Positive Songs For Negative Times #77: The Queen Is Dead...

…and it’s so lonely on a limb.

Yes, I'm heartbroken. Mrs. McCluskey, actress Gwyneth Powell, died earlier this week. Another icon of my childhood gone. Who's going to stop Gripper Stebson now?

Oh, very well then... 

I have been consciously avoiding writing about the death of Queen Elizabeth II due to the lynch mobs who are out there, listening to our every word, waiting to hang, draw and quarter anyone who responds with anything other than reverential grief. But since Alyson threw down the gauntlet... let’s see if I can dip my toe in that puddle without the piranhas biting it off.

I was saddened to hear that the Queen was dead. It’s sad when any old lady dies, and given that she was just a couple of years older than my own parents, it obviously made me worry more than ever for them. Is it more of a big deal when a famous person dies? I can’t claim to believe otherwise, since I’m regular wailing and gnashing my teeth as I eulogise departed icons here – musicians, actors, TV personalities, writers, comic book creators… Mrs. McCluskey! I still find it hard to accept that Prince is no longer with us. And Stan Lee. And Olivia Newton John. The list goes on and on. And the Queen was, we are told, the most famous person in the world, so clearly her death is a huge deal for many, many people, and who am I to question that?

What I don’t like is this idea that everyone is expected to grieve in the same way and at the same level. A level of grief prescribed and dictated by the TV stations that have cancelled all their programming in favour of wall-to-wall mourn-porn, and a Bank Holiday in which everything is shutting down (hope you weren't planning on visiting Center Parcs) to force us all to watch a state funeral, whether we want to or not. Attention, populace: YOU WILL BE DEVASTATED. None of this is about paying our respects; it’s just about putting on a show.

Andrew O’Hagan, a far better writer than me, wrote what I consider to be the definitive response to the media… I want to say circus, but it’s much bigger than a circus, isn’t it? Media Apocalypse? Royale-with-cheese-mageddon? Yet at no point is he disrespectful to the memory of QE2. Indeed, he makes some excellent points about how the Queen herself was a woman of quiet dignity, and how the very newspapers that are flagellating themselves the most are the ones who have tried their best to make her life miserable for the last half century. It’s one of the best pieces of social commentary I’ve ever read (hey, if everyone else is allowed to drown us in hyperbole this week, at least let me get in on the act), culminating in a final paragraph that lifts the roof off.

The Express reports on huge crowds weeping in the street. Modern journalism loves the idea that a nation has a heart and that a heart can break, as if there were a requirement to confect a sort of togetherness out of national torpor, the quivering lip having long since replaced the stiff upper one as a symbol of our essential nature. It won’t matter for very long, but today it all seems part of the workaday hysteria of British life, yet perfectly at odds with the quiet, persevering woman on the postage stamp.

Beyond all that, I firmly believe that the death of the Queen is another nail in the coffin of “Great” Britain. First Brexit, then a government that takes ineptitude beyond satire (The Thick Of It looks tame in comparison), now the death of the monarchy as an institution. Don’t try to convince me that Charles or William or anyone else will be able to save it, because without Elizabeth’s dignified resolve, the gradual slide into Reality TV Royals will become a landslide. Republicans might cheer at this, but they’d be wrong to do so. The Royal Family won’t go away. They’ll just become an embarrassment, and so will the “United” Kingdom. “And it’s so lonely on a limb,” sang that bloke I’m not supposed to be mentioning, but I’ve now mentioned two days running.

I didn’t post The Queen Is Dead here on Friday, partly because it would have been crass and disrespectful, but mostly because it was Sam’s ninth birthday and that meant a thousand times more to me than any of this. Choose Life, as Renton said.

TQID is my favourite album of the 80s, and the title track is one of the best things The Smiths ever recorded. But it’s also a rather misunderstood song. Despite the savage title, it’s not really about the Queen herself at all, but about the Queen as a figurehead for the monarchy. I’ve stolen this from Genius, because talent borrows but genius steals…

“This does not refer to a literal regicide. It is about how British society is still, culturally, rooted in the monarchy and aristocracy, and how the sudden decline in the relevance of those institutions means that British society is wayward and lost – it’s on a limb. To go “out on a limb” means to put yourself in a risky/vulnerable position. 30 years on, with devolution in full swing, a London-centric Parliament that can run wild, and peerages for sale, one might be inclined to think he’s got a point.”

And even despite Morrissey dreaming of “her very lowness with her head in a sling”, the Queen comes out of her encounter with this Rusholme Ruffian pretty well, firstly by playing Ernie to his Eric…

“She said, “eh, I know you and you cannot sing,”

I said, “that’s nothing. You should hear me play piano.”

And secondly, because it all ends thus...

Life is very long when you're lonely.

Thinking about that repeated coda now, in light of all that’s happened in the past week, I can’t help but wonder if the Queen herself lived a lonely life. If she did, then she does truly have my deepest sympathy. Because, as Mother Teresa once said, “loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty”. Even if you’re the richest woman in the world. I know loneliness, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone… especially not a lady who meant so much to so many.