It has to be admitted that finishing this review during recent months has been a challenging and frustrating experience. Not because of the book under review, but because of following day after day and month after month the twists and turns of the never-ending Brexit saga. Mad Dogs and Englishness, indeed. When thinking of the gently mocking imperial connotations of the Coward song title, there is something opportune in so naming the book at this time. When adopted, the study of Englishness should lead us to open some positive approaches surrounding the controversies and difficulties of Englishness or Coward's Englishmen, while in the real world England seems to have fallen into the continuing limbo of suffering the post-traumatic experience of not being the imperial power it still used to be in the days of Noël Coward.

With the panorama of Brexit opening week after week and the unsettling cultural legacy of British patriotism forming the frames for populist nationalism as it is today, it is quite difficult now to remember how English national identity was portrayed and celebrated in the heyday of Britpop and Blairism. This Brexit-led moment seems to favour the vague idea of ‘instinct populist nationalism’ – an antithesis of Orwellian praise of English gentleness alongside respect for constitutionalism and legality as positively patriotic – formerly presented in the form of Britpop as cheeky chappies of male working-class culture, and now reflecting more the thick-headed patriotism accepted by millions of English people, this according to Orwell, when they ’willingly accept as their national emblem the bulldog, an animal noted for its obstinacy, ugliness and impenetrable stupidity’ (Davison Reference Davison and Pimlott2001, p. 297). At the same time, the leading characters in this public performance come now from the semi-fictional world of the English upper-class, such as the parody of English stiff upper lip, taciturnity, eccentricity and various faces of nostalgia: see for example Vivian Stanshall's creation of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. Alternatively, see such hard-line Brexiteers as ‘Edwardian lawyer’ and honourable member of the eighteenth century, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boys’ Own fiction character Billy Bunter, Boris Johnson, and the cheerfulness of ‘cake and ale man’ Nigel Farage (Cohen Reference Cohen2019, p. 49).

So, what could be a better place to find some understanding for this than an exciting book like this, which seems to be looking for a respectable side of cultural pride and patriotism in the form of engaging with British popular music? This book is divided into three parts, the first of which searches for answers precisely from the direction which is part of the most intense battle of defining English identity at present: English heritage. Opening the book by discussing family, home and cultural identity in the music of Ray Davies and the Kinks, Carey Fleiner wisely dissociates the Kinks and their working classness from the semi-fictional Swinging London of the 1960s and the retro-ish heritage culture of pop music. Instead, she shows how complicated and nuanced – allowing for character-acting in Ray Davies’ songs – was the world of The Kinks, including the English virtue of resisting and questioning those very notions of Englishness.

When talking about character-acting, David Bowie certainly was an English pop star, who changed pop into an art form by playing with different roles and characters, deeply rooted in English heritage, but at the same time trying to break free from the constraints and burden of this heritage. His ‘late style’ particularly disrupts ‘heritage’ concepts of national identity (p. 43) when his ‘identity is happily mongrelised’ (p. 48). Although his career and back catalogue have also been neutered as part of the heritage of contemporary rock culture, he continually resisted this by re-inventing himself until the very end of his life. As Richard Mills points out in this chapter, even when Bowie used nostalgia, he was always looking forward, and the ironic exaggerations of his English identity in both his on- and off-stage character were always otherworldly and alien. This excellent piece of writing suffers only from some minor lapses, like mentioning that ‘Bowie in his late work had adopted his William Burroughs/Brion Gysin cut-up technique’ (p. 40), when this was already present in Bowie's work of the early-mid 1970s, but elsewhere it gives proper analysis of Bowie's role in the context of English (pop) heritage, especially in his later years.

The first part of the book ends with Ben Winsworth's analysis of The Jam's use of the Union Jack. The band's use of the flag, in which Paul Weller was trying to present the fashionable, modern and patriotic idea of Englishness through his band, was in direct opposition to Jamie Reid's iconic torn version of the flag. In Abigail Gardner's discussion of P.J. Harvey's albums as English heritage, Harvey's intentions are radical but also conservative as ‘part of an archiving process that contributes to a reframing of Englishness’ (p. 67). Harvey's material seemingly foregrounds some forgotten elements of English identity and landscape, as Gardner points out, and also refers to the experience of a ‘silent majority’ in England, part of the people resisting the change and perhaps voting for Brexit.

