Punk, prog rock, and thatcherism in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters’ club

cultural affiliations and musical styles that the novel pursues its examination of 1970s British politics and society.

The Rotters’ Club recounts the experiences of a group of school friends (and some antagonists) who attend King William’s grammar school in the 1970s, a fictionalized representation of the real King Edward’s School in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham attended by Coe during the same decade. The novel follows the main three male characters – Benjamin Trotter, Philip Chase and Doug Anderton – and the two main female characters, Claire Newman and Cicely Boyd, as they become involved in classroom politics and intrigue, the school newspaper, music, and nascent sexual relationships. Alongside the main focus on these characters, the novel develops sub-narratives related to their parents and siblings, setting the coming-of-age stories against their parents’ marriages and sexual affairs, and the broader social and political changes of the 1970s. In terms of its commentary on specific political issues of the period the novel establishes two main inter-related contexts. Firstly, the exportation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland to mainland Britain has a dramatic impact on Benjamin’s sister Lois as her boyfriend Malcolm is just about to propose to her in the pub ‘The Tavern in the Town’ in central Birmingham on the evening of 21 November 1974 when it is blown up by an IRA bomb. Malcolm dies in the blast and although Lois survives relatively unscathed, she suffers a protracted period of PTSD. The novel also records examples of the anti-Irish backlash following the pub bombings. The second context is focused on Doug Anderton’s father, Bill, who is a shop steward at British Leyland’s Longbridge car factory. The 1970s, of course, was a decade of high industrial unrest in Britain, and the car industry suffered significantly during this period, with British Leyland being a company that was eventually subsumed into the Rover Group. Colin Trotter, Benjamin and Lois’s father, also works at Longbridge but as a member of the middle- management. Bill and Colin are initially linked by their sons’ friendship, but as industrial unrest increases at the car plant an ideological distance gradually develops between them.

The school, then, can be seen as a microcosm of the events being played out on the social and political scene more broadly and the young characters’ emotional and intellectual investment in subcultural ideologies, styles and aesthetics form a displacement of those discussions in a form that is immediate to their personal situation. In his ground-breaking book Profane Culture, originally published in 1978, Paul Willis offers an account of the way in which lived ideologies are played out in subcultures and how youth cultures can be seen as ‘lived through’ the mechanisms of youth alienation and oppression as they are expressed in affiliation to, or engagement with subcultures and the cultural forms they produce and experience. As Willis argues, ‘it is in these [subcultural] places where direct experience, ways of living, creative acts and penetrations […] redefine problems, break the stasis of meaning, and reset the possibilities somewhat for all of us’[Willis 2014: 2]. Willis’s approach has clear resonance with the way in which subcultural identities are presented in Coe’s novel, where musical knowledge, subcultural affiliation and creative engagement are shown to be crucial in terms of the main characters’ bildungsroman narratives. There are numerous examples in The Rotters’ Club where the characters’ emotions, relationships with others and attempts to find (however unconsciously) a place within the socio-political frameworks of 1970s British society are projected onto the experience of music: listening to it, playing it, arguing about it, and expressing affiliations with certain genres and modes.

The theme of attaching emotional and cultural identification and socio-political context to lived subcultural experience coalesces in the novel around the phrase and motif ‘The Very Maws of Doom’, the title of the second of the novel’s three main parts. This phrase is introduced by one of the novel’s secondary characters, Harding, who at the school’s Debating Society’s mock election in 1976 reads out a speech including the phrase based on a National Front leaflet. Harding’s irreverent parodies have previously become well recognized at the school but his parody of the right-wing rhetoric included in the leaflet has a particularly unsettling effect on the school audience. The following day, at the first band rehearsal of Gandalf’s Pikestaff, the prog rock band that Philip Chase and Ben Trotter have formed, Philip introduces his 32-minute prog rock masterpiece ‘Apotheosis of the Necromancer’, which attempts to narrate ‘the entire history of the universe from the moment of creation up until roughly, as far as I could see, the resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976’ [Coe 2002: 179]. The phrase, however, is taken up by Stubbs, the band’s singer, as a moment of fracture representative of mid-seventies cultural definitions of youth culture. As Doug explains: ‘Philip had chosen the wrong moment, historically, to make his personal bid for prog rock stardom’[Ibid.: 179‒

80]. When the drummer and guitarist in the band rebel against Philip’s prog pretensions and move into a ‘ferocious back beat in 4/4’, Stubbs starts to scream ‘The maws, The maws, the very maws of doom’ repeatedly. David Laing has noted how the vocalists in punk bands tend to emphasize ‘speech, recitative, chanting or wordless cries and mutterings’ as a way of disrupting the ‘musicality of singing’ thus avoiding the ‘contamination of the lyric message by the aesthetic pleasures offered by melody, harmony, pitch and so on’[Laing 2015: 70]. The insistence of the verbal phrase is heightened in the example from Coe’s novel in order to reject the escapism implicit in Philip’s musical epic. As Philip later laments, after the ascendency of punk: ‘These were desperate times for someone like him, whose heroes – specialists, to a man, in fifteen-minute instrumentals […] – had until recently commanded two-page features in the music press but could nowadays barely get themselves a recording contract’ [Coe 2002: 250].

There is, of course, rich comedy in this aspect of the text, but it also represents the way in which the psychological impact of underlying anxieties over political shifts in class relations in the adult world resurfaces in the forms and language of rock music, articulated in a cultural context for school kids who do not really understand the nuances of those ‘adult’ political contexts. This resonates with Phil Cohen’s point about subcultures playing out the anxieties of the parent culture in their own terms.

