The most famous song about Queen Elizabeth II is called God Save the Queen, and it is also the second most famous. The Sex Pistols ’decision to record and publish their anti-monarchist script in time for the Silver Jubilee was the brightest provocation of a career that consisted almost of brilliant provocations. The band had been playing the song under its original title, No Future, for a few months, but manager Malcolm McLaren said the phrase sounded “like an announcement for a bank”. Much better, he thought, to kidnap the national anthem, turn it upside down, and take a walk through the jubilee. What a coup.
Another thing that shares the success of the Sex Pistols with the national anthem is that it is not Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, but a symbol of the British state. For John oung tiget Lydon, the queen is not only synonymous with “the fascist regime,” but “not at all a human being.” The song soon moves away from the ruler to the ruled with resentment, “the flowers in the trash.” In 1977, Britain was so cramped, politically, socially, economically, that for many young people, the patriotic jubilee festivities were a bitter farce of nostalgia and denial, like a wrapper in a bomb place. As Jon Savage writes in England’s Dreaming: “Here was the definitive statement of pop’s eternal present, just as the masses were celebrating the past.”
The most detailed On Her Silver Jubilee by folk singer Leon Rosselson explains Savage’s point:
Because even though the pound may fall, even if the panic fills the air, even though the government may collapse and the cabinets almost bare. Although the stairs begin to ring and the rats begin to look at each other, she surrounds her subjects in a mystical unit everywhere, and we know we are safe while the babysitter is there.
Reissued once again in time for the platinum jubilee (as it was for the 2002 and 2007 celebrations respectively), God Save the Queen is guilty of the same nostalgia it criticizes: an unpleasant echo of an explosion a once glorious. So successful in 1977 that rumors of a dirty tricks campaign to keep it off the charts still linger, the Pistol Diatribe became a magnet for anyone who hated the jubilee and a target for those who hated it. they didn’t. The tabloids went crazy. Lydon claimed to have been stabbed by a gang of thugs who shouted, “We love our queen, you bastard!” However, 38 years later, the singer stated: “I didn’t say no either. I just don’t like the institution.” This abstract quality is present in almost every song about the queen. It’s a blurry red-white-and-blue that rarely focuses.
Irregular blows … Manic Street preachers outside Buckingham Palace in 1991. Photo: Martyn Goodacre / Getty Images
The Queen ascended the throne in 1952, the same year that the UK Top 40 was launched, but she has never been a big fan of pop. In a list of his 10 favorite songs published in the press in 2021, the only issue released during his reign was Sing by Gary Barlow and the Commonwealth Band with the Military Wives, chosen, perhaps, for reasons that they were not entirely related to musical quality. She enjoys Broadway musicals from the golden age and is, according to Lady Elizabeth Anson, “a fantastic dancer. She has a great rhythm.”
The composers recognize the paradox of the queen: the best known woman in the world but totally unknown.
The first song about the queen was Young Tiger’s 1953 extremely literal calypso I Was There (At the Coronation). She seemed “really divine.” But before the Sex Pistols, the monarch’s presence in pop was largely limited to fancy cameos. David Watts’ bitterly mediocre narrator of the Kinks murmurs that he has never met the queen. The Beatles’ Penny Lane firefighter keeps his portrait in his pocket, but so does anyone carrying cash, as Paul Weller sings at Jam’s Down at the Tube Station at midnight: “I’m looking for change and I’m taking the queen out. . ”
The songs about meeting the real person were happily ridiculous, like Paul McCartney’s silly love song, Her Majesty (“a very nice girl but she doesn’t have much to say”) or U-Roy’s comic toker fantasy, Chalice in the Palace: “And I’m coming down from the palace / I’m going to lick my chalice / I’ll bend it with your majesty. In BB King’s Better Not Look Down, a party-tired queen asks the venerable blues guitarist for advice: “Oh BB, sometimes it’s so hard to put things together / Can you tell me what you think I should do?”
When it comes to protesting, the total assault of the Sex Pistols remains the alpha and omega of anti-monarchist disgusts. Only Repeat by the Manic Street Preachers is approaching its ferocity, with its irregular blows to “dumb flag slag” and “Royal Khmer Rouge”; Royalty by the Exploited is too blunt to be taken seriously. Stone Roses’ Elizabeth My Dear lyrics may sound straightforward, but they’re written in a popular ballad. In Nowhere Fast of the Smiths, Morrissey fantasizes about doing nothing more treacherous than taking off his pants in front of Her Majesty. Storm the Palace in Catatonia is a punk Republican manifesto with a comic sensibility: “Turn it into a bar / Get them to work at Spar.”
