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We listen with elegaic nostalgia to the music we first encountered as teenagers. That was arguably the stage of our lives most appropriate
for listening to pop music , being equally suitable for sulking and self-consciousness. Through the distorting lens of the media , popular
music is a world in which an obsession with its history often threatens to overwhelm its present configuration. Heritage rock magazines ,
retrospective rockumentaries on TV to mark yet another Anniversary - of the Summer of Love , say , or the release of Never Mind the Bollocks.
Veterans whose heyday was five decades in the past become headline acts of summer festivals. Self-appointed pop pundits wander their verbose
deserts of tired anecdotes and over-familiar landmarks , like writers of Rough Guides to holiday destinations. And music’s only the start of
it. From Arts and Crafts wallahs to Heritage Centres , there emerges a conscious fetish for period styles. From the Oldham Tinkers come hymns
of praise for the good old days of Industry and those leave-your-front-door-open terraced communities. The Way We Lived Then becomes another
bookshop theme , whose alcove size rivals the Damaged Lives section. It was neither snobbery , nor sodomy , which was the definitive English
vice. It was a populist veneration of the distant past , of antiquity. The Old Vic , Old Spot , Olde English , Old Puteney , Old Peculiar.
We are on familiar terrain when we encounter hedgerow and dry-stone wall preservation societies , when we pine for a lost arcadia of church
bells and thatched cottages , when we join the local history society's monthly meetings in the mock-Tudor village inn. Burning in its mock-
Tudor hearth are locally-sourced logs , their smoke rising above the sleepy hamlet of golf-playing , retired businessmen whose wives are active
in the local crafts fair. Preserving the past , or some idealised version of it , has always been a hobby for the better-off. The blue remembered
hills and vales of ploughmen , shepherds and market gardeners lead an attenuated after-life in romantic retrospectives within the pages of The
Dalesman and Country Life. By our own day commerce was exploiting the opportunities for profit in our limitless appetite for industrial nostalgia.
Guided tours around the silent forge and renovated water-wheel , school parties conducted underground in search of “the authentic coal-mining
experience.” We chug along the renovated canal in our weekend barge , reading adverts for holiday-lets in East coast ex-fishing villages and in
quarrymen’s converted Lakeland abodes. The Jacuzzi of the nostalgia industry bubbles away to equally profitable ends as those mineral springs
issuing from Caledonian fells. Who would have foretold , even fifty years ago , how much people could be persuaded to fork out for a bottle of
water ? Capitalist modes of production and distribution prevail , for all the popularity of farmers’ markets with their organic or "artisan"
produce and folk clubs in which songs about Merrie England were ever popular. For those with literary pretensions , how about sampling the
Wordsworth Experience on a trip to Dove Cottage ? Or you may prefer to ride Thomas the tank engine up from Keighley to the Haworth
Parsonage for the Bronte Experience.
Why is it that people in ‘advanced’ cultures search for hand-made products , antique furniture , period fireplaces , native pottery
and so on , while those in the ‘underdeveloped’ world are attracted to the newer technological products we have come to despise ?
Could it be that in the first case , hand-made products represent an authenticity felt to be missing from the modern world , whereas those
possessed of that commodity associate the mass-produced stuff we discard with a power we have become bored by ? Intimations of mortality
and our tendency to don rose-coloured glasses when reviewing past scenes are woven fine in those adverts evoking the good old days of Pennine
villages. Where in reality it gets dark at 3 o’clock under a grey blanket of raincloud hovering over smoke-blackened gritstone houses and
chapels. Fading inscriptions on crumbling tombstones in the sodden cemetery , struggle and strife and unremitting labour from time immemorial.
In sepia-tinted Ad-land there are Wesleyan hymns played by a brass band and the baking of real brown bread by grandparents whose current
non-existence is a welcome reminder of what awaits even advertising executives.
Derrida(1) coined the term ‘Archive Fever’ for a compulsive and nostalgic urge towards a place of absolute commencement ,
which for Freud was the inanimate state of non-being.
Wig.
(1) The Inspector Clouseau of Deconstruction. He is usually read in the same baffled spirit one might bring to publications on
Australian Etiquette and American Diffidence , or a compendium of Scandinavian Humour.
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