Suburban pastoral: Strawberry Fields forever and sixties memory

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 28-54

  Daniels, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEMORY; SUBURBAN AREA; TEMPORAL ANALYSIS;

ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; LIVERPOOL [ENGLAND]; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

FRAGARIA X ANANASSA;

EID: 30944445589     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474005eu349oa     Document Type: Review

References (190)

1. On the process of conflation in the contemporary culture of memory see A. Huyssen, Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory (Stanford, University of California Press, 2003), pp. 1-10;
2. P. Middleton, 'The new memoryism: how computers changed the way we read'; New formations 50 (2003), pp. 57-74.
3. P. Du Noyer, Liverpool: wondrous place: music from Cavern to Cream (London, Virgin Books, 2002), p. 17;
4. H. Davies, '"There's a place": 20 Forthlin Road', National Trust magazine 85 (1998), pp. 27-29;
5. National Trust, Mendips (London, National Trust, 2003).
6. G. Burns, 'Refab Four: Beatles for sale in the age of video', in I. Inglis, ed., The Beatles, popular music and society: a thousand voices (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2000), p. 185.
7. Du Noyer, Liverpool, p. 229.
8. S. Daniels and C. Nash, 'Lifepaths: geography and biography', Journal of historical geography 30 (2004), pp. 449-58.
9. My interpretive language here owes something to a paragraph on p. x of the introduction to R. Samuel, Theatres of memory, vol. I: Past and present in contemporary culture (London, Verso, 1994),
10. and echoes sentiments in the introduction to Huyssen, Present pasts, pp. 1-10.
11. J. Savage, 'That's how good it is', introduction to H. Kureishi and J. Savage, eds, The Faber book of pop (London, Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. xvii-xxxiii.
12. On Georgian landscape engravings see S. Daniels, 'Reforming landscape: Turner and Nottingham', in P. de Bolla, N. Leask and D. Simpson, eds, Land, nation and culture (London, Palgrave, 2005), pp. 12-36;
13. on sonnets, S. Greenblatt, Will in the world: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare (London, Cape, 2004), pp. 226-55.
14. P. de Bolla, N. Leask and D. Simpson, 'Introduction', to de Bolla et al., Land, nation and culture, pp. 6-7.
15. J. Dixon Hunt, ed., The pastoral landscape (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1992);
16. S. Daniels, Fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States (Cambridge and Princeton NJ, Polity Press and Princeton University Press, 1993);
17. D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, Reaktion, 1999);
18. G. Revill, 'The lark ascending: monument to a radical pastoral', Landscape research 16 (1991), pp. 9-19;
19. G. Revill, 'English pastoral: music, landscape, history and politics', in I. Cook, D. Crouch, S. Naylor and J. R. Ryan, eds, Cultural turns/ geographical turns: perspectives on cultural geography (Harlow, Pearson Education, 2000), pp. 140-58;
20. J. Barrell and J. Bull, The Penguin book of English pastoral verse (London, Allen Lane, 1974), pp. 1-7.
21. J. M. Richards, The castles on the ground: the anatomy of suburbia (London, Architectural Press, 1946);
22. S. Daniels, 'Suburban prospects', in N. Alfrey, S. Daniels and M. Postle, eds, Art of the garden (London, Tate, 2004), pp. 22-30.
23. P. Gould, The unfinished revolution: how the modernisers saved the Labour Party (London, Abacus, 1998), pp. 1-17.
24. My thanks to Charles Pattie for this reference. On Tory uses of suburbia see D. Gilbert and R. Preston, '"Stop being so English": suburban modernity and national identity in the twentieth century', in D. Gilbert, D. Matless and B. Short, eds, Geographies of British modernity: space and society in the twentieth century (Oxford, Blackwell, 2003), pp. 187-203.
25. J. Savage, England's dreaming: the Sex Pistols and punk rock (London, Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 1-11;
26. M. Bracewell, England is mine: pop life from Wilde to Goldie (London, HarperCollins, 1997);
27. S. Frith, 'The suburban sensibility of British rock and pop', in R. Silverstone, ed., Visions of suburbia (London Routledge, 1997), pp. 269-79;
28. D. J. Taylor, 'The sound of the suburbs: the idea of the suburb in English pop', in R. Webster, ed., Expanding suburbia: reviewing suburban narratives (New York, Berghahn, 2000), pp. 161-72;
29. J. Connell and C. Gibson, Sound tracks: popular music, identity and place (London, Routledge, 2003), pp. 74-79.
30. On the imaginative geography of bohemia see E. Wilson, Bohemians: the glamorous outcasts (London, I. B. Tauris, 2000).
