The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_MqfF0WBsU

The whole album (part 1 / part 2 / full power) is saturated with Englishness.

This song is an outstanding example :

 

By way of example, Dr Wu (thanks) has posted Bedside manners are extra. Another track by Greenslade is "Catalan", which..... sounds, er, Catalan. ;-)

However. This does it for me if you're thinking "Phlegm". ;-)

Sorry, only some British-inspired American phlegm there.

One of my favorite obscure Brit prog things....

(Puh LEASE don't say "Britishness". Britain refers to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.)

I got a comment on here saying "Since you're English, you may not know what "Englishness" is all about. Which is slightly logically odd. 

The "Englishness" which prog rock tends to refer to is all about a vision of tea and scones and cricket, of long lazy summer days gone by. It's not got much to do with reality - you could argue that the Sex Pistols' God save the Queen was more indicative of what it was to be English in 1977.

If you all think we drink tea and live in castles, I'll have to instruct the butler to give you a damn good thrashing. ;-)

I'd actually contend that the sense of "English whimsy" referred to by a lot of prog rock sounds originated a few years earlier with psychedelia, notably Syd Barrett, early Floyd, etc. 

Next !!! Obviously a post on "Teutonia" where I refer to the Germans as being obsessed with sausages and oompah music. Obviously no Germans can point out that this is "not German" as they live there and are too close to the subject to be taken seriously. ;-) 

ENGLISH is

Pertaining to the single country of England

Just to re-quote - 

""I think it does reflect Englishness and it might be naturally hard to observe this for you as a native."

Prog rock tends to harken back to a romanticised and highly selective view of "Englishness" which probably echoes what was going on with a lot of music in the psychedelic era. Matter of fact, there was a BBC documentary on recently which hypothesised about that at great length. 

I had no idea that this would, to be honest, be popular overseas. It certainly obviously didn't reflect real life here for the vast majority of the urban population. 

There are some fantastic photos of life in the slums of Manchester here - 

http://www.manchesterconfidential.co.uk/news/shelter-nick-hedges-make-life-worth-living-manchester

- that's basically my childhood, to be honest. Cricket on the village green it certainly wasn't.

I think it also goes some way to explaining the demise of prog rock here in the UK. Someone comes onstage wearing an elf cape and sings stuff which has increasingly less relevance to you when you're working a three day week and the electricity goes off most of the time due to strikes..........

Now, I'm not trying to ruin a thread here, I'm trying to inject an interesting spinoff. Yes, a lot of prog rock paints a picture of an England which never existed, or existed for a few people only. It harkens back to a near non-existent golden age. I think it's just as interesting to discuss *why* as to put examples of the genre up. 

but I honestly don't recall what the article stressed but I'm betting it was 'English' ....pastoral styles and that whimsy found in the public schools and countryside.....but then not being 'English'.....I'm sure I'm missing the core theme anyway.

It's like me calling someone from, say, Texas a "Yank." That'd go down well. I don't think. ;-)

Similarly, call a Scotsman "English", see what happens. ;-)

Ah... but that's not what "phlegm" and "phlegmatic" means. I agree with Dave here and that's nothing to do with not being able to observe this in ourselves. English reserve is a façade that we construct from understatement and controlled sarcasm - natives can recognise the subtleties of this in each other that non-nationals misinterpret as unemotional stoicism. (For example the apparent laissez faire calm English response of "That's all right, don't worry about it" actually means the opposite :- "it is certainly not all right and if you don't apologise immediately then you'll soon be sorry..."). A nation that has been at war with practically every nation in the world (including ourselves) at some time in history can never be described as "peaceful and relaxed" 

SEbtP is undeniably English but it cannot be phlegmatic, only something capable of having an emotional response can be phlegmatic (or choleric, sanguine or melancholic). The person who wrote the music can be phlegmatic but what they produce can have any emotion they care to impart it with.

Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and the rise of NWOBHM is as English as Genesis etc; Their background reflects the urban situation (and some extent that great English obsession, Class) from which the bands originated. Similar things were happening in Detroit and Dusseldorf..

