|
(Disambiguation: you may be looking for London Underground)
The English underground usually refers to popular musicians who have benefited from acquiring the sensibility of native English song, as that tradition has been passed down through the generations, often without any formal conveyance.
It was first identified by the neo-romantic historian E.P. Thompson in 1963, in his The Making of the English Working Class...
- "We must remember the 'underground' of the ballad singer and the fairground which handed on traditions to the nineteenth century (to the music hall, or Dickens' circus folk or Hardy's pedlars and showmen); for in these ways the 'inarticulate' conserve certain values - a spontaneity and capacity for enjoyment and mutual loyalties - despite the inhibiting pressures of magistrates, mill-owners, and Methodists."
The phrase was used, in slightly wider cultural sense than just music, by Jonathon Green in his book Days In The Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961-1971 (1988). This was a collection of first-hand accounts of the 1960s pop & rock -based 'underground' counter-culture in England.
The term is now often used among educated music fans, to identify a modern song-writing tradition which is usually taken to arise into the past thirty years via the work of Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt and Nick Drake. Wire magazine also regularly applies the term to the gothic-tinged neo-romantic 'post-industrial' music of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93 and others - calling it... "a shadowy scene whose work accents peculiarities of Englishness through the links and affinities they've forged with earlier generations of the island's marginals and outsiders."
The term has since been applied to the wider 'underground currents' by which essentially English romantic popular-cultural forms have been conveyed down through the generations.
The term also very occasionally appears in reference to the English underground press of the 1960s and 70s; to English underground film of the 1970s; to the English underground rave music scene of the 1990s. However, here it is likely to arise as a simple co-joining of words rather than consciously as a distinct phrase.
| 
