Zum bevorstehenden Brexit eine Serie englischer/britischer Selbstbetrachungen im Pop –
something about England:

The Clash – Something About England, 1980

„They say the immigrants steal the hubcaps
Of respected gentlemen
They say it would be wine and roses
If England were for Englishmen again
(…)
I thought the old man could help me
If he could explain the gloom:
„You really think it’s all new
You really think about it too“
The old man scoffed as he spoke to me
„I’ll tell you a thing or two“:

„I missed the fourteen-eighteen war
But not the sorrow afterwards
With my father dead, my mother ran off
My brothers took the pay of hoods
The twenties turned the north was dead
The hunger strike came marching south
The garden party not a word was said
The ladies lifted cake to their mouths

The next war began and my ship sailed
With battle orders writ in red
In five long years of bullets and shells
We left ten million dead
The few returned to old Piccadilly
We limped around Leicester Square
The world was busy rebuilding itself
The architects could not care

But how could we know when I was young
All the changes that were to come?
All the photos in the wallets on the battlefield
And now the terror of the scientific sun
There was masters and servants
and servants and dogs
They taught you how to touch your cap
Through strikes and famine and war and peace
England never closed this gap“
(…)

Goodbye, Piccadilly
Farewell, Leicester Square

The streets were now deserted
The gangs had trudged off home
The lights clicked out in the bedsits
Old England was all alone“

Manic Street Preachers – Repeat (UK)

„London, England
Consider yourselves warned:

Repeat after me
Fuck queen and country
Repeat after me
Royal Khymer Rouge
Repeat after me
Imitation demi-god“

Carter USM – England

„So just lie back
And think of England

Cause I’ve slid down banisters
For judges and barristers
Readers wives husbands
With toothless decay
I’ve been GBH’d
And ABH’d
For a packet of B&H
I’ve been taken
And I’ve been driven away
I was fornicating before I could read or write
And now I can’t stop sir
I graduated from the University of Life
And the School of Hard Knocks, sir
…
Talk dirty to me!
Oh come, all ye unfaithful
Joyful triumphant and pathetically weak
I’ve been Amsterdamned
And Reeperbahned
Wham-bam-no-thank-you-m’ammed
…
And if we ever meet again
I don’t know where
And I don’t care when
I’m gonna help you with your sickness
Like a Jehovah’s Witness
You’ll be born again and again and again
So just lie back
Close your eyes
And think of England
And what England’s done to me“