THE RECLAMATION BRITISH PRIDE

that made up the country, drawing influence from mixed-race two-tone groups of the 80s in the first image and the idea of quintessential Englishness of tea-parties and the countryside in the second. (Harris, 2004). These ideas, the intersection of British life, would subsequently be explored on Blur’s second and third albums. (Jones, 2023).

These examples show how the the UK indie scene at the time were trying to reclaim what was great about Britain, these players were fed up with how the English sensibilities of art-school music by the likes of Syd Barrett and The Kinks was lost and replaced by an Americanised worldview, so evident in grunge. The two aforementioned examples are some of the earliest examples of this reclamation (Jones, 2023). This shift in how the British national identity was viewed and the fact that these artists and journalists were proud of it could be said to have “perform(ed) an act of “magical recovery’ in that through its idealistic vision… it helps to rescue and revive an aspect of British cultural life which is gradually disappearing.” (Bennett, 1997). The narratives that came from the Britpop movement and its representation in the media is that this act of reclamation, saved the Union Jack from the far-right and became a representation of all the good things about England. (Hopkins, 2022) However, there is concern that it wasn’t a reclamation of pride for a nation but a way for ‘white, heterosexual males’ to assert their Englishness (Lueders, 2017). A significant counter argument against the reclamation shown in Blur’s British Image Number 1 is, “there’s no recognition that reducing the painful lived experiences of British minorities to props from a dressing up box might be problematic” (Hopkins, 2022). The impression is that in an industry that is mainly made up of straight white men, the stories and lived experiences of minorities were pushed aside, in order to live up to this media narrative of a great coming together.

It seems that this great coming together was less so about race and more-so about social class. Blur’s British Image series depicts the band as working class and upper class and the class fluidity this time period allowed. The feature by Select goes to the effort of heavily inferring they don’t want British pride to reflect the racist demeanour of the National Front and such organisations. But at what cost? ethnic minorities were not part of this reclamation, and the honest truth is, this sense of British pride is only seen retrospectively. In the long run, British pride fell out of touch quite quickly, whether it got corrupted by ‘lad culture’ or Tony Blair destroyed it when he invaded Iraq (Savidge, 2023).