At the Radiohead concert at the O2, I was sitting among 20,000 people. Bizarrely, it was the first time I had ever been in the audience at such a large show, and I was stunned by the depth of love in the room: people dancing, screaming, crying, hugging each other, throwing themselves around. I was struck by the realization of just how powerful live music is — that a group of individuals can come together and concoct a sound unique to them, and that people can connect with that distinctive vision as if it were their own experience. I could feel its moral quality, how this singular force has the capacity to repair the world with its goodness.

I engage in various spiritual activities — I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate — but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers — the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.

There is an unholy voice that every self-aware artist encounters at some point in their lives. The voice that whispers, “Am I good enough?” or, “Do I deserve to be here?” or, “What if people hate me?” — the voice that can ultimately lead to a state of paralysis. Yet, whether singer, artist, or otherwise, these are the demons we all must face. Whenever we take a risk in life, or do something that might set us apart, or draw the judgment of others, these crippling voices provoke a form of “stage fright” — a fear of existence, a fear of life itself. But, if you can summon the resolve to overcome these inner voices, you can conquer anything, and the world will lie trembling at your feet.

This is what the vast crowd at the O2 recognized: a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism — the audacity to stand before the world and declare, “This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.” Perhaps understanding that we all fight battles within ourselves can help us feel less alone and encourage us to step onto that stage. I hope so.

***

This piece was originally published on The Red Hand Files. 

This is not the band’s first farewell. After multiple breakups, regroupings and reincarnations, three of the four original members previously attempted to exit the stage in 2017. The plan was to bow out after a world tour titled, appropriately enough, “The End”. The years were taking their toll: Ozzy Osbourne, once legendary for his stage antics, now hung onto his microphone stand and barely moved, while guitarist Tony Iommi had to return to the UK every six weeks for blood tests to ensure that his stage three lymphoma had not returned. Bassist Geezer Butler seemed to be doing alright, but after the tour he stopped dyeing his hair and went home to catch up on his reading — not just acting his age but embracing it, content to put his touring days behind him.

There was, nevertheless, a sense of unfinished business. Drummer Bill Ward had refused to participate, blaming an “unsignable” contract (Ozzy retaliated that he was no longer capable of playing his parts). But now Ozzy, having survived a life of such extremes that he once seemed unkillable, has undergone four surgeries for a spinal injury and is beset with other health issues, including Parkinson’s. Mortality is on his mind; in 2022, aged 73, he announced he was returning to England (“I don’t want to be buried in fucking Forest Lawn”). But rather than go gentle into that good night, there will be one final gig. Ward, who has survived several heart attacks himself, has reconciled with his old bandmates and will join them on stage. Geezer has temporarily come out of retirement. Iommi never really stopped. But this time it really does look like The End.

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They have come a long way since their early days as The Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name allegedly inspired by a brand of talcum powder favored by Ozzy’s mother. Birmingham back then was still an industrial powerhouse, far from the garbage-strewn sinkhole it is today. Other industrial cities — Newcastle, Glasgow, for example — were considerably grimmer, yet while they produced the likes of Lindisfarne and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Birmingham and its environs spawned bands with a harder edge. Robert Plant and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin hailed from nearby Bromwich, Judas Priest would follow in Sabbath’s footsteps, while in the Eighties Napalm Death emerged from darkest Meriden.

When it comes to heavy metal, however, Sabbath are the source. Industrial machinery was directly responsible for the band’s sound: Iommi lost the tips of two fingers to a steel press on his last day working at a factory. Undaunted, he melted down a Fairy Liquid bottle to create makeshift prosthetics. He then altered his style to accommodate the injury, playing simpler chords, more slowly. The heavy, grinding sound matched their defiant attitude and sense of themselves as outsiders: Ozzy had grown up in poverty, Iommi and Geezer were the children of immigrants. As Ward put it: “There was this force, all this resentment and anger that was coming out. It came from what we thought was bullshit at the time: politics and war, and upbringing and people’s ways of life.”

But the band’s sinister tritones and penchant for occult imagery owed as much to shrewd commercial instincts as it did to self-expression. Blues bands were sprouting like mushrooms after rain in England in the Sixties; they had to differentiate themselves. As Geezer put it, people liked scary films so why not make scary music? So the band (by now “Earth”) renamed themselves after a film starring Boris Karloff and tapped into the post-flower power occult zeitgeist. Channelling the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley, they wrote songs about Satan, wizards and a “big black shape with eyes of fire” — not to mention drugs, death, war and an iron man traveling through time, seeking revenge.

Black Sabbath recorded their eponymous 1970 debut LP in a single, 12-hour recording session. Roundly despised by the critics, it was a roaring success with the kids, so they returned to the studio and made the follow-up, Paranoid, four months later. This time they had a luxurious six days. These albums, and the two that followed, Master of Reality and Volume Four, laid the foundation for a sound that was to conquer the world. Contemporaries like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple played heavy riffs but their ethos was hard rock, steroidal blues, even R&B, with (in the instance of Zeppelin) a whiff of Tolkien. Sabbath’s mutant blues, with its themes of angst, doom and horror, came straight from the depths of the abyss. Their streak of memorable riffs was unparalleled: applied to their music, terms like “sludge” and “grinding” became superlatives. Their influence spread. Judas Priest added another guitar and shrieked higher. Lemmy left space rockers Hawkwind to form Motörhead, turned up the bass and played faster. In Britain, in Europe, in America, in Asia, countless bands discovered endless possibilities within Sabbath’s elemental sound. Play louder, thrashier, slower; sing in a falsetto, sing like Cookie Monster; add blast beats; turn the riff into a drone; play in complex time signatures. Actually take the Satan stuff seriously, set fire to churches, murder your bandmates.

Yet, for all the variations of metal that exist today, no one has surpassed the work of the originators. While their heirs burrow ever deeper into narrower, more niche sounds, Black Sabbath were always looking outwards. They were fans of The Beatles, of blues and jazz; Iommi loved classical music and strove to bring its “tension and drama” to rock. Bill Ward made their songs swing, while Geezer found the groove in even Iommi’s heaviest riffs. The otherwise monumental “Supernaut” from Volume Four incorporates a calypso section, while Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, their most creatively expansive album, features strings, synthesizers and the lyrical piano of Rick Wakeman, plus a psychedelic song about DNA called “Spiral Architect”. 

After that, things get a bit diffuse. Sabotage is a solid album, and while Tony Iommi (and myself) both think that Technical Ecstasy is a classic, many would disagree. By 1978’s Never Say Die, however, the band was undoubtedly creatively exhausted. Ozzy left, taking his unique wail with him. He was replaced by Ronnie James Dio, a much better singer who brought new life to the band, and yet something was lost. Black Sabbath stumbled ahead with an array of vocalists, while Ozzy rose to superstardom under the management of his wife Sharon, becoming first the Prince of Darkness, and later a barely coherent Heavy Metal Homer Simpson on The Osbournes. Bill Ward left, Geezer and Iommi soldiered on, then Geezer left, then Iommi cycled through more incarnations of the band until Ozzy rejoined in 1997. 

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Given the advanced age and shaky health of the band, it is tempting to see them as a metaphor for the decay and decline of Birmingham itself, a city which has seen much better days. In fact, when Black Sabbath formed, in 1968, the city had a higher standard of living than most of the country. The factories were still working; the tower blocks were new. Even the Bullring, the notorious concrete carbuncle long reviled as a symbol of the excesses of brutalism, was in those days regarded as a cutting-edge vision of the urban future. 

It took Birmingham some time to catch up with Black Sabbath’s lyrical and musical vision. Between 1971 and 1981, Birmingham lost 200,000 jobs as the manufacturing sector went into decline. The recession that began in 1979 caused the economy to collapse, and by 1982 the unemployment rate had surged to 20%; it stayed elevated through the end of the decade and beyond. Suddenly songs such as “Hand of Doom”, “A Hard Road”, “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” provided the perfect soundtrack for a city in crisis. And yet by this time Ozzy was a mega star, Geezer was happily married, Iommi was living in a Warwickshire mansion with stained glass windows and Bill Ward had retreated to the LA beach where he would work on his strange, introspective album Ward One: Along the Way. 

Now Birmingham, bankrupted by an equal pay lawsuit, can’t even provide as basic a service as collecting the garbage. As for Black Sabbath, there is real anxiety as to whether they will even be able to perform. Iommi has cautioned fans that Ozzy can no longer play a full set and may be seated. Geezer described a nightmare to The Guardian: “I dreamed everything went wrong onstage and we all turned to dust.”

And yet it would ultimately be deeply unfair to compare the aged Black Sabbath to their dilapidated hometown. They rose from the humblest of beginnings and created a genre of music that spoke to millions. For all their ups and downs, despite all the drugs, alcohol and lawsuits, they remained loyal to each other at the end and are bowing out as conquering heroes. Even if Ozzy is confined to a chair and yowls into the microphone for 20 minutes, the fans will receive those final yowls with gratitude. “Birmingham forever,” says Ozzy. Yeah, probably not. Black Sabbath forever? Now you’re talking.

