X-Nico

2 unusual facts about English underground


English underground

The phrase was used, in a wider cultural sense, in Jonathon Green's book Days In The Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961-1971, a collection of first-hand accounts of the 1960s counter-culture that often drew on carnivalesque and music hall traditions and styles.

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 masses of people conserve certain values - a spontaneity and capacity for enjoyment and mutual loyalties - despite the inhibiting pressures of magistrates, mill-owners, and Methodists.



see also