31. S. Rycroft, 'The geographies of Swinging London', Journal of historical geography 28 (2002), pp. 566-88;
32. S. Rycroft, 'Mapping underground London', Cultural Geographies 10 (2003), pp. 84-111. These pioneering articles on the cultural geography of Sixties pop culture emphasise its progressive and radical currents but also identify old-fashioned elements such as aristocratic pageantry.
33. D. Brauer, 'British pop art 1956-66: a documentary essay', in D. Brauer, J. Edwards, C. Finch and W. Hopps, eds, Pop art US/UK connections (Houston, Merrill Collection, 2001), pp. 54-87;
34. C. Finch, 'London pop recollected', in ibid., pp. 20-42.
35. L. Lippard, with contributions by L. Alloway, N. Marmer and N. Calas, Pop art (London, Thames & Hudson, 1969), pp. 31-40 (these pages are from a chapter on British pop art by Alloway).
36. N. Whiteley, Reyner Banham: historian of the immediate future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 11-28, 91-93, 379.
37. R. Banham, 'Kent and Capability', New Statesman 64 (7 December 1962), pp. 842-43,
38. repr. in R. Banham, A critic writes: essays by Reyner Banham (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1996), pp. 87-90.
39. Whiteley, Reyner Banham, p. 379.
40. Lippard et al., Pop art, p. 200.
41. 'Pioneer of Pop Art', Sunday Times colour magazine (4 Feb. 1962);
42. Pop goes the easel, Monitor, BBC Television (25 Mar. 1962).
43. Listener (30 Nov. 1961);
44. Times (15 Nov. 1961);
45. Sunday Times (2 Feb. 1962). My thanks to Alex Kidson for letting me see the press cuttings file at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
46. On melancholic portrait paintings see S. Daniels, Joseph Wright (London, Tate, 1999), pp. 23-24;
47. on family snaps see D. Chambers, 'Family as place: family photograph albums and the domestication of public and private space', in J. M. Schwartz and J. R. Ryan, eds, Picturing place: photography and the geographical imagination (London, I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 96-114.
48. S. Sellers, 'Caro verbum factus est: British art in the 1960s', in B. Moore-Gilbert and J. Seed, eds, Cultural revolution? The challenge of the arts in the 1960s (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 255-78;
49. J. Jones, 'Portrait of the week', Guardian (2 Feb. 2002).
50. The picture also serves to re-vision English views of American pop art, recognizing products such as Superman, Coca Cola and Campbell's Soup as icons of the Thirties. See D. McCarthy, Pop art (London, Tate, 2000), pp. 58-64.
51. B. Robertson, J. Russell and Lord Snowdon, Private view (London, Nelson, 1965), pp. 274-77.
52. Topic (11 Dec. 1961).
53. Lippard et al., Pop art, pp. 28-32;
54. C. Stephens and K. Stout, eds, Art and the 60s: This was tomorrow (London, Tate, 2004), pp. 19-21.
55. Samuel, Theatres of memory, p. 93.
56. H. C. Prince, 'North-west London 1864-1914', 'Parks and parkland', in J. T. Coppock and H. C. Prince, eds, Greater London (London, Faber & Faber, 1964), pp. 139, 337.
57. M. Bracewell, 'Swinging back', Frieze 32 (1996), pp. 25-27.
58. Blow-up: a film by Michelangelo Antonioni (London, Lorimer, 1971), p. 49.
59. On arcadian London see D. A. Mellor and L. Gervereau, The sixties: Britain and France 1962-73 (London, Philip Wilson, 1977), pp. 13-21;
60. R. Hewison, Too much: art and society in the Sixties (London, Methuen, 1986), pp. 69-73.
61. G. Melly, Revolt into style: the pop arts in Britain (London, Allen Lane, 1970), pp. 6-8, 160-61.
62. Du Noyer, Liverpool, pp. 91-92.
63. J. Savage, 'The new naturalists', Mojo (Sep. 2004), pp. 114-15.
64. C. Booker, The neophiliacs: a study of revolution in English life in the fifties and sixties (London, Collins, 1969), pp. 18-26.
