The most famous song about Queen Elizabeth II is called God Save the Queen, and so is the second most famous. The Sex Pistols’ decision to record and release their anti-monarchist screed in time for the silver jubilee was the most brilliant provocation in a career consisting of almost nothing but brilliant provocations. The band had been playing the song for a few months under its original title, No Future, but manager Malcolm McLaren said the phrase sounded “like an ad for a bank”. Much better, he thought, to hijack the national anthem, turn it upside down and hitch a ride on the jubilee. What a coup.
Another thing the Sex Pistols’ hit shares with the national anthem is that it is not about Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor but a symbol of the British state. For John Lydon, the Queen is not just synonymous with “the fascist regime”, she’s “not a human being” at all. The song soon spirals away from the ruler towards the resentfully ruled, “the flowers in the dustbin”. Britain was so fraught in 1977 – politically, socially, economically – that to many young people, the patriotic jubilee festivities were a bitter farce of nostalgia and denial, like bunting on a bomb site. As Jon Savage writes in England’s Dreaming: “Here was the ultimate statement of pop’s everlasting present, just at the moment when the masses were celebrating the past.”
Folk singer Leon Rosselson’s more verbose On Her Silver Jubilee elaborates Savage’s point:
For although the pound may tumble, although panic fills the air
Although government may crumble, and the cupboards nearly bare
Though the stairs begin to rattle, and the rats begin to stare
She enfolds in mystic unity her subjects everywhere
And we know we’re safe from harm while nanny’s there
Reissued yet again in time for the platinum jubilee (as it was for the respective 2002 and 2007 celebrations), God Save the Queen becomes guilty of the same nostalgia it critiques – a tawdry echo of a once-glorious explosion. So successful in 1977 that rumours persist to this day of a dirty-tricks campaign to keep it off the top of the charts, the Pistols’ tirade became a magnet for anyone who loathed the jubilee and a target for those who didn’t. The tabloids went berserk. Lydon claimed he was knifed by a gang of thugs who cried: “We love our Queen, you bastard!” Yet 38 years later, the singer claimed: “I never said I didn’t either. I just don’t like the institution.” That abstract quality is present in almost all songs about the Queen. She is a red-white-and-blue blur that rarely swims into focus.
The Queen ascended to the throne in 1952, the same year the UK singles chart was launched, but she has never been much of a pop fan. In a list of her 10 favourite songs released to the press in 2021, the only number that was released during her reign was Sing by Gary Barlow and the Commonwealth Band featuring the Military Wives, chosen, perhaps, for reasons that were not entirely related to musical quality. She enjoys golden-age Broadway musicals and is, according to Lady Elizabeth Anson, “a fantastic dancer. She’s got great rhythm”.
The first song about the Queen was Young Tiger’s extremely literal 1953 calypso I Was There (At the Coronation). She looked “really divine”, apparently. But prior to the Sex Pistols, the monarch’s presence in pop was largely confined to fanciful cameos. The bitterly mediocre narrator of the Kinks’ David Watts grumbles that he has never met the Queen. The fireman in the Beatles’ Penny Lane keeps her portrait in his pocket, but then so does anyone who carries cash – as Paul Weller sings in the Jam’s Down in the Tube Station at Midnight: “I fumble for change, and pull out the Queen.”
Songs about meeting the actual person were cheerfully ridiculous, like Paul McCartney’s silly love song Her Majesty (“a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have a lot to say”) or U-Roy’s comical toker fantasy Chalice in the Palace: “I’m coming down di palace / Gonna lick ah me chalice / Gonna dub it with ya majesty.” In BB King’s Better Not Look Down, a party-weary Queen seeks the venerable blues guitarist’s advice: “Oh BB, sometimes it’s so hard to pull things together / Could you tell me what you think I ought to do?”
When it comes to protest, the Sex Pistols’ all-out assault remains the alpha and omega of anti-monarchist rants. Only Repeat by the Manic Street Preachers comes close to its ferocity, with its jagged blows at “dumb flag scum” and “Royal Khmer Rouge”; Royalty by the Exploited is too fist-blunt to take seriously. The lyrics of the Stone Roses’ Elizabeth My Dear may be bluntly regicidal but they’re couched in a wisp of a folk ballad. In the Smiths’ Nowhere Fast, Morrissey fantasises about doing nothing more treasonous than pulling his trousers down in front of Her Majesty. Catatonia’s Storm the Palace is a punky republican manifesto with a comic sensibility: “Turn it into a bar / Make ’em work at Spar.”
