From The Guardian's website – 'English musicians name the songs that they feel define Englishness':

Scott Wilkinson (Yan) of British Sea Power
Joe Meek: I Hear a New World
This is from the album of the same name that he made for shops to test new stereo equipment. It's a concept record, a voyage around an imaginary galaxy, somewhere between pop and strangeness. The modern equivalent would be something like Plone on Warp. Meek invented a lot of recording techniques and there's really nothing quite like him today. I didn't get into Meek until eight or nine years ago, when I had a job washing dishes. One of his main songwriting partners, Geoff Goddard, was washing dishes next to me and he'd tell stories about what they got up to. It captures an England that I don't wish I'd been around to experience - a time when you could get arrested for homosexual activities in a toilet. It's good that those days are gone. He was a paranoid man, though, probably why he shot his landlady and then himself straight after. He's buried somewhere in Gloucester. As his brother said: "He always did like sausages."

Kate Jackson of the Long Blondes
Suede: The Next Life
Englishness is all about the celebration of our little eccentricities. The Kinks knew this and were the benchmark for all to follow. But the first band that, as a teenage girl, I found noticeably different, noticeably English, were Suede. Suede's first album made me want to get on a National Express coach at 6am with a rucksack and my Walkman and live in a south London tower block squat with my unsuccessful photographer boyfriend. It doesn't conjure a quaint vision of Albion with cricket pitches and Sunday dinners but it glamorises the darker underbelly of life in the UK. Brett Anderson's lyrics seem a bit contrived now, but at the time, androgyny and dogs and Vauxhall Astras and nuclear skies felt like a very English response to the tedium of grunge.

Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne
Kate Bush: Wuthering Heights
I can't imagine this song going down well anywhere apart from England. Her stance is very quaint and English: the way she sings, her accent, the drama of it all. She had the audacity to put out a single that was going to stretch people's imaginations. I'm old enough to have heard it when it came out, and seeing her on Top of the Pops will be forever etched on my mind: it was a watercooler moment before they had watercoolers. Everyone talked about it at school the next day. In its style and atmosphere, it feels a bit late in the day, like it's from the hippy era. It's a bit of escapism from 1978 England. But it's a typically English thing to be so out there and taken on board by the general public. I've never met her, but funnily enough she's just moved down the road from me in Oxfordshire. Maybe I'll see her in the farm shop. She's a genuine eccentric.

James Rushent of Does It Offend You, Yeah?
The Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen
This is a song by English people for English people. It's a dangerous song and that's what England has always been good at - dangerous bands making dangerous music. English bands have ideas and manifestos, while American bands are more professional and play the game. For my generation, the Prodigy are the Pistols, but the Pistols and the Prodigy come from different Englands. The Pistols going on TV and saying "fuck" changed England! You can go on TV now and say "fuck" and no one cares. Touch wood, we'll make an impression in our time. I'm not saying we're full-on punks, but I'd like to think we freak a few people out, like the Mojo readers at the back going, "When are the band with guitars coming on?" As long as people leave scratching their heads, or pulling faces in disgust. That desire to make a statement and get a reaction, good or bad, is very punk, and very English.

Tom Sanders of Pete and the Pirates
The Smiths: Panic
The Smiths are such an English band. The lyrics to the song are very English, as is the video, which is bleak and dismal. But then, England is a dismal country. And Morrissey is a pretty dismal person. This song captures something that's been there since the 60s or 70s, the grimness of our towns. "Hang the blessed DJ" and "burn down the disco" - he's sick of seeing what's around him. It's funny that the eternal outsider should see his music become popular with communal drinkers in pubs. This song - not just the words and the way he sings them, but the music - has an Englishness about it. It's jaunty but sad. The England that Morrissey sings about is still relevant. In fact, the country's worse than ever. He reels off places that are grim - Birmingham, Dundee, Humberside, Carlisle - but I'm pretty disillusioned with all of England, the homogeneity of the high streets and the music. It's a bleak place. In fact, I'd rather live anywhere else.