While Blur may be doing better in their home country — they sold out Wembley last year — to most of my generation, they are essentially a sad nostalgia act. Rarely have a band’s glory days been so inseparably tied to such a derided historical moment: the “Britpop” movement and its demographic derivative “Britpopper” now represent an abyss of cringe. 

For Britpop was co-opted by that generation of British late-boomers who parlayed the end of history, their demographic glut and unique economic fortune into a series of foolhardy political conceits. Long before he invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, Tony Blair was having meetings with Damon Albarn in the Palace of Westminster. Soon enough the former lead singer of Ugly Rumours was saying things like: “Rock’n’roll is not just an important part of our culture, it’s an important part of our way of life”. Unfortunately, the heady cultural and intellectual optimism of that period can’t be seen as anything but complacency now.

As we see it, this lot valorised the liberalism that bore fruits for them, and sat on their hands as it rotted away. They fashioned a social-democratic aesthetic, and then forgot to build the social democracy. And they are consequently held responsible for a grab-bag of important and trivial mis-steps: New Labour, the Iraq War, the Olympic opening ceremony, the People’s Vote campaign and The Rest is Politics. This folk history of the Nineties does have a seductive simplicity, useful for young gadflies on Left and Right to caricature the decade, a way of chronologically tethering their competing attacks on Blairism. And it’s helped along by the fact that politics and culture did seem to align in that moment.

And yet, while Britpop certainly was gleeful at the prospect of political change, it also knew full well the problems it was running away from. Blur’s Parklife in particular, which celebrates its 30th birthday today and which was inescapable in that summer of 1994, is striking for how much of the Nineties mood it managed to get right at the time. Rather than a straightforward celebration, it sounds, now, like a melancholic critique of the period to which it also served as soundtrack, a record of the atomisation and anxiety that had already begun to seep into society. 

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Its reputation for care-free Cockney smugness is a product of the popularity of its title track — and Blur did occasionally over-indulge the musical style which Gallagher brothers called “Chas & Dave chimney sweep music”. But the rest of the tracks conjure a completely different mood: “Badhead”, “To the End”, “This is a Low” and “End of a Century”… So much of Albarn’s song-writing was drawing from a well of existential despair, his lonely characters drinking too much and cycling through American TV channels, stuck in apathetic or crumbling relationships. Already he was diagnosing the boredom and stasis we sometimes think particular to 21st-century life. And it is telling that he suffered from crippling panic attacks in the weeks immediately after Parklife’s release, bowled over by the force of getting everything he’d always wanted.

But these tracks are overshadowed by a grander project: Parklife’s nauseous portrait of modern life, a social diagnosis that Albarn and his cheerleaders went as far as to label a “manifesto” for modern England. Interviews from the time reveal his narrative of the recent past to be full of decline and decay. Post-Thatcher, “a whole new culture developed and old England died away… The American shopping malls landed in England, first in Essex. It was just awful to look at, like a spreading cancer…” And his songs are the stories of “​​characters living in this environment” and yearning to escape it — like Tracy Jacks, the civil servant who dreams of streaking on Walton Beach. Albarn called it “music for whistling in the dark”.  

The influence of Martin Amis’s London Fields has often been noted — not least by Albarn himself, who at the time painted himself as something of a Lad-lit troubadour. And he certainly inherits Amis’s scathing condescension, and his propensity for turning flesh and blood into a comedy cartoon. The album’s biggest hit, “Girls & Boys”, was written after a holiday to Magaluf, during which Albarn witnessed the emergence of Houellebecqian sexual scene, which clearly perturbed even if it did not offend. “There’s a very strong sexuality about it. I just love the whole idea of it, to be honest. I love herds. All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just… copulating. There’s no morality involved, I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen. My mind’s just getting more dirty.”

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Albarn’s exact class relationship to this milieu was fiercely contested, especially by more true-born working-class peers. Initially, he had talked up Parklife as a concept album — “the travels of the mystical lager-eater”, a spin on Amis’s cast of low-life flaneurs. And at various stages the album was to be titled London, Sport or Soft Porn. But, soon after release, Albarn seemed determined to actually become such a figure. He held the album’s launch party at Walthamstow Dog Track (“you get the ooze of life there”, he said). And he was soon saying things like, “I started out reading Nabokov and now I’m into football, dog-racing and Essex girls,” as comfortable in an East End boozer as he was in the student union. The reality was that Albarn was always a lower-middle bohemian, not a working-class hero. He was accompanied on his fact-finding trips to Magaluf by his St Paul’s alumna girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. And his life in Essex was characterised not by dog-racing but by art school and the kind of cultured, post-Sixties homestead where he called his parents by their first names.

These contradictions of Albarn’s perspective — that of the mordant satirist-voyeur and the enthusiastic participant — do work in his favour. They lend his songs a scope that allow him to capture both ends of the Nineties. This reaches a climax on Parklife’s masterpiece, “This is a Low”. Framed through a cycle of lyrics based around Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, the song is something of a mournful state-of-the-nation ballad. But its background account of a forgotten traveller on some twilit homeward journey (“Hit traffic on the Dogger bank/Up the Thames to find a taxi rank”) lend it a more wretched and introspective mood.

This isn’t triumphant Cool Britannia. It’s about as far from “Things Can Only Get Better”, or indeed Coachella bubble-gum, as you’re going to get, not least because it predates Britpop’s co-option by an expedient Labour Party and greedy A&R. But if we can accept that Albarn was capable of seeing behind the Nineties’ veil, perhaps we can also begin to reinterpret my generation’s received narrative of the decade. 

Rather than a last party busted by Columbine or September 11, for some the Nineties was the decade that parts of popular culture became aware of the sheer flatness of life after the great political battles of the Eighties. Part of this related to globalisation — and the music hall carry-on of Blur’s aesthetic universe was a conscious rebuttal of the creeping Americanisation they observed around them. But it also related to a distinct historical moment in Britain itself. 

Like Blair, Britpop had an ambiguous relationship with the Thatcher era that preceded it. Its subject matter — its commodity — was Thatcherism’s devastation. From their own corner of the wasteland, Blur, Pulp and Suede wrote about what they saw: lonely suburbs, remorseless yuppies and small-town drug abuse. Oasis, the most musically populist of the Britpop elite, admittedly traded in the headless euphoria of escape and renewal. But this only resonated because it was a dream, a dole-queue fantasy, that so many others could recognise. And yet, Britpop was ultimately to be consumed by the very forces that set it in motion. The first truly commercialised indie scene, they pursued popularity and market share without shame, allowing punk-ish taboos about “selling out” slide. “We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves,” says Noel Gallagher, sounding every inch the barrow boy who “got on his bike”. 

Perhaps that’s why the Nineties generation is so easy to resent. They bore witness to the arrival of the society that we still live in, but were either powerless to change it, or more than happy to swim with the tide. The music, though, stands as testament to the fact that the contradictions of the decade were being registered on some level. The Britpoppers may have quickly become consumed by illusions of the new millennium, some of them embarrassingly to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that some of them also gave voice to a world that had lost something — something which is still missing now. 

Of course, we used to say: “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through.” Needs re-working this adage, bequeathed to us by Leonard Cohen, via Jeffrey Lewis. Needs stripping of its misleading naiveté. I always picture a roof, a roof with a great big crack in it. It’s only under a broken roof you can absorb what’s actually going on outside the safety of your hermetically sealed sanctum. The ones who are cracked let the light in, sure, from time to time, when it’s light out, when the weather’s decent. But for the most part, as in Cobain’s case, the ones who are cracked also let in the damp, the rain, the drawn-out black chill of winter. I’m guessing Cohen was at least vaguely aware of this dilemma. That with truth, comes discomfort. All the same, I didn’t hear it like that at age 18. Crack = integrity. That’s all I heard. It would have been nice if there’d been a disclaimer.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, on the promo trail for a new album, and people frequently ask me if starting a band is a good idea, as if I’m an authority on the subject. The situation was bad enough decades ago, I tell them. Damaging enough. Unhealthy enough. Back then — pre-web, pre-Spotify deciding you deserve nothing — people were still crushing their minds chasing the dream, but they at least had the homes they’d bought through record sales to overdose in when the time came. They had space for failure both professional and personal. The more an artist is given the room to fail, the greater the capacity for success. But artists are no longer worth anything in society. The licence we formally granted them is gone. We’ve given up on Cohen’s maxim entirely. If you’re cracked, you probably need to be therapised out of existence.

I don’t want to come off negative. There is a good side to playing in a group, even in this dark, offensively inoffensive period of paint-by-numbers indie vapidity. It’s just I despise the good side even worse than the bad. It’s like with drugs, the high should bear the weight of your resentment, not the come down. The come down is your friend. The come down might stop you from mugging yourself forever. The high is what deforms you. The first 117 gigs I performed were dogshit bar one. All I was doing was rolling around town humiliating myself in pubs. Then some night you chance upon a small crowd that will go batshit for pretty much anything. And then your life as you knew it is over. You will never make it to adulthood. You will crave that fix until you’re dead. You will hanker for it whether you have anything to say or not. The art will frequently come second. The love, the delicious adulation, will come first.

