It is noteworthy that this Closing Ceremony Pageant, unlike Danny Boyle’s opener, did not receive universal acclaim from the media. Far from it. It got panned as cheesy in the right wing press and was generally misunderstood by the neutrals.
So what was it they didn’t like or failed to understand? For myself, despite its sometimes irritating and occasionally frightful moments, I rather enjoyed it. One thing for sure. It wasn’t traditional. Conventional stuff that everyone expected. There was so much that was madcap, romantic and plain fun, and so many moments that were meaningful. All in all a joyous celebration of some of the best and sometimes the worst of five decades of popular music and culture.
Opening with the chimes of Big Ben the audience was given a vision of working London with a zany Churchill-like figure quoting Caliban’s speech from Shakespeare’s Tempest. From here alas the BBC began sticking its establishment oar into the proceedings with remarks about Prince Harry of Wales representing the Queen and being called Team GB Ambassador. They clearly knew more than anyone else! It signalled time for the national anthem to be sung, union jacks waved across the Arena and for the Great Street Party to begin. A singularly British invention this. Typically lots of plates but no food. Guards bands marched, chaotic music belted out and vintage cars paraded around cyclists wearing great spiked orange hats that looked like something out of a Dutch Ku Klux Klan get together while pretty boy singers twirled in and out of moving lorries!
This splendidly calculated chaos was a prelude to the portrayal of five decades of British pop music l960 to the present day. Shame that Tommy Steele, Gene Vincent and Marty Wilde who started it all off in the fifties were missing as was Britain’s greatest singing star, instrumentalist and best loved actor of the thirties and forties, George Formby, whose risqué lyrics and tuneful voice is still such a delight on the ears today. Never mind, the musical procession kicked off with songs about London and particularly magical was Ray Davis, ageing Kinks star, singing their poignant number Waterloo Sunset which had many of the spectators wistfully joining in.
Now came one of the greatest moments of the Pageant. Something truly inspirational. There should have now been the formal entry parade of all the athletes carrying their flags. Instead competitors from all the many countries began coming down into the Arena through the seated crowds in the Stadium along with thousands more arriving at ground level wearing their national colours and waving their national flags and union jacks. All of it happening with a mass choir singing. It was marvellously informal. All the athletes mingling together then being shepherded into segments of what became a colourful union jack. This was a splendid and highly imaginative coming together of the participants of this London Olympics, its Olympic Family, in an enchanting and wonderfully choreographed happening. A real demonstration of the Olympic spirit of universal camaraderie shining through all the intense competition of recent days.
So what was it that the media might have objected to? Traditionally at this point came the final medals presentation ceremony of the Games, awarded to the winner and runners up of the Men’s Marathon after which all the British medallists were introduced to the crowd and flowers presented to the Volunteers whose work made the Games possible. A beautiful and moving touch this and well applauded. Surely nothing to condemn here. What followed was something else. A choir of children dressed in white track suits with their tops marked IMAGINE were accompanied by a big screen image of John Lennon singing the radical anti-religion, anti-establishment song of that name that he wrote and was so significant and potent a symbol of protest from the mid- l970s. Plenty for all the Thatcherite Tory Boys to hate and made worse when the children’s choir formed John Lennon’s face from above. Including this in the Pageant was inspirational and a typically London two fingers up to authority.
It couldn’t go on but it did. Only differently! How infuriated many must have been to see gay icon George Michael strut his stuff for gay Freedom. They needn’t have worried. The entire lyric belted out in deafening style came across meaningless, with only dedicated fans or enemies knowing what it was all about! Following this assault on the ears were symbols of the 60s and 70s ‘mod’ culture… a long parade of hundreds of geared up youths on motor scooters with ‘mod’ beat songs, mod icon David Bowie and huge floats of trucks displaying hoardings of famous fashion models in a British fashion parade replete with marching accomplices dressed in sinister nazi-style uniforms. In 60s and 70s London, pop music and fashion went hand in hand and was even seen on occasion in Liverpool, but how about the rest of the country? It was a bit of a joke really but a cool one because now, after fashion models paraded a catwalk, a ghoulish skeleton ship appeared commanded by Annie Lennox in a giant red silk dress at the prow rasping out a performance of Little Bird in best nightmare style.
Some real stuff you strutted there Annie, only what was it supposed to represent? Some kind of party style necrophilia with decay and age as the dark side of Olympian youth? Well I suppose it happens to all athletes Annie, maybe even Usain, but surely now wasn’t the time! Or was it the screaming, deafening nihilism of punk rock which heralded the death of lyricism, melody and artistic composition in pop music? Or could it have symbolised something altogether more sinister such as the coming of Margaret Thatcher!
Okay, the boat was pulled out of the Arena on ropes and replaced with Russell Brand wearing a top hat and striped trousers on an open bus top belting out the Beatles song I Am The Walrus with a good pulse surrounded by leggy girls playing violins, scantily clad police women dolled up in black lycra along with countless other dancers. As I said in my Opening Ceremony blog, that’s all British people are portrayed as doing these days when as everyone knows, they’re either boozing in pubs, eating obese-making rubbish fast foods, watching football, working for the council or in call centres, unless that is they’re otherwise busy in City of London finance houses figuring out new ways to swindle the public. Never mind! There was always Fatboy Slim riding an Octopus surrounded by hundreds of blue suited men wearing blue bowler hats with working electric light bulbs sticking out the top.
