Mad Dogs and Englishness

Mad Dogs and Englishness connects English popular music with questions about English national identities, featuring essays that range across Bowie and Burial, PJ Harvey, Bishi and Tricky. The later years of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in cultural and political meanings of Englishness in ways that continue to resonate now. Pop music is simultaneously on the outside and inside of the ensuing debates. It can be used as a mode of commentary about how meanings of Englishness circulate socially. But it also produces those meanings, often underwriting claims about English national cultural distinctiveness and superiority. This book’s expert contributors use trans-national and trans-disciplinary perspectives to provide historical and contemporary commentaries about pop’s complex relationships with Englishness. Each chapter is based on original research, and the essays comprise the best single volume available on pop and the English imaginary.

With Brexit looming, and ongoing questions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ in relation to borders, immigration, migrant workers and national independence within the United Kingdom being asked, this book couldn’t be more timely., There’s an old, oft-used, truism that the arts help us make sense of the world in which we live. Never has the world needed such conduits to comprehension as we do today, as we grapple with the seemingly unthinkable reality of the post-Brexit United Kingdom standing separate from Europe, and the juggernaut that is the United States of America lying in the unpredictable hands of Donald Trump, a “surely it couldn’t happen” president. Within the arts, popular music functions as both a contemporaneous mirror to the society in which it was spawned and a potent agent for enlightenment, protest, and change. In Mad Dogs and Englishness an admirably broad and talented team of international scholars unpicks the cultural and political implications of being English, as represented through the always exciting lens of popular music. The “problem” of being English is tackled head-on in this watershed volume that ranges admirably free of disciplinary fences.

Lee Brooks, Mark Donnelly and Richard Mills work in the School of Arts and Humanities at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, UK. They have extensive experience of teaching courses on popular music cultures. They have also published on subjects such as Sixties Britain, The Beatles and Morrissey.