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Surprisingly, this hardly matters. The book becomes
fascinating, at least to this reader, once it puts the
Penguin Modern Classics back on the shelf and turns
on the stereo. In fact, Bracewell writes in such a way
to make Art seem a mere rehearsal for pop’s Great
Performance. Bracewell gives both time and energy to
what he clearly loves the best – his record collection.
What is most engaging about England Is Mine is
Bracewell’s insistence on treating pop music as an
explosive and pensive form, often most thoughtful precisely
at its most physical. By the time the Mods arrive,
Bracewell is really guzzling the gas. He casts them as
smart Modernists rather than the retro-obsessed, tentwearing,
hairdrier-riders of public imagination. The
Mods are asking what others are afraid to:
“The question, in fact, was a massive: ‘Who am I?’
The male sensibility in English pop, as it built its muscles
through Mod, was both a reaction against adolescent
(even teenage) conformity, and a belief that pop could
be a spiritual quest through the boredom and hostility
of modern English life in search of self-knowledge.”
Bracewell is right in there with his subject.
The gulf between academia and getting down with
The Kids is a whole language apart, which is why ‘quality’
journalism often lacks credibility. It requires deftness
to pull the trick without the cards all falling from
your sleeve. Bracewell manages it better than most.
He rarely attempts to score points with the cred police,
BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and
nor does he bring his laptop to the disco. Reynolds,
Hebdige and Marcus, on the other hand, those other
professors of pop, make their appeal to the eggheads. It
doesn’t often translate. When Bracewell’s taste and wit
compound, the results can be dee-liteful. Of The Cure
he says, “The soul is not so much bared as reduced to
wandering around in its dressing gown.”
By dealing with relatively unacknowledged areas
of ‘prole art’, the book proposes a convincing alternative
to the received canon, pop or otherwise. Mark E
Smith’s output is seen as an oeuvre and reverence is
paid to largely forgotten individuals like John Cooper
Clarke. As such, the approach fresh and fruitful. The
entirety doesn’t quite convince the jury, but the mixture
of art forms does have the advantage of comparing pop
with literature favourably, a rare admission.
There are a few factual errors, the most ironic of
which is accidentally renaming Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look
Back In Anger’ as ‘Sally Can Wait’. Noel Gallagher’s
tempering of the Angry Young Man could have become
the lynch pin in a discussion of Britpop’s conservatism
and the oversight is uncharacteristic of Bracewell’s
normal attentiveness.
Unfortunately, England Is Mine closes as weakly
as it began. The 90s are telescoped into a single
chapter. The passion that illuminates the finest parts
of the book has withered. The verdict is that the
needle has stuck, repeating the same phrase with
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