Return of the Cockney - playlist

After publishing the 'Return of the Cockney' post I realised that I hadn't included any music which seemed an oversight, so after some prompting from Alex here is the 'playlist'.

80s cockney music has its roots in pub rock and punk, with their deliberate deployment of London accents (real or acquired), songs and imagery about London ('Down in the Tube Station at Midnight', Kilburn and the Highroads) and importance of local venues like the Hope and Anchor in Islington, which attracted loyal followings.

It was Ian Dury and the Blockheads, though, who set up the key elements for 80s. Obviously, through their frontman they kept the vocals and imagery side, with Dury's art-school twist. But they also added funk and soul to the music, and this took them into proper pop hits territory. These two elements are, I think, in tension with each other for many London working class bands through the 80s.

For Madness, it would be ska and reggae rather than funk and soul but the balance is similar. They also cemented the saxophone into London music of this period.

Like Chas and Dave, Madness combine lyrics about child/adult relationships ('Baggy Trousers'// 'Sideboard Song') with catchy choruses, and it this nostalgia for all age groups that explains something of their long lasting appeal.

Alternatively you could drop the vocals side entirely (and indeed any humour or playfulness) and concentrate on being a slick, modern soul band, as with Islington's finest Spandau Ballet:

As Squeeze moved into the 80s they also went in this direction - there would be no more 'Cool for Cats'. The video for 'Black Coffee in Bed' is a rewrite of the narrative of 'Up the Junction' but instead of ending on the sigh of the everyman, Glenn Tilbrook is now more cynical. 'Oh well on to the next one' his eyes say to us. What these bands seemed to particularly value in soul music (and we could include Sade in this) was not just a modern sound but also a grown-up sexuality: "listening to Marvin all night long".

Curiously given Paul Weller's love of black music, 'modernism', and class politics, the Style Council should been the best of all these bands. Although they had 7 top ten singles, which are as good as anything he did with The Jam, the mix between the elements never quite convinces. Despite his supposed love of style, Weller is responsible for commissioning some of the oddest videos of all time. Without these they probably could have had some success in the US, but MTV viewers would simply have been baffled by the mix of homoerotcism, Eastern European chic or, er, northern Town Hall chic:

Unlike Spandau and Squeeze, Weller was too prickly just to let go and fully embrace slick pop. Perhaps unexpectedly it was those who never attempt to have a modern sound, but kept the vocals/imagery side, who have lasted best. But they did this either being being half-outsiders like the Pogues or as with Billy Bragg deliberately trying to undercut the assumptions of his own time and place. His best songs are not his big political numbers, but his love and everyday life material. 'A Lover Sings' is far more 'grown up' about sex, than hanging by the nightclub bar with your sleeves rolled up. His unpicking of male life on 'Like Soldiers Do' or 'Its Says Here' is particularly strong, perhaps why Morrissey was a fan at the time. 'Levi Stubbs' Tears' could be seen as the flip side to 'True' or 'Smooth Operator': a very different mix of soul music, sexuality and London life.

Return of the Cockney

Although the smart consensus now is that 'the Sixties' in Britain was really 'Swinging London', outside of the art/fashion/music scene it was really a northern decade. Starting with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning then the Beatles, The Making of the English Working Class, Coronation Street, Z Cars, Manchester United, the New Universities (none of them in London), Harold Wilson (Huddersfield) vs George Brown (Lambeth) it was the north that made the running. The stereotype of 'the northern scientist' - ex-grammar school, then onto British Steel - was much more representative than, say, Michael Caine.

In many ways, as The London that Nobody Knows suggests, much of London's popular culture, architecture etc was looking rather archaic by the '60s. Blow Up is a strangely silent and empty film, as a small group of hipsters run round a Victorian playground. And for good reason: London was already in its then alarming decline, in which it would lose a million of its population. Get Carter is a great cinematic revenge on Londoners, in which Caine has to head to where the real money and power is. And never returns.

The real London decade was the 1980s. There's no need on here it rehearse the economics and politics of why that was so. But it’s worth noting that it was the decade when working class Londoners (including the Essex/Kent/Surrey diasporas) finally decided to take themselves seriously and catch up with modernity. No more Steptoe and Son.

Most striking was the big invasion of cockney voices, writing and faces into the media. Obviously Only Fools and Horses, Eastenders, Minder, The Bill, Grange Hill. Cockney was down-on-the-street 'real'. Maybe more importantly cockney accents were finally allowed on factual television, the medium's great test of authority:

Always going to be too pronounced for some those accents, but they properly reflect the desire to force yourself onto the medium without apology and without fluffing your lines. Also note there's no censoriousness or 'anthropology of the workers' in those films, but no cheap exploitation either. Instead it’s relaxed, democratic, in-the-moment. It has a 'this is what my friends do at the weekend: why shouldn't it have 15 mins of airtime?' feel.

The Robert Elms/Spandau Ballet/Paul Weller wing of this minor movement began to take themselves rather too seriously, of course ('From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection: the Spandau Ballet'.) The northern suspicion of 'cockney wankers' grew in this period: either they were too brash or too slick. Definitely too materialistic.

Billy Bragg, Paul Weller or Ken Livingstone might feel rather aggrieved at being labelled this way. They were after all rather more explicitly anti-Thatcher than New Order or Tony Wilson ever were. The Style Council were incredibly earnest, and their clumsiness in crafting a modernist-socialist-soul sound stands in contrast to the cool post-modernism of Factory.

The brief hegemony of cockney was its undoing. The tabloids and commercial TV embraced it and distorted it for their own ends. The path to London Fields and Parklife began here. 'Cockney' was also very male, always with a hint of aggression to it, and apolitical. Red Ken is very rarely called 'a cockney' although he is one. Admitting that 'the most successful working class socialist politician' really was a man of the people would have been too much for The Sun.

The likes of Class War did attempt to give the 'Loadsamoney' style a leftish twist:

It doesn't quite convince, mainly because Ian Bone is actually from Bristol. But the clip nicely brings out some of the contradictions of the 80s cockney. Ross, whilst hinting he agrees with some of the politics, isn't going to drop the American-style slickness he's hard won, even as his brother is denounced as a class traitor.

It was the actors, where voice matters most, who really suffered in the 90s fall out. Kathy Burke has now effectively given up acting, Ray Winstone reduced to betting ads. Nil By Mouth showed what they really could give to British culture. But we've ended up with Nick Love and Notting Hill instead.

"After Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty directors would not hire her because she was not "trendily working class", an exasperated Kathy Burke found the effort of keeping a civil tongue in her head too much to bear. "As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes," she told Time Out, "I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter: shut up you stupid cunt."