Sea Songs makes a brief transition into Mailwatch

In one breath, Peter Hitchens moans that Britain is now "a subject province of a continental empire".

In the next, he comments that while travelling recently in a European country, he was unable to change British currency into local money because it was "an exotic currency".

I rather suspect he is referring to Turkey here, but even by his / the Mail titles' standards, this is an astonishing level of self-contradiction. If Britain is ever again to have a proper, globally recognised currency, it has two choices. Sadly, I suspect Hitchens would rather see us dollarise. And then go on, in the same breath, about being forced to listen to pop music. Never has the stench of hypocrisy been uglier.

The sad thing is that the case for Europe can arguably be made more convincingly by cultural conservatives than by the likes of Polly "Capital Gold" Toynbee, just as the case for US statehood can be made more convincingly by pop-culture-fundamentalist "leftists" than by an unabashed fogey such as Hitchens Minor (not that he does make such a case, but he would surely see it as a lesser evil, in the exceedingly unlikely event that he ever accepts that the Britain he dreams of is geopolitically unworkable). A greater shame than ever that Auberon Waugh isn't around to make the European case, because he had the ear of people who believe, like Hitchens Minor, that J.S. Bach represents the peak of all musical achievement for all time, people who are not tied to the "rebellion" of 43 years ago as so much of the "left" still is. As it is, most "conservatives" and most "leftists" are both wedded to people who are not their natural allies (the latter, of course, can sometimes make excuses for both the worst excesses of American big business and the worst excesses of Islam: the fact that the Mail dislikes both - hypocritically in the latter case: the most natural non-Muslim sympathisers with the more extreme Islamic tendencies are social conservatives - does not mean the left should defend either). If and when either pathetic tribe returns, blinking, towards the light, I hope they will consult the likes of me, rather than either tribe's house journals, for advice on where to turn next. I may not do very well, but I have no doubt I could do better than any newspaper - of which, in terms of power to distort and lie and poison, there remain none deadlier than the Mail.

But having said the below ...

... is it perhaps a universal human pathology that we all like to think we came in at the end of something very rare, special and beautiful that those younger than us did not experience, or is it more commonplace among those who do (I insist) have a greater justification for it than others?

Three examples spring to mind.  There is Peter Hitchens' entire existence, built as it is on his being "just old enough to have seen with (his) own eyes ... the very last years of an older Britain" (mirages of the summer of '59 define every breath he draws in '09), Neil Clark's fixation on his own 1970s childhood, the final years before the Fall of his own half-true, half-romanticised left-right hybrid vision (it is sometimes impossible to believe that he was 17 in 1983, so little does that period seem to have made any impact on him at all) and my own determination - some would say desperation, but I hope and believe I can control that, indeed resisting all temptations to escape into my own hermetic universe is a huge priority for me - to know more about, to get a deeper and stronger feeling for than I could experience directly, the lost universe of the Puffin Club, Wednesdays at 5.10, schools radio, The Book Tower, European imports und so weiter (the demise of Radio 4's ghost ship Go4It feels like the absolute end of the last twitchings, the point from which there will never be return, and the old school of literal-conservatives know it).

It is undoubtedly true that people's earliest clear memories are their most voluminous and special, as well as (obviously) their furthest away at whichever point in their life, so I think it is probably a natural tendency to exaggerate that specialness.  But funnily enough I also think Hitchens, Clark and myself have more justification for taking such a view than some others would, which probably does explain why it is so strong among the three of us (who hardly have anything else universally in common - Clark may share some of his views with Hitchens and some with me, but there is precious little uniting all three of us, nor should there be).  It is true, overdone though it once was (and to a lesser extent still is) by lazy amateur historians (who have now largely moved their focus on to the '70s and '80s), that Hitchens' earliest remembered years (he was born in October 1951) were the last years of a vast network of steam railways, the last years of genuine public deference towards, even fear of, authority (at least in the southern English, middle-class world Hitchens existed entirely within), the last years before the influence of the mass media began to accentuate towards its current level, the last years of widely-held collective and class-based cultures (on all social levels) largely untouched by popcult.  It is true that mass consumerism and Americanisation were obviously beginning to make their presence felt in the post-Suez, pre-Beatles period, and the psychological ramifications of Britain's retreat from empire became stronger and stronger during that time, but it was still just about possible for those who were sufficiently innoculated through privilege and rural isolation (as Hitchens' family undoubtedly was) to pretend it wasn't happening.  So, although it obviously doesn't excuse his political paranoia (Cameron a "socialist" or whatever else he has convinced himself, in his madness), I think Hitchens - or anyone else his age who shares his yearnings - has a greater justification for mythologising his earliest remembered years than many people of many other generations, let us put it that way (indeed, the importance of this period is confirmed by the way their early childhood continues to have a vital impact in the narrative of post-war history set up by many other babyboomers whose views on virtually everything are Hitchens' antithesis, as What We Needed To Get Away From, and the working-class experience - "grey", etc, etc - of the post-war years seems to have left a vital imprint in the minds of many boomers of that age, of all political views but generally leaning towards the left, who had none of Hitchens' social privileges and certainties, inevitably to be shattered by The First Time You Heard The Beatles).

