In a way, British pop musicians and the Queen have been in a quiet competition to define the image of the country for over half a century.
Some say British pop played a crucial role in the nation’s adjustment to the loss of empire: If Britannia no longer ruled the waves, it might still rule the airwaves. During the entire 1960s, most of the ’70s, and much of the ’80s, the UK shared dominion over global pop with America, despite having one-fifth the population. These days, British music exports don’t contribute nearly as much to the country’s balance of trade, but the idea of a native pop flair remains a cornerstone of national identity. If you meet an Anglophile abroad, chances are it’s the Beatles or the Clash, the Cure or the Smiths, that’s the reason for the affection, not Shakespeare, soccer, Harry Potter, or Downton bloody Abbey.
England was swinging starting in the ’60s, but that had nothing to do with Elizabeth II. The architects of the nation’s new charisma were people like clothing designer Mary Quant, photographer David Bailey, and the stream of sharply dressed, irreverent pop groups like the Kinks, the Who, and the Rolling Stones. Living in an old country, teeming with castles and cathedrals, is tough for young people trying to forge a groovy new national identity. The Sixties generation treated the imperial past as material for mischievous play. That’s why the look and sound of psychedelia involved Edwardian garments, vintage military uniforms, and the huffing pomp of brass bands. Lord Kitchener, the general who crushed the Boers in South Africa and was Secretary of State during WWI, became an ironic icon, popping up in concert posters and inspiring the name of the trendy clothes boutique I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet.
The arc of the Beatles’ evolution from entertainers to counterculture leaders can be traced through their interactions with Elizabeth II. In November 1963, they were nice boys in smart suits playing a Royal Command Performance alongside other “variety” acts, offering just a hint of cheek (Lennon famously urging the posh set to rattle their jewelry in lieu of clapping). A few years later, the Beatles trooped to Buckingham Palace to receive MBES (it stands for Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) as acknowledgment for their sales impact internationally, and, according to Lennon, smoked a joint in the lavatory to steady their nerves. Then, in November 1969, Lennon returned the award in protest against British interference in the Nigeria-Biafra war, the country’s support for America in Vietnam, and, in a flippant final flourish, the sliding chart position of his heroin-inspired solo single “Cold Turkey.”
The Beatles also wrote one song about the Queen. Abbey Road closed with “Her Majesty,” a throwaway “secret track” that described the sovereign as “a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.” Paul McCartney later characterized his ditty as “basically monarchist, with a mildly disrespectful tone, but it’s very tongue-in-cheek, it’s almost like a love song to the Queen.”
Unless Herman’s Hermits “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” counts, I can’t think of any other ’60s Brit rock songs that even mention the existence of the monarchy. All of that was part of the world being swept away by the unstoppable tide of youth culture, or so it seemed. By the early ’70s, a general contraction of possibility and hope had set in. Bitter strife between workers and management repeatedly brought industry to a standstill. The era was pervaded by a sense of national decline. Far-right political groups resurged, calling for an end to the country’s multicultural policies and the repatriation of immigrants from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent (former colonial subjects who thought they’d be welcomed to the mother country). Reactionary figures among the ruling class, including Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, flirted with the idea of staging a military coup to restore order and standards.
Meanwhile, rock in the ’70s became its own kind of aristocracy: wealthy, decadent, and wrapped up in glitzy spectacle. The emergence of a group called Queen made sense. Although Freddie Mercury’s attraction to the name had its queer aspect—a way of flaunting his sexuality without explicitly declaring it—the group’s music really did sound lordly. Take Brian May’s guitar-playing on “Procession,” the opening track on 1974’s Queen II: It’s as stately as a court ceremony. “The concept of Queen is to be regal and majestic,” declared Mercury. “We want to be a good British regal rock band.” Accordingly, the group’s logo, designed by the singer himself, is a crown resembling the one Elizabeth wore during her 1953 coronation, flanked by crowned lions, a pair of fairies, and a fearsome phoenix.
