The Diamond Jubilee - where are the Sex Pistols when you need them?

By Andrew Eaton-Lewis
Published on Wednesday 8 February 2012 17:40

IN 1977, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee was marked by national celebrations. The year was also the height of punk, and punk responded to the anniversary with a refreshing amount of disrespect.

“God save the Queen, a fascist regime,” snarled the Sex Pistols, prompting establishment and media outrage, a BBC ban - and a huge hit.

Looking at the line-up of the Queen’s diamond jubilee concert - announced earlier this week by Take That’s Gary Barlow, one of the event’s organisers - my first reaction was: where are the Sex Pistols when you need them? Not that I’m suggesting they should play Buckingham Palace alongside Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Cliff Richard and Sir Tom Jones (are you spotting a pattern here?), although that would be entertainingly surreal. And, knowing John Lydon’s perverse sense of humour, he would probably be up for it - although he’s very unlikely to be asked.

But really, where’s the subversion? Where’s this year’s equivalent of Derek Jarman’s 1977 film Jubilee, in which Queen Elizabeth (the 16th century one, the current one having been killed in a mugging) wanders through a ruined, nihilistic England inhabited by snotty young punks such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam Ant and the Slits?

A lot has changed since 1977, of course. Rich, reckless bankers are a more obvious target for anti-establishment rage at the moment than an 85-year-old woman who has already endured years of grief thanks to the embarrassing exploits of her various offspring. In 2012, I suspect, a song with the sentiments of God Save The Queen would struggle to avoid coming across like a juvenile attack on an easy target. Who wants to lay into an old lady, after all?

Still, the lack of a genuinely subversive response to the anniversary - so far at least - is more than a little disappointing. And the fact that a pop concert is such a significant part of the celebrations is another indication of how much establishment interests have now co-opted an art form which, at its most vibrant, is fiercely anti-establishment. It’s a lifetime now since pop stars, with their unconventional clothes and noisy music, seemed like a different species to the government and the royal family. Not any more - Jessie J, one of the young stars of June’s diamond jubilee concert, comes across exactly the way David Cameron - a careerist, shamelessly populist clone of earlier successes in the same field, a product of ambition with no obvious end other than itself.

Perhaps a better target, then, is Gary Barlow. “I love the monarchy and I love the Queen,” he said this week, in what might well be the first stage of a campaign to get himself his own knighthood. There was a time when I felt a lot of goodwill towards Barlow - for the quiet, dignified way he dealt with Robbie Williams’ merciless attacks and his own fall from favour over the years, and the lack of boasting when he managed to get back on top - but it ends here. Barlow, you’re a social climbing sycophant.

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