Eliza Carthy
Half Man Half Biscuit: A Country Practice
This is from their album Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral. More than Anne Briggs, Ian Dury and Queen, who I'm a massive fan of, this makes me think of Englishness. It's incredibly wordy and conversational, with Nigel Blackwell talking over beats and making up almost nursery rhymes. In this song, Blackwell goes all over the country to pick apart English people at our basest: trying to be famous or making money living on the streets rearing fat cows. Then at the end, there's a little old lady in front of the TV watching the millennium fireworks. As Sting plays on the roof of the Barbican, she dies alone because there are no hospital beds for the poor and she's got no family. The song seems over-clever and flippant, but it's bitter and very funny, which is very English: pathos disguised by wit and emotional detachment. It's like a camera flying over the country, zooming in and out; like watching a film of England.

Seth Lakeman
Richard Thompson: Bee's Wing
It's an amazing story about "a laundry girl"; a great English working-class narrative that sums up a lot about England in the past, but it works for any era. It's timeless, despite the girl being a Gypsy, "running wild". It's a lovely story of heartfelt longing, capturing the romantic side of working-class England. Richard Thompson is very English in the way that he sings, and he's got a distinctively English way of playing guitar. I'm trying to keep this tradition alive. There a lot of people doing it: myself, Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy; a new generation of folk musicians exploding across the country, telling their own stories and narrating their own concerns.

Henry Dartnall of the Young Knives
Robert Wyatt: Shipbuilding
I can't imagine Americans writing a song like this. It has a grim beauty. It feels pessimistic in one breath and optimistic in another. I always thought Wyatt had written it and Elvis Costello had sung it, not vice versa. Wyatt's is such an English voice; he doesn't affect a mid-Atlantic accent at all. On the jazzy notes, he sings like a slightly broken old man. Subject matter aside - that war creates jobs for the unemployed - it's got that sort of broken glory feeling. I was four or five during the Falklands but I can imagine this song capturing the mood of the nation. It has a real resonance with our fading British empire.

Claire Teal
The Beatles: A Day in the Life
I was a geeky anorak who only listened to jazz and big bands, but I had a great clarinet teacher who played me stuff to shock me. When I was 10 he played me this and I hated it, but I couldn't really process the emotions. So he gave me a tape of it for my holiday to Mallorca and I grew to absolutely love it. I was born in 1973, but the song makes me think of 1967, of colourful costumes and Carnaby Street, and a time when things were so cool. The 50s had been a grim time of rationing and greyness, and then suddenly there was colour. It's incredible that only four years separate From Me to You and this. You can tell from the song that it's the time of Vietnam, drugs, freedom, sex and heightened political awareness. An extraordinary time to be a young person. And awful if you were old.

Dan Gillespie Sells of the Feeling
The Kinks: Waterloo Sunset
This is more about London than England, but London is all I know of England because that's where I grew up. When I was young, my dad took me to see Ray Davies at the Kentish Town Forum, and for the first time I realised these songs were written by a living human being. Because to me, Waterloo Sunset sat alongside Kumbaya and We Wish You a Merry Christmas as one of those songs that just existed. Davies was a Muswell Hill boy, and I was from Bounds Green, the suburb next door, so I feel a connection there. I've always found that sense of suburbanness interesting in his writing. The song romanticises the mundane. The English are so reserved, and there's a kind of shyness that can be quite charming, that beating-around-the-bush way of expressing emotions that makes the songwriting more realistic. Waterloo Sunset isn't about the hip city, it's about suburban kids coming to London. But it's tinged with melancholy: Davies conveys the sense of missing a moment almost as it's happening. This is a less DayGlo, more black-and-white and grainy version of Swinging London. It's a long way from Carnaby Street to Waterloo Station.

