Does having gone to public school, being a trust-funder etc make you more inclined to listen to 'alternative' music'? Why?

The stereotypes:

Public school kids = middle class, hence 'tasteful' choice of music Everywhere else = Plebs, no taste.

In reality there doesn't seem to be much difference (having been to both grammar and comprehensive schools), except *what* 'alternative' music is listened to. The grammar school choice was more Anglo- centric indie stuff, whereas at the comprehensive American (nu)metal was the firm favourite. Hmm...

Dunno about the link between private school/Trustafarians and "alternative music." Though I went to (American) public schools, I grew up in a town within spitting distance of 2 prestigious private schools (Lawrenceville Prep and Hun). The private school students' tastes in pop music really weren't that much different than that of us plebes, at least not during the late Eighties -- only differences were that the private school types tended to like "classic rock" (the Beatles, Pink Floyd, U2) or "safe" Eighties alternative (like the Cure, Depeche Mode, the Smiths) and tended to dislike "scumbag rock" (i.e., Aerosmith, Iron Maiden, Metallica) more than us public school plebes. And, for what it's worth, I can testify firsthand that most youngish lawyers (late twenties-early thirties) have awful and pedestrian taste in music generally (lotsa Dave Matthews fans amongst the JD set).

On the other hand, lotsa indie/alternative acts do seem to have college educations.

i went to a "public school" (by the english def'n) for 1 year after having been at a regular normal type school the rest of my hi-school yrs, & the guys at the posh school had even more entrenched classic- rock tastes in general than at the regular high school. all they listened to was led zep, the doors, the stones, pink floyd, blah blah blah. this was a fucking long time ago but i get the impression the same guys' sons are still out there listening to the same shit.

NO WAY

Another one who went to both

State school in coastal community empty in winter: criminal boys listened to Devo, the Pixies and the Violent Femmes, the Celibate Rifles, Sticky Filth. That place was literally wild! Nobody was contained, the coast was deserted, getting to friends houses and even school was decided by whether the tide was in or out, parents seemed to expect their children to die anyway

When I went to 'Creedence Clearwater Revival and Year of the Cat' girls school all I could think was that they knew NOTHING. It was like kindness ruled out musicality.

Interesting. The tastes in my suburban high school ran the gamut of all the genres (wavers, punks, soft rock mall rats, southern-fried, metalheads, hip-hoppers) save one, which seemed to be the preserve of the privately educated kids from boarding schools who I never met until college:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Grateful Dead. As in, 'Dad, can I borrow your BMW and Visa card? Time to keep on truckin'."

Firstly, indie-alt not always a sign of "diverse" musical taste - often the opposite of that, in fact. And Eminem, for example, just as likely to give 'young people' a sense of "rebellion" as rock music. Indie discourse often includes assumptions of superiority (over 'ignorant' deluded pop fans etc.) that could strike a chord with public schoolkids brought up to believe that one day they will be running the country.

Secondly, comprehensive schoolkids just as likely to feel 'isolated'/alienated - who said the middle classes had a monopoly on teen angst?

Enuff with the generalisations abt culture and taste!! There must be a sociology of ACCESS here! The diff between growing up in a family where teen can (to return many long ages to my own youth, for defamiliarity effect) afford to buy eg a DOUBLE ALB and play on their own, er, system, in their own room, or own a — excitment! — cassette-player and make tapes of older sib's records VS those who only hear music on a (little) radio.

Not nec. a diff between Public (=private, UK- side) school and Grammar school back then: but between Pub/Gram and Comprehensive? (for bemused US-ers and others outlanders, Comps were the non-selective High Schools: to get into Grammar you had to pass an aptitude exam, at 11...)

The indie-fication of punk was its gentrification: discuss. Because the leisure and ability to track down a whole sub-world of obscure vinyl was JUST NOT THERE if you lived in a world w/o a certain minimal level of disposable.

(For the record: Public School/private educ. but on scholarships: 12-16 I was the only kid in my whole school who got there by bus and/or walking. When I was 17 there was one other bus-kid. All the other little princelings got driven, bless 'em...)

(And somewhat to the point: I DIDN'T have a record player independent of the parental one till I went to college, or a tape player. My tape player was an obsolete second-hand reel-to-reel, which I'd bought for MUSIC- MAKING reasons: it had also to do duty as my substitute cassette player. )

Anyway, this isn't to insert attitude: not all my school-pals were jerks, and jerkishness didn't at all relate to parental wealth. But class-cultural variation does have an unavoidably material element. Pip pip!

The thing about public schoolkids - or the ones I knew anyway - is that the bulk of them are 5-10 years out of date. So when I went to boarding school - '86-'91 - basically nobody was into indie, but every school band was doing Pistols and Clash covers. Apparently the Smiths - reviled when I listened to them - were the height of fashion in '93-'94 and dance music finally hit in around '95 or so.

This was actually quite handy in creating a sense of otherness among those of us who were indie kids and had it not been for my continued addiction to pop radio I'd probably have become a terrible indie snob (I probably did anyway, actually).

But Andrew is totally right in that the bulk of the kids there did hold their opinions with a sense of effortless superiority - but there was also the diplomatic desire (Winchester being a civil service feed school in essence) to be on the winning side, so classic rock was massive. Floyd - Zep - Dylan. Dire Straits was fairly popular.

The really crucial thing about the listening habits at these places is that people like what they like with very little sense of engagement or context - when I edited the school magazine I ran a review which pointed out that some amateur band or other was playing "Anarchy In The UK" with apparently so sense of irony and the response was complete bafflement that anyone would even notice or think it an issue. The social force of pop, the tribalism etc., was completely absent. This might sound like some kind of Momus classless fantasyland but actually it made for rather pallid listening - a refusal to really get behind the music. I'm probably most down on it because I think some of it rubbed off on me.

