The Times - UK (2020-09-15)

24 1GM Tuesday September 15 2020 | the times

Comment

Ah, leather

on willow

and a whiff

of sanitiser

I

played cricket on Saturday at a

beautiful private ground in

Gloucestershire with a delightful

bunch of chaps, as part of an old-

fashioned country house party. I

kept wicket, as I usually do these

days, more to avoid being called

upon to bowl than anything else, or

to chase down hefty cover drives on

my old legs, or turn and throw in

from the boundary, what with my

dicky elbow, and watch the ball fall

short then bounce four or five times

and slowly peter out like a skimmed

pebble, coming to rest 30 yards from

the stumps, while the batsmen jog

through for a leisurely, all-run seven.

And also to avoid hand-sanitising,

from which wickies are exempt, which

is rife these days even at country

house level, and must be done every

six overs lest, spread out across a

large field, in sunshine no virus could

stand, one were to catch this not

very serious summer cough from, I

Music really was

better in the Sixties

and Seventies

Will Hodgkinson

M

r Blue Sky by ELO, that

hoary if uplifting

symphonic rock ode to

good times from 1977,

has been played more

than 432 million times on Spotify. It

made it into the streaming site’s top

200 songs every day in July. And it

isn’t the only golden oldie to become

a coronaviral hit. The Beatles’

equally cheerful Here Comes the Sun

reached 63,000 plays a day in July.

According to research by Timothy

Yu-Cheong Yeung, of the University

of Leuven in Belgium, this is because

people have “dived into nostalgic

music to escape the reality of

lockdown”. We certainly turn to the

comfort blanket of familiarity during

hard times but there is another

reason: music was better then. People

have simply had enough time over

the past few months to realise it.

It’s bad enough when the pub bore

lectures everyone on how music was

better in his day; for the rock and

pop critic of a national newspaper

like me to do it is tantamount to

career suicide. Nonetheless we have

to face the facts, and for my part this

is no mere exercise in nostalgia. I

grew up in the 1980s, when the charts

were backed up with pop effluent like

Living in a Box by Living in a Box,

and came of age in the 1990s, when

the cultural high point was watching

rock yobs Oasis putting the boot into

posh students Blur. There were a few

shining beacons of genius like Kate

Bush and Prince along the way but

for the most part it was a wasteland.

That’s why I ventured back a decade

or two, where a seemingly endless

treasure trove of colourful, exciting,

revolutionary music was — and

remains — waiting to be discovered.

The music of the 1960s and 1970s,

a product of the baby boomers’ need

to mark themselves out from the

Second World War’s “greatest

generation” who preceded them,

came from a period as unstable as

our own. Everyone from Aretha

Franklin to the Beatles, Marvin Gaye

to Joni Mitchell explored personal

and social transformation against the

backdrop of Vietnam, civil rights and

the three-day week, resulting in the

most vibrant and dynamic songs of

the 20th century. Streaming has

allowed us to revisit this golden age

and to dismiss that as nostalgia is a

bit like saying we shouldn’t read

Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens

because they’re from the past. Mind

you, not all retrograde listening

should be encouraged. There has

also been a surge in streams of early

Radiohead. Times may be tough, but

we should never abandon all hope.

Will Hodgkinson is rock and pop critic

The period produced

the most vibrant songs

of the 20th century

Simon Schama’s spellbinding TV series obscures the truth that idealism makes for bad politics

Romantic dreamers betray us all in the end

storm? How can I be sure?”

Only to be forced by law to write,

beneath that, “The value of

investments may fall as well as rise

and you may not get back the

amount you originally invested.”

Which is your answer to all three

questions, right there, isn’t it, matey?

Lockdown spirit

T

he Queen has applauded

British resilience under

lockdown after perusing a new

National Portrait Gallery collection

of portraits from the pandemic.

These include a woman at her

sewing machine, titled “PPE

Volunteer”; a young girl with a cut-

out model of her grandmother,

called “Never Without Grandma”;

and a portrait of a Royal Mail worker

listed as “Everyday Hero”.

Sadly, we have no record of Her

Majesty’s response to the Coren

family’s lockdown album, which

includes “Home School Star”,

featuring Sam in his pyjamas at three

in the afternoon, passed out on the

kitchen floor after 14 straight hours of

Minecraft; Kitty showing off her

bandy legs from not going outside for

the whole of April called “Rickets”;

and an entry from both of them,

wittily named, “All In This Together”,

which shows me and the wife in late

June, going at each other with garden

tools during a row about who put

wooden spoons in the dishwasher.

boats supposedly illustrating the

noxious effects of Romantic ideas such

as nationalist nostalgia, fail to include

current Romantic monstrosities on

the left. There’s no reference, for

example, to the cancel culture or the

dictatorial demonisation of ideas

deemed to contradict progressive

wisdom — even though this coercive

moralising is surely heir to the

French Revolutionary Committee of

Public Safety.

The series gives rise to an

unspoken question. Since Romantic

idealism almost always ends in

failure or results in the opposite of its

professed ideals, why does it

continue to attract so many

dreamers to its world of fantasy?

It’s probably because it

nevertheless articulates what we all

most deeply share: feelings such as

grief, longing, love or intimations of

mortality. Moreover, the imagination

is indeed a potent source of human

sympathy. So Romanticism seems

generous and inclusive. Which is

why the grim realism of some who

stand against it is so unappealing.

But often, they alone stand against

tyranny. The dreamers betray us all.

As Sellar and Yeatman put it in

their classic 1066 and All That, in the

civil war people were either “Right

but Repulsive” or “Wrong but

Wromantic”.

