I am delighted to finally announce my next book. It is called LOVE AND LET DIE. Here’s how it is described in the official press release:
The Beatles are the biggest band there has ever been. James Bond is the single most successful movie character of all time. They are also twins. Dr No, the first Bond film, and Love Me Do, the first Beatles record, were both released on the same day – Friday 5 October 1962. Most countries can only dream of a cultural export becoming a worldwide phenomenon on this scale. For Britain to produce two on the same windy October afternoon is unprecedented.
LOVE AND LET DIE is a story about two opposite aspects of the British psyche exploding into global culture. It is a clash between working class liberation and establishment control, told over a period of sixty dramatic years. It is also an account of our aspirations and fantasies, and of competing visions of male identity. Looking at these cultural touchstones again in this new context will forever change your understanding of the Beatles, the James Bond films, and six decades of British culture.
When Paul McCartney was asked to sum up the Beatles in the mid-1990s, he said they were about love. “It was all done in the name of love, and about love, and I’m very proud of that,” he explained. From first single Love Me Do to their posthumous final single Real Love, through songs like All You Need Is Love which was the soundtrack to the 1967 Summer of Love, McCartney’s assessment is hard to argue with.
While the Beatles represent love, James Bond films represent death. What makes Bond different from other spies in that he has a license to kill. From films like Live And Let Die to A View To A Kill, Die Another Day or his latest adventure No Time To Die, Bond is an assassin who has official permission to kill anyone he wants.
The Beatles and the Bond films, then, can be seen as cultural representations of love and death playing out in front of a worldwide audience. Freudian psychologists refer to love and death as Eros and Thanatos, the two competing drives behind human behaviour. Physicists will tell you that when a particle is created, an opposite anti-particle is created at the same time, to keep the universe in balance. Love and Death are opposites but, as William Blake tells us, “Without contraries is no progression”.
Putting these two stories together throws up a host of new perspectives on two of the most implausible cultural stories of recent history. There is a larger story playing out here – as those who have staggered out of No Time To Die shocked by the ending, or those trying to reconcile Peter Jackson’s Get Back with the original Let It Be movie, may already suspect.
LOVE AND LET DIE will be published in hardback, ebook and audiobook in September 2022, in time for the 5 October 2022 sixtieth anniversary of Beatles records and James Bond films. Keep an eye on my newsletter for more updates. Oh, and if anyone is thinking of forming a Beatles tribute band that plays Bond themes – called The Bondles – let me know and we’ll talk about the book launch…
My newsletter gets sent out 8 times a year – you can subscribe here. This is the newsletter that was sent on 23 September 2019…
Higgs’ Blind Octannual Manual #14
A six-and-a-bit-weekly newsletter from author John Higgs
Autumn Equinox 2019
Happy autumn equinox all! The wheel of the year grinds ever on…
Huge thanks to all who came to the launch of my short book William Blake Now at the Social last Monday. Special thanks to Salon London
for organising it at the last minute and to the die-hards who came to
sing and proclaim at the spot where Blake was born afterwards – that was
a real joy.
Many
thanks to Richard Norris for the above photo, in which our gathering is
blessed by a very Blakean thread of golden light. Slightly fewer thanks
to Flinton Chalk for the following picture, of me at Tate Britain’s new
Blake exhibition deep in contemplation of the genitals of the giant
Albion.
In
school, Hanif Kureishi was taught that the Beatles did not write their
own songs. Those songs were really composed, his music teacher told him,
by the well-spoken Brian Epstein and George Martin.
Kureishi’s
teacher was expressing the delusion of class superiority. If you
believe you are automatically superior to a bunch of scruffy Scouse
herberts, then a lot of cognitive dissonance will be created when some
of those Scouse herberts produce work far in advance of anything you or
your peers could ever dream of. In those circumstances the teacher’s
brain took refuge in a conspiracy theory, because this took the pressure
off his model of reality.
Note that the teacher was probably
unaware he was doing this. His belief in class superiority would have
been imprinted upon him as a child. It was buried so deep, and framed so
much of his worldview, that he would have been entirely unaware of it.
It resided in his mind’s blind spot. It is hard to correct delusions
that are invisible to us.
We all have a blind spot. None of us
really know the delusions that lurk there. For all we may want to
condemn Kureishi’s teacher, we are not that different oursleves. In the
forecourt of the temple of the Delphic Oracle was carved the command
‘Know Thyself’, but illuminating the darkest shadows of our reality
tunnels is hard. Often the best we can do is hope that our delusions are
not harming others, and that reality doesn’t intrude to create the
cognitive dissonance that so troubled Kureishi’s teacher.
The
collision between invisible delusions and reality is typically
expressed as unexpected anger, for which the explanations given seem
irrational and incoherent. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is a lot of
this about at the moment in Britain. In many cases, the invisible
delusion in question is British Exceptionalism.