65. The Beatles, The Beatles anthology (London, Cassell, 2000), pp. 40-110;
66. P. Trynka, ed., The Beatles: ten years that shook the world (London, Mojo, 2004), pp. 10-91;
67. S. Frith and H. Horne, Art into pop (London, Methuen, 1987), pp. 80-81.
68. R. Coleman, Lennon: the definitive biography (London, Pan, 2001), p. 350.
69. G. Barry Golson, ed., The Playboy interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (New York, New English Library, 1981), pp. 129-30.
70. G. Cook and N. Mercer, 'From me to you: austerity and profligacy in the language of the Beatles', in Inglis, The Beatles, pp. 87-104.
71. Du Noyer, Liverpool, pp. 4, 141, 195. The surreal style is typified by Liverpool comedian Ken Dodd.
72. Melly, Revolt into style, pp. 79-80.
73. Interview with George Martin in Record Mirror (27 May 1967);
74. G. Martin with W. Pearson, All you need is ears (London, Macmillan, 1979);
75. J. Tobler and S. Grundy, The record producers (London, BBC, 1983), pp. 108-23;
76. P. McCabe and R. B. Schonfeld, Apple to the core: the unmaking of the Beatles (London, Sphere, 1973), pp. 77-78.
77. 'Howard Goodall's 20th century greats', BBC 2 (27 Oct. 2004). Simon and Garfunkel's version of Scarborough Fair released as an album track in 1967 is based on a mid-Sixties arrangement of the song by Martin Carthy.
78. I. MacDonald, Revolution in the head: the Beatles records and the sixties (London, Pimlico, 1994), pp. 157-58.
79. M. Lewisohn, The complete Beatles chronicle (London, Chancellor Press, 1992), p. 222.
80. On the geneaology of this portrait imagery see R. Leppert, Music and image: domesticity, ideology and socio-cultural formation in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988)
81. M. O'Gorman, 'Strange fruit', in Trynka, The Beatles, p. 248.
82. P. Norman, Shout! The true story of the Beatles (London, Elm Tree, 1981), pp. 250-73;
83. Trynka, The Beatles, pp. 208-35;
84. The Beatles, The Beatles anthology, pp. 200-237.
85. J. Green, Days in the life: voices from the English underground, 1961-1971 (London, Heinemann Minerva, 1988), pp. 74-137;
86. P. Fryer, 'A map of the underground: the flower power structure and London scene', Encounter (Oct. 1967), pp. 7-20.
87. On IT see Rycroft, 'Mapping underground London,' pp. 88-91.
88. Green, Day in the life, p. 79.
89. Martin, interview.
90. J. S. Wenner, Lennon remembers: the full 'Rolling Stone' interviews from 1970 (London, Verso, 2000), p. 60.
91. P. Shotton and N. Schaffner, John Lennon in my life (Sevenoaks, Coronet, 1984), pp. 101, 122.
92. From an unused tape for ITV's South Bank Show, 'The making of Sergeant Pepper', quoted in G. Martin with W. Pearson, Summer of love: the making of Sergeant Pepper (London, Macmillan, 1994), p. 72
93. The various takes are available on several bootlegs, the fullest set on The Beatles, Nothing is real: the making of Strawberry Fields forever (Chapter One, 1992).
94. Day-by-day documentation is in M. Lewisohn, The complete Beatles recording sessions (London, Hamlyn and EMI, 1989), pp. 87-90.
95. Melody Maker (28 Jan. 1967).
96. The version with an aerial photograph is in Record Mirror (18 Feb. 1967).
97. On this panoramic sensibility see S. Daniels and S. Rycroft, 'Mapping the modern city: Alan Sillitoe's Nottingham novels', Transactions, institute of British Geographers 18 (1993), pp. 460-80.
98. Record Mirror (4 Mar. 1967).
99. H. Davies, The Beatles: the authorized biography (London, Heinemann, 1968);
100. H. Davies, 'Paperback writer', in Trynka, The Beatles, p. 247.
101. Reprinted as Wenner, Lennon remembers, first published in the UK by Penguin Books in 1973. Quotations taken from the recent Verso edition, 2000, pp. 144-45.
102. Golson, The Playboy interviews;
103. Du Noyer, Liverpool, p. 228.
104. Golson, The Playboy interviews, pp. 129-30;
105. S. Turner, A hard day's write: the stories behind every Beatles song (London, Carlton, 2000), pp. 118-20.
106. Indeed, the most recent authoritative critic, Ian MacDonald, describes the vocal as the confused cry of 'an orphan at Strawberry Fields': Revolution in the head, p. 172.
