of Mystery Austin Powers, played by Mike Myers.

Consider this clip in relation to the April 1966 Time magazine article in the course document pack which popularized the phrase ‘Swinging London’.
– How many of the ‘Pop’ fashions and icons which the article addresses can you identify in this opening sequence?
– How important are these in the ongoing myth of the ‘Swinging Sixties’?

Jay Roach’s 1997 film, the first in the Austin Powers trilogy, pays homage to several British (or US-UK) films of the 1960s, particularly the first two James Bond films Dr No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963). Above all, however, the title sequence parodies, affectionately, the unprecedented hysteria of early Beatlemania portrayed in the opening of A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester, 1964).

‘Good old Mr Wilson’ meets ‘our friends The Beatles’ (1964)

Here is a wonderfully evocative newsreel clip, showing a famous early example of pop stars meeting politicians. Who benefited more on this occasion?

The Beatles were not Britain’s first pop stars. Performers such as Tommy Steele, ‘Skiffle’ king Lonnie Donegan and teenager Cliff Richard (Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley) had great domestic success in the early days of rock and roll in the late 1950s.

What made The Beatles so different and so important? They were, in 1964, the first British act to take America – and then the world – by storm. They led the pop-cultural ‘British Invasion’ of the US, which included numerous bands, new, working-class film stars with regional accents such as Michael Caine and Sean Connery, and the fashions of Mary Quant and Carnaby Street. Unlike previous ‘recording artists’, The Beatles composed their own songs and played their own instruments. They made standard the guitar/bass/drums line-up which has dominated pop music ever since. Also, the media and many sections of the public adored their cheeky Scouse wit and their four, distinctive personalities. Therefore, while they were not a ‘manufactured’ act, they were, arguably, the first example of what would later be called a ‘boy band’.

Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson quotes the music critic of The Times to demonstrate that, three years before they made Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles were also one of the first pop acts to be analyzed as ’serious’ music (although most record-buyers in 1964 just thought they wrote good pop songs). The soon-to-be Prime Minister recommended to the Queen that ‘our friends The Beatles’ be made MBEs in 1965: the first pop stars to be honoured in such a way.

What you don’t see in this clip, however, is ”Arold’s’ great embarrassment at John Lennon’s joke about ‘purple hearts’. What was Lennon referring to?

The Rolling Stones in 1967

Early in both their careers, The Rolling Stones were marketed, astutely, as the antithesis of the (initially) more ‘family friendly’ ‘Fab Four’, The Beatles. The Rolling Stones’ management even encouraged the press to ask ‘Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?’ This clip shows The Stones performing ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ on the 1967 Christmas edition of the BBC’s Top of The Pops. Fronted by Mick Jagger (now Sir Mick), The Stones are introduced by Radio 1 Disc Jockey Jimmy Saville (now Sir Jimmy). Top of the Pops had been running since 1964, but Radio 1 had only begun broadcasting pop-rock music on BBC radio on the 30th of September 1967.

As the latter part of the clip shows, however, by no means all the successful chart music in 1967 was of the raucous, ‘Beat’ style of The Stones, The Beatles or The Who. The Rolling Stones may have been ‘the big, influential group’ of the year (in the opinion of another Radio 1 DJ, Alan Freeman) but ‘Ballad singers’ such as Long John Baldry still appealed to a great many ‘pop pickers’. Baldry held the number 1 spot over Christmas 1967 with his song ‘Let the Heartaches Begin’.

The Beatles in 1967

In this clip from June 1967, The Beatles, by now a global phenomenon, perform their new song ‘All You Need Is Love’ as the climax of the first ever live, international satellite television broadcast, Our World. The BBC co-ordinated this show which reached an unprecedented world-wide TV audience of 400 million (and would have been seen by many millions more had not the USSR and Soviet Bloc countries pulled out a week before the broadcast). Amongst those in the audience is Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones. In keeping with the international nature of event, the song begins with the French national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’; a rare moment of Europhilia in recent British popular culture.

NB: the original broadcast was transmitted (and videotaped) entirely in black and white. The exceptionally good job of ‘colourizing’ this clip was carried out for The Beatles 1995 Anthology documentary series.

