I work in North-West London and sometimes I find myself just sitting in my office and looking at the planes taking off and landing at Heathrow. I mention this because at the end of one day last week I was doing exactly that while listening to some music and suddenly, the following line came out of the speakers:
"Looking out my bedroom window/See the planes take off from Heathrow"
I shouldn't have been surprised of course. The line was from a song called "move on Now" by Hard-Fi, a band of young men who grew up around Staines and West Drayton and whose days and nights were lived out under the Terminal 4 flight path. Listening to the album a bit more closely, I found that the whole thing is a tapestry of observations about working class (or should that be lower-middle-class?) West London. It set me off thinking about the fact that as Media teachers and students, we often forget that popular music is full of all kinds of representations that we often just ignore, either because we are too busy looking at a pop artist's visual image, or because we think that representations of class are simply confined to things like newspapers and soap opera. The Hard- Fi album though, musically and lyrically, is part of the creation of a band identity which firmly emphasises their roots in the council estates and industrial parks that cluster round the North side of the M4 in a fug of grey smoke and petrol fumes. Musically the sound is an interesting mix of punk, dub, electronica and rock 'n' roll (there's a genre study in there somewhere!) all of which have their origins in working class youth culture. Lyrically Hard-Fi's world is one where Cash Machines always have "insufficient funds", where people are always looking forward to Friday night and where everyone is "Tied Up too tight" and trying to break free from the constraints of have no money and no real future.
They aren't the first to do this kind of thing of course. Mike Skinner of The Streets has mined similar material with a good deal of intelligence and humour, wearing his interest in working class culture like a badge. (It's interesting to note that Skinner himself actually grew up in quite a middle class home - his dad sold hospital equipment, but his move from London to Birmingham and back again meant that he was exposed to all sorts of people). Historically, singing about class was the province of left-wing singer songwriters like Billy Bragg or the agit-pop of punks from The Clash to Chumbawumba. Perhaps the band that Hard-Fi most resemble then, is The Who. Daltrey, Townsend and Entwhistle were grammar school boys who came from working class, West London backgrounds and sang, initally at least, about their lives. "Better do Better" is Hard-Fi's "Substitute"; " Hard to Beat" their "I Can't Explain". I'm not for a second saying that Hard-Fi are musically the same as The Who, or that they reach the matchless heights of "Tommy " and "Quadrophenia", but more that they are cut from the same cloth in terms of their attitude and class background.
There are two things that people researching the representation of social class in pop music need to think about: Firstly, Hard-Fi are the full package in terms of social class. Not only do they look and sound like working class musicians (which is basically what gives acts like Oasis their mass appeal) but they sing about being working class. These self-proclaimed "Stars of CCTV" know what a lot of people's lives (and livers!) are like. When thinking about how class is represented in popular music, one should not only look at them but what they produce and how they are marketed. It would be interesting to know the working class pop stars influenced them, and to look into the future and see who (if anybody) they influence.
Secondly, there are some interesting things to think about here regarding audience. When I started thinking about this, I wondered how many of my students, living a stones throw away from where this band grew up and first began to ply their trade, had listened to the album and how many of them might have seen their own lives reflected in it. The fact is though is that this album isn't just selling to working class audiences; it is selling to middle-class audiences who know (or think they know) what working-class life is like and perhaps those people who are middle-class but see themselves as working class. Ironically, there is a kind of romanticization going on here: Hard-Fi, who are clearly from a working/lower middle class background, end up creating a world, through their music and lyrics, that middle-class audiences can safely inhabit without actually having to put up with working class life. Richard Archer and his bandmates probably never intended this, but what we are left with is an example of how social class is never clear cut, either for the producers or consumers of media and popular culture texts.
© Steve Connolly 2006
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