IT’S ODD HOW, in a country as obsessed with nostalgia and culture as Britain, we seem to have a blind spot for our own indigenous music. While the Americans love their bluegrass and the bhangra kids use traditional melodies and the Spanish have an interesting flamenco-fusion thing going on, British folk influences are still pretty much invisible in the British charts. Or, indeed, anywhere in Britain. As someone whose husband has run a modern folk club for the past three years, I can confirm, from a quick glance at our balance-sheet, that English folk music arouses little passion in the hearts of the young. Even if there’s a totally hot babe working the door, giving free Cadbury’s Mini Eggs to all who come in.
Of course in many ways, this is a positive thing. The British music scene is still so vibrant, still so busy processing new things, that it hasn’t felt the need to go back and reassess something so, well, pre-Beatles. And although a British take on the White Stripes’ aesthetic — something so authentically indigenous that, perversely, it sounds modern — would be fascinating, I personally don’t know if I’m ready for a Seven Nation Army version of All Around My Hat.
Of course, it’s not just English folk music that we’ve ignored in the giddy onrush to the future. Folk’s raucous, unrespectable step-aunt — music hall — is also an ostensibly forgotten era of British culture. It was, however, a vital area — arguably the moment when music finally found an urban format to mirror the seismic population shift from village to town. Whereas British music had previously been folk music dispensed in inns and at fairs in workday clothes, music hall was show business. It was fast, gaudy, by turns rabble-rousing, sentimental or lewd, and phenomenally popular.
Given the impact this largely forgotten movement has, it’s easy to see why the Bodleian Library feels justified in its current exhibition of music hall material. Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay: The British Music Hall Song, 1850-1920 opened this month — partially, one suspects, to give half the stuff an airing, lest it go musty.
The exhibition calls on a collection of over 15,000 items of sheet music, and one of the first things that hits you is how big the stars of the day were. The “saucy” Marie Lloyd, or “exquisite” male impersonator Vesta Tilley, appear on the covers, dressed up in their gaudy, rock’n’roll stage gear, and surrounded by slogans (“The London Idol”). On others, they might be surrounded by smaller pictures of themselves acting out dramatic scenes, waving from a departing train, or weeping. The effect is like a hybrid of advertising, cover art from modern pop singles, and the front page of Hello!, something overwhelmed by the drama and the exoticism of the performers’ lives.
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Of course, in some cases, their lives weren’t in the least dramatic or exotic — Vesta Tilley, despite being named after a match and spending her professional life serenading women while dressed as a man, led a serenely dull and respectable life, and ended her days as Lady de Frece.
Marie Lloyd, on the other hand, was a pretty transgressive figure. Her stage-show, primarily centred on the joys of innuendo, was deemed to be so offensive that the fabulously named Mrs Ormiston Chant, of the Purity Party, commanded an assessment of her by the equally fabulously named Vigilance Committee. Of course, performing her material completely straight, Lloyd gave the Committee no reason to sanction her, and they had to let her go free.
She then went on to perform a version of the tender ballad Come into the Garden, Maud “with such a wealth of gesture that it became obscene”. The scandalous Lloyd went on to take a lover 20 years younger than herself and tried to pass him off as her husband when she went to the States — only to be turned back at Ellis Island.
She eventually became such an unrespectable figure that when the first Royal Command Performance was put on in 1912, Lloyd was deliberately excluded, despite being the biggest star in the country. Piqued, she booked herself into the London Pavilion and printed posters which read “Every Performance By Marie Lloyd Is A Command Performance” and “By Order of the British Public”. After she died — in 1922, weakened by alcoholism — 50,000 people attended her funeral.
And so this, perhaps, indicates what music hall’s legacy is. It’s not the music — which never really made the leap to the new technologies of radio and recordings, and lives on only in the theatres, in pantomimes. No — music hall’s legacy “comes in”, as Marie Lloyd would have enjoyed saying, the precedents that it marked. The scale of its connection with its audience was wholly novel. In turn, the fortunes that its stars accrued allowed them a certain amount of autonomy and freedom — a particular boon for the women, who previously would either have to marry well or mistress well. And it confirmed one of modern pop’s key rules: it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.
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In many ways, popular music hasn’t moved on at all since Marie Lloyd performed Come into the Garden, Maud with such a welter of gesture that it became a Girls Aloud video.
But finally and perhaps most importantly, music hall established, right from the get-go, that no one you’d ever want to go down the pub with would ever do a Royal Command Performance.
Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-De-Ay is at the Bodleian Library until October 29 (01865 277216)