The Great British Dream Factory

Dominic Sandbrook’s new volume is a compelling read. He is a zeitgeist historian who recoils at gross media myths about the British cultural past—and, for this book, seems to have been stirred by Danny Boyle’s take on Britain’s cultural heritage which opened the 2012 Olympics. Boyle, who hails from Lancashire, placed the Industrial Revolution at the core of British identity, and this in itself was quite a subversive take on modern British history—leaving the Tudors and Stuarts out, as it were. Sandbrook relishes taking on the liberal Establishment—be they cosmopolitan ‘Europeans’ who write for, or read, The Guardian, or dreary scholars writing excruciating articles about the semiotics of Spice Girl lyrics (obviously this is a distillation not a direct accusation). It took the present reviewer a long time to discover what this huge but diffuse book is actually about. Sandbrook is more of a synthesist than an original scholar and he quickly abandons the only overtly-stated thesis of this book early on. The idea that Britain conquered the world with cotton in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, since the Second World War, has experienced industrial decline but a new era of conquest, by means of the export of pop culture, is entirely unconvincing. What it leaves out is that pop culture began in the United States c.1956 with Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and the somewhat more anodyne Bill Haley. As John Lennon put it so memorably: ‘Before Elvis there was nothing’. Sandbrook strains to link the country’s Victorian industrial heritage with the pop cultural world of the 1960s and 1970s (Part I)—though his case study of Tony Iommi, the guitarist of the 1970s heavy metal group Black Sabbath, who started his career as a sheet-metal worker (ch. 1), offers polemical support to his strained thesis. Had he strayed from his fascination with Birmingham and the West Midlands to explore the impact of de-industrialisation on the North West and the emergence of post-industrial music there (for example, the de-humanising electronic pop of Joy Division and New Order in the late 1970s and 1980s), he might have been more convincing

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