107. Golson, The Playboy interviews, pp. 132-36.
108. Shotton and Schaffner, John Lennon, pp. 28-29.
109. R. Stradling, 'England's glory: sensibilities of place in English music 1900-1950', in A. Leyshon, D. Matless and G. Revill, eds, The place of music (London, Guilford, 1998) pp. 177-96.
110. R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd, eds, The Penguin Book of English folk songs (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968);
111. A. L. Lloyd, Folk song in England (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1967);
112. Revill, 'The lark ascending';
113. G. Boyes, The imagined village: culture, ideology and the English folk revival (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994);
114. D. Harker, Fakesong: the manufacture of British 'folksong' from 1800 to the present day (Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1985), pp. 231-53.
115. Vaughan Williams and Lloyd, English folk songs, pp. 18, 17, 106.
116. W. Empson, Some versions of pastoral (London, Chatto & Windus, 1935), pp. 253-94.
117. L. Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking glass: the centenary edition, ed. H. Haughton (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998), pp. 9-12.
118. Davies, The Beatles, p. 11.
119. Shotton and Schaffner, John Lennon, p. 33.
120. Broadcast on BBC 1 13 Oct. 1965 and 6 July 1966. Miller quoted at www.aliceinwonderland.fsnet.co.uk/film-tv-miller, accessed 21 Dec. 2003.
121. R. Philips, Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's dreamworld as seen through the critics' looking glass, 1805-1971 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), pp. 452-88.
122. For other Carroll-influenced Lennon songs see also M. E. Roos, 'The walrus and the deacon: John Lennon's debt to Lewis Carroll', Journal of popular culture 18 (1984), pp. 19-29.
123. Melly, Revolt into style, pp. 80-81.
124. C. Lennon, A twist of Lennon (London, Star, 1978), p. 181.
125. The sound is reminiscent of the pipe organ revived for folk music by Shirley and Dolly Collins: D. Laing, K. Dallas, R. Denselow and R. Skelton, The electric muse: the story of folk into rock (London, Methuen, 1975), p. 146.
126. The information in this paragraph is based on the bootleg Nothing is real and the Beatles CD Anthology 2, Disc 2, Tracks 1-3, and analyses of the record in W. Mellers, Twilight of the gods: the Beatles in retrospect (London, Faber & Faber, 1976), pp. 84-5;
127. MacDonald, Revolution in the head, pp. 170-75;
128. W. Everett, The Beatles as musicians: Revolver through Anthology (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 75-84;
129. Martin and Pearson, Summer of love, pp. 14-23.
130. B. Miles, Paul McCartney: many years from now (London, Vintage, 1998), pp. 264-6.
131. McDonald, Revolution in the head, pp. 177-79.
132. B. Golden, The Beach Boys: Southern California pastoral (San Bernardino, CA, Borgo Press, 1976), pp. 32-35.
133. Miles, Paul McCartney, p. 17.
134. Daniels, 'Suburban prospects', pp. 22-23.
135. Lewisohn, The complete Beatles chronicles, p. 243.
136. Produced by Tony Bramwell for Subafilms, one of the Beatles' two film companies, the film was directed by Peter Goldmann, whose main work was on pop programmes for Swedish TV. Goldmann was clearly influenced by Dick Lester's use of (musical) non-performance in his Beatles feature films, as some early promotional videos show. See the interview with Goldmann in New Musical Express (18 Feb. 1967).
137. Also B. Neaverson, The Beatles movies (London, Cassell, 1997), pp. 39-40.
138. The art performance element owes much to the mid-Sixties Fluxus group, with which Yoko Ono was associated. See T. Kellein, Fluxus (London, Thames & Hudson, 1995).
139. National Trust, Knole Park (London, National Trust, 1998).
140. D. Killingray, 'Rights, "riot" and ritual: the Knole Park access dispute, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1883-85', Rural history 5 (1994), pp. 63-79.
141. The working-class regional accents (south Wales and Somerset respectively) of Tom Jones and the Troggs placed them decidedly outside the art school orbit of metropolitan pop.
142. New Musical Express (18 Feb. 1967).
143. Melody Maker (11 Feb. 1967).
144. Ibid. (28 Jan. 1967; 11 Feb. 1967).
145. The Move's singer was Carl Wayne, the Tremeloes' Alan Blakeley. For the Move and the Tremeloes in the 1960s see P. Hardy and D. Laing, The Faber companion to 20th-century popular music (London, Faber & Faber, 1990), pp. 572-3, 635.