Chris Difford of Squeeze
The Small Faces: Lazy Sunday
I bought this when it came out. I was about 11. At the time, we were living on a council estate and we'd play along with our tennis rackets while all my friends' older brothers turned up on their Lambrettas. Sunday afternoon was a very English time: the family would get together and everyone would be outside on sunny days. There aren't that many shared events now. You go out to eat with one or two people, but that sort of community stuff happens less and less. So my memory of this song is tinged with sorrow and nostalgia for those were days when we'd stay up as late as possible because there was school the next day, and we'd play football in the garden. Sundays have never been the same since the licensing laws changed; only Christmas Day feels like a Sunday now. For it to feel like Sunday, the shops have got to be shut and the ice cream van's got to come round.

Barry Adamson
Tricky: Hell is Round the Corner
I get a sense of the innocence of an English childhood from Garry Sobers hitting sixes as Roy Harper's When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease plays. But on this song, things are getting a little bit messy and murky: an Englishman's home is his crackpipe. The whole of the album Maxinquaye resonates for me. Being of mixed race doesn't really afford you the luxury of hanging out in Cool Britannia. People like me have to find our own way through that territory. Today, it's sunny and I've been riding my bike listening to Cat Stevens's Matthew and Son and I swear my bike lifted a few feet, so being English and Jamaican can be OK. But on this track you get the poignancy and prophecy of an artist born out of a multiracial society. It says that England is a dark and murky place. It's like a portrait of English society by an artist who also does outsider art because of his situation; a beautiful observation by an artist in full flight.

No Nick Drake?
:confused: :confused:

Quite a few great songs on that list.

Voted for "A Day in the Life" - probably my favourite Beatles song (and that's saying something). Could just as well been "Wuthering Heights" though. Pure magic that tune, but perhaps more 'otherworldly' than 'english'?

I always thought The Kinks Autumn Almanac was the most english defining thing they ever did.

For years I thought that too 'till some wise man here corrected me. Anyway, I'm not english so not sure about voting.

not "Village Green Preservation Society"? obvious choice, I know.

I live that song.

I wouldnt know what "englishness" is, coz I'm not english. -_-

:devil:

Whatever Jam song that includes the line...its one more than youll get in Zaire or sth like that


Or perhaps: "youre all a bunch of cunts so fuck off.".whoever sang that one gets my vote

Penny Lane Beatles
Rusholme Ruffians Smiths
No Thugs in Our House XTC

I voted for Waterloo Sunset out of pity, but I will not withhold the truth from all of you poor, poor dentist deprived island bastards.

Englishness is defined by the song and video Safety Dance. It is well known to staticticians and social workers that midgetry and dwarfdom are more than just a medieval phenomena in England- it is a dirty secret that, even if the evacuation at Dunkirk had failed, the genetic mark would still hold queue. Wake up and smell the shit littered streets; all that prancing about was a bunch of faerie winking that you had no idea would be detected....

"An abstraction that has been forced on the Welsh" - R S Thomas

A very good list, hard to vote against any of them really....... I'll go for HMHB for two reasons:

A. It's a great song

B. If you want Englishness 'defined', Nigel Blackwell has been doing it consistently for 20 years.

How tf does this define englishness though?

Interesting
1960,s-Kinks,
1970,s-Pistols,
1980,s-Smiths,
At least, thats how it feels to me, each of them a good example of england at that time.
But my vote would go to Service by the Fall, walking through a dirty autumn street, kicking leaves. MES everytime for englishness.
(kinks) (smell the river and traffic)

Great song but it's more tongue in cheek - "God save donald duck, vaudeville and variety", obviously donald duck is US and vaudeville and variety very old ideas.