The Queen is a throwback to the 19th century in Billy Bragg’s Take Down the Union Jack. She’s an avaricious parasite in the Housemartins’ Flag Day, and a sneering quasi-dictator in Crass’s Big A Little A. In the grime era, she resurfaced as the taunting embodiment of privilege and inequality in Dizzee Rascal’s 2 Far (“I live street and she lives neat”) and Slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain, but when Slowthai aimed a weapons-grade expletive at her in 2019, there was barely a whisper of controversy. For one thing, the likes of Prince Andrew have done such a thorough job of discrediting the monarchy from within that external attacks now feel more like paintballs than hand grenades. The heretical power of the Sex Pistols is unrepeatable. For another thing, Slowthai’s insult isn’t really directed at her as an individual. No protest song is.
Songwriters recognise the fundamental paradox of the Queen: at once the most well-known woman in the world and yet totally unknowable. She seems to have sublimated herself to the demands of the institution. Rosselson sang of “a glass cage around her and an absence in her eyes”. The lack of any deep understanding of the real person created space for imagination and dreams.
The greatest of the phantasmagorias is The Queen Is Dead, which is both Johnny Marr’s favourite Morrissey lyric and the Smiths’ four-cornered masterpiece, with each member firing on all cylinders. This unfathomably strange and, in its way, majestic song opens with a sample of the wartime ditty Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty being sung in the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room, which was already dated in that context. It is not just the monarch who is dead, “her head in a sling”, but the whole country, with its “cheerless marshes” and aroma of decay.
At the same time, there’s a subversive strand of homoeroticism that derives, like the song’s title, from the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, and a broad streak of music-hall humour. As Michael Fagan infamously did in 1982, Morrissey breaks into Buckingham Palace. “I know you and you cannot sing,” the Queen says tartly. “That’s nothing,” he replies. “You should hear me play piano.”
Every facet of the young Morrissey coexists here, connected by nothing but dream-logic, the band’s rampaging urgency and a silver thread of feedback. This is England, in all its sadness, absurdity and underdog defiance; the suffocating pall of privilege and hypocrisy but also the wit and romance. Morrissey described the royal family, without exception, as “magnificently, unaccountably and unpardonably boring” but The Queen Is Dead is quite the opposite.
The Smiths’ song cast as long a shadow as the Sex Pistols’, and it is a peculiar irony that both bands’ singers soured into nostalgic reactionaries. You can detect traces of Morrissey’s dark whimsy in This Is a Low, Blur’s elegy for Britain in the form of an absurdist shipping forecast: “The Queen, she’s gone round the bend / Jumped off Land’s End.” It’s there, too, in Dirty Pretty Things’ Tired of England, where she “sits on her throne of bingo cards and chicken bones”, and in the Libertines’ Radio America, which finds her crying to old movies over afternoon tea at the palace. She has a shadow life in songs as a tragicomic symbol of loss and national decline – more victim than perpetrator.
Pet Shop Boys’ Dreaming of the Queen stands out as an unusually nuanced and moving portrayal. “I’d read that one of the most common dreams people share is that the Queen comes round to their house,” Neil Tennant explained. “Sometimes it’s an anxiety dream and sometimes it’s a nice dream.” (Badly Drawn Boy dreams that he’s married to her in You Were Right, but that doesn’t stop him flirting with their next-door neighbour, Madonna.) Into this scenario Tennant weaves reflections on the Aids crisis and Princess Diana’s collapsing marriage. This Queen of the subconscious is a source of both empathy (“The Queen said I’m aghast / Love never seems to last”) and awkward comedy (“For I was in the nude / The old Queen disapproved”). The ultimate figure of authority is also a matriarch saddened by the death of love. From a pair of avowed republicans, the tenderness surprises.
This will most likely be the Queen’s last jubilee, which gives the pageantry a bittersweet valedictory undertow. You could argue that the UK in 2022 is every bit as fractious, aimless and grubby as it was in 1977, if not more so, but there is little appetite for railing against an ailing 96-year-old widow. For anyone dismayed by the current state of the nation, she is far too soft a target, her power too depleted. The mood is more This Is a Low than God Save the Queen.
And what of Charles? Only the Smiths acknowledge his existence, and not kindly: “Don’t you ever crave / To appear on the front of the Daily Mail / Dressed in your mother’s bridal veil?” After seven decades, we know him far too well. There is melancholy there but no mystery. You suspect few will dream of the King, and even fewer will think him worthy of a ferocious broadside or surreal reverie. How could he possibly spark the imagination like the woman who, as far as songwriters are concerned, is everywhere and nowhere?
• This article was amended on 1 June 2022 to say that 1952 saw the launch of the UK singles chart, rather than the Top 40 chart.