By the mid-’70s, the lifestyle led by superstar rockers seemed hopelessly remote from the experience of ordinary kids. Among the many contenders for the moment that triggered the punk uprising are the 1976 newspaper photographs of Mick Jagger hobnobbing with Princess Margaret, a friendship so warm that rumors of an affair circulated. The simple sight of a rocker and a royal in a clinch showed that the ’60s most disreputable reprobates had become jet-set socialites. Punk targeted rock’s new nobility but it also fired salvos at the actual ruling class.
The movement’s all-time iconic image is Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her mouth, created by Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen.” Timed for the Royal Jubilee celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Elizabeth’s coronation, the single railed against a country suffocated in nostalgia (“There’s no future in England’s dreaming”) and bedazzled by pageantry (“God save your mad parade”). A tirade pressed into wax, “God Save the Queen” represented the massive break in consensus that so many discontented young Britons craved. To buy it was a protest vote. Support was strong enough to push the single past the total bans on radio and TV and the refusal of some stores to stock it, to the top of the charts. Here’s where the conspiracy theories of Establishment conniving come into play: “God Save the Queen” halted at No. 2, supposedly held back by an innocuous Rod Stewart song.
Some punks took “God Save the Queen” and the Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” literally. Pioneers of the anarcho-punk genre and earnest believers in self-government, Crass issued aural tracts denouncing every form of hierarchy—church, state, military, monarchy. Their fans probably loved them as much for their elaborate record packaging designed by Gee Vaucher as for their basic punk sound. Her most famous artwork is a dream-like tableau in which Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher are leather-clad punkettes, while Pope John Paul II sports a “Destroy” T-shirt, for a poster sleeve wrapped around Crass’ 1980 single “Bloody Revolutions.” The song was not actually an incitement to hang the ruling class from lamp posts, but an anthem of non-violence and peaceful change.
Crass and the other anarcho groups aside, punk anti-Royalism was not really a serious political stance. I’d be very surprised if many, or any, Pistols fans joined the existing pressure groups in the UK that campaign for the abolition of the monarchy. “God Save the Queen” was more like an exasperated howl at living in a stagnant and deadlocked country, the national anthem inverted. Above all, it was an act of sacrilege, akin to punk’s controversial—and, to modern sensibilities, indefensible—use of the swastika. Rather than representing actual fascist sympathies, this was purely a shock tactic and a form of symbolic treason, deriding the idea of Britain’s finest hour, the plucky island nation holding out against the Nazis, so central to the country’s ailing sense of pride in the decades after WWII. “Always very much an anti-mums and anti-dads thing,” according to Siouxsie Sioux, who wore the offending symbol in the early days of punk—a giant fuck-you to the Blitz generation.
Like other old punks, Johnny Rotten has softened his stance towards the woman he once described in song as “no human being” and the figurehead of “a fascist regime.” Earlier this year, he told Piers Morgan that he was “really, really proud of the Queen for surviving and doing so well.” (Perhaps that turnabout isn’t surprising given that he’s also a Brexit supporter, a Trump fan, and an anti-wokeness whiner.) Another Brexiteer, Morrissey doesn’t appear to have reneged on his fervent anti-Royalism, even though his politics have shifted sharply to the right. Then again, “The Queen Is Dead,” the title track of the Smiths’ classic 1986 album, is not a clearcut denunciation of the Royal Family, but more like a weird blend of lament and whimsy. As so often in his songs, Morrissey seems at once trapped by a country where nothing ever changes yet horrified by change—fatally attached to the past, even though it was so miserable.
“The Queen Is Dead” was consciously designed to be the successor to “God Save the Queen,” elevating and anointing the Smiths as the most important and subversive band since the Pistols. But the feeling that comes off the song, the album, and the entire blemished body of Morrissey’s work is his signature blend of fatalism and doomed romanticism. As much as the lyric mentions breaking into Buckingham Palace to speak to “Her Lowness” (who haughtily declares, “I know you and you cannot sing”), “the queen” in the title equally refers to the dandy Morrissey, who’s waiting for his life to start, lost in reveries of third genders and indefinable sexualities. The title is borrowed from a chapter in Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, about a drag queen named Georgette. This perhaps accounts for the surreal fantasy of the lines that address the Prince of Wales: “Charles, don’t you ever crave/To appear on the front of the Daily Mail/Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?"