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These articles, the book I co-wrote, my journals, they are the beginnings of an exit strategy, a literary life raft with which I hope to salvage something bearable from the coming storm of middle age. Something that doesn’t demand my having to Frankenstein myself, to enmesh myself with the hopes, dreams and dreary shortcomings of others to make my living. That’s actually the worst of it. Especially if the people you’ve got on the squad are arguably even more cracked than you are. How your identities get all molten and confused. This character splicing is of course also what makes a great band. Once you merge, stylistically, spiritually, philosophically, you can act and think as one. This is of great use to you, what with your trying to keep time, and cultivate a strong group aesthetic. Nirvana for instance, they don’t sound like a few guys, they sound like one guy. The problems truly begin when this bizarre soul congealment bears real-world fruit, and a murderous over-excitement begins to brew. Long-forgotten personal boundaries have no hope of re-emerging in the sudden climate of smash-and-grab opportunism.

Becoming an artist is all about access to irresponsibility. With irresponsibility often comes marginality sure, but at least you get out in the open. Those who compute the world aesthetically — the overly sensitive — clock very early on in life that the price of civilisation is this incredibly dull thing called repression, and they start trying to hustle their way out of that agreement accordingly. I will live by my imagination. My contribution will be the uniqueness of my very persona. This might demand your sinking into squalid self-absorption and penury, but at least the future will bear your signature. That is unless you drift into the notion that maybe you should start a band. In which case, the future will bear several signatures. Whose signature has more prominence will almost certainly become an issue. Because being in a band means that you have to share everything.

I don’t consider myself a musician. Not really. I can play, a bit. I’m more of a performance artist. A performance artist and a lyric whore. Music is just the medium with which I happen to earn rent money. More than any other type of artist, musicians are eternal children. It’s why so many of them — like Cobain — don’t make it past 27. And the bigger the star, the more freakish the Peter Pan syndrome should things drag on too long, Michael Jackson being the prime example, who went as far as actually building his own personal Neverland. There’s nothing comparable in any other medium.

But consider the talent these people are lumbered with. If you can coast through life by simply making sounds, why develop the rest of your brain? Music, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, is not like the other arts, it isn’t an intermediary between idea and will, but will itself. Everything else is just tracing shadows on sheafs of paper and rolls of film. Music transcends all that pedantry, any causal notion of law and logic. It is primeval. Pre-verbal. A realm of pure intuition.

What happens when these beings of pure will club together in groups will always be of some fascination to the general public. The paradox is too severe, bears too much sweet schadenfreude. Failure is the key component in comedy, and few things are so rich in failure. The widescreen interpersonal schisms — they quench an egotistical demand for high drama within the group, and a perverse love of watching other people fail outside of it. But: to live outside the law, you must be honest, as Bobby D sang. Your freakishness, of which you made a song and dance, of which you demanded the world celebrate, is now inescapable, calcified, permanent. You will be known henceforth by the crudely rendered cartoons you elaborated to replace yourselves. Your alter ego, initially your deliverance from unadulterated boredom, you soon find to be nothing less than the guarantee of your permanent exile. It’s important to remember that this is what you wanted. I have a feeling that it’s something the Nirvana frontman tried very hard to forget.

Luckily, we’re reaching the end of the band era. The further we roll from its heyday, the more I reckon my incredibly meagre stock is likely to rise. Once all of the old guard finally croak, people will turn to the only dregs they have left. The last turds on the block. Against my better judgement, I hope to be among those turds. There will only be a handful of us left, the real deal who went out and properly fucked up our lives on account of a few hooks and the odd Nazi-themed video.

For the most part, “rock and roll” today feels like a silly turn of phrase. A euphemism out of time, it means “hard on then move on”. Not exactly the vibe anymore. The medium has been reduced to a middle-class pageant for people who fancy a little more colour in their lives. I can’t remember the last person to really let the light in, the light and the drizzle and the dark. That’s because folks aren’t steeped in enough dysfunction. It sickens me, the politesse and consideration with which some of these new-fangled groups conduct themselves. The endless groaning about mental health. You’re supposed to break your soul. Any band worth its salt is a machine for cultivating and harbouring cracked souls.

To refute the systemisation of utterly everything at the price of full social ostracisation, there is no stronger aesthetic. To tell yourself the world is flat and live accordingly, because you feel ontologically more at home in a world with a beginning and an end, a world that looks and feels like a story… few things take more guts in an age as brutally formulaic as this one. Idiocy, drug abuse, infantilism, depression, schizophrenia, these are not ailments, these are the price of resistance. These are the bravest symptoms of a worldwide disease one might call metaphysical nihilism. A disease that insists on the supplanting of reality with a quantification of reality. A band is a machine for arrested development, and what could be more crucial than an arrestation of development in a world that can’t switch itself off, even as — to lift from Cobain’s final words — it chooses to burn out, rather than fade away?

Earlier in the summer I saw the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park and that was a good night out but nobody in their right mind would claim that the Stones are better now than they were in 1969 or 1973. Yet the best time to see the Bad Seeds, who formed in 1983, is right now. Though Cave is about to turn 65, the refinement of his craft has required no ebbing of conviction. When he inhabits a murderer on Death Row in “The Mercy Seat”, or a mad prophet retelling the birth of Elvis Presley in “Tupelo”, he still goes all in. The quasi-industrial brutality of “From Her to Eternity” is as persuasive as the naked pleading of “I Need You”. When I went back to the studio versions over the following days, I found them somehow lacking by comparison. Between songs, Cave radiated warmth and good humour. Most frontmen pick a moment to commune with the crowd from the edge of the stage but I suspect Cave could have happily spent the whole show down there, arms outstretched.

Until I read Cave’s new book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, I found it hard to put my finger on why the Bad Seeds have become so much more potent and popular in recent years. Their only Top 20 entry is “Where the Wild Roses Grow”, a 1995 duet with Kylie Minogue. Two of their most popular songs on Spotify, “Red Right Hand” and “O Children”, owe their position to appearances in Peaky Blinders and Harry Potter. Many of their live highlights weren’t even singles, let alone hits. Since the creative nadir of Nocturama in 2003, the Bad Seeds have enjoyed a series of rebirths: the explosive maximalism of Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, the slower, subtler Push the Sky Away and the lambent prayers of Ghosteen.

That last transformation was enforced. Seven years ago, Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died after falling from a cliff near Brighton. Cave’s grief was etched into Ghosteen and its predecessor Skeleton Tree, the making of which was chronicled in Andrew Dominik’s gently shattering 2016 documentary One More Time with Feeling. This incomprehensible tragedy suddenly became the signal fact of Cave’s life. “The loss of my son defines me,” he says in the book.

After a period of necessary privacy, Cave chose to make his grieving public. In 2018 he started answering questions from fans on his website under the name “The Red Hand Files” and on the road with his “Nick Cave in Conversation” events: an experiment in radical transparency and fostering a community of the bereaved. The first entry in The Red Hand Files was about how he resumed songwriting after tragedy. “Creative people in general have an acute propensity for wonder,” he wrote. “Great trauma can rob us of this, the ability to be awed by things. Everything loses its sheen and appears beyond our reach. We were surviving, but we were surviving in exile on the perimeter of our lives, way beyond anything that mattered.” His lifelines were “work and community” — a means of connecting with the suffering of others in order to feel less alone.

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As you can tell, Cave is one hell of a writer. As the author of countless spectacular lyrics, two novels, an epic poem and an unproduced screenplay (a berserk take on a Gladiator sequel), he could surely write a classic memoir but Faith, Hope and Carnage is something else: a series of conversations with his friend Seán O’Hagan, an Observer journalist. Kudos to O’Hagan for having the idea and Cave for running it because it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind book. An alternative title might be God, Grief and Art.

Cave may claim to hate interviews but he is a miraculously fluent talker, incapable of a dull line. Many of the sentences have an aphoristic punch. Creating art is “the act of retelling the story of our lives so that it makes sense”. Hope is “optimism with a broken heart”. Twitter is “just a factory that churns out arseholes”. On lyrics: “A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow after repeated singing; a truthful line collects meaning.” On death: “If you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it.”

Cave’s songs have always been saturated with religious imagery and language — first the Old Testament, later the New — but it was never clear how much of a believer he was. Now, he says, he is emphatically religious in the sense of feeling a “deep inclusion in the human predicament”. That sounds just like Leonard Cohen, another great songwriter whose wisdom derived from an idiosyncratic relationship with the divine and an underrated sense of humour. To call this a self-help book would horrify everyone involved but I suspect many readers will find it useful, especially those who have known catastrophic grief.