My apologies to
non-UK readers for dwelling on this subject, but this country is working
through some issues at the moment at it seems important to look at
them. For the past year or so, ever since Theresa May brought her EU
deal back to parliament, British Exceptionalism and political reality
have clashed head-on. They have been aggressively grinding against each
other ever since, and while political reality is unaltered, British
Exceptionalism has been shredded beyond repair.
British
Exceptionalism is, for historical reasons, the polite term for English
exceptionalism. It is the belief that Britishness is by definition best,
and that Britain is automatically superior to other countries. It looks
ridiculous when it is written down and brought into the light, which is
perhaps why this is rarely done. For many, it is imprinted so deeply
into their reality tunnels that it is invisible and unquestioned. It is,
in the words of Lord Victor Adebowale, the Empire of the Mind.
For example, there are many who were appalled that Russian spies took a
nerve agent to Salisbury and killed Sergei Skripal and others, but they
will happily watch James Bond killing people in whatever country he
wants and see this as entirely reasonable.
(I’m capitalising
British Exceptionalism, incidentally, to distinguish it from actual
British exceptional things, which are terrific and worthy of
celebration. The work of J.R.R. Tolkien, Alan Moore or David Bowie, to
give a few random examples, are all British and exceptional. But this is
because of the quality of the work itself – it is not true by default
based on who their parents were.)
The real nature of Britain is a
politely pagan surreal circus, a fact that is entirely obvious to the
majority of those of us who live here. This is what we like about the
place. Those imprinted with British Exceptionalism had to invent a mask
to put over this – they needed to deny the country’s true character,
because it’s easier to feel superior if you pretend that you’re Downton Abbey rather than acknowledge that you’re Monty Python. The utter inappropriateness of the dutiful, stable, decent Downton Abbey mask is of course extremely funny, which does give some insight into the actual nature of Britain.
The Downton Abbey
mask, however, has been all but destroyed by the Brexit process. Or at
least, it has in the eyes of observers in other countries. Many were
shocked to discover that Britain, which they thought of as being largely
stable, dutiful, competent and decent, is in fact none of those things.
A reputation can be destroyed quickly in the twenty-first century. It
does not tend to recover.
Will British Exceptionalism survive?
One way to check its health is to check the current status of our folk
heroes James Bond and Lara Croft, because both Bond and Croft have
British Exceptionalism embedded in their character.
Lara Croft’s last game Shadow of the Tomb Raider
tackled the issue head on. It made it explicit that she was the bad
guy. Croft uses her wealth and privilege to travel to South America,
damage their heritage and steal a cultural artefact, which triggers a
tsunami and kills thousands. To make amends, Croft offers herself up as a
sacrifice at the end of the game. She willingly lets the ‘Tomb Raider’
be killed. After coming back to life – er, somehow – she vows that she
will change. She will no longer probe the mysteries of the world, but
protect them instead. Quite how this will play out in future games
remains to be seen, but it’s encouraging that the next Tomb Raider film is being made by Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump.
Bond
is trickier, as he is essentially British Exceptionalism personified.
If the gossip surrounding the next Bond film is true, the intended
director Danny Boyle was taken off the project after delivering a script
in which Bond died. For producers with a cash-cow to protect, that was
clearly unacceptable. Yet given the current disintegration of British
Exceptionalism, I’d argue that Boyle’s approach was entirely logical.
What else could he have done with the character?
Boyle has now
left the project and the Phoebe Waller-Bridge is now working on the
script. Waller-Bridge’s achievements with Fleabag have been unfairly
overshadowed by debate about her class, but that subject does seem
relevant here. She seems a perfect hire for producers wanting make Bond
relevant in the #MeToo era, but who are afraid of tackling the deeper
and more taboo issue of unquestioned superiority.
Away
from Croft and Bond, there has been a creative surge of work that looks
at English or British identity without being nationalistic, or by being
actively anti-nationalistic. Danny Boyle’s and Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s
opening ceremony to the 2012 London Olympics is an obvious example, as
is Stormzy headlining Glastonbury’s pyramid stage wearing Banky’s union
flag stab vest. You also have artists such as Jeremy Deller and @ColdWar_Steve, musicians including Richard Dawson and Slowthai, comics like Kieron Gillen’s Once and Future and writers such as Jez Butterworth, who gave us both the play Jerusalemand the series Britannia. Looking further afield, you find things like the open-source folk horror project Hookland, the film A Field in England by Lara Croft’s new parents Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump, and the New Weird Britain Movement.
All
this is a reminder that, creatively, British Exceptionalism is unwanted
baggage. There’s far more interesting stuff being done without it. To
drag it out into the light where it can be dismissed is going to be a
painful process for many, but I doubt the process can be stopped. It
seems to me that life in our politely pagan surreal circus will be all
the better once it is over.
John Higgs’s Octannual Manual is a free newsletter sent out once every six weeks or so. It contains news, thoughts and reviews, and is the best way to stay in touch with what I am up to.
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