British culture was once open to 'messy kids' from secondary moderns. But if you want to make it in 21st century Britain, you'd best have a cut-glass accent and public school pedigree
Last week the actor Stephen McGann spoke out about how difficult it is for young people from working-class backgrounds to enter his profession. "Opportunities are closing down," he said in an interview with the Independent. "If you're a messy kid from a council estate today, I think the chances of you making it as a successful actor are a lot worse than they were."
McGann, 50, youngest of the family of acting brothers, grew up on the edge of Toxteth in Liverpool and was educated at a Catholic grammar school. "What counted for me and my brothers – and for mates of ours like David Morrissey and Ian Hart, all growing up in Dingle and Toxteth – was the real change in education," he said. "We had one shot and we made it: none of us would be actors if we hadn't gone to that school. That's where I fell in love with acting and that's why I'm here."
McGann was echoing opinions expressed by other prominent actors recently. Brian Cox told an interviewer: "I feel awful that young people don't have the opportunities that I had. It's like we've excluded a root element from cultural life, and I think that's very dangerous." And Julie Walters, in an interview with the Sunday Times, contrasted her youth with that of aspiring actors today. "Back then, it was still possible for a working-class kid like me to study drama because I got a grant, but the way things are now, there aren't going to be any working-class actors."
These sentiments resonate with me, not just because I come from a similar background and once made a similar trajectory – from grammar school to polytechnic to a job in the media – but because they also echo a view I have heard expressed lately in different ways by certain artists and musicians. It contends that popular culture is becoming increasingly gentrified, not just in the elitism that still holds sway in so-called highbrow forms like opera and classical music, but in the drift of society at large towards privilege and exclusion.
"I look at almost all the up-and-coming names and they're from the posh schools," said Walters. "Don't get me wrong … they're wonderful. It's just a shame those working-class kids aren't coming through. When I started, 30 years ago, it was the complete opposite."
Artists have also noted this sea change in our culture. When I interviewed Peter Doig last year he recalled his formative years in London's now dramatically gentrified King's Cross. "It was a different city then – you could easily find cheap places to live and studios to work in. We took all those things for granted and now they are gone. It does feel like you have to be wealthy in London now to have that kind of freedom. It's a shame. I think young artists need the time and space to waste time until they find a voice."
Society itself has altered too, and with it the cultural dynamic of Britain. The access that smart, creative, messy kids from council estates once had to polytechnics, universities and art colleges has been eroded by prohibitive college fees. We live in a Britain where the so-called democratisation of culture though digital technology has gone hand in hand with the increasing exclusion and disempowerment of the young and talented. As writer and pop historian, Jon Savage, whose illuminating documentary, Teenage, is released this week, noted recently: "It is a cruel irony that, just as commercialised youth culture seems everywhere – appealing to all ages, and making untold millions for media corporations – the demographic on which this was once based is being excluded from society. Without financial power or overt political affiliations, young people are too often ignored in this costive age."
Consider, too, the words of another successful British artist, Gary Hume, perhaps the most thoughtful, least extrovert of the YBA generation. "When I was a student at art college," he told me in a recent interview, "it was full of kids from all kinds of backgrounds, mainly misfits and outsiders. That is exactly why they were at art college. Art has become a respectable career path now, another professional option for the young and affluent. But what do all the wrong people do now? Where do they go – the misfits and the outsiders? If you can't do something meaningful through art because you can't afford to go to art college or even rent a studio, what happens to you?"
What is the cost, culturally, of their exclusion? Could it be that, for the first time since pop culture emerged in the 1950s, it too is being gentrified, even made elitist? You do not have to look far for the evidence – even the Daily Mail acknowledged it in 2010, citing an article in the now defunct music magazine, The Word, which calculated that more than 60% of that year's successful pop and rock acts were former public school pupils compared with just 1% 20 years ago.
The Mail followed up that feature with one headlined "From cricket to the catwalk to Westminster, public school accents are back: We reveal Britain's 50 most powerful posh people under 30." They included: actors Ben Barnes (educated at King's College School), Robert Pattinson (Harrodian School in west London) and Emma Watson (Oxford's Dragon School and Headington School); comedian Jack Whitehall (Marlborough College), model Poppy Delevingne ("Bedales-educated with royal connections"), playwright Polly Stenham (attended Wycombe Abbey and Rugby) and pop stars, Florence Welch (Alleyn's School in south-east London) and Marcus Mumford and Ben Lovett from Mumford & Sons (both educated at King's College School, Wimbledon).
