How to Be English Read Free Page B

at me.
I hope you can forgive me / Please forgive me.
I cannot say / express how sorry I am.
I apologise for … / I’d like to apologise for …
Please accept my (sincere) apologies.

THERE IS A strange paradox about the English global image: on the one hand it is about bucolic self-satisfaction and order (‘There’ll always be an England, while there’s a country lane’); the English are seen to exude tradition and stuffy decorum; and are portrayed in foreign films as stiff idiots or as psychopaths seeking global domination. Yet look at England: there’s an eighty per cent urban population and has been for a century. The English are forerunners in technology, from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet and are pre-eminent in advertising and youth culture.
    When the Beatles emerged from Liverpool with their first hit record in 1962, they embodied this mismatch between the image and reality of England more than anything else, before or since. There was the prime minister, an Edwardian buffer called Harold Macmillan, the changing of the guard, the old men who – as the poet John Betjeman put it – ‘never cheated, never doubted’. Then suddenly, there were these four young men with long hair, who took the hallowed American pop charts by storm, grasped the 1960s by the throat, dominating the psychedelic wave that followed and have been pasting their songs all over our memories ever since. They provided a backdrop to everyone’s lives during the late twentieth century, and way beyond England.
    The paradox goes deeper than that. John Lennon’s middle name was Winston, though he later swapped it for something more appropriate. Paul McCartney’s lyrics for ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ may have shown a delicate understanding of the England of their parents’ generation too – and the simple longing for ‘a cottage in the Isle of Wight / If it’s not too dear’ – but it was McCartney who wrote it; Lennon explained that he would ‘never write a song like that’.
    The band began as the Quarrymen and managed to test out a number of other names – the Blackjacks and Johnny and the Moondogs – before they settled on the Beatles, and Lennon’s friend and early band member Stuart Sutcliffe had his hair cut in the famous style on a trip to Hamburg with the band. They attracted the attention of local record-store owner Brian Epstein in 1962 and the recordings at Abbey Road Studio in London followed. By the autumn of 1963, hundreds of screaming fans greeted them at Heathrow Airport in the rain and Beatlemania had begun.
    The Fab Four (a phrase coined by their press officer Tony Barrow) – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – hit the American market in 1964 and it was in the USA in the summer of that year that the folk singer Bob Dylan introduced them to cannabis (their dentist secretly added LSD to their coffee the following year). It was an important cross-cultural moment. By the time the band broke up, just six years later, they had become the most famous and successful rock group in history, selling around 600 million records.
    Their cultural influence was immense, whether it was the creative flair of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967) or any of their later work, but between them they seem to have laid the foundation of a fusion of English and American culture that still resonates.
    Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 and Harrison died of cancer in 2001, though the two surviving members of the group continue to play their part in English life – McCartney playing at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert and Starr narrating
Thomas the Tank Engine
– another seminal cultural export from the English north-west.
    Beatles statistics:
    Number of Beatles albums sold worldwide: 600m
    Number of copies of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
sold in the UK: 4.5m
    Number