“In a Land that I Love”: Working-Class Identity and the End of Empire in Ray Davies' Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

Abstract

In Britain, the rise of rock music coincided with the fall of empire, but the two are rarely connected. This paper considers a distinctive exception, the Kinks' album Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969), in which Ray Davies develops a unique hybrid of rock music and social commentary, drawing the aesthetic of the “Angry Young Man” into the rock revolution, to offer a series of connected songs exploring the working-class experience of imperial decline. I argue that Davies creates an interplay of many voices and musical styles to challenge a monologic establishment with perspectives on empire that are multiple and double-edged.

Acknowledgements

“Arthur.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Australia.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Brainwashed.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“End of the Season.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1966 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Mr Churchill Says.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Shangri-La.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Victoria.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

“Yes Sir, No Sir.” Words and Music by Ray Davies © 1969 Davray Music Ltd and Carlin Music Corp. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Notes

^[1] In fact, of the twenty odd songwriters Thompson cites in this chapter, all but two are English (the exceptions are Donovan Leitch and Gordon Mills, raised in Scotland and Wales respectively). It was not, perhaps, British pride that was resurrected but a non-imperial identity which was more specifically English, as I argue below.

^[2] When Penguin Books published D. H. Lawrence's sexually explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960, they were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act but the court ruled in Penguin's favor, amid a sense that the establishment was out of step, puritanical and patronizing of the people. John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, resigned from the government in 1963 after he had lied to conceal his affair with Christine Keeler—a woman reputedly also the mistress of a Russian naval attaché and spy. The “satire boom” of the early 1960s included the stage revue Beyond the Fringe (1960), the magazine Private Eye (launched 1961), and the television show That Was The Week That Was (1962–63), all of which sought to ridicule the perceived pomposity and hypocrisy of the nation's rulers; for a full account, see Ward (“‘No Nation Could Be Broker’”). Colonies gaining independence in the ten years from 1957 include Ghana, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Trinidad, Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar, Malawi, Malta, Botswana, and Gambia.

^[3] There was a related response to imperial decline from “folk rock” bands such as Fairport Convention and the Pentangle (both formed in 1967): in covering, and imitating, traditional folk songs, these musicians reached back to a pre-imperial Englishness.

^[4]X-Ray is an idiosyncratic book—it is set in the near future, and Davies creates a fictional narrator, a young man who is sent to interview an elderly and evasive “Ray Davies.” Nevertheless, the account given by this older version of himself of his childhood and the rise of the Kinks is mostly reliable and accords with other sources. (Davies himself, when reading from the book on his Storyteller tour, made no distinction between himself and the character who speaks in the book.)

^[5] On that album, the track “Back in the Front Room” gives a mythic version of the band's developing creativity in that special space.

^[6] This difference becomes all the more apparent when “You Really Got Me” is heard alongside the songs it accompanied on the Kinks' first album. The first six tracks are boisterous, rough-at-the edges imitations of American R&B standards; the seventh, “You Really Got Me,” introduces an extraordinary change of tone, achieved through the syncopated riff, the rising volume and the unorthodox, un-American chord changes. See Perone (104–07) for an account of the musical hybridity of Davies' earlier songs.

^[7] See Minogue and Palmer for an extended discussion of subversion and containment in Sillitoe's novel.

^[8]Thomas M. Kitts (24) outlines the influence of the Angry Young Men on Davies, and 1960s rock in general. In a later song, “Where Are They Now?” from the album Preservation Act I (1973), Davies name-checks the working-class protagonists of several key works of the sixties (Arthur Seaton, Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton) and then the Angry Young Men themselves (Stan Barstow, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe).

^[9] Princess Marina (1906–68) was a member of the Greek royal family. She married Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of the reigning King George V, in 1934.

^[10] Even the young John F. Kennedy adopted the term: in a letter to his friend LeMoyne Billings from Europe, he wrote in 1938: “[I] have been sporting around in my morning coat, my ‘Anthony Eden’ black Homburg and white gardenia” (Dallek 56).

^[11] The song's bridge is another matter—see note 25. See Faulk for a discussion of Davies' use of English music-hall styles. He argues that, in The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, music hall signifies the group's “critical distance from the current moment of rock culture” (121), offering a culturally rooted alternative to the hippie individualism of psychedelic rock. In Arthur, it also functions as one of several musical topoi that compound our sense of an array of characters with different subject positions, as discussed below.