Cave describes the loss of his son as nothing less than an annihilation of the self. He has been broken to pieces and remade — born again, you might say. His songwriting, too, has required reassembly. He considers Skeleton Tree, mostly written before Arthur’s death but recorded afterwards, as an “unholy” record which he struggles to revisit. But making Ghosteen, via long improvisatory sessions with Ellis, was a “holy” experience in which his son’s spirit felt literally present. “Arthur was snatched away, he just disappeared, and this felt like some way of making contact again and saying goodbye,” Cave says. Over the course of these conversations, which began with lockdown in March 2020, there are other losses: his mother Dawn, his ex-lover Anita Lane, his friend Hal Willner and, most recently, his oldest son Jethro. Covid-19 gives the book an eerie backbeat.

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O’Hagan is a sensitive interviewer — really more of a conversationalist. Cave says that he finds relating his own history “unbearable, mostly”. What’s more, it feels to him like someone else’s life — that of a man who had not yet lost his son. So why look back?

Still, O’Hagan occasionally manages to lure Cave into the past. His idyllic, outdoorsy childhood in Wangaratta, Australia, gave way to a delinquent adolescence, which was blown apart by the death of his father, a teacher of literature, in a car accident when Cave was 19. He was already taking heroin, an addiction that he relates, perhaps surprisingly, to a conservative need for routine rather than the thirst for chaos that animated his music for many years. After the hellfire post-punk of the Birthday Party came the Bad Seeds. Cave remarks that Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld, band mainstays from the beginning until the 2000s, were domineering personalities like himself. “The potential for disharmony is enormous! It’s like having Hitler, Stalin and fucking Mao Zedong trying to make a record together.” Warren Ellis, who joined in 1997, is more like a brother: an equal partner in the studio and a remarkable friend. On the topic of friendship, Cave’s affection for Coldplay’s Chris Martin is delightfully unexpected. “Obviously, there’s a fair amount of daylight between the kinds of music we play, but who fucking cares? I have always been drawn to his generosity of spirit, his engagement with the world.”

When he was younger, Cave thinks, he had too much disdain for the world. Now it inspires awe. He cherishes humility, mercy and mystery; he loathes dogma, cynicism and the morally obvious. He is therefore stronger than most on the subject of cancel culture, to which his objection is more personal than political. He recoils from the punitive impulse; the failure of empathy and forgiveness. I would argue that forgiveness needs to be sought and earned but I think he’s right to say that the online ritual of denunciation can be merely “a kind of sadism dressed up as virtue”. I hope this section doesn’t get clickbaited as “Cave slams cancel culture!” because it’s more about the particular view of human nature that he has arrived at: “I rarely see badness in people; rather, I see layers of suffering.”

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The context is obvious. Towards the end of the book, Cave finally talks about the night of Arthur’s death, and how he and his “astonishing and oceanic” wife Susie negotiated the immediate aftermath. Hard to read, it must have been infinitely harder to speak, but emotional availability is essential to everything he does now. The most common question submitted to The Red Hand Files, apparently, is “Does it ever get better?” To which Cave can now reply: “The answer is yes. We become different. We become better.” Instead of being diminished by loss, he has been enlarged. “I became a person after my son died” is a startling line.

It is impossible to overstate how unusual it is to find this depth of self-analysis and wisdom from a rock musician. Faith, Hope and Carnage makes most rock memoirs look like skips full of rusty anecdotes and grudges. Among other things, the book finally helped me understand why Cave and the Bad Seeds keep getting better. Cave’s growing hunger for “communal awe” makes the shows feel genuinely necessary. And he believes himself to be a more generous and expansive person than he was before, so he has more to give.

“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around,” he tells O’Hagan. “Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is.” He knows now.

That one idea was at once reactionary and revolutionary. The Ramones reduced rock’n’roll to its core values (loud, fast, catchy, fun) and spiked it with the stink and danger of 1970s New York, thus inventing punk rock. Recorded in just a few days, their 1976 debut album squeezed 14 songs into 29 minutes, none of them grazing the three-minute mark. What’s more, these four men from Forest Hills, Queens — 1, 2, 3, 4! — styled themselves as a tight-knit street gang. They were the Beatles for people who thought the Beatles peaked in Hamburg in 1962, when they wore black leather, chomped amphetamines and got into punch-ups.

Now they are all gone. Like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Motörhead, the Ramones belong to that small, unlucky category of bands who have no surviving members from their classic line-up. Frontman Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) died in 2001 from lymphoma; bassist Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin) in 2002 from a heroin overdose; Johnny (John Cummings) in 2004 from prostate cancer; and drummer/producer Tommy (Tamás Erdélyi) in 2014 from cancer of the bile duct.

The Ramones brand, however, has proved much more durable, thanks to their entrepreneurial designer Arturo Vega. He made their heraldic logo as recognisable as the Rolling Stones’s tongue by licensing it for use on pillowcases, licence plates, baby bibs and, of course, T-shirts, which you can currently buy in Primark.

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“They sold more T-shirts than records,” former manager Danny Fields told the New York Times when Vega died in 2013, “and probably they sold more T-shirts than tickets”. The fascination endures. Following the numerous tribute albums, the tribute songs, the Lower East Side street corner called Joey Ramone Place, and the absurd 40^th anniversary edition of their debut which is longer than the first five albums put together, there are now plans for a biopic, with comedian Pete Davidson as Joey.

Vega based the logo on the US presidential seal because, he said in 1993, they were “the ultimate all-American band… To me, they reflected the American character in general — an almost childish innocent aggression”. Though they were not technically all American (Dee Dee grew up in West Berlin and Tommy was a Jewish Hungarian), Vega was on to something. Even as they yearned for the sweet teenage kicks of early rock’n’roll, covering pre-Beatles hits by the likes of Bobby Freeman and Chris Montez, the Ramones had a thick streak of nihilistic brutality: a razor blade concealed in a wad of bubblegum. It was the dream of innocence combined with the reality of violence that made them truly American.

The Stooges and the New York Dolls heralded punk, but Joey’s voice, Johnny’s riffs, Dee Dee’s tunes and Tommy’s machine-gun beat forged the template. When they started playing shows in 1974, only pausing between songs if a fight broke out, people couldn’t tell if they were a serious band or a satire on rock’n’roll.

Photographer Roberta Bayley, who worked at New York’s punk crucible CBGB, remembered: “It was almost like conceptual art or something. It was so great that you couldn’t believe that it could exist.” The sleeve of their debut album alone — brick wall, leather jackets, ripped jeans — created an eternal template for grubby New York cool. When the Strokes arrived in 2001, shortly before Joey died, they looked like the Ramones if they had read Vogue and smelled nice.

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The Ramones didn’t have entirely one-track minds. Dig into the lyrics on the debut alone and you’ll find references to Patty Hearst, CIA spies and World War Two. But their selling point was simplicity. They dug the trashy ephemera of the American century, from monster movies to cheeseburgers, and made the musical equivalent. They sang most often of desire and its opposite, crying I Wanna… (Sniff Some Glue, Be Your Boyfriend, Be Sedated) or I Don’t Wanna… (Go Down to the Basement, Walk Around with You, Fight Tonight). No title sums up punk’s foundational impulse better than 1978’s I Just Want to Have Something to Do.

Nobody could ever be that basic, and thus that accessible, again. When they played their first UK show on the unimprovable date of America’s bicentennial, members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and the Damned flocked to see them because they got the message: If we can do this, so can you. Joey later clamed that the “Hey ho, let’s go!” chant in their debut single Blitzkrieg Bop was a call for listeners to start their own bands.

On one level, the Ramones were a classic four-cornered band. Tommy had the vision, Joey the misfit charisma, Dee Dee the tunes and Johnny the discipline. Beyond the stage and studio, however, they were stunningly dysfunctional. Joey was sickly and sensitive and suffered from OCD. Johnny was a monstrous control freak with a contempt for weakness, especially Joey’s. Dee Dee was a heroin-addicted chaos agent who dug Nazi memorabilia and claimed that “the Ramones stand for nothing but pure hate”. Tommy was fine but he quit in 1978 because he was “losing my mind” and his replacement, Marky Ramone, drank too much. Tommy once made a startling comment to author Steven Lee Beeber: “Growing up with fear of Holocaust, being with Johnny and Dee Dee was like living with danger.”

When the surviving members were inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they sat at separate tables. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis described the subsequent backbiting documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones as “one of the bleakest films ever made about rock music, an unsettling cautionary tale about the benefits of quitting while you’re ahead”.

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By the same token, Johnny’s posthumously published Commando is perhaps the most unwittingly hilarious rock memoir I’ve ever read, cleanly dividing life into the things he loved (America, Elvis, Coca-Cola, baseball) and hated (pretty much everything else in the world). Fanatically incurious, he calls Andy Warhol’s Factory “a bunch of freaks”, the CBGB crowd “a bunch of assholes” and Stonehenge “a bunch of rocks”.

One of rock’s few arch-conservatives, he boasted of being a Republican from the age of 12. When Joey, who was Jewish and staunchly liberal, railed against Ronald Reagan’s visit to a German military cemetery in the 1985 song Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, a furious Johnny demanded that he change the title: “You can’t call my president a monkey!”

