While I was writing this review, the film version of Dad's Army (1968–1977) comedy television series – an ultimate celebration of English characteristics seen through the activities of the Home Guard during the Second World War – was in the cinemas, the Brexit referendum of UK was waiting in the wings and the first Muslim (Sadiq Khan) was elected as the mayor of London. All of these cultural and political news items point to the content of this book: a splendid overview of the connection between Britishness and popular music and the timely analysis of various and myriad roles of popular music in recreating, promoting and assuming nationality.

In this connection, it is appropriate to remember that the more we distance ourselves from the revolutionary fabric of the rock age, the more we will be familiar with the fact that popular music and culture are now a vital part of the mainstream national narrative. However, it is an anomaly – increasingly visited and revisited after the end of the Cold War – first (ironically) celebrated during the Britpop years and recently becoming an active part of the (new) heritage culture. What could then be a better example of this than Britpop-related extravaganzas of the year 2012: the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee concert – the first one also serving as the opening example for this book. Alas, there is now no escaping the fact that we are experiencing early 21st century British cultural modernity by also confronting the ancien régime.

Through an engaging discussion of the 2012 London Olympics, Morra introduces the themes of the book: the national tradition (heritage and rebellion), the communal voice (English people, women and race), Empire and ‘Elizabethanism’ of Britishness. Enjoyably, with the more than sensible taste of a British pop music fan, Morra links ‘punk and pomp sensibilities’ (p. 25) while conducting a detailed study of British popular music reflecting the wider ideas of Britishness/Englishness and its heritage. In a manner both critical and celebratory, she reminds us of the role of popular music in the new milieu of British national identity, finding that popular music has become an important signifier of a post-war identity, ‘now as much a part of establishment national culture as Shakespeare, Dickens, the BBC, and the Queen’ (p. 188).

There are a great many recent studies related to the subject, obviously because of the post-Cold War confusion over what it means to belong to a particular national identity in the neoliberal age. Losing the Empire – but gaining a new one through British Invasions – and the different notions of the new Elizabethan age have all, almost silently, permeated the popular national sensibility since the 1950s, helping to explain the rapid post-war change.

However, while the music of the Swinging 1960s was in part a cultural form serving to separate the nation from its imperial past, it has now evolved into a rigid template essential to the definitions of British pop music. In this book, for example, by less concentration on the story of the second British Invasion (p. 183), this template could have been questioned, and the competing narratives could have been incorporated more effectively into the whole picture. However, the introduction of the role of women and, for example, a critical overview of P.J. Harvey's recent work (pp. 109–11) – as well as some obscure female groups (e.g. Liverbirds from Liverpool) – implicitly questions this template.Footnote ¹

Another point of view, addressed in this book through an analysis of two dominant, conflicting narratives around popular music – music as the voice of an indigenous English ‘folk’ and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire – raises an argument of how much popular music is now accepted both as the authentic ‘folk’ music of modern Britain and how much as the part of the heritage culture. The recognition of the importance of pop music in creating the new form of national heritage has arguably also foregrounded a dominant middle-class element in the music industry, exemplified by the fact that in one week in October 2010 ‘60 per cent of UK chart acts were educated at private schools compared with 20 per cent in 1990’ (Robinson 2010). This has obviously led to ‘the unexamined colonising of popular music by privately-educated and stage-schooled careerists’, as Jones has argued (Reference Jones2013, p. 86).

This is a dismaying reminder of the other side of the coin – not sufficiently analysed in this book: the question of the national ‘people’ in popular culture – who are included or excluded in and from this definition. If pop-modernity in the 1960s meant the inclusion of lower orders to create and extend this national (popular) heritage, with the advent of new ideas of education, welfare politics and progressive societal ideas, what does this modernity mean at the beginning of the new millennium? As Morra's analysis argues, the parameters defining the new rock ’n’ roll rebelliousness can no longer be regarded as belonging exclusively to white males with guitars (p. 53). Therefore, women (the chapter on ‘Women and Song’) and race (the chapter on ‘Race and Indigeneity’) can identify new forms of the peculiar rebelliousness of British popular music. An obvious example is rapper Dizzee Rascal, who can both represent Britishness in the London Olympics (p. 1) and at the same time question the mainstream cultural fabric.

