‘Chewing through your wimpey dreams’: Whimsy, Loss, and the ‘experience’ of the Rural in English Music and Art, 1966–1976

Abstract

The second chapter of Part III approaches the subject of cultural hauntedness as part of a particular moment of transition in English national identity as seen specifically through popular musical responses to the hauntedness of loss and melancholy. There were, the chapter argues, strong elements of archetypal manifestations of Englishness, such as whimsy, eccentricity, and nostalgia in relation to idealized and romanticized notions of place, particularly the English rural landscape. Music from the 1960s, through to the 1970s found a concerted focus in the loss of rural identity as a figure for the ghosts of an Englishness passing away, as it was seen; such music made specific reference to late Victorian and Edwardian cultural memory as a rejection of the modernity of post-war Britain.