The Ramones thought that they deserved to be huge but it was not to be. They had no Top 40 hits in the US and only four in the UK, the biggest by far being a cover of the Ronettes’ Baby I Love You. It must have been hard, being outpaced not just by their peers but by their followers and, eventually, their followers’ followers. After the failure of their big crossover bid, 1980’s Phil Spector-produced End of the Century, they accepted that they had plateaued and became a punk-pop assembly line, as stolidly reliable as a burger chain. “A machine of habit,” Johnny called them.

On a purely aesthetic level, the Ramones would have been better off pulling the plug in 1978 after their first four albums. Their fidelity to their original sound and image meant that they could never grow up. Dee Dee bailed out in 1989, tired of “four middle-aged men trying to be teenage juvenile delinquents”. By that point, their tour bus had four separate compartments so that they didn’t have to talk to each other, Joey having never forgiven Johnny for stealing (and marrying) his girlfriend. Joey hit back, it is said, by writing The KKK Took My Baby Away.

Johnny thought his outrage ridiculous. Just imagine being on the road with someone you hate for that many years, only acknowledging each other’s existence for an hour a night. Johnny didn’t even visit Joey in hospital before he died, claiming that it would be hypocritical. In the documentary, he defends himself by saying he felt sad for a week.

The problem with writing about the Ramones is that the more you know, the sadder the story becomes. It’s easy to sneer at people who wear the T-shirt as a fashion statement without knowing the half of it but perhaps it is better to remember them as an imperial abstraction: one band, indivisible, with one perfect notion. The reality can break your heart.

This was a considerable improvement on Imagine’s last prominent public outing. In March 2020, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot decided to cheer up everybody on lockdown by asking 26 of her celebrity pals to film themselves singing a line, irrespective of their ability to hold a tune. The a cappella montage did at least provide the most terrifying phase of the pandemic with a shared moment of unintentional hilarity and a lasting monument to the hubris of well-meaning celebrities with nothing to do. One guilty participant, the actor Chris O’Dowd, put it down to “that first wave of creative diarrhoea that seemed to encase the entire world”. Of course, Gadot had to choose Imagine.

Imagine, which turns 50 in September, occupies a unique place in our culture. When the song’s producer, Phil Spector, first heard it, he thought it was “like the national anthem”; but like Spector’s reputation, that assessment has proved complicated to say the least. While some regard it as beautiful and profound, or at least unifyingly inoffensive, others damn it as a sanctimonious monstrosity. It was voted the UK’s favourite song lyric in 1999, the best single of all time in 2001, and the greatest song ever in 2004. Yet it has also been named as the worst song in the world so often that to despise it has become a cliché. “I am hardly the first writer to dislike Imagine,” wrote the critic Tom Ewing. “In fact, the laurels on the comment thread are likely to go to anyone who can make a really good case for its beauty, wisdom or excellence.” This cannot be put down to just its chronic overfamiliarity. Other played-to-death songs such as Hey Jude or Bohemian Rhapsody aren’t nearly as divisive. So what is it about Imagine that drives so many people crazy?

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

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People who find Imagine about as deep as a Keep Calm and Carry On poster might be surprised by how seriously contemporary critics took it, but it is a startlingly radical lyric wrapped in a musical comfort blanket. Running from the myth of Beatle John, Lennon was desperate to shed every form of baggage, and Imagine magnifies this process of renunciation to global proportions. Like Gimme Some Truth, God or Give Peace a Chance, it is a list of things to reject. The first verse scraps heaven and hell; the second bins nations, religions and war; and the third abolishes possessions and poverty.

As the chorus acknowledges (“You may say I’m a dreamer”), that’s a lot for one song to ask for. Its haters are divided between those who consider this prospectus anodyne drivel and those who find its picture of a godless, classless, borderless world “a vision of hell”, as one writer put it. Lennon told the NME that it was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement”. He preferred “a nice British socialism” to “the way some daft Russian might do it”.

“Imagine no religion” angered the kind of people who had still not forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus but it was “Imagine no possessions” that became the main bone of contention. “Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions?” sang Elvis Costello in his 1991 single The Other Side of Summer. Lennon himself realised that he’d misjudged the next line, tweaking the inadvertently condescending “I wonder if you can” to “I wonder if we can” in at least one performance.

The visuals don’t help his case. Lennon decided to film the making of the album and a clip from the movie — John playing his white baby grand piano in his big white mansion — became the music video for Imagine. He should have anticipated that this tableau of smug luxury would sit uneasily with the third verse, but to be fair to him, he was at the time very happy to play benefit concerts and give money to all kinds of causes, including two of the Chicago Seven defendants, Biafran refugees and Clydeside shipbuilders, one of whom misheard the name of the donor and shouted out, “But Lenin’s dead!”

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I’m not convinced that it’s inherently hypocritical for a rich man to imagine a different world, given that anyone who has a big enough platform to spread such a message is almost inevitably wealthy. Still, one has to love the card that Elton John sent to the couple at their extravagant home in Manhattan’s Dakota Building: “Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do/ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.”

By the time they moved into the Dakota in 1973, Lennon’s revolutionary phase had flamed out. Lennon biographer John Wiener argues that Imagine “seemed to many movement people a hymn to the New Left in defeat”. Not long after the hot mess of Lennon’s 1972 protest album Some Time in New York City, Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide and Lennon made a brisk, bitter retreat from politics. The FBI, which had been monitoring him as a potentially dangerous radical, closed its file.

It seems remarkable now that when it was released as a single in the US, Imagine hung around the charts for no longer than Power to the People had done and was outperformed by Paul McCartney’s amiable Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. It didn’t come out in the UK until 1975, when it peaked at number six. McCartney angered his estranged friend by telling Melody Maker that he liked Imagine because it wasn’t as political as John’s recent stuff. Lennon shot back with a furious letter: “So you think Imagine ain’t political? It’s Working Class Hero with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine!”

It’s the sugar that makes the song so portable. It may have the most comprehensive agenda of any hit single ever made but Imagine sounds modest, tentative and unassuming. On a compositional level, it is almost childishly simple. (You can hear an instrumental scrap of it, called John’s Piano Piece, in outtakes from the Beatles’ 1969 Let It Be sessions.) The basic track was recorded in less than half an hour (they used the second of three takes) and the subsequent string arrangement was extraordinarily restrained for a Spector production. The Tokyo version, orchestrated by Hans Zimmer, is far too grandiose; a thought experiment should not be oversold.

Imagine, therefore, lends itself to occasions when something hopeful but not overbearing is required. After Lennon was murdered in 1980, the song topped the UK charts for four weeks but its suitability for mourning is much broader than that. Stevie Wonder performed it in 1996 in honour of the victims of a terrorist bombing during the games, Neil Young reached for it at a 9/11 tribute concert and Madonna chose it to remember those who died in the 2004 tsunami. As Slate’s Katy Waldman wrote when it again became a song of grieving after the assault on the Bataclan in Paris in 2015, “No one who has just watched footage of families mourning their loved ones in the wake of a terrorist attack is ready to swallow a dose of unalloyed affirmation. The song seems veined with the sad understanding that its own dream is too simple.”

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Yet at the same time, Imagine still carries enough of a residual political charge to have been banned by the BBC during the first Gulf War and (briefly) by the US radio network Clear Channel after 9/11. At the end of 2001, Rolling Stone called it “a new national hymn, a strong, quiet counterweight to the institutional psalms and fight songs… that have filled the air since the terrorist attacks.” Former President Jimmy Carter told NPR that on his travels around the world, he heard it “used almost equally with national anthems”.

Imagine is rather like a tourist attraction in your hometown: you’re so used to seeing it in the background that you forget why it’s remarkable. To be honest, I need never hear it again but I’ve warmed to it in recent years precisely because its naked idealism is so very uncool and so easy to deride. There has never been a song like it and it would take a supernatural blend of talent, ego and idealism for anyone to even attempt one. Can you imagine what Twitter would do if, say, Chris Martin tried it?

Unless I am seriously underestimating the global appetite for utopian socialism, most listeners are not embracing it on a literal level as a time-capsule of Lennon and Ono’s post-Sixties art-school radicalism. As Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has said, “If people really believed the sentiments John Lennon expressed in that song, we would have had revolution in this country a long time ago.” It has become instead a generous vessel for all kinds of aspirations, both big and small. Three years ago, the Observer asked Ono what the word “imagine” meant to her and she replied simply: “To think of something to hope for.” You may say I’m a sucker but I find that idea hard to hate.

Recent events have coughed up a particularly prime example of Morrissey hitting a nerve years before anybody else in the pop sphere, getting castigated for it, and being justified in saying he told us so when it became horribly relevant.

Ten years ago he described footage of the treatment of animals in Chinese markets as “absolutely horrific” and that anybody who had seen it “could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.”

This statement was Morrissey’s reaction to the hullabaloo after an interview in The Guardian with the poet Simon Armitage in which he said, hotly, after watching animals being skinned alive: “You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.” In Morrissey’s view cruel treatment of animals makes you less than human, but this wording, robbed of its context and intent, was a gift to his many enemies.