Every time I mention school I feel a huge urge to say that I went there on a scholarship, which I did. But this time I thought, no, I won't say that cause it's not relevant. But Mark's legitimised doing so, phew.

Sociology-of-access: I had a one-deck tape player, which got upgraded some christmas or other to a two-deck. And I had a walkman. We had big communal living spaces and one of the richer kids would have a hi fi (in some cases with GASP a CD player). They would usually let other kids use it for the public playing of music though they would have right of veto. So you spent most of your time listening to other people's music.

To anyone here familiar with Western Canada, I'd like to cite the example of the University of British Columbia, a fairly democratic institution - whatever the background of the student, from rich West Van kids to rural hicks (i.e. myself) and recently arrived Asian immigrants, they (in the late 80s-early 90s anyway) were guaranteed to have the worst, dullest taste of anybody in the world. The sight of newly-freed rebellious youth celebrating their emancipation by partying to Seal, Simply Red and Boston was profoundly disillusioning. It was a shaming moment for me, as I had previously ridiculed the dirt-farmer's sons I grew up with for their taste for Motley Crue and Judas Priest - which suddenly sounded like the best music in the world, once I had arrived at this sinister yuppie hatchery calling itself a university.

Suzy: re US boarding school kids and hippy music: absolutely. What a fascinating question, since I've pretty much encountered the full range of class / taste configurations. My impression had always been that US indie rock was a middle-class thing, but not a boarding school type of thing (see hippies above). You do get the odd working-class person, but I think the exposure is through college radio - a lot of people in bands worked at college radio stations.

Working-class kids: it's actually more complicated than stereotypes would have you believe. Some are metalheads, many if not most are into rap, at least where I came from, and those are black AND white and Latino kids. When I was growing up, I don't think people gave a rat's ass what I listened to: I just couldn't afford that many records back then. Also, the whole thing was complicated by the issue of ethnic diversity: black kids, R+B; Latinos and Italians liked dance music, Eastern Europeans tended towards hard rock, and Irish kids seemed to like pop and/or new wavey things. At least that's how it was where I grew up. As I said, indie seems to be mostly a middle-class thing, but I didn't sense any narrow- mindedness about music when I was growing up. No one told me not to listen to certain things because it wasn't "working-class" enough. In fact, a few years ago, I was surprised to read that a number of Chicago avantistas were from my prole-ish stomping ground, the south suburbs. Also interesting: there *is* a "no bullshit", anti- "pretension" reactionary attitude in Chicago, but IME, it actually tends to be a north and west suburban thing, and those suburbs are squarely middle class. It used to piss me off, because I had a lot of friends who felt they were being more "populist" because of it. I suspect it may be that many working-class people here are more "ethnic" - first and second-generation Americans, and therefore less brainwashed with all that bullshit about Midwesterners being more "honest" and less "arty farty" and all that. In the eighties, the standard insult directed toward alterna-kids was "Euro-fag" or "Euro-trash". Well, if you *are* more "Euro", I guess you're more likely to identify with cosmopolitan elements in music, and less with "heartland" sentiments. At least that's how *I* felt.

Sociology-of-access, I'm guessing, more relevant in the 70s (when it was still quite common for middle-class parents to ban *all* pop music unequivocally) than now. But the whole nature of public schools (though probably more the Winchesters and Etons than what used to be called the "minor public schools" and ex-grammars) is to impose a certain official culture, an intense pressure to succeed and conform, and pop as ILM cherishes it can't really be fitted into that. This can lead people in various directions: the direction of the effortless superiority of those classic rock fans at WinColl 86- 91, or the self-consciously "rebellious" snottishness of yer 14-year- old Limp Bizkit or Eminem fan, or the direction that Tom took - remaining a pop fan and / or indiekid, but some of the passionlessness rubbing off. Of course there's also the cliche of the public school Romantic (cf Nick Drake, Marlborough College 62-67 or thereabouts) which I'm sure a few people in those schools aspire to.

Tom's mention of pop radio reminds me that Winchester was, I think, two and a half years behind Leatherhead getting Radio One Eff! Emm! in that period (London & SE = Nov 1987, Hampshire = May 1990), out of which I can draw some *very* cheap sociology about distance and separation from what you loved, getting an inferior quality of reproduction.

Mark: can you fill me in on the truism (or otherwise) of the pre-punk 70s cliche of middle-class: prog / working-class: metal? I can see how a lot of prog, with its aspiration to traditional ideas of "high culture", would have been a music people listened to in public schools partially because of the pressure to be on the winning side, to be very consciously and arrogantly "intellectual" and superior. Also prog seems a very passionless, studied music and so would fit into the absence of pop as social force / tribalism that Tom mentions.

Were you at Shrewsbury School? Can't avoid thinking of Private Eye every time I think of that particular seat of learning ...

And, of course, it brings on liking Travis, hating Destiny's Child, and taking your band name from "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen" :).

(sorry Tom)

This thread has reminded me of the upper-class hippie (or, as we called that sort of person at my undergrad college, the Trustafarian). I also think that it's interesting that that sort of "hippiedom" flourished as other rebellious subcultures were coming up -- whether it be punk (I was a teenager during the Eighties when it was still rebellious and "weird" to listen to Minor Threat or Black Flag), rap, or even metal. Alongside of what Tom was saying about the British public schoolers being five years behind the times (though over here it seems more like the private schoolers are at least ten years behind the curve), it seems more a reactionary pose. And being a Trustafarian would certainly help for certain aspects of the Deadhead lifestyle (e.g., following the band around the country with other Deadheads with no visible means of support).