In this connection, two of the themes of this book, re-engagement of the music with the idea of the rise of ‘The New Elizabethan Age’, ‘with the emphatic re-emergence of a familiar, traditionalist Great Britain’ (p. 145), and the pretentiousness latent in the industry-controlled commercial idea of the British Invasion, were often seen also as the new rise of the idea of Empire during the time when the real Empire was disappearing into the cultural historical memory. While male guitar-dominated bands were evolving from the margins of provincial Britain of the 1960s, ‘I'm backing Britain’ campaigns promoted the new sense of Elizabethanism, now related to the consumerism and media-orientated entertainment invasions of British pop culture.

It is beyond argument that the New Labour politics of the 1990s reactivated this ‘new Elizabethan sensibility’, when Tony Blair declared that ‘rock ‘n’ roll is not just an important part of our culture, it's an important part of our way of life’ (p. 1). Therefore, it would have been interesting to read more about the story of Cool Britannia and its political relationship with the definition of Englishness before Blair. For example, it was Tory minister Virginia Bottomley who invented the term in the early 1990s under the John Major administration (Jeffries 2007), not some Britpop related think-tank, as many are accustomed to believe. The slogan reflected Neil Postman's argument in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (Reference Postman1985), that a contemporary public will be oppressed by their addiction to amusement, especially offered by a new kind of political leader.

Especially when neo-nationalism has also been recently working as a sinister political and cultural force by creating darker overtones in promoting its values, the role of new politicians is certainly increasingly important. Of course, you can find more examples of neo-fascist undertones in (alternative) contemporary British pop (e.g. neo-folk) – deliberately created as contrarian tools against contemporary cultural status quo. These are, quite often, expressions of neo-nationalist sentiments contrasting with the jubilant atmosphere of national spectacles. Morra's book shows – perhaps unintentionally – how the once radical form of (youth) culture and anti-authoritarian force has now become ‘the primary signifier and expression of contemporary national identity’ (p. 10), but it can also underline ‘the extent to which national popular music can be invoked to articulate very different social and political agendas’ (p. 20). Indeed, Postman's Cold War prophecy and neo-fascist flirting with contemporary popular culture may also be seen as oppositional legacies of modernity and nationalism.

Morra also argues that the national(ist) aspects of pop music have been nonetheless largely overlooked in academic writing (p. 9; the study of popular music ‘has become removed from a critical consideration of its very real national role’) and how analyses of popular music tend to eschew the nation in favour of the local and the global. This is a considerable exaggeration, especially when considering how much research – related to national identity, place etc. – there has recently been in the field of popular music studies. Although Morra acknowledges ‘the pioneering investigations’ (p. 9) of Frith, Hall and Hebdige, the more recent studies, e.g. by Cohen (Reference Cohen2007), Gardner (Reference Gardner2015), Cloonan (Reference Cloonan1997) and Zuberi (Reference Zuberi2001) – although some of them are listed in the references – should have also been mentioned in this chapter.

Another critique of this book lies in the methodological question of ‘the very assumption of a canon and of the presiding importance of recorded music as representative “text” [continuing] to recognise the presiding influence of an ideal established in relation to English Literature’ (p. 15). It is arguable that this relationship is still as problematic as it was during the Cold War era. If Morra suggests that the oppositional relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘established/high’ is now resolved, it requires a much more convincing argument. Not only transcending but also questioning the relationship between popular music and English Literature tradition could have overcome some limitations in Morra's argument and would have questioned the most obvious celebratory moments – moments often presented as clichés in the canonical histories of popular music and also one-dimensionally suggesting a linear and ‘continuous mode of national expression’ (pp. 55, 58).

The last is related to the choice of sources in this book. Morra's decision to focus exclusively on the mainstream music press and news media raises again the question of inclusion and exclusion in this debate. If the inclusion of digital sources (websites, blogs, forums and social media devoted to music criticism) will dissipate the target of the work, it will certainly – at the same time – increase critical voices targeted against neo-nationalist celebrations. In the future it would be a welcome inclusion to study these contrasting voices, hopefully provided by countercultural arguments created in the web. These probably will also articulate a wider range of points of view and, in the process, diversify cultural agency beyond a cliqueish whiteness and maleness of rock-related media.

All in all, this work will appeal to all researchers working on national identity, popular music and society and the modern history of Britain. It is an informative read, which covers a detailed history of British popular music with an evident enthusiasm for its subject, and would be a timely addition also to the reading lists of scholars and students of English Literature, Cultural and Media Studies.