Later lines about how “when you’re tied to your Mother’s apron/No one talks about castration” strengthen the sense of a curious identification between Morrissey and Charles, in 1986 and for another three and a half decades stuck in limbo as he waited for a beloved mother to die so that he could become the man he was born and trained to be. (Now, finally, at the ripe old age of 73, he’s King Charles III.) Morrissey sings about being distantly related to the Royals (“I’m the 18th pale descendant of some old queen or other”), which may or may not be why in the earlier Smiths classic “Still Ill,” he declared, “England is mine, it owes me a living.”
Flitting between camp frivolity and aching despair, “The Queen Is Dead” is hardly a storm-the-palace rabble-rouser. Morrissey’s actual outright ode to regicide came with his 1988 solo debut Viva Hate and “Margaret on the Guillotine”—except that it’s Thatcher, the matriarch governing with an iron fist, who’s being decapitated rather than the symbolic head of state, Elizabeth. (It’s striking, though, that this method of dispatch is the one associated with the French Revolution). Morrissey’s vengeful fantasy of popular justice got him in trouble: A Tory MP reported him to Scotland Yard for incitement to violence and Special Force detectives dutifully investigated, even turning up at the offices of Melody Maker where I worked at the time to ask me about the tone of voice in which the singer had described the song in our interview. The tone was actually an unreadable blend of deadly earnest and Wilde-like quippy camp: Morrissey professed to be willing to carry out the execution himself and even to have the appropriate uniform ready.
During the Britpop ’90s, very few groups took swipes at the Royals. The exceptions are two bands who fancied themselves Sex Pistols inheritors: the Stone Roses taunting, “It’s curtains for you, Elizabeth, my dear,” and Manic Street Preachers snarling, “Repeat after me, fuck Queen and Country.” It was the Cool Britannia era, when, in an echo of the mod ‘60s, the Union Jack became a fashion component. (Besides, the Windsors were doing enough damage to themselves at that time, as Charles and Diana’s marriage disintegrated very publicly.) But by the early 2000s, as the sheen came off Tony Blair’s New Labour, Damon Albarn—older and more life-battered than the perky twat of Blur’s heyday—sang about his countrymen as “a stroppy little island of mixed-up people” on “Three Changes,” the standout track on the self-titled debut of his supergroup the Good, the Bad and the Queen. That band’s name is a self-contained poem, suggesting that through calm or chaos, periods of progressive purpose or right-wing retrenchment, one thing alone abides: the monarch, symbol of stability for some and stasis for others.
Support for the Royal Family has waxed and waned, but there’s always been a majority in favor of keeping them around. The most recent polls this summer suggest that around 60 percent of the UK population supported the continuation of hereditary monarchy, although feelings towards the Queen as a person were warmer than the institution in itself. Around one in five expressed a firm preference for an elected head of state. Since their eviction from Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral, and the rest has never seemed remotely likely, the most that a progressive-minded Brit can hope for are signs of modernization, a spring-cleaning of attitudes and protocols, the faintest hint of humanity. Generally that has come in the form of brides from outside rather than the inbred tribe itself: Di, “the People’s Princess,” with her caring common touch and love of Duran Duran. Meghan Markle seemed for a moment to promise a multicultural and emotionally-irrigated monarchy fit for the 21st century. Even a non-Royalist like myself was touched by the sheer soul power of the wedding ceremony. You can see her and Harry as spoiled celebs with heads full of Paltrow-y nonsense and also feel that for a moment there, the stiff upper lip was (thankfully) loosening a bit.
Perhaps that’s why Dry Cleaning, a group otherwise unsparing in their bleak depiction of entropy in the UK, first made their name with the “Magic of Meghan,” off their 2019 EP Sweet Princess. Far from a piss-take, the song, singer Florence Shaw has said, was born of genuine, if brief, infatuation. “I had just broken up, and I was clinging to that story to distract myself from the abyss. I transplanted all my normal thinking about my own life onto thinking about their lives for a few weeks.” It’s a neat encapsulation of the way the Royal Family really do function like pop stars—permanently for some people, and for others, only in moments of weakness. Maybe one day, there’ll be no dreaming in England’s future—no need for distraction from the intractable.