Clark, for all his faults (fewer than Hitchens, and his heart is usually in the right place, but that doesn't paper over them) has similar justifications.  I'm much more ambiguous about him, and sometimes openly critical, than I once was.  The middlebrow nature of the "international" films he cites here is all too typical - there's no room for Godard in his Daily Express Page 9 vision of the past, any more than there's room for even P&P, let alone Petit, in his excruciatingly Mailish (with one very obvious exception, which in context is more startling than it deserves to be) list of favourite British films. Mainland European influence in the UK charts of the late '60s was on nothing like the scale he suggests (even back then, the BBC's imports were, as its former controllers of children's TV Edward Barnes and Monica Sims have clearly stated, part of a public-service drive against the tide rather than the way things were naturally, if left alone, heading), his use of the phrase "The New Labour Reich" (because of the smoking ban, apparently) is unworthy even of Littlejohn, and several comments on his blog (the thinly-veiled anti-Semitism of two contributors, along with the apparent defence of theatre censorship, enforced by the holder of the noted egalitarian/socialist office of Lord Chamberlain, by another - "the working class" weren't clamouring for it to be abolished, apparently) are simply indefensible. Nonetheless, he too has an unusual level of justification in citing his early life as a profoundly special, separate period.  Born in 1966, Clark's early memories will be - as he himself comments here - of a time (as I have mentioned before, unsettlingly like now) when every moment of a British person's life seemed, in some way, to be connected to a last battle, a final conflict for the ownership of the future that lay beyond the crumbling consensus, when nascent Thatcherism was merely an equal competitor to a strong, powerful socialist movement which appeared to stand an equal chance of winning.  What was clear, even before 1979, was that the centre could not hold, and that fact gives Clark an equal justification for his fixation with his childhood - the more voluminous and tense your early years are, the more total and absolute they remain, up to and including the moment you die.

And for me?  Well, my fixation is more specific - to do with broadcasting and media structures, and the culture they maintained, rather than grand-scale social changes (my childhood and adolescence were characterised by the long march through the institutions - of which the changes in broadcasting was merely one of the key moments - of the ideology that reached power shortly before my birth, not by any specific moment as epochal as 1979 or, in a different way, 1963).  Nonetheless, as a 1980 baby, I did experience the last years of the programmes, institutions and associated structures and systems mentioned at the top of this long, pointless ramble, I was 10 at the time of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, I did live my early life amid what everyone knew to be the dying fall of a world where broadcasting was in large part protected from the full rules of the market and had aims beyond sensation and the hard sell.  And, again, that makes my early years, in terms of broadcasting, more piquant and potent than they would be for many/most others.  I was inspired to write this by a comment from my mum (who still doesn't know how important and fascinating this idea - the elusiveness of time and early life - is to me) while reading this piece, to the effect that I'd experienced the very end of the heyday of children's literature that Rachel Cooke talks about, the last knockings of a particular world before it finally crumbled before the wider world and the entirely visual basis of the new British childhood.  She was right.  So are Hitchens (on this if very little else), Clark and me.  It may be a universal syndrome, but the fact that the three of us do so much of it suggests that, while it is obviously easy and tempting and horribly lazy for everyone to look back on their formative years and say "ah, that was just before everything changed", and while it is undoubtedly true that a paleoconservative like Hitchens and a traditional socialist like Clark are both naturally programmed towards - ultimately - rather pointlessly wistful nostalgia, their assessments are echoed, if from an entirely conflicting perspective and for different reasons, by those of utterly opposed views from the same generations, and I'm sure the same would apply to the action cartoon fans of my age.  Some people do have more justification for this kind of thing than others, and the knowledge that evolution must continue doesn't make it any less painful.  That's why I listen to this.