As for the ethnicity thing -- well, it does seem that I have a more hard-rock liking than some on ILM though I never thought of that in terms of my being of Eastern European ancestry. The only specifically ethnic sorta things rammed down my throat as a kid was classical music, particularly Chopin and piano music (though no mention was ever made of the likes of Penderecki and Górecki when I was slogging through my childhood music lessons). There are lots of young Russian immigrants where I live, and a lot of them seem to like the same sort of music other American teens like these days (Eminem, nu-metal, etc.) -- then again, as someone once said, never trust a Polack when he's talking about Russians :-)

Comments on "whole ethos of public schools" - Robin, you have an obvious fascination with British public schools (fair enough, they are fascinating things) but I'm not quite sure you understand them. "Intense pressure" isn't there, overtly, or wasn't at Winchester.

The point is that generalising about public schools is like generalising about, say, Greek city-states. These are institutions with between two and six hundred years of history and traditions and the one thing they have in common is that they operate as separately as possible from the rest of the world, including other schools. They have different traditions, outlooks, ethoses (what is the correct plural of "ethos"?), even languages, and the effect they have on the people who go there is vastly more subtle and more profound than a simple formula of "pressure to conform".

Sorry to go on about a tangential issue to the thread but a) as you know Robin I'm wary about other people making assumptions about what is after all my personal history, b) this has been on my mind lately for various reasons.

The only absolute statement we seem to be able to make is that (in the UK, at least) non-comprehensives are very odd places. I'd agree. I don't mean this to sound snobby, but I also find the most interesting people I know (bar 2) didn't go to a comprehensive. The people at Chadwell High were *painfully* ordinary.

Tom - you went to Winchester! You didn't go to Pilgrims, across the road, as well did you? (Sorry to turn this into an ex public school boy forum). It has to be said, I know people at Wichester, (they wouldn't let me in!) and they're all still about 5 years out of date. Also, surreally, never let your old teachers give you too much to drink, it fucks youm up way too much!

Bill

Tom: you're right about the institutional: in fact the stuff about internal language, running like a city-state, operating separately from everyone / everything else is really what I was trying to say, and certainly the impression I got when I looked at official and unofficial WinColl websites. That internal outlook also seemed to be there, probably to as great an extent as it can be in the state sector, in some of the grammar schools where some of my friends went in the Dartford / Gravesend area 10 years ago, at least one of which had a history going back further than many public schools. I think I put down the phrase "pressure to conform" because it was the simplest way of expressing something I knew fully to be much more complicated.

I'm honestly not sure that I'll ever understand public schools as well as you, which is why I value what you say on the matter. I suppose my fascination with them came from the fact that I've always opposed their existence ... and you have to get to know your enemy before you can really present an articulate argument against it.

Tom: "ethodes" (that's a total guess, actually, but the "correct" pl. of octopus = octopodes)

Robin: "Can you fill me in on the truism (or otherwise) of the pre-punk 70s cliche of middle-class: prog /working-class: metal?" & "traditional ideas of 'high culture'" & "pressure to be on the winning side/ arrogantly "intellectual" and superior"

Useful question: I'm gonna take some of it onto Punk-Never-Happened later. But for now: punk's GREAT ACHIEVEMENT was to invent and impose strong-yet-wrong cliches on its immediate past, I think. Prior to punk there was NO winning side withinrock: it was all-of-rock vs all-the-rest (give or take Creem and Frendz and a few underground hold-outs). (UK) Punk sucked us-vs-them INTO rock. At my school — and I think this is micro-specific to where I was — the born 58/9-ers were glam kids and drop- outs; 60-61 (= me) no clear allegiance; 62/63 proggers. But the trend-making kids in the progger age-range were ALL younger brothers of glam-kids, and — I think — somewhat protesting in a proto-Thatcherite way the sense of life-wastage the glam-kids (who were v.arty, druggy and wild) projected. The punk faction arose very clearly in the unaligned age range, but was a minority (me&Chris&Phil, Anthony and Pete the Tool sorta, plus another kid whose name I've completely forgotten who had an O-level in Technical Drawing when he arrived: very exotic!! We had no idea what to make of that!!) against a majority in that range who WEREN'T MUCH BOTHERED BY MUSIC AT ALL. (The "punk faction" being incapable of solidarity by defn, I spent more time with (a) the [older] glamkids, cuz they were "dangerous", and treated me as their pet, and (b) the [younger] proggers, because one of them was totally cute and my first live pash.

Prog is/was NOT bland. Have you ever HEARD Brain Salad Surgery or Tarkus? Horrible horrible horrible noise: Merzbow for blued-up nutters. Topographic Oceans = endless acres of weird improv shit, prettiness emerging from dreary sludge. OK Barclay James Harvest were bland, and Genesis WENT bland, but the other chief median tastes were DEEP PURPLE and RAINBOW, as metal as metal gets. GENESIS and PURPLE: that was what most liked, ie one foot totally on either side of the cliche.

Prog = trad ideas of high culture? This genuinely makes no sense to me. I mean, I recognise it as a sociological distillate of punk cliche, but it just ain't there in the music. Trad High Culture = Rick Wakeman's Cans & Brahms? *Kif-style sigh..*

Middlebrow works for Barclay James Harvest and *some* Genesis: but a lot of prog is way too dotty to fit this, either.