So why has Schama romanticised

Romanticism? Because he himself is

a Romantic. Which is why, through

his great gifts as a teacher and

communicator, his series is a source

of enchantment. The heart soars

over his account of “thoughts that lie

too deep for tears”, even though the

head may shake in sorrow.

“see into the life of things” and

connect to both memory and

humanity.

As the historian Gertrude

Himmelfarb observed in her book

The Roads to Modernity, the 18th and

19th-century cult of Romantic

sensibility was associated in Britain

with conscience. Beauty was

associated with generous behaviour,

poetry with moral truth.

Edmund Burke, whose protest

against the French revolutionary

terror cemented him as the father of

conservatism, wrote that poetry,

painting and other arts were suffused

with sympathy for the plight of

others. But it was only the British

Enlightenment, Himmelfarb suggests,

that viewed compassion as a social

virtue. In France, the Enlightenment

was not so benevolent. Adam Smith

recognised that Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s morality was no more

than a device for obtaining power

over others. And so it’s no surprise

either that Rousseau, a founding

father of the Romantic movement,

spawned eventually the German

Romantic movement from which

developed both communism

and fascism.

Schama, however, doesn’t mention

Rousseau. He presents Romantic

artists instead as heroic campaigners

for liberty and equality against

materialism, poverty and

exploitation. True, he shows how

delving into their imaginations drove

several of them mad. And he doesn’t

evade the gruesome body count of

the French Revolution.

But his allusions to modern politics,

flashed up in images of Donald

Trump, Nigel Farage or migrants in

T

he sparkling new series on

BBC2 by Sir Simon

Schama, The Romantics and

Us, has one big and

absolutely correct idea. It’s

that the preoccupations of our

modern era, such as equality, sexual

licence or veneration of the natural

world, aren’t actually modern at all.

Their roots, along with the

antecedents of the social revolution

of the 1960s, go back much further.

The origin of all of it was the

Romantic movement of the late 18th

and early 19th centuries. This was a

revolt against convention and

authority, elevating the rights of the

individual and downplaying reason

in favour of emotion and sensibility.

In his tour of magnificent art and

with a spellbinding exploration of

ideas (including a lot of wonderfully

declaimed poetry) Schama draws out

the often remarkable ways in which

the ideas of some two centuries ago

sound like the signature motifs of the

modern era.

He starts with the 1830 painting by

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading

the People, which became the poster

symbol of the 1968 student uprising

in Paris. This painting depicts a

woman personifying liberty leading

people over a barricade while

bearing aloft the Tricolour.

As Schama observes, the work is

suffused with the same Romantic

passions for liberty, sexual equality

and the rights of man that were to be

championed by the Marxist soixante-

huitards two centuries later. Those

students covered the streets of Paris

with revolutionary art, churned out

by the Ecole des Beaux Arts where

Delacroix had studied. A key slogan

was “l’imagination au pouvoir”, or “all

power to the imagination” — the

Romantic belief that the world could

be remade through creativity and

passionate emotion.

Romantic artists such as Delacroix

believed that paintings, poetry and

music could electrify the masses.

Their works proceeded to inspire

subsequent generations of idealists

out to change the world.

Similarly, William Blake, who used

his poetry and drawings to target the

industrial world’s dehumanising

obedience to reason and extol in its

place the dominance of passion and

the imagination, inspired beat poets

and rock bands in the 1960s while

lines from his poems sprang up as

graffiti all over London.

Shelley wrote his blistering poem

The Mask of Anarchy in protest at the

1819 massacre of Peterloo, when a

crowd in Manchester demanding

human rights was attacked by armed

militiamen. Wordsworth, in his great

poem Tintern Abbey, celebrated

nature as a way in which he could

He presents Romantic

artists as heroic

campaigners for liberty

don’t know, clapping or something.

But this was the only encroachment

of the great modern nonsense into a

Cotswolds idyll of freshly cut grass,

men in whites, poached salmon and

rosé for lunch, and views in every

direction of emerald fields, dotted

with honeyed stone cottages and the

odd church, rolling to meet a hazy

blue sky at the far horizon.

I didn’t keep too badly, I

thought, letting only a

dozen or so byes through

my actual legs and even

engineering the stumping

of a dangerous late-order

slogger off a deliberate

legside wide — a move

upon which the Ancients

might perhaps have

frowned, but which is

permitted by the laws

of the game and is

perfectly in keeping, I

would argue, with the

spirit of cricket in 2020.

“You remind me of

Ian Healy,” declared

the scion of one of

England’s great

families from mid-off,

citing Australia’s pre-

eminent gloveman of

the 1990s.

“Really?” I blushed.

“Totally,” said first

slip. “Short, old and a

bit of a ****.”

Viral toffs

S

taying with the grand traditions

of England, did you see there has

been an outbreak of Covid at

Eton, with at least 12 boys returning

with it from their hols? Honestly, I

don’t know what the afflicted coves

were thinking — in my day, we’d

have flipped some scrofulous townie

a shilling to have the bally disease

for us.

Mind your assets

I’

m sure we all love the “terms

and conditions” appended to

newspaper and radio adverts.

The way the whispered expression

of potentially catastrophic

downsides undercuts

the chutzpah

of the copywriters.

But I was especially

tickled by one for

the investment

giant UBS,

which

sought to

recommend

its services at

this difficult

time by asking,

in the guise of a

handsome silver fox

in cashmere: “Will the

world always be this

unpredictable? Will my

portfolio weather the

Giles Coren Notebook

Melanie

Phillips

@melanielatest

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for us.

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m sure we all lov

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