The most important sense in which 1977 was a turning point

When Peter Hitchens (a man I have actually debated with once, and who confirmed his reputation as someone who simply chooses not to respond to any points that may significantly challenge his, and who cannot even remember the full details and implications of what he has written, so completely that I need happily never bother a second time) proclaimed that he was "just old enough" to have "seen with (his) own eyes ... the very last years of an older Britain" (by which he clearly meant the late 1950s and early 1960s) he was saying so in an entirely different tone, and with utterly oppositional implications, to those we would hear from any of British pop/rock's iconic figures if they used similar language.  For Hitchens, who has built his entire career on what is more or less a false memory syndrome - rose-tinted yearnings for a world of which he himself witnessed only the dying embers (once pathetically moaning that he "thought" he could "just remember" Children's Hour) - it is the sadness of his life than he cannot remember the days when Britain Ruled The Waves, or Stood Alone, or whatever.  For the first true rock generation in Britain (whether they stuck with left-wing views or whether, as happened much more often, they gleefully jumped on the bandwagon of Thatcherism's adaptation of rock culture's privatisation of the mind) it is a repressive memory that they are glad to have escaped and which, when they are not desperately trying to forget they ever lived through it, exists only as the mental source of everything they congratulate themselves for having kicked against (when not congratulating themselves on having laid the groundwork for the privatisation of Iraq's oilfields).

Nonetheless, pretty much all the best British rock music between the mid-'60s and the coming of punk was, to a greater or lesser extent, defined by its shadow of the dying Old World in which its protagonists had grown up.  "Penny Lane" combined rose-tint and an obtuse sense that things were not quite as they seemed.  Hidden almost inaudibly in "Revolution No. 9" (which, incidentally, has an almost exact counterpart for a much later generation in Mordant Music's "We Are the Mean") was an exhumation of memories arguably more powerful than Lennon's later confessionals.  Syd Barrett reimagined his early childhood as a starting point for his creation, in the brief moment before the new world proved too much for him, a parallel universe far richer and stranger than anything that ever actually was either before or after the Big Changes, and in his final moment with Floyd, "Jugband Blues", his use of a Salvation Army band, lost amid the sound of a fading mind, brings on a potent feeling of a '50s universe audibly collapsing and curdling ("I'll get my loving in the winter": the winter of his own life that would only end with death, but also Britain's long winter as Murdoch crept in and the enabling state crumbled).  Even the Rolling Stones, at first, existed overwhelmingly in the shadow of the old order - its very non-acknowledgement in their music only served to hide how much they were about fleeing from it, eventually ending up as the epitome of the corporate institutionalisation of rock which proved to be the real future.  And those are only the canonical "greats" - I could go on almost infinitely if I went on to the (rightly, in most cases - apart from the below) critical "untouchables" of pure prog, or the more credible Canterbury school, or (especially) folk-rock.  I could even return to the Larry Parnes generation, raised entirely amid the old order, and how they relate to the aftermath of Suez (every bit as crucial to early British pop as the death of John Smith and its aftereffects to Britpop).

When Peter Gabriel quotes Del Shannon in the song that gave this blog its URL (though not, importantly, its actual title), he's trying desperately to reconcile the vast range of his post-imperial experiences - growing up amid the wonderfully elegant, utterly useless and played-out detritus of the gently declining upper middle class, and hearing "Runaway" through the fuzz of Luxembourg, and trying to work out which of the two held more emotional sway over his life - and somehow hoping that he can work it all out on the most public stage of the post-imperial world.  The power of that one line, to me, is almost indescribable - an epic battle between Greece and Rome in one man's mind, between his own inheritance and what he must have subliminally known, even in 1961, would be everyone's future. It's far more powerful to me than a great deal of music which I know to be objectively far superior.  And yet in the end, like all the compulsive introspection of the British '70s, it was a dead end.  The generation that supplanted Genesis knew nothing and cared less of these battles.  All they knew was that all certainties were dying.

As I've listened constantly to Metal Box interspersed with the first two Pink Floyd albums for the last couple of days, it's occured to me that this is probably the most profound sense in which 1977 and the years immediately following it were a turning point - it was the first time when the bands coming through were made up of people who had no meaningful recollection of pre-1963 Britain.  The aftermath of punk was also, even more importantly, the first time when the children of those who emigrated to Britain between 1948 and the restriction of Commonwealth immigration in 1962 were old enough in sufficient numbers to be playing a genuinely important role in British music.  So even if you think (as I tend to, on the whole) that 1977-as-year-zero did enough long-term aesthetic harm to outweigh its immense and vital short-term good, you cannot dispute its vast importance - both in terms of what was happening at that specific time (slow death of Butskellism, etc) but in terms of the slow-burning impact of the most important change in Britain within the Butskellite period, the time when we wrongly thought we'd overcome the psychological ramifications of searching for a post-imperial role by sheer pop-cultural celebration.  As was blatantly obvious by the early '70s, we hadn't. Essentially we still haven't.