Shrewsbury: yup, and I just about managed to bite back a remark abt did you think I was one of the ignorant oaves who only get into WELLINGTON (the only poss. local Public School alternative for me to be a day-kid at): a *very* catty-snobby kneejerk response lying dormant yet toxic somewhere in me lo! these 25 years... This being a school where no less than six of the TEACHERS ran away to join Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's in Oregon in 1979!! (And from which some 30 kids had been expelled in c.1969 for unnatural practices: ie male-on-male dorm orgies!! I had not yet arrived alas: plus was day-kid anyway...)

Tom is correct: you just can't generalise. I didn't feel under pressure to conform AT ALL: but then a Scholarship Kid is coinage for a second-rank private school. If I get a good Oxbridge place, it burnishes THEIR cv. I was just left alone, basically.

Today of course the proggers wd all swear to be have been punkers. Cz punk invetned the idea of the "winning side" in order to BE THAT WINNING SIDE. But Chris the Sabbaf fan — whose father was probably the richest parent of all the day-kids — was the one who actually bought "Oh! Bondage!" and brought it to school, and Phil and me were the ones who actually played it.

Wicked Phil = dead of drink and mayhem (most gorgeous smile I've ever known). Sabbaf Chris = farmer in Oxfordshire (well, last time I heard, which was many years ago). Me = mark s. (THIS IS TRUE!!)

Sorry, didnt make myself clear - languages traditions etc. different not only from outside world but from *each other*. Winchester and Eton for instance are as different as Athens and Sparta, would have been the point I was trying to make, but clearly both Athens + Sparta are more similar to one another than to any modern city, so it is possible to generalise a little bit about public vs state schools.

(Although you can't really get much further than just following Tarden's comments about institutionalisation in the band-dynamics thread, which gives a broad schema for what life in a boarding school is like.)

If I were you I wouldn't spend much time looking at those websites, too.

Sorry: Shrewsbury (my school) was the school with the Bagwash ppl and the orgies. Wellington was just a kind of long-stay remedial hostel where dimwit army teens stayed while their parents fucked up the Great Abroad. (Can he get away with that?)

One thing that was of course beaten into us as, er, fags: saying SORRY a lot.

"Does having gone to public school, being a trust-funder etc make you more inclined to listen to 'alternative' music'? Why? "

Well I went to an inner-city comprehensive, and during my High School years (1983 - 1989) the music of choice for those that wore their musical tastes on their sleeve was mostly Hip-Hop and Gangsta Rap.

There was quite a sizable tribal subculture going on which involved a) listening to pirate radio - in class, on a walkman hidden below the desk with one headphone stuck furtively in an ear, b) graffiti, and c) wearing designer sports clothing (this was the Eighties and labels had become extremely important to tribal conformity. God help those who turned up to school wearing "immoes' - cheap imitations of name brands, normally bought from market stalls).

"Because the leisure and ability to track down a whole sub-world of obscure vinyl was JUST NOT THERE if you lived in a world w/o a certain minimal level of disposable."

I wouldn't say so. It was a case of the harder, the nastier and the more cutting-edge the Gangsta Rap the better and therefore obviously not readily available in the major record stores. And though not your 'typical' vinyl-sniffing, alt music geek, the Hip- Hop headz still had that sense of hipper-than-thou about them. I must also say that (outwardly) ostentatious signs of wealth and one- upmanship are depressingly integral parts of working class culture.

During '88 there was a shift however. A lot of the white kids who were into Rap seemed to flock, as one, to Acid House (perhaps I should point out that the percentage of white kids was around about 65 - 70%). The rave scene, Ecstasy and that bloody 'smiley' symbol culture hit big during my last years at school. I was in the 6th form '88 - '89, and in with a tight band of Indie kids into The Smiths, New Order, My Bloody Valentine, The Wedding Present, Mighty Lemon Drops, The Sugarcubes, Pixies, Throwing Muses and The Housemartins (guilty!)etc. We were outnumbered however. That sodding Smiley face began to appear everywhere. One of my lasting impressions of the place is on one blistering hot day a load of lads, stripped to the waist, standing on the bike shed roof, 'ghetto blaster' blaring out House music with them all jabbing their hands in the air, wailing: "Aciiieeeeed! Aciiieeeeed! Aciiieeeeed!"

My girlfriend at the time went to a dead, dead posh school in Malvern. She and a lot of her school friends shared my indie-indie tastes, though they favoured the Goth-lite sounds of All About Eve and The Mission (puke!). But from what I was told and what I could make out the general musical tastes at the school seemed to be fairly mainstream: a lot of chart pop - esp boybands like Curiosity Killed the Cat and A-Ha - and soft rock: Bon Jovi and MeatLoaf seemed to be strangely popular.

Obviously I never went there, but as the sort of rigid tribalism that was so all-pervasive at my school was nowhere to be seen at the more well-to-do school my girlfreind attended, so neither was the interest in more outre forms of music. Though whether this was because it was a private school or even an all-girls school, I really don't know.

Robin - "superiority" incidentally not to outside world (which was irrelevant) but internally and to everything. A kind of James Dean attitude - "what are you superior to?" "what have you got?", the sense of being able to out-think any position. This may well not be true of places other than Winchester, which was as I say a civil service/diplomacy feed school and in those careers sophistry is a survival skill. (the single most crucial fact about its outlook is that it 'only' produced one Prime Minister!)

Mark brings up an interesting thing re. prog (which I still know v.little about) - not aspiring to join high culture (the Beatles- Schubert thing much more an example of that, though reversed) but perhaps aspiring to replace it? Which is the attitude of the underground now, in a lot of cases: this stuff is art-in-exile, held back by its blood ties with the horrid mainstream.