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That’s because Morrissey annoys people, and unlike most purportedly outspoken pop stars he often annoys the people pop stars aren’t supposed to annoy. What I’ve found fascinating is how many of the opinions he has expressed in his long career have become hot topics on the table of late. Immigration, animal rights, free speech, the denigration and demoralisation of the working class, the unhealthy news media. And with universal basic income sliding its legs ever further over the sill of the Overton Window, his famous declaration in song from 1983 “England is mine, it owes me a living” feels more apposite by the day.

In his own strange way, for how could it be other than strange, Morrissey was a post-liberal before anybody else really cottoned on, and this from someone regarded commonly as stuck in 1954.

Morrissey’s mind is unschooled. One might even call it deschooled. (Anybody in favour of the return of selective education should have a read of the section of his autobiography dedicated to his gruesome years at a secondary modern and take pause.) He left school at 16 almost completely unqualified, and didn’t get tipped into the academic funnel that increasing percentages of us have been strained through. His intelligence and learning is of the scattergun, autodidactic variety that sometimes lights on obvious things that we have been accustomed to ignore or to look at without seeing.

It’s also interesting, and often very funny, to see the reactions of former disciples of the posher, ‘indie fan’ variety, when he says something outrageous but which they don’t like, to the point they get huffy and disown him. His advocacy of terrorism for animal rights and his repeated death wish for Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s — “the sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher escaped unscathed” he said very soon after that happened — didn’t ruffle feathers because it coincided with their own bluff talk. But when Morrissey lamented in 2007 that “England is a memory now, the gates are flooded and anybody can join in” they fainted clean away over a stack of Belle & Sebastian CDs.

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The double standard is gobsmacking. Fantasising in song about the public execution of the elected prime minister? Just a bit of harmless fun from a loveable old eccentric. Saying he was ‘excited’ by John Redwood? Burn him at the stake!

Why does Morrissey upset people so? His singing voice drives some instantly to distraction —my father couldn’t stomach more than ten seconds of it before shouting, in a broad Cardiff accent, “Oh, bloody hell, it’s the ghost of Jim Reeves” — but this is equally true of many other pop stars who merely get the occasional grumble for it.

A lot of the time it boils down to envy, and I’m as guilty of that as anybody else. Morrissey got to do things many millions of us dreamt of — mythologise our adolescence, inspire the adoration of perfect strangers in distant lands, say what we actually think — and it happened almost by accident. He can’t be accused of pandering, trend-chasing or compromising. He has the toxic combination of arrogance and self-pity that has fatally holed so many in a similar position, but he also possesses the humour and talent to leaven it. His lyrics are witty and smart, with an eye for life as it’s lived rather than the upbeat escapism and puppyish approval-seeking of most pop music. He keeps doing the same bloody thing and it keeps working, sailing over the heads and the power of critics. He has a ghastly habit of rising from the grave.

All this had to happen to somebody. But it’s a constant, maddening reminder that it didn’t happen to us.

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There are things that drive me potty about him. He can’t do polemics — his most direct, unambiguous material (the songs “Meat Is Murder”, “America Is Not The World”, “World Peace Is None Of Your Business”) is his weakest. Fiction writing is not, let’s get this out of the way quick before the screaming starts, his strong suit. His horror of electronic instruments and any development in dance music after about October 1972 is just silly, like the ladies of Cranford boarding their first train.

But the problem with criticising Morrissey is that his entire schtick is criticising himself. People pointing out his faults seem not to realise that he got there 37 years before. Right from the off he has sung about his personal failings, of pushing people away, of being intense and unbearable. He knows exactly what he’s like and he’s not happy about it.

However, all this openness and honesty can lead to terrible, avoidable blunders if you haven’t thought everything through. The “now, I must be careful how I put this” reflex is not there in him. That lack is the source of his success, but also of his woes. Because if your thing is always saying what you think, people will take what you say seriously. Bashing in with his size nines with open support for Anne-Marie Waters’ For Britain party was serving himself up on a plate.

To Morrissey, it’s obvious that he’s not a racist. But to advocate a political party, and of the fringe right — in considered statements, not off-the-cuff interviews — was breathtakingly naive. What on earth did he think the reaction would be? Did he really think he was helping — himself or anyone else?

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It was as daft as singing a song called “The National Front Disco”. Seen in the broad flow of his oeuvre the song is obviously about a rather sad loner in the 1970s who drifts into a hopeless cul de sac. The repeated phrase “England for the English” is delivered in weary and mournful quotation marks (by the republican child of Irish immigrants). But people often don’t have time to think beyond the obvious, and ambiguity can be a gift to those who want, for whatever reason, to destroy you.

Morrissey is more often, I think, right than he is wrong, and a sizeable chunk of the things he’s observed, some of it long ago, have reared up to bite us all on the bum. “The left has become right-wing and the right-wing has become left — a complete switch, and this is a very unhappy modern Britain,” he stated recently, which is a fair enough summary of where we find ourselves.

We are constantly being asked to view the most anodyne and conformist pop stars as challenging and controversial. But we’re not having this conversation about Ed Sheeran, and I suspect we probably never will. We should be grateful for, in our increasingly dull and frightened culture, this bizarre, awkward, contradictory, funny fellow.

So far, more than £700,000 has been spent on the festival team’s staff costs, and there’s not even an agenda for the project. The festival’s boss, however, says the event will prove cynics wrong and bring the nation together with “a bit of joy and hope and happiness”. What exhibits could achieve that worthy aim? Our writers have a few suggestions…

Customs officials
Polly Mackenzie, Director of Demos

Our little islands have had customs officials for more than 1,000 years. Yes, we were pioneers in free trade, but we were pioneers in tariffs, taxes and tick-boxes long before. And now, thanks to Brexit, we are going to be hiring a new generation of customs officers — not least those needed to man a flotilla of boats in the Irish Sea to police our new internal trade border.

Customs officers are precisely the kind of people we should be celebrating in our Festival of Brexit, and not just because this vast make-work scheme could eradicate unemployment completely. Working at a customs post appears to be so catastrophically dull that it catalyses creative genius. An astonishing number of our greatest poets and writers worked in customs — more than enough to fill an exhibition hall: Robert Burns, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Congreve, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith.

We will need to celebrate these people if we’re to have a hope of recruiting all the customs officers we need. We’ll call them national heroes, perhaps even name a new tariff after each one of them.

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And let’s hope history will repeat itself. The bright young minds will rebel against the tedium of trade; I mean, can you imagine training your brain to differentiate between frozen and super-chilled garlic? Working up the energy to care about the percentage of non-domestic sugar permitted in an export under Rules of Origin restrictions?

In search of intellectual stimulation they will start to write. And thus, from the ranks of HM Revenue & Customs will emerge another explosion of literary talent and insight. Brexit Britain will be a nation of poets.

Ordinary people
Gareth Roberts, screenwriter

My exhibit for the Brexit Festival of Britain will be in honour of the British people that just get on with it without making an exhibition of themselves.

This was — well, within living memory — one of this country’s proudest characteristics, though of course if anybody actually said they were proud of it (or anything else) they were quickly frowned or mocked back into silence, with a healthy dose of “And who does he think he is?”

It sometimes feels today that everybody, everywhere, every day is more in the business of telling you what it is they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it, rather than actually doing it. Mission statements, company ‘values’, businesses and cultural ventures that come on like trailers — still to come, coming up, coming soon, watch out for … Brexit is the archetypal example. Endless talking, no doing. A DVD that’s all special features, but no film.

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A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

Almost everything now comes with a showboating personal angle and a story, more often than not of the sob genre. From TV quiz shows to silly songs, heralded as if they were the living end. It’s rare to pick up so much as a bloody yoghurt without reading the inspirational story behind it. It strikes me that a core British characteristic was not drawing attention to yourself, and turning in the best you can because that’s what you’re tacitly expected to do. If you don’t, be assured that someone will soon make you aware of it, in true British style.

What must ordinary people think of all this announcing and presenting? Let’s exhibit a harried parent readying their kids to be washed, dressed, packed and breakfasted before half past seven in the morning. They don’t have the urge or the time to proclaim, “I’m passionate about using my unique skill set to empower my children, and to optimise solutions according to this family’s values of equality and inclusivity. A lot done, a lot still to do.” No, they just do it, and nobody thanks them for it. Let’s thank them.

An igloo of Brexit 50p coins
Sam Leith, author of ‘Write to the Point: How to Be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page’

The Festival is a perfect opportunity to take stock of all the benefits that our departure from the European Union will have brought us by then. And what better, and more sustainable, way to do this than to make use of all those Brexit 50ps that were minted to commemorate our freedom? A thousand were minted for March 31, and put on ice when it didn’t happen. An unspecified number were produced for October 31, when Brexit also didn’t happen. Rather than melt them down — as is now apparently threatened — we should use them in a historical display.

We should weld them together into an igloo-like structure, across which would be blazoned the slogan on each coin — “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations” — and into which visitors would be invited to stroll. Inside, a constantly updated digital graph would indicate the current price to collectors of one of these commemorative coins; alongside the value of an ordinary 50p coin tabulated against the currencies of all those other nations with whom we are friends, tracked right back to the date of our final departure from the Union.

