The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
of nineteenth-century female piety, was for the bulk of young people
abruptly dissolved. The change in print media was surpassed in speed and
pace by the arrival of new signifiers in other media. The rise of the pop
group, signalled by the release of the Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ in October
1962, introduced the pop concert and female adulation on an unprecedented
scale. Over the next three years, the pop record, the pop magazine, radical
fashion (including the miniskirt), pop art and recreational drug-use
combined to create an integrated cultural system which swept the young
people of Britain. Television was ambiguous, straddling the traditional
discursive world of the establishment and the conveyance of the new. Its
pop programmes (‘Ready Steady Go’ and ‘Top of the Pops’) fed ‘swinging
London’ to the nation, whilst its burgeoning youth comedy (‘That Was
the Week That Was’ and ‘Monty Python’) ridiculed ‘establishment’ values,
pomposity, politicians and Britain’s armed forces. 40 International telecommunications,
pioneered by the Telstar satellite in 1963, was by 1967
providing same-day coverage of the hippie ‘summer of love’ in California.
Between March and August of the following year, it provided coverage of
the major political touchstones of the decade: the Prague Spring, the
Cultural Revolution in China, the May revolution in Paris and other cities,
and, from America, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement
and the Democratic Convention riots in Chicago. British television
remained the representation of the establishment, yet even in its implied
criticism (of sexual promiscuity, drug culture and radical politics) it was
signalling profound discursive change.
Central to the signification power of all the media was the pop record.
Aided by over a dozen pirate radio stations which were active around
Britain’s shores between 1964 and 1967, the vinyl record in single and longplaying
formats displaced the printed word as the key method by which
young people formed their own discursive world. In part, as McLuhan
famously said, ‘the medium was the message’ – its own form being a signifier
of a discourse of a new irrationality. 41 In this regard, pop music signified
more trenchantly than any magazine a challenge to hegemonies of the establishment.
The discourse change was also within pop music. The Beatles
rose to fame in Hamburg and Liverpool playing mostly other people’s
songs, including American rock and ballads, dominated by lyrics about
dance (rock and roll and the twist) or about romance. As argued earlier in
this book, romance was the central area of interaction between religious
and secular narrative structures from the 1840s onwards. The Beatles
reflected the pop world generally in the early 1960s by sustaining this tradition
in popular song (which had stretched from the Victorian music hall
to the crooners of the 1950s). The lyrics of all of the 49 songs copyrighted
by the Beatles during 1963–4 were about boy-girl romance. Beatles lyrics
then changed radically, with romance dropping to 83 per cent of their 1965
lyrical output, 40 per cent of 1966 output, and a mere 5 per cent of 1967
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