DavidM writes: "I must also say that (outwardly) ostentatious signs of wealth and one- upmanship are depressingly integral parts of working class culture."

OK, good point, yet this was still very far from generally so in the early 70s, at least outside what you might call the big-city "mod" and/or "clubbing" strongholds. A good way to get a sense of what most of the UKworld looked or felt like is to watch a movie like ON THE BUSES, not for Hilarious Comedy Action of foreground, but for the locations and real-time backdrops, shopfronts, ordinary clothes, the shapes of cars: just incredibly oppressive pervasive shabby blinkered dreariness. Dominant "design" colour = shit-brown. Style = nowhere. (But there *was* a wide-spread, often quite hostile street anti-style unisex uniform for "soulboys/girls": star jumpers and tanktops, high-waisters, a kind of knobby platform shoe whose actual name escapes me, except that it looked like a built-up boot for someone with a deformed foot... )

I played rugby to a high-ish standard at school, and got the crap kicked out of me on well-manicured fields the length and breadth of England, (including Winchester, as I recall). Anyway, I remember playing after a game somewhere or other, one of the opposition's thuggish props was wearing a Joy Div t-shirt, we got talking and had a great chat about JD, Factory recds etc. I think he ate a lightbulb later on.

I just remembered two books worth peeking at for those interested in the concept of class affecting consumption of music which I used for a thesis on teen subcultures in college. They are:

Learning to Labour by Paul Willis (waaaay out of print) Sound Effects by Simon Frith

LTL focussed on a school in the North, Frith's work is more general. Both of these are concerned with 1970's patterns, eg. working class kids did the charts; middle-class kids did LP's with lots of prog. I recall a quote from one sniffy, posh longhair who dissed T. Rex as 'commercial' compared to his beloved Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Fun bit of trivia which Mark Sinker hasn't mentioned yet: John Peel went to Shrewsbury too. He was not on a scholarship.

Kerry: I always thought the whole John Hughes movie OST and Wax Trax thing ruled Chicago, but most of the people I knew from there came from places like Lake Forest and Winnetka, so, well, duhhhh on me. In Minneapolis the only weird music coincidences I ever noticed were the Asian kids into synth/Depeche Mode-type stuff and the more working- class kids from South Mpls. who liked skate-thrash all-ages show hardcore/SST groups. *Really* rich kids tended to have shallower tastes, they'd know things like a group's most famous song but didn't care. They were sort of freaked out by an obsessive interest in anything and occasionally cast aspersions on their more dedicated peers.

But mostly I noticed what people liked had more to do with intelligence than social backgrounds. The vast bulk of those with specialised/ expert/indie taste in music tended to be honours students or what your mother would call 'artsy'. Also, I never had a dime of pocket money growing up but all earnings from jobs, etc. were plowed into expensive imports and NOBODY ever tried to diminish girls on the scene; too many strong and supportive females around to make that an option. It was also understood that the music thing was not a lifestyle, it was one's life. I think I was really lucky to grow up around those people!

Tom: I haven't looked at any of the WinColl sites for months, but I went through a phase of visiting them regularly ***to see what the enemy was up to*** (the phrase of a leftish teacher at my comprehensive school when asked why she occasionally read the Daily Telegraph). I think you're right about superiority *over everything* and not *caring* about the outside world: I assume the thing about Winchester producing "only" one Prime Minister is to contrast it with Eton's innumerable PMs? (though, of course, Blair is the first public school PM since Lord Home)

Of course the atmosphere at Harrow, which by all accounts has never been an *intellectual* school in the sense of some other major public schools, must be very different again from Winchester.

Mark S: my knowledge of prog is too limited to really make the sort of assertion I did. I've got a feeling you're right, though: in fact I deliberately put forward a kind of distilled punk cliche to see how far from the truth it was. I think you're right about the OTT thing being more a *redefinition* of high culture than an aspiration to it.

You're right about early 70s Brit parochialism and mundanity, as well (relative to today, it might as well be 1947, as I think I said in the radio thread a while back). Wasn't there, but is it just me who, when watching old Public Information Films and the like, obsessively concentrates on the background detail, the period smell, and doesn't think for one moment about Kevin Keegan's perm or whatever? Or memorises the font on an old shopfront, or the design of the Radio 1 Roadshow truck, in a clip featured in some nostalgia show while brutally avoiding every word Maconie has to say? We're getting into Martin Parr territory now of course ...

DavidM, I think you're right about the divide in the 80s. You may not be quite as right if applying a similar scenario today, though.

Suzy: Peel *himself* was a posh longhair who dissed T.Rex blah blah blah. I can't comment on the sniffy bit, though.

Other "Old Salopians" of note: Michael Palin, Richard Ingrams, the mad anti-EU zealot Christopher Booker, Paul Foot, Willie Rushton (the last four explain the Private Eye thing I mentioned earlier).

> Kerry: I always thought the whole John Hughes movie OST and Wax Trax > thing ruled Chicago, but most of the people I knew from there came > from places like Lake Forest and Winnetka, so, well, > duhhhh on me.

It could have been popular then, I don't know. The period I was talking about was more late 70s, early 80s. Wax Trax didn't get big until I went to college, which, it just so happens was on the North Shore, at Northwestern. IME, NU kids didn't listen to that stuff - it was too "goth" or something, and goth kids were usually the scary "townies" who didn't have the money for NU. Is it just my imagination, or is goth / "industrial" more of a lower-middle class and working-class thing? I didn't know anyone at college who listened to that stuff. A lot of "ethnic" kids did. To run around in black leather and dyed hair at NU was just sooo uncool.