At a glance, you’ll be able to see how many dollars or Euros your 50p will buy you at that moment, and how it has soared from the dog-days of our vassalage. Around this chamber, played on a loop, will be the ringing patriotic words of Harold Wilson’s “the pound in your pocket” speech — showing that Brexit will have represented not a break with the past, but a glorious continuation of Britain’s bulldog spirit.

Dogs 
Simon Evans, comedian and radio presenter

I thought long and hard about the ideal exhibit, but there’s only one real choice. Dogs.

Dogs are of course not merely the best of British, but the best of humanity. And mankind’s domestication of the wolf — and vice versa — is an achievement lost so far back in prehistory that it would be futile for the most chauvinistic of Brits to claim it as our own. We may have our suspicions, but only that.

But still, our relationship with dogs is singular, and characteristic, even to the point of puzzling other nations. The respect in which dogs are held, as well as the affection. No Brit can sleep happily if they can hear the barking of dogs, chained up outside all night on concrete — as common and commonly ignored in other nations as car alarms are in Chelsea.

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By Giles Fraser

This love transcends gender, age and class. But it is perhaps most keenly felt for working dogs. Surely the most British TV series ever made — can it possibly have even been broadcast overseas? — was One Man and His Dog. An entire show dedicated to sheep dog trials.

Other nations would perhaps nod at that and assume that certain guilty dogs were to be subjected to justice. But we got it. Nor was this a one off, a novelty. It ran for 25 series. At its peak, presented by Phil Drabble, it attracted audiences of more than eight million viewers. My favourite moment came when Drabble asked a shepherd how he communicated so effectively with his border collie when the howling gale surely defeated his shouts and whistles. “Well,” mused the grizzled old fella, “I suppose I just thinks him across.” Drabble simply nodded. He knew.

I could point out that the nation’s love for the glorious variety of breeds suggests that we don’t really have the problem with diversity that those who would denounce Brexit would have you believe. But really, that reads like a rather snippy and defensive point, and this is after all a celebration. And as every proper family in the country knows, it’s not a celebration without the dogs.

A Memorial to the Unknown Remainer
Simon Heffer, writer and historian

A post-Brexit Festival of Britain should emulate the 1951 event — by showcasing British exceptionalism. We are punch drunk from assertions that decline, poverty and misery are the inevitable handmaidens of leaving the European Union. A tonic reminding us of how successful and inventive Britons are is just what is required. After all, the Briton who invented the medium that has recently revolutionised the world — the World Wide Web — is still very much alive, and the rest of us are not dead yet.

So let’s have a display of the fine things we produce and that the world beyond Europe wants, from Rolls-Royces to gin to Tiptree jam. Let’s celebrate our great universities, which are the best in Europe and not only produce the thinkers, entrepreneurs and inventors of the future, but attract students from all over the world. And we can’t demonstrate British exceptionalism without some representation of our financial services industry, which makes, and will continue to make, most of our money — perhaps a barrow-boy boozing champagne.

Despite the current little local difficulties in her family, the Queen remains the ultimate symbol of our exceptionalism: nearly 68 years on the throne, in her 94^th year and still doing a full-time job with no thought of ‘stepping back’. She, her family and all that goes with them also earn a fortune for the country through the huge amounts of tourism they help engender.

But the Brexit Festival must also seek to heal the wounds of the past four years. So somewhere in the show there needs to be the Memorial to the Unknown Remainer, if only to remind us of the perils of trying to ignore that other fine British tradition largely unknown in Brussels, democracy. And it should bear a strong resemblance to Jo Swinson.

Morrissey on a loop
Fiona Sturges, writer and columnist

As surely as night follows day, where there is a celebration of all things British, there will be terrible pop music. Remember Brian May swathed in dry ice on the roof of Buckingham Palace during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee shindig? Or Russell Brand honking his way through “I Am the Walrus” in 2012 at the Olympic Closing Ceremony? A Festival of Brexit featuring flatulently self-admiring performers long past their prime is precisely what the country needs — no, deserves! — in 2022, and there could no better headliner than that bastion of isolationism and self-loathing, Morrissey.

Along with a heartfelt cover of “The White Cliffs of Dover”, there will be aptly-titled classics from The Smiths’ canon including “Barbarism Begins at Home”, “Nowhere Fast” and “I Know It’s Over.” Backing vocals will be provided by Ringo Starr and The Who’s Roger Daltrey.  As is customary for outdoor musical events, the sound will be dreadful, the queues for the bar will stretch over the horizon and the toilets will be flooded by teatime.

It will be glorious paean to the Blitz spirit and a fitting tribute to our freshly liberated isle.

Driverless buses
Peter Franklin, associate editor of UnHerd

First of all, think 1851 not 1951 — the Great Exhibition, not the Festival of Britain. Spend and build accordingly, except don’t do it in London. Pick somewhere up North. York, for instance — the tourists will love it.

Before deciding what to put inside the new Crystal Palace we need to work out how to get visitors to and around the exhibition. If we want to provide a vision of the future, without waiting 10 or 20 years to build a tram network or something like that, then there’s an obvious candidate: driverless buses.

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For reasons I explain here, this is the technology with the greatest potential to revolutionise public transport. And, yes, such vehicles do actually exist — in fact they’re already being trialled in the UK. An event with millions of visitors is an ideal opportunity to launch a grand effort to get us out of our cars and into faster, cleaner, safer, more accessible modes of transport — not least in the traffic-choked urban North.

If 2022 is too early to pull off a major demonstration project, then let’s wait a few more years — it’ll take that long to construct an exhibition space worth having anyway.

The 21st century Great Exhibition should be where Brexit Britain shows off a new direction to the world — and the show should start from the moment that visitors step off the train.

An exhibition of the Brexit Wars
Ed West, deputy editor of UnHerd

Brexit is a fitting occasion for a national exhibition; the first ever such event in history, the Exposition des produits de l’industrie française, was a product of another great break with the past — the French Revolution. And that all ended well.

Brexit hasn’t led to mass guillotining or civil war, but it has caused a sort of collective mental breakdown. To commemorate this, perhaps we could host a special Interactive Exhibition of the Brexit Wars (2016-20forever) like the Imperial War Museum had the Trench experience. Visitors walk into a cavernous dark room and on the wall are projected giant images of Femi, Mark Francois, Aaron Banks, Gina Miller, Stop Brexit Man, Jolyon Maugham etc. etc. — all those people we might cheerfully have gone through our lives having never heard of if the referendum hadn’t happened.

Visitors might gasp at a mosaic featuring millions of tweets by academics telling us that Britain is literally heading for fascism; by Brits on the continent posting sadface pics of themselves enjoying their last holiday as Europeans; or high-status actors and musicians reminding us what a small, rainy and insignificant island we are; and people — fully grown adults often in positions of authority — telling us how they’re never going to talk to a relative because they voted Leave.

They could also project a selection of those charts Carole Cadwalladr is fond of, showing the web of secret and shadowy interest groups behind the Brexit vote, and New York Times articles reporting how English people want their empire back because that’s all everyone talks about here!

This part of the festival will be paid for by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Continental food
Marie Le Conte, author of ‘Haven’t you Heard: Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works’

The mere idea of a Festival of Brexit, intended to showcase what the United Kingdom does best, will feel a bit silly to anyone who has had to endure the past few years of Brexit hell. It doesn’t really matter where you stand on the issue; if there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that Brexit has shown that we cannot agree on anything.

But let’s embrace it. If there is anything I hope to see there in 2022, it is a strong European presence. No, really.

I would like to see a stall selling fresh Polish pierogi, with onions and sour cream, and another one selling Portuguese pasteis de nata. In fact, a whole corner of it should be dedicated to produce from the European Union.

After all, we can only hope that by 2022, our own Brexit psychodrama will have subsided, and we should by then be attempting to mend our relationship with the continent. As Boris Johnson himself mentioned in his speech to conference last year — to awkward silence from the audience — Britain will not be turning its back on Europe entirely.

In fact, it intends to remain a friendly neighbour, and is there any better way to show friendship than by sharing food? The stalls could also be manned by European citizens still living here. They have made their life in this country and deserve to be a part of it.

In years to come, Britain will have to figure out where it wants to stand in the world, but whatever happens, it cannot stand alone; a bit of camembert won’t provide all the answers,  but it would be a start.

The ghosts of local newspapers
Jenny McCartney, journalist and novelist

One stall at the 2022 Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should be a largely commemorative one, adorned with yellowing pictures and reports of smiling couples celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversaries, schoolchildren excelling in various academic and sporting endeavours, local fetes, dance competitions, and outrage at the closure of public services. It would be in memory of all the local newspapers that have closed in the 21^st century (according to Press Gazette, there was a net loss of 245 local UK newspapers in the years between 2005 and the end of 2018).

Many larger regional papers still exist, of course — and in recent years have yet again proved their worth with some brilliant reporting and investigations — but in general the local newspaper is in sharp decline, and as a result much of the connective tissue of our body politic has withered away. Smaller local newspapers were in the main a civilising, uniting influence which gradually made different elements of any community — including recent arrivals — knowable to one another around a shared sense of place.