There will be many who might cynically say that this somehow represented the musical wilderness that accompanied 15 years of Thatcherite hegemony but I’m not so sure. After all, the period also marked the rise of Elton John and the on-going presence of forever young bachelor boy Cliff Richard in the hearts of the Queen’s mother and the blessed Margaret, so loved by everyone from Essex.
The lyrical-romantic demise of pop music during the eighties, continuing its path into the flat, grey, colourless years of John ‘pass the peas Norma’ Major’s half of the nineties, later typically marked by a song with only 4 words, You Should Be Dancing repeated over and over accompanied by countless gyrating youths. And how very true it all was! A decade and a half of Tory rule had depoliticised the once culturally radical youth of the sixties and early seventies and turned them into a-political dancing morons who soullessly rotated to lyrics of a few flat words and tunes flat as pancakes.
Right now though, as to exemplify it all, we were given another symbol of the demise of lyrical imagination with the appearance of a totally artificial, comprehensively manufactured pop culture perfectly represented by The Spice Girls phenomenon, a girly band put up to rival the Beatles whose major contribution came in the song they belted on top of London black cabs telling people what they really wanted.
Yes, we’re definitely telling you what you really want! And if you don’t like it we’ll tell you again…
It was so strange really. As I listened to them singing their song in the London 2012 Stadium Arena I could hear the ripe, arched, thoroughly manufactured Tory tones of Margaret Thatcher telling people what they really wanted and what she was going to give the striking coal miners. Mercifully, this entirely a-cultural purely money-making piece of sterility was replaced by something so very different. Something mad, zany, anarchic and comprehensively British! A real brainwave on the part of the producer. After falling out of a dud cannon, Pythons star Eric Idle got on his feet and in best Eric Idle style sang Always Look on the Bright Side of Life with completely crazy, uncontrolled and thoroughly anarchic happenings going on around him including nuns in full gear on roller skates, a group of Indians all dolled up in traditional gold costume with him at the centre dancing and playing Indian music, dozens of men and women done up as Roman soldiers stomping about with a formation of Scots pipers in kilts in the background while Idle himself cavorted with Britannia.
It was beautifully done. Short, sharp, thoroughly anarchic and very funny. Little wonder it was ignored by the media in general along with the wretched BBC presenters who just didn’t know what to make of it.
Well I’ll tell you. Personally I never did like that song. It always struck me that a purely cheerful attitude to life was a rotten substitute for not doing anything to change rotten circumstances or challenge rotten people who had a habit of telling everyone else to ‘lighten up’… which meant not doing anything about anything, especially them! Now I know better! It’s a particularly cunning aspect of the British character, this always looking on the bright side of life. You pretend to be doing it of course, whistling away like an arsehole but while you’re whistling you’re actually scheming the total demise and downfall of the bastard who told you to ‘lighten up.’ Cool dudes, the British, and a superbly cool piece of Pageant.
It was followed by screen images of deceased Freddy Mercury singing and Brian May of the Queen looking plain old and making as much screechy noise as possible on his electric guitar. What was that all about? I just don’t know. Maybe some sign that the Pageant of Pop had run its course. That there was no need for Elton or Sir Paul. Throughout it all however, BBC cameras focused intensely on every athlete or group of athletes supposedly singing the songs. In fact they probably had to work hard to do so because most seemed to be just talking together, waving flags or in the case of many young female athletes from East Europe, blowing hand kisses into the lenses possibly hoping to be spotted by some rich old daddy who might finance their future careers!
And so the loud music died. In its place the national anthem of Greece was played and followed by the Olympic anthem sung by the London Welsh Choir. The fun was at an end. Time for the Handover Ceremony. The flag was passed by Boris to Jacques Rogge who gave it a wave and passed it to the mayor of Rio de Janeiro who did likewise. Brazil’s national anthem followed then a ‘presentation’ by that city to London as a gift. Some gift! It was Rio’s version of more bloody dancing only this time the samba. Men dressed in gold and tall coffee coloured ladies swinging their lithe torsos. So this is what we’re going to get in four years’ time. A kind of cha-cha-cha Sex Olympics! Europe’s bankers, royals, politicians, aristos and of course footballers will undoubtedly be there only you and I won’t!
The samba-ing over, it was time for the speeches. Coe again with the majesties and royal highnesses bit. The ones who matter coming first before the people, before the athletes and volunteers. Thanks Seb! And the same went for Rogge. Administrators always know which arse to kiss first. That’s why they’re chosen to administer… on behalf of their majesties and royal highnesses, Harry, Barry and Co. And all accompanied with enthusiastic flag waving and singing of the national anthem by everyone in the Stadium. The association of royalty, monarchy and nation won’t happen in the next Olympics. Samba or not, Brazil’s a Republic.
The most moving moment of the Closing Ceremony Pageant now came. The arms of the magnificent torch slowly lowered and Darcy Bussell the ballerina magically flew into the Arena like a bird as the flames began to extinguished themselves and die. And after this great, often quite momentous, quite wonderful celebration of youth, of sport and sportsmanship, of the altruism and kindness of the volunteers, of the pleasure and delight of people all round the world, what were we left with?
Well I was left feeling empty. It had all come and gone. All that emotion and excitement… And I was never even there! I think that maybe we were all left feeling empty in our own way. In our own way we all kind of watched and took part.
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