Speaking of John Hughes movies, I did go out with this guy who had bit parts in those, but he was pretty wealthy. I don't have much gossip, except that he *hated* John Cusack for some reason, and he had an infatuation with Molly Ringwald and claimed to have had some sort of fling with her, but I think he could have been full of it. I couldn't really relate to those movies, they made me feel so unglamorous. Pretty in Pink was probably closest to my life - in fact, the same guy said, after seeing it, "oh my god, this is about you and me."

Thinking about sub-cultures associated with class, the Dead- head/Phish population is alive and well in the U.S. college I go to, and is mostly made up of the upper class kids. I agree with the idea that being rich certainly enables the following of bands, but I think the rich hippie stereotype also has a lot to do with drugs. Most people on financial aid can't afford to buy lots of pot/acid/shrooms/ecstasy, whereas the Phish heads here do all of those drugs in great quantity. Speaking of ecstasy, it also started to take off around here with the rave thing, because again, the kids can afford the drugs and going to the clubs etc. We punks seem to be the poorer students simply because we can't afford to experiment with drugs (nor can we risk getting busted and kicked out of school), we can't afford to follow bands around, and we're pretty angry about the way these kids act most of the time. Although I agree with mark in that you can't generalize. There are certainly exceptions to all of these things.

Kerry: I think Goth was interclass where I was; re. Chicago I completely blanked on mentioning Weenie Albini! Industrial, however, I always associate with lakesider rich kids who liked to bandy words like 'decadent' about. People who were regular at the record stores I went to in Mpls. used to have a complete sociological breakdown for all the followers of various sub-genres.

In Britain, with a few exceptions, I think it's a very lower middle class kind of thing to be a Goth, especially when it's tinged with hippie eg. Nephilim/Mission. 'Eskimos'. Yucch.

John Hughes gossip corner: Molly Ringwald was schtupping the director 24/7, not your ex (no offence). Don't know why your friend had Cusack hatred either; he visited an Evanston pal of mine at college and was really cool, handling all the predatory rich girls asking for lights with a certain aplomb. As it happens I nearly went to NU myself (accepted to journalism school) but nixed it in favour of going somewhere in NY with no frats/sports that was offering me even more financial aid as enticement. And weirdly, the most industrial/leather girl I knew from Chi was an escaped debutante who went out with a club- promoter ex of Brix Smith's. Hmmm...

"Other 'Old Salopians' of note: Michael Palin, Richard Ingrams, Christopher Booker, Paul Foot, Willie Rushton": actually I think this is a phrase completely without intelligent meaning, Robin. None of these people have the remotest thing to do with ANY of my life (well, no: Paul Foot, oddly enough, has SWP friends-colleagues he sometimes visits in the block next to mine, and I also saw him across a waiting room in Homerton Hospital two years ago, when we were both due for operations, his very major and life-threatening, mine totally minor — but that's just celebrity happenstance, like seeing Anoushka Hempel in Superdrug in Tufnel Park). I think your understandably disgusted Public School fantasy Sociology is not a billion trillion miles from the media misperceptions of the Rural which you object to so vociferously. (I can well imagine, mind you, that Shrewbury's website peddles exactly such misperceptions, and that its eager ignorant customers buy straight into them like the panicked duffers they are. I shall not be checking it out.)

I feel left out here. Did anyone else here go to a (non-fee paying) grammar school?

I went to a plain old US public (i.e. PUBLIC) high school, DG, and did my undergrad and master's at a US state (i.e. PUBLIC) school. But private high schools are sort of rare (I think?) around here anyway and I think my college's musical tastes owe a lot more to its conservative surroundings and the conservative studies pursued at it (lots of engineering and agriculture) than to its publicness. So I'm afraid I don't have much to say.

Mark: my sentence has "intelligent meaning" purely in the sense that all the people I mentioned went to Shrewsbury. I never implied that you had anything to do with any of them. Notice also my contemptuous inverted commas for their term for old boys.

Actually, I've long believed that British private schools are among the main peddlers of that misperception of all things ruralist: their self-image is very often as a kind of haven in the middle of Our Own Glorious Countryside from which The Proles Are Kept Out (if you want to fucking *choke*, go to www.hanford.dorset.sch.uk). The entire sociology / psychology of people from the London area sending their children to, say, Sherborne, is *exactly* the kind of ruralism that stands diametrically opposed to mine. But my fascination with it all comes, as I said earlier, from my desire to know as much as I can about all that I dream of destroying, to help me in my task ...

DG: I went to a state-funded grammar school. For about a month. It's a long and tortuous story.

Josh: my deeply conservative (in terms of musical taste) cousin went to agricultural college in 1999. For about a month. In fact, probably less. I don't really want to read anything into this.

Well, I went to a non-fee paying grammar school, but of course this was in Scotland and therefore subject to a different (but was it better?) educational system.

My interview at Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall, if you must know) took place on the morning of Tuesday 9 December 1980, at which point everyone around was in a state of semi-trance induced by the news of Lennon's assassination. The first question my (Eng Lit) interviewer (no names, but someone you might have heard of) asked me was: "OK, so who's the greatest - John Lennon or John Keats (the latter being the subject of one of my entrance exam questions)?" I coolly replied, "Well, where does that leave Cole Porter?" He immediately warmed to this and we spent the rest of the happy hour debating Sinatra on Capitol vs. Sinatra on Reprise, Jenkins vs. Riddle, Miss Otis as Iago, etc. etc., and needless to say I got in.

