No Fun

‘We don’t need no educashun!’ sang the Pink Floyd somewhat ungrammatically and looking at their bank balance you felt they had a point.

But does education really have a place in pop music? I can’t help feeling that somewhere along the line pop music has become a little too worthy. I blame LiveAid (1985 for those old enough to remember) for trying to raise the stature of the medium out of the ‘purely for enjoyment’ category into the ‘take us seriously’ category. It seems that everywhere you look and this includes music, everything has to be educational rather than just plain fun. There is something of the intrusion of the Nanny State at work here. You can imagine the scene in Nurseries everywhere:

All together now kiddies…
‘Hey Hey we’re the Anthropoid Apes,
And people say we primate around,
But we’re too busy learning,
To put anybody down.’

Perhaps all music outlets should become a branch of Early Learning then we’d all know where we stand. Toys long ago became instruments of ‘Education’ so that we cannot buy anything for a pre-schooler without it having to teach them something. My own experience reveals that toddlers generally ignore these overpriced teaching aides and continue to play quite happily with cardboard boxes and wrapping paper thus learning a basic British right – to be suspicious of all authority.

Which is why I really can’t get to grips with politics in music, there’s too much preciousness involved and it turns me off. We have that stuff breathing down our necks all the time, the last place I need it is entertainment. But what I really don’t need is some earnest teenager ramming a non-too subtle ‘message’ down my throat. Comment on the state of the union by all means but don’t preach otherwise I’m off to play with the cardboard boxes.

Let’s be clear, I have no quibble with those who make a general observational protest in lyrical form – Nerina Pallot’s ‘Everybody’s Gone to War’ is a good example – but I really don’t want to spend money on a CD that then accuses me directly of creating all the world’s ills. It’s not all my fault, honest! Nor do I take kindly to being told to give money to various causes by rock stars who could probably finance the problem out of existence, personally.

So, where were we? Oh yes…
‘Hey Hey we’re the Monkees,
And people say we Monkee around,
But we’re too busy singing,
To put anybody down.’

Much better.

Could Do Better

I very rarely venture into the world of politics but having a wife who is a primary schoolteacher has sensitised me to goings on in the education world. The current UK government has mooted the idea that on top of the mountains of bureaucracy heaped on the education system, teachers should now produce a weekly on-line report for every pupil in their care. Just in case you haven’t grasped the magnitude of the task, let me say that again, ‘a weekly on-line report for every pupil’. I trust that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will personally be producing a similar weekly on-line report on what he is doing for the country? Don’t count on it.

Perversely, I still have all my school reports and very entertaining they are too. They reflect an age when public servants were not crippled by the dead hand of political correctness and a spade was, funnily enough, a spade. My favourite is from my old Geography master, who when assessing my achievement as top of the class in his subject provided a succinct appraisal in the single word, ‘Good’.

But he is not alone. A newspaper recently published extracts from school reports of various well-known public figures and what a hoot they all are. There is a fair splattering of the usual ‘He/She will never amount to anything’ but many had a deliriously off-kilter flavour typical of a less straitjacketed world. The one that caught my eye was a headmaster’s report on the young Richard Briers. I’m sure Mr & Mrs Briers would have been bemused to read, ‘It would seem that Briers thinks he is running the school and not me. If this attitude persists, one of us will have to leave’. Brilliant!

You wouldn’t get anything anywhere near that degree of surrealistic humour these days – it’s all too homogenised, grey and frankly tedious. In a way, this seems counter-productive as many of the best teachers have an innate madness about them that makes them irresistible and to remove this part of their personality through political machiavellism is plain daft.

There was one such individual at my school and shamefully, I can’t remember his name. Whenever it was his turn to take morning assembly, the place was packed to the rafters with standing room only at the back. It was the sense of danger he seemed to invoke when you (or even a nervous Headmaster) really didn’t know what was coming next that was so spellbinding and there is no doubt that he succeeded in getting his message across whether you believed it or not. I doubt he would get a look in these days and more’s the pity.

Losing My Religion

You know how something only becomes apparent years later in retrospect? Usually, these sorts of moments occur long after the event and it takes a catalytic jerk to slot all the pieces together in your brain.

It happened to me recently when I was forced into thinking about my school years following a meeting with an old schoolfriend – someone I hadn’t seen for over 30 years. This meeting was the catalyst that suddenly jolted me into the realisation that I had actually witnessed the end of the hippy dream, in real time, as it were.

It was about 1970 and I was sitting at my school desk paying my usual non-attention in a class designed to impart religious instruction. Following a prolonged bout of window gazing, I had tuned in just long enough to hear the teacher say, “I just don’t know about John Lennon any more…once it was ‘All You Need is Love’, but now…”

And she trailed off into a sort of melancholic reverie for a few moments during which there was total silence in the class. I think we all realised that this was a moment of discovery for her, but it is only now that I can appreciate what it was. It was the catastrophic awakening to the fact that hippydom had failed and the real world had re-invaded our consciousness.

1970 was certainly a defining year. It marked the end of those years with a ‘6’ in them, the Beatles were no more and suddenly reality was as grim as it had ever been. The Vietnam war raged, the UK began its slide into industrial unrest with strikes and the three day week only years away. For my teacher, who clearly saw the future in that far off instant, it must have been a crushing blow after the naïve optimism of the late 60s.

Funnily enough, John Lennon and religion always seem to be linked. I once swapped my copy of ‘Imagine’ for the Who’s ‘Who’s Next’ with a member of the God Squad at University. Clearly he thought that Lennon was more likely to redeem his soul than Pete Townshend. And who’s to say he was not wrong. After all, Lennon had once claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus so perhaps he had a point.

But Lennon alone was not enough to save the world from the 1970s and by the middle of the decade, not only was the UK in turmoil but pop music was on its knees waiting for the deathblow of punk to re-start the circle of raw development that had originally occurred in the 1950s. Nevertheless, I didn’t really expect to witness the end of an era in last period before break.