The second part of the book (‘Spaces of Identity’) opens with Dene October's exquisite if somewhat peripheral discussion of sound as experience in Doctor Who and its aural and spatial links to 1960s England (Dene October). Jon Hackett's discussion of Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield – theorised through Marxism, and concerning production and labour – argues how specific forgotten and obsolete cultural modes can still create critical interest, without being nostalgic, as in this case the radical tradition of Sheffield was also celebrated and used as an inspiration in the material produced by other bands emanating from the Sheffield scene. In the last chapter of this section, Johnny Hopkins returns to the debate on the use of the Union Jack as a contested symbol of Englishness in popular music. The use of the Union Jack is complicated, and a whole book could be produced to devote to the issues of the use of the flag in English (popular) culture.

Following the logic of this book so far, it seems to be that popular music reflecting or commenting upon Englishness is always balanced between the fear of becoming mainstream heritage culture or trying to find some radical alternatives from the very notions of the national and the people. The final part of this book seems to be an excellent example of the latter. As Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski argues in the first chapter of the concluding part (‘Performing Discrepancy’), the commodification of punk and its relation to royalty, common decency, dissent and self-expression is a complex map pointing also to the various directions of English (cultural) decency and rebellious tendencies. If popular music, and in this case punk, is the real voice of the people and its instinctive reactions, reflecting – among other things – the class struggle, ‘punk, therefore, poses a number of paradoxes’ (p. 149). This piece inspires the reader to think about the relationship of punk anger to the anger of contemporary culture, both as mediated through music. The idea of how much ‘indecency is a characteristic of authenticity’ (p. 150) in popular music could especially be connected to wider notions of authenticity in the context the nation and the people.

As summarised and contextualised by Brooks and Donnelly in the introduction (pp. 1–13), English identity certainly is plural and contested, and the second chapter of the concluding part presents one of the best examples of this in British pop music. Christian Lloyd and Shara Rambarran discuss Tricky as oppositional to Britpop, as he ‘constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs elements from an eclectic musical past, present and future, regardless of origin’ (p. 172). Tricky writes songs registering ‘a kind of internal culture shock at the retrograde politics of national identity in the Engpop era’ (p. 163), also reflecting the fictional origins and performative nature of national culture. As the authors argue, this can be seen as the modern idea of self-reflexive listening in most popular music when constructing song meaning(s) concerning the culture.

This concept can include the style of Burial's complex urban dubstep, where this famously anonymous musician tried to distance his personality from his music, at the same time commenting on alienating and anonymous British urban experience. Gabriel Marino argues in his piece that Burial's work, like that of Tricky, also produced a collage of various cultural references, this time created in the hauntological context and soundscapes of urban life, presenting Burial himself as ‘a secluded bard for these days of future past’ (p. 189). The book ends with an analysis of Bishi's Albion Voice album, coming from the same kind of urban metropolitan experience as Burial, but now from the female perspective of a second-generation Londoner of Bengali heritage. This radical voice is a perfect antidote to the Brexit-leaning limited vision of Englishness: contemporary, cosmopolitan, critical of imperial Englishness coming from the descendant of the colonised and citing to the direction of unique ‘mongrelised’ nature of British identity while questioning the essentialism of most of the national culture.

Primarily this essay directs the reader to ponder the whole contemporary nature of national sentiment. Orwell detested the arrogant assertion of British greatness, but also the people in the country houses as parasites, disliked the Blimps and was hostile to the Europeanised intelligentsia who sneered at the prevailing culture of the country. So, what is left here, if Orwell's good and ordinary people are increasingly manipulated and hypnotised by the new digitalised nature of (popular) culture, social media and ‘characters’ performing as Churchillian savours of the nation? By reading this book, you start to wonder, what could be the options for Orwell's and Bragg's (Reference Bragg2007) progressive patriotism today, without dismissing or sneering to the culture that was for him (Orwell) truly native, centring around the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the lovely cup of tea.