TThe most revelatory experience I had this year occurred at Glastonbury on the Saturday night of the festival. I was in the big top, left field, which held 1,500 people. The afternoon begins with a panel discussion on politics, and the evening concludes with music. The penultimate attraction of the day was a quartet from Leeds called the English Teacher who performed for an hour and took my breath away. Not only because their music was full of ideas and creativity, but because it seemed to perfectly crystallize the American condition. country. As the performance progressed, the audience took it all in with glee. By the end, it felt like everyone had concluded that they were experiencing something truly special.
Their first album, This Could Be Texas, was released in April. The song isn’t a great feat of rhetoric or sloganeering, and it doesn’t have much to do with party politics. Its subject matter is too kaleidoscopic to be reduced to simple social or political commentary, and like the best musicians who capture the zeitgeist, The English Teacher deals with a wide variety of issues. A poetic, impressionistic, and often wonderfully strange language. The words written, sung and spoken by singer and lyricist Lily Fontaine can suggest snippets of conversation overheard at bus stops, pubs and cafes. It’s full of the feeling that your life has been turned upside down, but humans are somehow confused. Shoes were bought and broken in / A new pair breaks the levee… Can the river stop the levee from bursting? It’s not the rain’s fault, it’s the parliament’s / The country wasn’t prepared for the collapse… is in a bad condition/the place has a familiar feel to it. ”
Combined with music, her lyrics evoke a mixture of exhaustion, confusion, and periodic flashes of anger, giving a sense of a life somehow held together by the kindness of others. The allure comes from the fact that Fontaine is a black woman in a musical environment dominated by white men. What some of the songs convey particularly well is the sighing sadness of Albert Road, the depiction of life in a place of neglect, disregard, and malignancy. We are where we are / That’s why we can’t get very far. ”
Three weeks before Glastonbury, I continued to travel around the UK, mostly around the UK, trying to understand the impending general election and the mood of public opinion. While most media focused on the grim science of polling and pre-empting a Labor landslide, what people told me suggested it had little to do with how they actually felt. was. Mostly, I sensed the bitter rift that would soon become evident with Keir Starmer winning a supermajority in Parliament with the support of around one in five voters. It was a serious problem that no one thought would or could be solved. I wondered if anyone would actually go to the trouble of voting.
Looking back, much of what I heard was strikingly similar to Fontaine’s lyrics. In Birmingham, the city council has gone bankrupt, and people queuing for food parcels provided by the city’s central mosque said with bitter surprise what was happening. They are closing the library. Privatize all pools. There’s nothing left. ”An elderly man attending a weekly community meal in the ostensibly affluent town of Woking, Surrey, described the basics of daily life as follows: Please leave it at a pawn shop. Make money. ”A few hours later, I met a girls soccer team. One of the players answered my question with an almost desperate tone: We’ve had austerity and Brexit, but what does the future actually hold? …What is the UK going to stand for? ”
As well as melancholy, another of the English teachers’ strengths is their ability to conjure up the ways in which modern Britain fills everyday reality with sheer surreality. And as I was playing their songs while driving, it all reached a peak of crazy weirdness when I was sent to the Lincolnshire town of Boston, two days before Glastonbury started. 75% of voters supported leaving the EU. Now Richard Tice of Reform UK is fantasizing about his chances of ousting incumbent Conservative MPs. The place had a familiar feel to it. A hopelessly desolate town center and a simmering anger expressed in the slang of GB News and the Daily Mail: “We are no longer allowed to be British. We are not allowed to fly the flag.” Not done.”
In the nearby village of Swinehead, I attended a public meeting organized by Tice and former Conservative MP Ann Widecombe. Ann Widdecombe emerges from a reformed London taxi looking like a ghost from a Dickens story. All 25 people were there, listening to organizers rant about the wonders of “common sense” and how seemingly intractable problems can be instantly solved if power is won. Outside, when I answered my question about the impact of Brexit on local farmers with something bordering on wild nonsense, the co-founder of a purportedly anti-elite party said that if I were to get back into the swing of things, Told me that if I interfered, the interview would be “terminated.” . Ten days later, Theis was elected to parliament with a majority of just over 2,000 people. Voter turnout was 53%.
By the end of the summer, the riots that followed these senseless killings in Southport had not only ended the political aftermath of the election, but also brought an end to the political fallout of the modern far-right. provided a lesson. Tice and Nigel Farage and their friends befriend an American millionaire who plans to colonize Mars (shades of the English teacher’s song ‘No one can go to space’). Apparently aiming to funnel his wealth into the South Wales Valleys, South Yorkshire and the post-industrial Midlands. We seem stuck in an ever-bizarre replay of 2016, with a rebellious and bitterly cynical public and mainstream politicians seemingly unable to empathize. Meanwhile, millions of everyday lives align with what “This Could Be Texas” depicts.
In September, the album won the Mercury Prize. The judges praised the work for its “originality and individuality” and for its “lyrical work that combines surrealism and social observation.” I still play this game almost every day. Almost everything on record continues to perfectly capture the feeling of absolutely everything being in flux, always waiting for answers that never come. The song speaks volumes about the band’s brilliant talent and the troubled state of Britain, whose songs express our predicament as powerfully as any podcast, documentary or written work. If you want to understand everything that will intensify in 2025, this is a great place to start.