^[12]Stuart Ward also notes that many cultural responses to British decline expressed a profound ambivalence towards the Empire: “Time and again in these writings, a potent blend of trauma, nostalgia, and resentment towards the ruling establishment converged around a deep sense of loss at the core of British civic culture” (British Culture 11).

^[13] See, also, Faulk, who notes that Davies, a former art college student, “was a representative intellectual working in a commercial music field…. Early on, he seized on the notion that rock music could claim art status as an expression of individual creativity in spite of being popular” (109). The debate over the extent to which popular songs can be artistic expression rather than a packaged commodity is one with a long critical history. See Gelbart's note 22 for a summary of sources. Gelbart concludes: “It seems clear that all of this music is a balance between manipulation and ‘artistry’, between record-industry control and consumer choice, and between mediation and directness” (206).

^[14] The Kinks were unique in releasing successful singles that were also dramatic monologues. “Dead End Street” reached number 6 in the UK charts, “Waterloo Sunset” number 2, and “Autumn Almanac” number 2 (Hinman 93, 99, 105). In the same period, Dave Davies released the solo single “Death of a Clown,” also a dramatic monologue, which reached number 3. Of all the other songs prominent in the UK singles charts for 1966–67, perhaps only the Beatles' “Paperback Writer” does something similar.

^[15]Mitchell was an excellent choice. His novel The White Father (1964) juxtaposed the end of Empire with the rise of pop music. One of its two central characters is a talented jazz musician who is tempted away from true creativity towards the hackmanship of writing mindless pop tunes.

^[16] For this story, Davies drew on the life of his brother-in-law, Arthur Anning: “I was very close to Arthur…. [He was] a simple man, but he realised the British Empire was fucked. His brother was shot and killed in the war. Arthur realised that it was futile, that you could never get a break in the British Empire” (qtd. in Rogan 104). This statement is a curious mixture of lament for the Empire, and diatribe against it.

^[17] Jon Savage notes, “[T]he vocal of Ray Davies … veers from the upper class parody, ‘Yes Sir, No Sir’, through his Mickey Mouse vocals in ‘Australia’ … to the quietly intense outrage of ‘Some Mother's Son’” (110).

^[18] Compare Davies' later television play Return to Waterloo (1984), which included several songs from the Kinks' album Word of Mouth. In the play, when actors sing the lyrics, each actor represents a single character and nothing else. On the album, Davies' delivery retains the double-voiced quality.

^[19] This is counter to the monolithic voice of early rock songs (inherited from the blues), in which the song is presented as the unmediated and sincere voice of a speaking subject. Gelbart calls this voice the “composer-singer-instrumentalist-protagonist persona” (204). Regardless of whether the singer was the songwriter, “the idea was to create in the act of performance the illusion that the songs were earnest outpourings of their lyrical protagonists, ‘composed’ spontaneously as they came out” (206).

^[20] I imagine a close up of the framed photograph of Eddie on the living room wall (described in the song about his death, “Some Mother's Son”), which then segues via the flash of a camera to a living Eddie, in the photographer's studio in 1915.

^[21] Two key events were the lifting of the Lady Chatterley Ban and the Profumo affair—see note 2.

^[22] This is a gesture he actually delivers at the very end of the film Return to Waterloo, with similar effect (an attempt, perhaps, to override the drawback I have noted in note 18, above).

^[23] Listen, also, for the horn section in “Yes Sir, No Sir”: it first appears in muted form (0:50–1:47) then re-emerges sounding particularly imperial from 2:14. This serves as an appropriate backing to the song's exchange of imperial voices—the deceitful superior (who publicly avers: “Let them feel that they're important to the cause,” but privately instructs, “Give the scum a gun and make the bugger fight”) and the downtrodden soldier, whose “Yes sir, no sir” is the sheep-like refrain of the spiritually crushed. The trumpets become, by turns, uplifting and ironic.

^[24] An additional example of the way in which the virtual persona emphasizes these divisions appears in the song's chorus, where the chord progression shapes the meaning of each repetition of the Queen's name. The first two repetitions are melodically identical—with the high F note on the second syllable (Victoria) emphasizing a sense of uplift, pride, and victory—but the first is sung over the major chords F and C while the second is sung over the related minor chords, D minor and A minor. The first “Victoria,” thus, expresses a joyous triumphalism, but the second suggests a sense of loss and, perhaps, a more conflicted awareness of her symbolic power. With the third repetition of the name, the song returns to the major chords C and F, but the melody is at a lower pitch, as if the speaker, unsettled by doubt, wishes to reassert his initial, celebratory feeling, but cannot quite manage to do so. This sense is compounded by the final repetition of the name, which is only partial: “'toria.”