‘Nothing Great About Britain’ … Slowthai in Glastonbury in 2019. Photo: Alicia Canter / The Guardian
The Queen is a 19th-century take on Billy Bragg’s Take Down the Union Jack. She’s a stingy parasite on Housemartin’s Flag Day and a quasi-mocking dictator in Crass’s Big A Little A. In the age of dirt, she resurfaced as the mocking embodiment of privilege and inequality in Dizze Rascal’s 2 Lighthouse (“I live on the street and she lives in order”) and Slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain, but when Slowthai directing an insult to arms in 2019, there was hardly a whisper of controversy. On the one hand, people like Prince Andrew have done such a thorough job of discrediting the monarchy from within that external attacks now look more like paintballs than hand grenades. The heretical power of the Sex Pistols is unrepeatable. On the other hand, Slowthai’s insult is not really addressed to her as an individual. There is no protest song.
The composers recognize the fundamental paradox of the queen: the best known woman in the world at the same time and totally unknown. It seems to have been sublimated to the demands of the institution. Rosselson sang “a glass cage around him and an absence in his eyes.” The lack of a deep understanding of the real person created room for imagination and dreams.
The biggest of the ghosts is The Queen Is Dead, which is both Johnny Marr’s favorite Morrissey lyrics and the Smiths’ four-cornered masterpiece, with each member firing at every cylinder. This unfathomably strange and, in its own way, majestic song opens with a sample of the war song Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty sung in the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room, which was already dated in this context. It is not only the monarch who has died, “the head in a sling”, but the whole country, with its “discouraged swamps” and the aroma of decay.
Watch the video for The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, directed by Derek Jarman
At the same time, there is a subversive thread of homoeroticism that derives, like the title of the song, from the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, and a wide vein of music-hall humor. As Michael Fagan did in 1982, Morrissey burst into Buckingham Palace. “I know you and you can’t sing,” the queen says in tone. “That’s nothing,” he replies. “You should hear me play the piano.”
All facets of young Morrissey coexist here, connected by nothing but the logic of dreams, the urgency of the band, and a silver thread of feedback. This is England, with all its sadness, absurdity, and disadvantaged defiance; the choke of privileges and hypocrisy, but also wit and romance. Morrissey described the royal family, without exception, as “magnificently, inexplicably, and unforgivably boring,” but The Queen Is Dead is just the opposite.
Badly Drawn Boy dreams of being married to the queen, but that doesn’t stop him from flirting with his next-door neighbor, Madonna.
The Smiths’ song cast a shadow as long as the Sex Pistols, and it’s a peculiar irony that singers on both sides embittered in nostalgic reactionaries. You can spot traces of Morrissey’s dark whim in This Is a Low, Blur’s Elegy for Britain in the form of an absurd shipping forecast: “The Queen, she’s turned around / jumped from Land’s End” . She is also there on Dirty Pretty Things ‘Tired of England, where she “sits on her throne of bingo cards and chicken bones,” and on Libertines’ Radio America, which finds her weeping over old movies over tea. in the afternoon at the palace. . He has a life in the shadows in the songs as a tragicomic symbol of national loss and decay: more victim than author.
‘Quasi-dictatorship’ … Steve Ignorant of Crass in 1981. Photo: Steve Rapport / Getty Images
Pet Shop Boys ’Dreaming of the Queen stands out as an unusually nuanced and poignant portrait. “I would have read that one of the most common dreams people share is for the queen to come to her house,” Neil Tennant explained. “Sometimes it’s a dream of anxiety and sometimes it’s a pleasant dream.” (Badly Drawn Boy dreams that he is married to her on You Were Right, but that doesn’t stop him from flirting with his next-door neighbor, Madonna.) In this scenario, Tennant weaves reflections on the AIDS crisis and the collapse of the marriage. of Princess Diana. This queen of the subconscious is a source of both empathy (“The queen said I’m horrified / Love seems like it will never last”) and awkward comedy (“Because she was naked / The old queen disapproved”). The highest figure of authority is also a matriarch saddened by the death of love. Of a couple of professed Republicans, the tenderness is surprising.
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