In terms of forming attitudes to music: well, I played clarinet and occasional tenor sax for six years in the school orchestra, and on piano accompanied most of the end-of-term "house shows" when not playing inaudible keyboards for Bothwell's finest Raw Deal. But intrinsic musical leanings were probably most formulated by my parents: the MoR/bel canto interface from my Italian mum, the avant tendencies from my dad. I used the White Album and Escalator Over The Hill to join the dots.

DG : Yes, I did.

I feel left out here. Did anyone else here go to a (non-fee paying) grammar school?

I did

"Also, I never had a dime of pocket money growing up but all earnings from jobs, etc. were plowed into expensive imports... " So quoth Suzy.

How well do I know what it's like. I grew up rural and welfare class owing to the farm crisis etc., but that didn't mean I didn't hesitate to pay insane prices for Factory Records imports. My education was almost exactly as Josh described above. My biggest peeve in life is people who equate poor (or even simply middle-class) with stupid. We are as much a product of what we've reacted against as what we have instilled in us.

Prior to punk there was NO winning side withinrock: it was all-of- rock vs all-the-rest (give or take Creem and Frendz and a few underground hold-outs). (UK) Punk sucked us-vs-them INTO rock. (mark s)

There were clear divisions and snobberies before Punk though. Status Quo are the most obvious example of a group who were derided for their simplistic music (and boozy, working class outlook). Others: Black Sabbath, Edgar Broughton, Hawkwind, the Faces. Ok Hawkwind obviously weren't 'boozy' (more druggy) but their music was widely ridiculed.

At my school — and I think this is micro-specific to where I was — the born 58/9-ers were glam kids and drop- outs; 60-61 (= me) no clear allegiance; 62/63 proggers. But the trend-making kids in the progger age-range were ALL younger brothers of glam-kids, and — I think — somewhat protesting in a proto-Thatcherite way the sense of life-wastage the glam-kids (who were v.arty, druggy and wild) projected. The punk faction arose very clearly in the unaligned age range, but was a minority (mark s)

You say it was micro-specific and it sounds it. Prog (69-70), after all, pre-dated Glam (72 at the earliest). In the classic analysis, Glam kids were reacting against Prog and stolid blues-rock. I suppose what you might be identifying is a second, younger wave of Proggers who got into ELP, Yes etc only after they reached stadium status.

As to the source of Punk's troops, surely they could have come from anywhere ie no more likely to have been fans of Roxy Music than Wishbone Ash (original pioneer punks a different matter - Bromley Contingent were Roxy/Bowie fans - but by mid '77 people of all sorts were going over to Punk in droves).

Yay! I'm not alone then.

Micro-specific, yes, possibly, David; second-waver proggers, absolutely: but as a result I'm just super-suspicious of the big- picture sociology that gets slapped onto the big-picture evolution (in particular prog = middle-class, punk = working-class, which I'm afraid has always just been rubbish on a stick). Younger siblings reacting against older siblings is a REAL thing in the world, but it's not very susceptible to class analysis (at least at the teen level: two teens from the same faimly are the SAME class).

I agree that a broad-brush analysis based on the date of birth would be even more sweeping and silly, and I'm not proposing mine was the picture ANYWHERE but where I was. However geographical variation is VERY to the point: again, the sociology of ACCESS, who you got to see (here's who played Shrewsbury — ie the town not the school: the Stranglers, Penetration and the Buzzcocks... No Clash, Pistols or Damned in 77/78!!). As I've said elsewhere, it was work even to find NME/Sounds in those days....

If prog was JUST 69/70, then even MORE goofy that punk takes the credit for "killing" it (cf punk thread sometime soon for more on this probably sometime maybe sigh). But of course part of its ethos was LP- to-LP development, index of its artistic evolution over years. (Punk condensed this, kinda brilliantly, to singles, and evolution over months: at least, that's how it felt to me...)

Another element here: is that Received Sociology — an agreed-on idea of what "a hip they" said you OUGHT to be listening to — only got into the media-bloodstream at cliche level with or around punk. Yes, clearly there were always rivalries and divisions, snobberies and hostilities on the ground (mods vs rockers, for example), but I don't believe there was a GENERALLY AGREED ON street-sociology (except obviously rock vs pop, which is a different KIND of sociology, and anyway part of Rock vs Everything).

I'm being very unclear.

(Actually, 69/70 is already second-wave prog, in a way: Floyd/Crimson/Soft Machine/ Tomorrow ALREADY too big to play eg ICA/ UFO by 1968... (not stadiums yet, true).)

In Shropshire generally, Quo were BIG BIG BIG BIG BIG but, yes, kind of a lumpen joke also (tho again against cliche, the two fans I knew were both good-enough-to-be professional classical musicians: go figure that!!). Sabbath, curiously, not so big at all: I don't know if this was some intra-midlands thing, east vs west. Local boys the Strawbs were big big big also — who fell completely out of ANY version of the canon that I've ever encountered!! Local farmers' kids that I knew always had a run of three-four Strawbs albums.

Hmmm, maybe no surprise. The Strawbs have always struck me as, mmm, *lumpen-ruralist*: misunderstood Labour pisstaking and all. Though I assume we're talking here about the post-Sandy Denny period?

This is getting surreal. I've just mentioned the Strawbs on the Monks thread! Also, they were from Shrewsbury? Uh? I always thought they were from Twickenham/Strawberry Hill. (Hence the Strawbs) A couple of them still play from time to time round here in pubs, and everyone seems to regard them as 'locals made good'.

