[Robert to add: the opening Morrissey "Still Ill" quotation]", sang Morrissey — before adding, slyly, "[Robert to add: the second Morrissey "Still Ill" quotation]."
Notions of Englishness have always resisted interrogation, and Michael Bracewell's allusion to Morrissey's "Still Ill" in his title is apt, as the song embraces both that reticence and the national tendency towards nostalgia.
Bracewell's book is a bit reticent itself, beneath its 235 pages of verbiage. It is unclear whether it is an account of English pop music's changing attitudes to Englishness; or of the way Englishness changes and evolves, as seen in its cultural products; or – and this seems more plausible – an idiot's guide to English society in the past 100 years, with exemplifying quotes from the author's favourite records, films, and books.
There is no argument of any coherence; merely a highly selective tour of history and culture. Bracewell's trope of choice is analogy ("Auden as Neil Tennant to Brian Howard's Boy George", whatever that might mean) and his links between the icons he throws up are generally spurious. Early on we read of an England "compromised by the tragedy of World War One and the lingering shadows cast by the trial of Oscar Wilde" – as if these two events were of near-equal importance. Bracewell raises the concept of Arcady, the pastoral myth of England, and dispatches it; he then romps through such phenomena as the emergence of disaffected youth, the social realism of 1960s cinema, the Mods, suburbia, female artists, the North, the New Romantics, Morrissey . . .
A lot of significant figures at least get a name check, but those chosen as seminal are given pages of attention, without anything particularly useful emerging. The chapter called "Crawley articulate: the sound of the suburbs" uses as its point de départ an epigraph from John Burnside (how odd to use a Scot, when so many young poets have made contributions on these areas of Englishness), and then says astonishingly little. Suburbia is uniform, conformist, xenophobic; it is also a "theatre for adolescent frustration", the site of many English satires and sitcoms, and the home of a large number of punk rockers.
Why, in this context, Bracewell should devote five pages to slagging off a group like the Cure is hard to explain, but he does, with this deft rhetoric: "And it could be argued, in fact, that the pop sound of suburbia has been defined by the melodramatic, monolithic music of the Cure, in which an eerie monotony gives service to morbidity". If this alliterative thesis could, in fact, be argued, Bracewell doesn't bother. What he means – I think – is that the essence of suburbia is boredom, and that Robert Smith is a moany old phoney.
Bracewell also attempts to locate Englishness in camp. We start with Wilde; we take in Forster and Radclyffe Hall; Auden and Noel Coward; Derek Jarman and the Pet Shop Boys; the Carry On films; 1970s David Bowie; the androgyne New Romantics; and, of course, we end with Morrissey, whose debt to Wilde is overtly articulate in the songs Cemetery Gates and Oscillate Wildly. The dissidence of the dandy, the blurring of gender or class, and the use of irony as both defence and weapon can indeed be found in figures throughout the century. But Bracewell can never resist the faux comparison; by comparing Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth with Icarus in "Musée des Beaux Arts" by Auden he arrives at the improbable conclusion that Auden is "a grandfather of the robot dandies".
Everywhere the same thin points are laboured, with an NME style in which pun and breathless, sixth-form excitement fail to compensate for the lack of content. The index is inconsistent and the dustjacket blurb is risible. It is hard to believe that anyone at HarperCollins actually edited this book.