The moment referred to above from The Rotters’ Club reveals both something of the naïve and perhaps apolitical ideals of prog and the politically ambivalent nature of the punk rebellion, but it is also connected by Doug Anderton to a shift in the political climate in Britain from the continuation of a broad form of consensus politics to an ideological stand-off between left and right from the mid-seventies into the eighties and beyond. The evening after the disrupted band rehearsal Doug remembers seeing his trades union activist father have an edgy conversation with Benjamin’s father after the result of a byelection in which the Tories had won a landslide victory causing him to reflect later: ‘Meanwhile waiting in the wings was a new breed of Tory and these people meant business’[Ibid.: 181 ] . Later, this moment, Harding’s parody of right-wing rhetoric, and Philip Chase’s ambitions of producing a prog masterpiece are all connected with ‘the death of the socialist dream’, as Doug reflects:

This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen [Ibid.: 181] .

This section is indicative of a wistful lament for the loss of something in post-war British culture that the arrival of Thatcherism ushers in.21

Formally, Coe’s novel draws from both the complexity of prog rock and the punk aesthetic in its irreverent stitching together of different textual and material styles.2 In one sense, the typographical diversity of Coe’s novel represents the bricolage approach of punk with its raiding and subverting of images and styles from a broad range of cultural contexts. As Dick Hebdige writes:

The [punk] subculture was nothing if not consistent. There was a homological relation between the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format for the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the “soulless,” frantically driven music. The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they dressed – with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, interviews and love songs [Hebdige 1988: 144].

The Rotters’ Club details the appeal of this new rebellion to a number of characters most notably Harding and Doug, whose diverse political affiliations represent something of the anarchic but often contradictory ideological positions within the subculture. Punk, however, stands in the novel not so much as a structured expression of political resistance but more as an expression of destructive individualism. Richard Bradford, for example notes that Doug Anderton is ‘fascinated by punk, not because it is art but because it seems to him to distil a selfish disregard for collective or personal responsibility’[Bradford 2007: 44]. Doug, son of a senior shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the Longbridge car factory, represents the way in which the parent culture’s class politics is manifest through the attraction to a politically-informed punk. In one section, he attends a Clash gig in London, responding to the physical and later political content of the music and lyrics: ‘Doug had never heard these songs before but in the months and years to come they would become his closest friends: ‘Deny’, ‘London’s Burning’, ‘Janie Jones’. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of Joe Strummer shouting, screaming, singing howling into the microphone’[Coe 2002: 162]. As one of the text’s proleptic jumps into the future tells us, Doug becomes involved in Labour Party politics and the inspiration for this political direction is a combination of his family background with the political content of the punk subculture to which he is attracted at the moment he is developing his political identity.

Punk, as many commentators have noted, has a complex set of political (and apolitical) associations. Elizabeth Wilson has argued, ‘Punk spoke the anger of youth in a crumbling economy administered by out-of-touch politicians, and, insofar as nihilism is political, it was political; it was anti-establishment, it was about outrage, shock, violence, pornography, anarchy and self-destruction’ (emphasis in original) [Wilson 2000: 135]. However, punk evades a systematic ideology that maps the left-right political landscape of 1970s Britain. As Roger Sabin points out, punk’s ‘political ambiguity left ample space for right-wing interpretation’ [Sabin 1999: 199]. Neither version tells the full story, and it is certainly the case that punk appealed in different ways to different people with respect to the complexities of class politics of 1970s Britain. Dylan Clarke notes ‘Some punks went so far as to valorize anything mainstream society disliked, including rape and death camps, some punks slid into fascism’ [Clarke 2003: 226]. In Coe’s novel, this darker side of the punk subculture is represented by a number of characters, including Benjamin’s younger brother Paul who at one point invades a conversation between Benjamin and Philip in a rural setting which might promise ‘fine old English folksong’ with the opening lines of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’: I am an anti-Christ/I am an Anarchist’ in ‘an excruciatingly tuneless boy soprano’ [Coe 2002: 211]. This irritant interruption within the older boys cultural enclave punctures their idealistic escapism. Later, Paul is recorded as pursuing a similar disruptive attempt to Doug Anderton’s left-wing political idealism; Doug recalls an incident on Bonfire night during a strike at the Longbridge plant where Paul thrusts a sparkler in front of Doug’s face asking ‘What’s this’ and when it burns out laughs, ‘the end of the socialist dream’[Ibid.: 182]. Paul, then, is representative of what Doug describes as ‘a new breed of Tory’ whose rhetoric was fierce: it was anti-welfare, anti-community, anti-consensus’[Ibid., 181]. As the text moves forward, Paul is found to be attracted to the monetarism and emerging neo-conservative economics of Milton Friedman, and right-wing cultural journals and magazines such as of The Spectator [Ibid.: 272].

I would argue, then, that the novel stitches together the complexities of the structuring organization of prog rock, with the avant-garde cut-up bricolage effect of punk. It is in the identification of the two subcultural identities through which Coe narrativizes the ideological and political confrontations of the seventies and early eighties. Rather than a straightforward before and after – a modernist prog rock followed by a postmodernist punk – the novel presents an oscillation of the two forms and sentiments, as indeed is achieved in the combination of Benjamin and Philip, Doug and Harding as reflective of a series of binary oppositions in the text. The novel ends with a long stream of consciousness section, which sets out Benjamin’s positive hope for the future. Benjamin’s affirmative stream of consciousness is not the last word, but it is placed in such a way as to project its sentiments into the future, giving validity to its desire for a unified culture made up of disparate, mutually-enhancing elements, despite the imminent arrival of a divisive Thatcherism.