The version of ‘All You Need Is Love’ recorded during this broadcast was promptly released as a single. Although John Lennon, the song’s composer, insisted on re-recording his vocals, little else was over-dubbed onto the live recording. Within weeks of their album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band reaching number 1 around the world, ‘All You Need Is Love’ did the same. It was The Beatles’ twelfth UK number 1 single.

Housing in the 1960s

Two BBC news clips (viewable onsite by clicking on the links) which highlight Britain’s chronic housing problems at the end of the 1960s. Both reports were filmed within walking distance of QMUL and, therefore, a short bus ride from the heart of supposedly ‘Swinging’ London.

The collapse of Ronan Point in 1968 called into question the wisdom of the rush, from the 1950s onwards, to build affordable rented housing in tower blocks which were relatively cheap to construct.

It should be borne in mind, however, that tower blocks were widely considered, at the time, to be both a sensible and urgently-needed solution to the severe social deprivation caused by slum housing, as highlighted in 1969 by the recently-founded pressure group Shelter.

Britain’s housing problems gained increasing media attention in the wake of a 1966 BBC Wednesday Play called Cathy Come Home. Written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, it was first broadcast a matter of days before Shelter was launched.

Edward Heath: ‘Go out and fight’ (1970)

Conservative leader Edward Heath rallies his troops in advance of the 1970 election. Contrary to the expectations of the opinion polls, incumbent Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and many leading Conservatives, Heath won the 1970 election with a comfortable majority of 30.

The Who, 1965 and 1971

The Who were, alongside The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, the Small Faces and numerous others, part of the British ‘Beat group’ explosion of new ‘Pop’ bands in the early to mid-1960s. They reached number 2 in the UK single charts in 1965 with ‘My Generation’. This clip, viewable onsite only, skilfully edits together TV and live footage of The Who at various stages in their career between 1964 and 1978. It shows many of the trends in music and fashion which The Who both led and reflected. We see them as a young ‘Mod’ band; as part of the ‘psychedelic’ era of the late 1960s, and, ultimately, as one of the most globally popular (and for many years officially the loudest) of the ’stadium rock’ bands of the 1970s.

Some questions to think about:
- Can any band represent an entire generation? Do you think that is what The Who were, in fact, trying to do?
- Is the thinking behind the lyrics of ‘My Generation’ drastically different (and does the song sound drastically different) from what Punk rockers The Sex Pistols would be doing 11 years later?

The 1971 performance of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ below is preceded by a snippet from an interview in which a young Jeremy Paxman questions guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend about the excesses of The Who’s ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ lifestyle. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ was one of the first rock songs to use that important new piece of music-making technology: the synthesizer.

– Do the lyrics of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ suggest a change in attitude from ‘My Generation’? Or are we wrong to think that pop music has a ‘message’?

Northern Ireland, 1968

This clip is the beginning of the first episode of journalist Peter Taylor’s 1997 TV series Provos. The first five minutes is a heavily-condensed account of the history of Northern Ireland from Partition in 1921 to the late 1960s. The second five minutes addresses, in brief, the birth of the Civil Rights movement in Derry (or Londonderry) in 1968 and the outbreak of The Troubles in 1969. The narrative of historical events from 1971 – but this time from the point of view of the British Army – is continued here.

The segment below includes contributions from John Hulme, who was a key figure in the non-violent movement in Derry (which was inspired, in part, by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in the United States). Hulme served as an Independent Nationalist member of the Northern Ireland Parliament between 1969 and 1972 and became a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973. He was a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which he led from 1979 to 2001, and a long-serving Westminster MP and Member of the European Parliament (MEP). John Hulme and Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 in recognition of their central roles in the peace process which led to the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement.

Also in 1968, an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in London resulted in violent clashes between mounted police and protesters. This confrontation attracted extensive news coverage. It continues to figure prominently in accounts of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ (particularly in rather simplistic TV documentaries). The events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 are often overlooked, or mentioned only briefly. Why? Which was more important in the history of the United Kingdom between 1945 and 2008?