Unlike memes and rumours on social media, they were also highly accountable to their readers. Their disappearance has often left the workings of local government unexamined, important local events unpublicised, and the successes of businesses, individuals and schoolchildren uncelebrated. Is it any coincidence that, as so many have closed down, we have seen the rapid rise of ‘fake news’ and the growing estrangement — particularly outside London — of ordinary people from decisions of government?

There have been some efforts to plug the information gap — in particular the BBC’s funding for 150 reporters under the Local Democracy Reporting Service — but it will be difficult to revive the newspapers we have lost in print form.

Digital local news is another matter, and perhaps festival-goers could be encouraged to donate a few pounds to help local websites expand and thrive. Or maybe a chunk of festival funding itself could flow there, to help forge closer, more confident communities in the future. The playwright Arthur Miller once defined a good newspaper as ‘a nation talking to itself’. With the creeping extinction of our local newspapers, our increasingly angry, divided country has been showing just what happens when the talking stops.

Save the money and go to the pub
Giles Fraser, associate editor of UnHerd and Rector at St Mary’s, Newington

The Festival of Brexit is a nauseating idea, a pathetic thumb nose to the 48%, and the very opposite of the sort of Festival of National Togetherness that is precisely what we need after nearly four years of bruising self-laceration.

After the English Civil war, the Church of England reinvented itself as the big tent, a space where people could come together in the pews and put their bloody ideological differences behind them. That’s why the Church of England isn’t big on doctrine — for it was doctrinal differences that split families and set communities at war with each other.

Turning pikestaffs into ploughshares, the Church of England surrendered its theological intensity and transformed itself into the well-meaning community organisers of modern ridicule. The limp handshake and homoeopathic levels of conviction were a price worth paying to bring the country back together. OK, many were still excluded from this Big Tent philosophy — but the basic point that divisive convictions can be traded in for peace was to set the tone for generations to come.

Burke put this especially well when he writes about maintaining ideological truth: “Perhaps truth may be far better [than peace]. But as we have scarcely ever the same certainly in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of virtues.”

The parish church was one place where this was supposed to take place. So too the local pub. So Boris — here is a very Boris thing to do: instead of wasting all that money on some ghastly monument to victor’s justice, why not give us all a few quid to take someone from the opposition down to the local boozer. We need to remind ourselves what we have in common. It’s time to make up.

Stuck a piece of crack in a butcher’s hand
Remind me to give me my cat back
– Happy Mondays, “Do It Better”

Over four decades have scampered by since the Rolling Stones – tongues stuck firmly in their collective cheek – wrote a song about being “so respectable” (“Well now we’re respected in society/We don’t worry about the things that we used to be”); almost five have elapsed since the late singer George Melly first conceptualised the process whereby commerce sweeps up anything left-field and confrontational in its sanitising grasp, sands down the rough edges and starts making money out of it. Melly’s thesis was entitled The Revolt into Style – the phrase can be found in Thom Gunn’s 1950s poem about Elvis Presley – and illustrations of it can be glimpsed in practically every major UK publisher’s catalogue, as well as most Friday nights on BBC4.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the revolt into style’s ever more devious assault on the citadels of high culture than the book that fell out of a parcel onto my kitchen table sometime last month. Published by the fine old firm of Faber & Faber, dinkily got up in the wafer-thin hardback format of a svelte volume of poetry, uncompetitively priced at £14.99 for 93 widely-spaced pages, this turned out to be… a new collection by Paul Muldoon? The latest musings softly let fall by Sir Andrew Motion? No. What we had here was Wrote for Luck, the “selected lyrics” of Shaun Ryder, one-time front-man of the Happy Mondays and Black Grape and still called upon to perform vocal duties for these ensembles whenever another VAT bill wings in from HMRC, beginning with a song entitled “Kuff Dam”:

If you’ve got to be told by someone then it’s got to be me.
And that’s not made from cheese and it doesn’t get you free
– Happy Mondays, “Kuff Dam”

The Mondays, in case you don’t remember them, were a particularly lairy bunch of northern hooligans brought to public notice by the ‘Madchester’ phenomenon of the late 1980s. The music journalist Nick Kent conducted a famous joint interview with Shaun and his boys and fellow Mancunians the Stone Roses in a Top of the Pops studio around this time, which made such legendary wild men of pop as the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls look positively anodyne. Of the many autobiographical fragments in the current volume, my favourite – in fact from the mid-’90s Black Grape days – has Shaun waking up stark naked in the basement of a restaurant next to a pair of similarly unclothed waitresses, holding a gun from whose chamber three bullets have disappeared, and with no idea of how he got there or what happened to the missing ammunition.

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All this is simultaneously a proper larf, as Ryder would put it, and, with its elegies for dead friends and drug casualties, a serial tragedy, a kind of souped-up Mancunian version of Hubert Selby jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what are we – the critical, interrogative we, that is – to make of Wrote for Luck, in whose elegant presentation and chaste Faber typeface there lies the hint of something deliberately provocative?

Ryder’s introduction is horribly self-deprecating (“I’ve never put myself forward as an agonised wordsmith.”) His sponsor, Faber’s Lee Brackstone, has remarked, on the one hand, that lyrics are rarely art (although there is a case for regarding them as “pop art”) and, on the other, that publishing them in the format of a Muldoon or a Motion is a self-consciously subversive act. Shaun, as Brackstone winningly puts it, is a poet, but he doesn’t write anything that could be called ‘poetry’.

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As for Wrote for Luck’s three dozen or so selections, Shaun confides that at the start of his career, when the Mondays were not much more than a musical street gang whose heads were as scrambled as those of their MDMA-toting audience, he was “more concerned with how the words sounded than what they actually meant”, which makes him seem like more of a sound poet hauled out of a bygone experimentalist’s vault inhabited by such hard-line Sixties avant-garde pranksters as Bob Cobbing. Crammed with arresting images (check out ‘Performance’, which nods to the Nicolas Roeg film of the same name), and huge amounts of drug-addled free associating, the Ryder oeuvre also nods at what might be called the buried literary sensibility that lies at the heart of so much English pop – the way in which bright but undereducated working class boys (Ryder claims to have left school at 14 as a virtual illiterate) are still borrowing from a word-hoard assembled from everything from the Bible to Charles Dickens.

You’ve been with fat lady wrestlers
And Germans in trenches,
And teachers who speak to themselves
Snide sneak corner, and baby beat a pauper
Peasants who eat from the road
– Happy Mondays, “Fat Lady Wrestlers”

All this may not, strictly speaking, be literature, but like many another pop lyricist’s gleanings – practitioners as various as Paul Weller, Polly Harvey and Howard Devoto spring to mind – it occupies a curious hinterland where pop and literature (and a fair amount of sociological baggage) collide head on. Meanwhile, as reviews of Shaun’s magnum opus continue to appear in Sunday newspapers and Keith Flint – another mad-lad denounced as a public menace 20 years ago – finds his obituary taking up a full page of The Times, it is worth trying to locate the topsoil in which all this sanctification of pop-cultural talent took root and grew.

Certainly, such a thing barely existed in the world of my adolescence. A few high-brow critics might have acclaimed the Beatles’ “pentatonic clusters”, but I can remember the terrible row that broke out in August 1977 when the The Times obituaries page led with an encomium to Elvis rather than a distinguished churchman who had died on the same day. I can also remember, as a sixth-former, discovering a review of the first Siouxsie and the Banshees album in the New Statesman, and registering my surprise that a magazine I had previously gone to in search of upper-brow literary criticism should now be noticing, well, pop records.

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By the late 1980s, most of the snootiness had gone, such luminaries of the ’70s music press scene as Charles Shaar Murray were ornamenting the arts pages of the Daily Telegraph and rock sociology had become a staple of publishers’ lists (again, much of the running was made by Faber, who published Jon Savage’s trail-blazing England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock as early as 1992.) As for the motivation, part of it lay in an awareness that such subjects are, and were, fascinating – whatever you might think of Morrissey he is part of a tradition of working-class auto-didacts that goes back to Winstanley’s diggers. A little more, to return to Melly’s ur-text, is to do with commerce and still more is to do with straightforwardly generational factors.

As was several times pointed out at the time, one of the reasons Kate Bush’s series of live concerts a couple of years back attracted such lavish coverage (Ms Bush, too, is a beneficiary of the Faber lyric-publishing project) is that all the nation’s middle-aged male newspaper executives had never got over her first performing “Wuthering Heights” back in 1978.

The future, alas, is less promising than it seems. Leaving aside R&B and teen-pop, the big money in the modern music business tends to be earned from the entity known as “heritage rock” played – and replayed – by musicians who have in some cases been going for upwards of half a century. What happens when Mick and Keef and Paul and all the other beneficiaries of the revolt into style have shuffled off the planet? Twenty years hence, will Faber be publishing, say, the selected lyrics of Dizzee Rascal? It would be interesting to hear Mr Brackstone’s views.