To that privileged list you can now add successful young British actors including Harrow-schooled Benedict Cumberbatch and old Etonians Damian Lewis and Tom Hiddleston, pop singer Laura Marling and the newest supermodel, Cara Delevingne (Poppy's sister), all products of expensive public schools. Likewise, more established stars such as Chris Martin of Coldplay (Sherborne School, Dorset) and James Blunt – real name James Hillier Blount – Old Harrovian and former member of the Life Guards.
Pop culture has, of course, always had its share of often-credible posh performers, from the likes of Pink Floyd and Nick Drake in the late 60s to Radiohead in the 90s. But the dramatic increase suggests something has gone seriously askew. Pop music has always been a prescient form – the Beatles signalled the coming of Harold Wilson's Labour government, punk the rise of Thatcherism, and Britpop soundtracked the birth of New Labour – so it seems appropriate that the rise of posh in pop culture should chime with the ascendancy of the current Tory leadership. (David Cameron is an Old Etonian, George Osborne was educated at St Paul's. Both were members of Oxford's infamous Bullingdon Club alongside Eton-educated London mayor Boris Johnson.)
Pop culture, lest we forget, initially grew out of the postwar affluence that allowed working-class teenagers to express themselves though choice – the music they listened to, the clothes they wore, the styles and movements they spawned, whether mod, rocker or hippy – but it was also propelled by the progressive changes to educational access that began with the Education Act of 1944. The path from grammar school to art school, for instance, was one of the key determinants of great British pop music of the 60s and early 70s. It led to the meeting of minds that was John Lennon and Paul McCartney and spawned the proto-postmodern stylings of Roxy Music, one of the most adventurous and influential British art-rock groups ever. (Given Bryan Ferry's embrace of all things gentrified, and the emergence of his son, Otis, as an unapologetically reactionary spokesperson of the New Posh, it is hard to believe that he comes from a working-class background in the industrial north-east and that one of his father's jobs was looking after pit ponies at the local mine.) Neither the Beatles nor Roxy Music would have existed, never mind shaped pop culture, had there been prohibitive college fees.
When I worked for NME in the 80s and for style magazines like the Face and Arena in the early 90s, music and fashion were still the two places where smart and savvy working-class kids were given a chance to have a voice. Publishing and the media – including the liberal-left media – were run and staffed in the main by white public school or Oxbridge-educated men. (That has changed somewhat, but not nearly enough, in the interim.) Pop culture, to a degree, belonged to the chancers, the misfits, the outsiders, the feisty, often left-leaning mavericks and messy kids from housing estates who, by and large, created, shaped and wrote about it. Likewise, many of the seismic British pop-cultural moments – from 60s pop and rock through mod, punk, 2-Tone and acid house.
The world of pop culture has changed dramatically since then, becoming more fractured, atomised and less culturally important. If pop music is characterised by anything today it is a curious lack of meaning. "When I formed a rock group back in my teens," says Primal Scream vocalist Bobby Gillespie, "it really was all or nothing. It was literally my one chance to express myself or to resign myself to a life of drudgery in a factory. I'd heard the Sex Pistols and recognised immediately that their music was born of essentially working-class anger and frustration, and that in itself was empowering. When was the last time you heard music like that, music that said something so strongly with so much genuine and justified rage?"
Instead, it often seems like the pre-pop values of showbiz have returned in the shape of The X Factor and The Voice, and in the almost masochist escapism of posh soaps like Downton Abbey. If today's art, music and fashion often seem oddly estranged from any notion of political or social awareness, could it be because the kind of people who enter these arenas no longer have the kind of life experiences or desperate need to express themselves that Gillespie identified.
Where have all the wrong people gone – the working-class mavericks like Mark E Smith and John Lydon and Alexander McQueen? Where is the beautifully incandescent anger of the excluded that the Who or the Sex Pistols or the Specials once articulated? Does it still have a place in today's pop culture? Does it still have a meaning? One thing is for certain: if it does, it won't be voiced by Mumford & Sons.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/26/working-class-hero-posh-britain-public-school
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