Back from checking AMG - "Formed in 1967 from a local bluegrass trio - The Strawberry Hill Boys by singer-guitarist Dave Cousins......."

Anyway they had lots of members - maybe there was a Shrewsbury faction too.

Yes, I thought of the Strawberry Hill / Twickenham thing as well. But then there is a certain sort of "image" that can twist people's idea of a band's geographical origins: surreally I thought the same thing about the (appalling) Wonderstuff as a kid, when I confused their home town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands with (I'm guessing) Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and perceived them as rather lumpen-ruralist. I probably hated them *even more* when I discovered their true origins ...

Erm, I think I must have meant it in the 3Mustaphas3 sense: "Local music! From the world!"

Oooops: I've just checked too, and I think I've been on crack re the Strawbs = local boys since c.1970!! My sister and I had a babysitter called Susan who was fan who told us she liked them because they were local. So she was on crack and we totally caught it from her, I guess! (Well, actually I shouldn't pronounce so blithely on my sister's crack- status, in this regard or any other...)

DG: this is the Second Seal!

I know what you mean. Aspirational quasi-yokels the lot of 'em.

I can certainly imagine Tory farmers' sons who *did* get the irony of "Part of the Union" finding it very smart indeed ...

I love it when Robin says "I know what you mean", and then expands to say something where you (=me) completely don't what what HE means? *I* didn't say (or mean) anything about tories *or* aspirational — so it's pretty much projection; the farmers' kids I mainly mean were NOT-rich tenant farmers' kids (daughter = my sister's best friend at school). Anyway, *apart* from 'Part of the Union', does this politics/satire manifest? I just looked them up in Rough Guide, and the LPs I remember seeing were Just a Collection of Antiques and Curios, From the Witchwood, and Grave New World (with Blake's 'A Flea' on the cover, I vaguely recall?) One of them was on eight- track, at least in PE's car, it was.

Sorry: point being that these all predate 'Union' by some years, so ie it wasn't the lead-in hit that got these particular fans into the band.

Actually that raises another point re geography and access. TIMES GOES NOT AT THE SAME SPEED!! At least in the rural west midlands in the mid-70s: the metropolitan sense of cultural turnover was nothing LIKE so present. By the time my sister was a punk, a year or so after me — she was in a PRETEND PUNK BAND!! They didn't play, they just gave themselves funny punky names and decided what they WOULD have played! She was Becky Bondage!! (Another was Lin Bin!) And then that other BB, that celebrity interloper came along and stole Becky's name! She was much cooler than me... — that sense of be-here-now had landed (probably because TV had begun to pick up on being "in touch" with the kids).

Fuck what I said this morning on the '...religious?' thread, I'm off to church. Mark was wrong *again*.

May as well follow the Strawbs thing to the bitter end - turns out that with a bit of futher research ((a) former next door neighbour and (b) wife's work colleague)that The Strawberry Hill Boys were in fact from Hounslow, and Dave Cousins's Dad owned a pub oposite Hounslow bus garage. Seems like adoption of Strawberry Hill may have been a bit of social climbing or an attempt to get closer to the Eel Pie island scene. So the Strawbs should have been called The Houns.

Ah, but Mark, I very often say things that *nobody* understands :). Actually, having always been fascinated with the 70s, I value everything you say on growing up in that period, and wouldn't be without a word of it.

My fascination comes largely from the whole idea of Time Going Not At The Same Speed back then, and I'd always imagined late 77 / early 78 as being a point where this started to break down, so it's wonderful to have it confirmed. There were other factors making pop more central and instant at that time, such as the increase in Radio 1's broadcasting hours from their neo-austerity-imposed mid-70s nadir, and I can see what you mean about TV picking up on down-with-the-kids at that point: that first wave of what would become "yoof" TV formed in the late 70s though it took C4 in 1982 to really push it on. Even watching old clips from shorlty before C4 hit, though, there's an incredible sense of "This Is What Youth Culture Is Like" explained from a paternalistic perspective which has vanished *forever*: anyone who saw the introduction to some feature on the New Romantics on "I Love 1981" (which would obv. have been much better if it were *all* old clips with NOBODY FUCKING TALKING IN BETWEEN) will know exactly what I mean. Compared to some sensationalist scare story about Eminem on Tonight With Trev, it's pure Reithiania.

All Robin's reminiscences remind me of the satire on yoof programming from The Young Ones, Nosin' Around. Does this make anyone go, 'ohhh, SNAP?'

"How would you feel if you were old enough to join the armed forces, yet could not drink in pubs?"

And let us not forget "No Limits": good god that was a fucking bizarre fusion, sped-up version of mainstream travel show and uber- 80s videos ...

no limits = a hideous music show, with Jenny Powell, but completely taken over by the music choice of that obnoxious Jonathan King - all those horrid corporate american/canadian/ brit transatlantic bollox rock bands he use to plug such rubbish as Y & T, The Hooters, Nightranger, Asia, Mr Mister, Baltimora, Huey Lewis & the News, Glass Tiger, The Outfield, Cutting Crew and others of that ilk. Ghastly. Horrible. Vile.

America had Casey Kasem in Britain we had JK. Two prize plonkers who knew/know fuck all about music. These two were living in Room101.

I did not go to public school but when the mainstream radio 1 daytime/ and JK on TV dished up utter shit in 1985/1986 it is not suprising I found an alternative with: Peel 10-12 mon-wed, Annie Nightingale request show, Peter Anthony Alternative show on Radio Luxembourg, Dave Fanning on RTE2 8-10 weekdays, The Tube, Melody Maker and Sounds etc.