146. Melody Maker (4 Mar. 1967).
147. Record Mirror (11 Feb. 1967).
148. Ibid. (18 Feb. 1967).
149. This was the BBC's official chart of charts; the Beatles did reach number one in Melody Maker's chart.
150. Record Mirror (1 Apr. 1967).
151. Ibid. (8 Apr. 1967).
152. Daily Mirror (9 Feb. 1967).
153. This may have been a slot on the early evening magazine programme Tonight. I cannot recall exactly when, and have failed to find out, but the appearance is confirmed in D. Cooke, 'The Lennon-McCartney songs,' Listener (1 Feb. 1968).
154. E. Thomas and D. Gutman, eds, The Lennon companion: twenty-five years of comment (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1987), pp. 109-13.
155. Coleman, Lennon, p. 556.
156. Quoted in K. Negus, Popular music in theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996), p. 155.
157. Samuel, Theatres of memory, pp. 341-42.
158. S. Whiteley, The space between the words: rock and counter-culture (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 61-81;
159. A. Clayton, John Lennon (London, Sanctuary, 2003), p. 148;
160. R. Chapman, 'Pot-head revisited', Mojo (June 1997), pp. 42-55.
161. Du Noyer, Liverpool, pp. 90-96.
162. P. Davies, Liverpool seen: post-war artists on Merseyside (Bristol, Radcliffe Press, 1992), p. 145;
163. A. Brighton, 'The John Moores and its critics', in Walker Art Gallery, John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 18 (Liverpool, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 1993);
164. Adrian Henri: paintings 1953-1998 (Liverpool, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 2000), pp. 8-13.
165. Du Noyer, Liverpool, pp. 93-97.
166. E. Lucie-Smith, The Liverpool scene (London, David Carroll, 1967);
167. IT (International Times). (13-26 Feb. 1967).
168. A. Henri, R. McGough and B. Patten, The Mersey sound (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), p. 29.
169. Du Noyer, Liverpool, pp. 92-93;
170. J. Willett, Art in a city (London, Methuen, 1967), pp. 271-75.
171. For Liverpool University's participation in this concern to arrest decline at the time, in a project eventually funded by the Social Science Research Council, see R. Lawton and C. M. Cunningham, eds, Merseyside: social and economic studies (Harlow, Longman, 1970).
172. Melly, Revolt into style, p. 115.
173. M. Wood, 'John Lennon's schooldays', New Society (27 June 1968),
174. repr. in Thomson and Gutman, The Lennon companion, pp. 145-49.
175. Samuel, Theatres of memory, pp. vii-x.
176. D. Marshall, 'Making sense of remembrance', Social and cultural geography 5 (2004), pp. 37-54;
177. B. Anderson, 'Recorded music and practices of remembering', Social and cultural geography 5 (2004), pp. 3-19.
178. R. J. Krase II, 'Imagining Strawberry Fields as a place of pilgrimage', Area 35 (2003), pp. 154-62;
179. see also the excerpt of a 1996 study by B. Wheeller in Connell and Gibson, Sound tracks, pp. 226-28.
180. This traumatic strain is central to works reviewed in S. Legg, 'Memory and nostalgia', Cultural geographies 11 (2004), pp. 99-107;
181. see also the articles collected in New formations 50 (2003), particularly R. Luckhurst, 'Traumaculture', pp. 29-47,
182. particularly R. Luckhurst, 'Traumaculture', pp. 29-47,
183. and A. Gibson, 'Oublier Baudrillard: melancholy of the year 2000', pp. 123-41.
184. Memory is heavily, sometimes traumatically, evident as a deep stratum of myth in Simon Schama's 1995 book and television series Landscape and memory. (London, Harpercollins 1995)
185. J. Green, All dressed up: the sixties and counter-culture (London, Pimlico, 1999).
186. For an example of traumatic pop history see D. McKinney, Magic circles: the Beatles in dream and history (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003), a response to being born in 1966 in Waterloo, Iowa, 'too young to remember the sixties; too old for them not to loom over me as a mythic measure against which my era was in every way meager and inconsequential'; quotation on pp. 339-42.
187. Savage, 'The new naturalists', p. 114.
188. See also Savage, 'That's how good it is';
189. J. Savage, 'Do you know how to pony? The messianic intensity of the sixties', in A. McRobbie, ed., Zoot suits and second-hand dresses: an anthology of fashion and music (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989), pp. 121-31.
190. For a more pessimistic view of pop's post-sixties prospects see I. MacDonald, The people's music (London, Pimlico, 2003).