Where Autumn Almanac has lines like

"Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns
Cant compensate for lack of sun,

I like my football on a saturday,
Roast beef on sundays, all right."

and tellingly

"This is my street, and Im never gonna to leave it,
And Im always gonna to stay here
If I live to be ninety-nine,
cause all the people I meet
Seem to come from my street
And I cant get away,
Because its calling me, (come on home)
Hear it calling me, (come on home)"

The middle quote there reminds me of Saturdays Kids by The Jam, which is very British (I say british as at that time we were more uniform that we are now):

"Saturday's boys live life with insults,
Drink lots of beer and wait for half time results,
Afternoon tea in the light-a-bite - chat up the girls - they
dig it!
Saturday's girls work in Tesco's and Woolworths,
Wear cheap perfume 'cause its all they can afford,
Go to discos they drink Babycham talk to Jan - in bingo
accents."

It doesn't - but far more importantly, the bloke from British Arcade Fire (as they should more accurately be known) thinks it makes him sound clever.

Mind you, the comments on Panic are even more inane! It just goes to show, if you don't experience something in real time, you're never going to fully appreciate it, no matter how much you sincerely like it after the fact.

Yes, agree.

Panic is obviously musically a homage to TRex, and I do believe Morrissey wrote the lyrics after hearing the radio where some DJ followed a news story about a tragedy with a cheerful link to some inane record*

*It was Steve Wright, who followed a news report on Chernobyl with Wham's 'I'm Your Man'

TouTube short clip featuring "I Hear A New World"

Beeswing :wub:

Mothers Thinking Bath
http://stuartestell.co.uk/buy-cds/

You have put the cart before the horse there. An error of George Lamb style proportions.

As Hexen Definitive/Strife is not listed...

I don't agree with many of those choices but then one's definition if englishness is probably very subjective. I voted Shipbuilding, but my alternative list might look like this:

The Fall - English Scheme
Roy Harper - When an old cricketer leaves the crease
Pink Floyd - Fat Old Sun
The Beatles - Penny Lane
Nick Drake - At the chime of the city clock
XTC - Respectable Street
Genesis - Dancing with the moonlit knight
Caravan - Golf Girl
John Martyn - Spencer the Rover
Richard Thompson - 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
Lal Waterson - Red Wine Promises
Jethro Tull - Baker Street Muse

oh, loads really.

The British Arcade Fire blokey has misquoted wurzel transvestite wizard of sound Joe Meek's brother....it was on a documentary and goes like this:
"he was a good cook, Joe"
"what sort of thing could he cook?"
"sausages"

Infact the whole of Grotesque (and The Fall from 1977-1982).

robert wyatt? That's a relief. I almost thought the Guardian and i had synchronized.
i thought the beatles 'day in a life' was New York.

I dunno.... Stuff a lot of agit-pop-orientated poms wouldnt like probably (no offence, blah). Virginia Astley for that childhood feel. Noel Coward for the wonderful satire. Neil Innes for making sardonic sense of culturally saturating brit invasion pap and still making fun of it. Ian Curtis for not allowing us to be comfortable about the Brit misinterpretation of Californian gloom-trendiness for a second. Kirsty MacColl just for being. Brian Eno for getting it so wrong time after time, being a prat time after time, and still being Brian Eno. They're all pretty fcuking English to me.
I love those guys.

The lyrics mention Dublin and Dundee for fuck's sake!!! :banghead:

Voted for shipbuilding but really the most English song is Golden Hair by Syd Barrett is it not?

:lol: :o

Mike Oldfield--Big Brown Beastie, (horseback)?
Jethro Tull--Songs From The Woods. (resonating english vocal).

"two world wars
and one world cup
doo dah"

Although I've just remembered that the lyrics to Golden Hair are from a poem by James Joyce...
Still, it's Barrett's voice in this song which epitomises Englishness.

My pick would be 'Jerusalem' by The Fall.

Yup.

Oddly enough this is probably my favourite song at the moment. Very very beautiful. :wub:

Flanders & Swann anyone?

Blackberry Way - Move
In The Crowd - Jam
Grantchester Meadows - Pink Floyd

Another really Great singles band The Jam

"Thats Entertainment " and a Town Called Malice"

"Down in the Tube"


All speak about Englishness

I voted for The Kinks.