Yes, a tough urban upbringing in Manchester is equally 'English' to growing up in Buckinghamshire or the Cotswolds or Devon in the 1960's.. but only equally.. not everyone who grew up in a more rural situation owned a castle, was posh or went to private schools! life in the sticks could be pretty grim too if you were a farmworker in a tied cottage suddenly made unemployed and homeless! But yes there was pigeons cooing in the horse chestnut trees and cricket on the green but there was still deprivation and poverty..

Again, just as many people found reassurance, solace and escape in elements of progressive rock in the early mid 70's  during the power cuts and three day weeks as rejected it and pushed towards a more political 'keep it real' stance with punk. Neither were right or wrong as it turned out; just the two sides of the same coin.

Every country (certainly every European country) has its own music which reflects this mix of urban and rural, political realism and mystical, pastoral whimsy which reflects its own history and social/ ethnic mixes. Go and explore and enjoy- England, Britain.. its just a very small part of something much bigger.

Q:  What is the definition of a gentleman?

A:  Someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but chooses not to 

Perfectly quintessential unphlegmatic Englishnessnessness from the third (or possibly fourth, *shrug*) most well-known English Progressive Rock band you've possibly never heard of:

So Floydian and Floydesque are perfectly correct as Floyd is a noun and the resulting word is an adjective (describing word). Floydnesss is incorrect because Floyd is not an adjective. [I guess you could say Floydianness... if you really must]

(...I know what you are thinking...) English is a noun so why is Englishness not incorrect. Here 'English" is used as an adjective that means "of or pertaining to England, its inhabitants" ... 

As to why Beatlesque and not Beatleian - that's simply a matter of what sounds best or is easiest to say (I think that Floyd-esque is possibly used more that Floydian).

What I find ... irritating..... is when someone from a different culture comes on a thread and tells me what it is to be English, and then tells me I can't possibly know, as I'm English, and therefore can't see it. 

File under "patronising", cross file under "stupidity".

If this thread is just "let's all have a little club where we post songs which have some kind of proto- English connection to them", then that's just some boring game which is probably on a level of the "solve if u r genius" threads you see all over social media. Boring, boring, boring.

(As for the "lots of low class" in England, sh*tfire, man, WORKING class. "Low class" is an insult. And if you don't know the difference between "English" and "British" then what are you doing commenting on this thread ??????? )

I stuck my oar in here because (a) I find a lot of people telling me what it is to be English who don't have a clue and (b) there's a MUCH more interesting point here. 

Prog rock starts off by being brewed up by a number of privileged middle class kids at a selective number of universities. Their music is listened to by very worthy promoters and producers from an upper middle class background who then decide what the General Unwashed Public are going to hear. Prog rock picks up on a wistful yearning for childhood and bucolic themes of nature from the previous psychedelic era (although it does to an extent intermingle with it.) This is played to people who have a choice of Max Bygraves or a few other groups..... who generally live in housing stock which hasn't changed all that much since 1915. Remember, two world wars, rationing, near bankrupt country.

When prog comes out - late sixties - things are beginning to change in the UK. And the rest of the world, for that matter. Living standards are, for the first time since WW2, increasing. There is - across the world, a sense of the optimistic or possible. This is reflected in the music. People are more inclined to consider new forms of music (look at Krautrock in Germany: the art of the new and experimental replacing the older establishment Schlager music). So, at the time, prog rock becomes acceptable. It's fantasy, experiment and a yearning for a bucolic, mythical golden age which is certainly a bit nicer than living in a smoke blackened terraced house with a gasometer at the end of the road. 

What happens ? Well, after a while, the dream, which is still somewhat of a hippie / psychedelic dream, goes pretty sour in the UK, with increased strikes, social tension.... reality kicks in. And then you get a more angry, uptempo music replacing it which pretty much echoes what is going on in society. So. Is THAT actually "English" ? Is punk rock - a reflection of youth culture in the late 1970's - more reflective of being "English" than music created and distributed by a very few privileged people a few years before ? And, as Dean says, why on Earth do people outside of the UK think that the English are somehow bucolic, slow moving and ponderous ? 