^[25] All songs on the album offer some interesting variation on this interaction between the three personae. Consider the effect of the change in voice and musical style in the bridge of “She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina,” or the complex relationships between voice and topoi in “Yes Sir, No Sir.”

^[26]Hammerton and Thomson point out that “emigration could be a painful and even contested issue within families” (78). See Davies' own anguished response to the departure of his sister Rosie, with her husband Arthur and son Terry, in 1964: “The day Rosie, Arthur and Terry left to emigrate to Australia, I took Anita [a girlfriend] up to a northern sea resort … as Anita and I were walking along the beach in the moonlight, I suddenly started screaming. A part of my family had left, possibly forever” (X-Ray 137).

^[27] Examples of these adverts can be viewed on YouTube: “Australia, the young country for you and your children. Maybe you're seeking a new and exciting life? Then Australia is the country with great opportunities and a great future” < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = TA_0B2yXMDU>; and “Come over to the sunny side now! Australia – a great place for families. Opportunity for you! Fine for your wife! Great for your children!” < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = JoY29Y6Y_lQ>. Accessed 1 Nov. 2012.

^[28] Compare this, from the first of the two adverts cited in the previous note: “Australia's the country for get-up-and-go people!”

^[29] In this, the musical borrowing from the Beach Boys operates in a different way to the splendid parody of the Beatles' “Back in the USSR,” which was released while Davies was working on the album, in November 1968.

^[30] In the song, Harris tells the tale of a dying stockman instructing his mates in what to do with his various effects—his wallabies, cockatoo, koala, the eponymous kangaroo, and so on. His final request is, “Tan me hide when I'm dead, Fred / Tan me hide when I'm dead”; the singer tells us: “So we tanned his hide when he died, Clyde / And that's it hanging on the shed.”

^[31] This is one of four such songs on the album. The others are “Some Mother's Son,” “She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina,” and “Arthur.”

^[32] Davies relates that this song arose when Julian Mitchell told him, “‘Ray, you've got to write a song about this man's pebbledash Nirvana’” (Songbook). Davies replaces Nirvana with Shangri-La—the former is solely satirical, the latter is less single-minded: Shangri-La is also a name given to houses by their owners in an attempt to announce their hopes for a harmonious and tranquil life. It is satirical, but it also shows the sad (faintly comic) distance between Arthur's utopian ambitions for his house and the reality. In this, the song recalls Philip Larkin's poem “Home is So Sad,” which describes the suburban home as a “shot at how things ought to be / Long fallen wide” (Larkin 17). This nuance sets the song apart from more straightforward satires of suburban complacency such as the Monkees' 1967 hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday” or, indeed, Davies' own “Mr Pleasant” of the same year.

^[33] This view is supported by Davies' comment: “Arthur was a labour of love. I was angry with a society that had built me to be factory fodder; I wasn't angry about older people because I could see that they'd been victims of it” (qtd. in Savage 114).

^[34] I am grateful to Sally Minogue for this observation.

^[35] It is interesting that Davies uses an imperial metaphor to describe Granada's power—his relation to Granada is analogous with Arthur's to the British Empire.

^[36] Durden-Smith was an experienced documentary maker and current affairs presenter; in 1968–69 he was director and/or producer of films about pop music and counterculture, including Stones in the Park (1969) and Johnny Cash in San Quentin (1969).

^[37] The cancellation of filming certainly was a missed opportunity in terms of publicity in the UK, where the album failed to chart (it peaked at 105 in the USA, “buoyed by the Kinks' presence in the country” [Hinman 133]). Poor sales may also be attributed to the timing of the release—because of delays, it appeared six months after the Who released Tommy, and so, as a rock opera, seemed imitative. John Savage adds: “With its mystical/sensational preoccupations and its musical pyrotechnics Tommy was much better suited to the demands of the pop market in both countries: Arthur, by comparison, was too muted, too real, and its concern for the old was desperately unfashionable” (111, 114). Despite an extremely positive critical reception, especially in the USA (see Kitts 143), these factors stymied the album's commercial prospects.

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Andrew Palmer

Andrew Palmer is a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK. His research is focused on literature and popular music about working class experience and war in the twentieth century. He is currently working, with Sally Minogue, on a monograph: Bright Tracks: The Poetry of the First World War and its Afterlives. This project will include a chapter on the influence of First World War poetry on Ray Davies' song “Some Mother's Son”.