So I find that a bit more of an interesting conversational subject than people telling me "what it is to be English and how I can't hear English themes in music because I'm English myself. " Do me a favour. 

It also completely overlooks the fact that English musicians have English influences and are playing in England. What do you expect them to sound like ? Chinese ????? Yes, people copied it. With - as we can see - no understanding whatsoever. 

By all means have fun posting "examples of Englishness in music" but please don't confuse it with *actually being English" unless you've been here and lived here. Otherwise I'll tell you all about your country and what it's like and then tell you you're wrong. 

You can't, even if you wanted too. 

It's also quite interesting to reflect that a lot of prog rock from the 60's and 70's has scenes of bucolic idyll in, which hadn't existed here since, well, about 1760 and the Industrial Revolution (remember, we're the first country to industrialise by a long way) - it's just weird. Of course, within a few years, the music changes, the references change, too.

I could just have easily put up "Forgotten Sons" by Marillion, which is all about getting your nuts shot off in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. That reflected a lot on the actual times, and was probably more about being English in the mid 80's than sipping tea by a cricket pitch lyrics in 1974. 

Please don't stop putting up threads about what you perceive as what it is to be "English" either, honestly, go right ahead because not doing so deprives of us some good music. Could we please not think that it's anything other than a cartoon version of being English, though ? ;-)

As Dave says, this discussion is a little more interesting and thought provoking than just posting examples that illustrate the original premiss, but are in fact misleading....

A fair assessment but not one I wholly agree with. England in the early 1970 was already beginning to lose the optimism that the middle of sixties represented (the white heat of technology ... or 1963 and all that), the post-flower-power psychedelic dream bubble had already burst. Prog Rock was as much a product of that as Punk was a few years later - 21st Century Schizoid Man is a perfect example of the rapidly fading optimism; with Dark Side of the Moon (ignoring the insanity subtext) we see modern life viewed with cynicism; Selling England By The Pound paints images in pastoral shades that are contrary to the stories they tell (all that fighting and stamping & shouting) ... and this is before we even start looking at Van der Graaf Generator.

Prog Rock came in many shades and hews some of it was a continuation out of psychedelia and hippiedom and some of it was a reaction to it, just as Krautrock was as much a reaction to western (Anglo/American) popular music as it was to Schlager music.

Britain is not England Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Britain is just England Scotland and wales. The term The United Kingdom refers to England Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, hence the correct term being: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

 

 

 

 

 

ps: thanks to whomever posted that Stackridge track.

Sean Trane, thanks, mate. Official prize for the most obscure prog rock band ever, surely. ;-)

The name Great Britain is actually the Greek term for the largest island in the island archipelago of the British Isles, the next largest island they called Little Britain ('mikris Brettanias') which we now call Ireland. Since this is an island grouping defined by geography and not an arbitrary scribbling of lines on a map drawn by kings, princes and generals the island of Ireland will always be British...

Albion is the older of the two names the Greeks gave it, though whether it was derived from the off-white cliffs of Dover or not is pure conjecture

 

 

Excellent musicianship for sure - but for my taste, too twee.

 

That record came out in 1977. I would have been nine. My experience of England, at the junior school I went to in Leeds, was a bit different. The question that if you were unlucky the big lads would ask you in the playground was whether you were a Mod, a Rocker or a Punk - the third element having been added about a year previously. And yeah, Leeds and Bradford were so massively behind the times that Mods vs. Rockers was still a thing there in the late seventies. The answer you gave to the question didn't really matter, though, it was just a pretext to thump you.

 

Of course your tribal musical identity at that age was passed down from older brothers, if you had them.  Apart from my mate Carl who idolised Elvis and wore a bootlace tie to school (1977 would turn out to be a bad year for him) I don't remember anyone having much interest in actual music beyond TOTP and what was on the radio.  Some lads had Northern Soul patches on their denim jackets, but that was an older brother thing again.  I didn't have one, but of my friends who did, most had gone punk. That didn't mean they'd thrown their Pink Floyd albums away, though - they weren't daft, after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom" rel="nofollow - The United Kingdom

and

http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/britain/britain.htm" rel="nofollow - Great Britain