The most revelatory experience I had this year happened at Glastonbury, on the festival’s Saturday night. I was at the Left Field, the 1,500-capacity big top where the afternoons begin with panel discussions about politics, and the evenings are given over to music. The penultimate attraction of the day was a quartet from Leeds called English Teacher, who played for an hour, and took my breath away: not just because their music was brimming with ideas and creativity, but because it also seemed to perfectly crystallise the state of the country. As the performance went on, the crowd received it all with an increasing feeling of rapture; by the end, it felt like everyone had concluded that they were experiencing something very special indeed.
Their first album, This Could Be Texas, came out in April. Its songs do not achieve their feats with rhetoric or sloganeering, nor have much to do with party politics: their subject matter is too kaleidoscopic to be reduced to simple social or political commentary, and like the best zeitgeist-capturing musicians, English Teacher deal in poetic, impressionistic, often wonderfully strange language. The words written, sung and spoken by the singer and lyricist Lily Fontaine sometimes suggest fragments of conversations you might hear at bus stops, or in pubs or cafes, full of a sense of life having been upturned, but human beings somehow muddling on: “Shoes were bought, broken in / One new pair breaks the bank … Can a river stop its banks from bursting? Blame the council, not the rain / No preparation for the breakdown … That country is in a bad state / There’s a familiar atmosphere about the place”.
In combination with the music, her lyrics evoke a mixture of weariness, confusion and regular flashes of anger, and lives just about held together by other people’s kindness. A compelling element comes from the fact that Fontaine is a black woman in a largely white and male musical milieu. What some of the songs convey particularly well is a sighing sadness, as on Albert Road, a picture of life in somewhere neglected and ignored, and full of malignancy: “Don’t take our prejudice to heart / We hate everyone … That’s why we are how we are / And that’s why we don’t get very far”.
In the three weeks before Glastonbury, I had been constantly travelling around the UK – England, mostly – trying to make sense of the imminent general election, and the public mood. Most of the media fixated on the dismal science of opinion polling and looked ahead to a Labour landslide, but what people said to me suggested that this had precious little to do with how they actually felt. Mostly, I found the bitter disconnection that would soon be manifested in Keir Starmer winning a huge parliamentary majority with the support of about one in five of the electorate, and deep problems that no one thought either would or could be sorted out: sometimes, I wondered if anyone would actually bother turning out to vote.
In retrospect, a lot of what I heard sounded strikingly like Fontaine’s lyrics. In Birmingham, the council was bankrupt, and the people in the queue for food parcels provided by the city’s central mosque grimly marvelled at what was happening: “Look at the state of the roads. They’re shutting libraries. Privatising all the swimming pools. There’s nothing left.” In the outwardly affluent Surrey town of Woking, an elderly man at a weekly community meal explained the basics of his everyday life: “You have to sell things. Put them in the pawnbrokers. Make some money.” A few hours later, I met a women’s football team, one of whose players responded to my questions in a tone of voice that sounded almost desperate: “There needs to be a vision. We’ve gone through austerity and Brexit, but it’s like, what’s the actual future? … What’s the UK going to stand for?”
As well as melancholia, English Teacher’s other forte is an ability to conjure up the way that modern Britain suffuses ordinary reality with the downright surreal. And as I played their songs while driving around, everything reached a peak of delirious oddness two days before Glastonbury began, when I was dispatched to the Lincolnshire town of Boston; 75% of voters there had backed Brexit. Now, Reform UK’s Richard Tice fancied his chances of evicting the sitting Tory MP. There was a familiar atmosphere about the place: a desperately forlorn town centre, and a flailing anger expressed in the argot of GB News and the Daily Mail – “We’re not allowed to be British any more. We’re not allowed to fly the flag.”
In the nearby village of Swineshead, I pitched up at a public meeting hosted by Tice and the former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, who emerged from a Reform-branded London taxi looking like a ghost from a Dickens story. There were all of 25 people there, to hear their hosts bang on about the glories of “common sense” and how seemingly intractable problems could be instantly solved if they managed to win power. Outside, when he answered my questions about the effects of Brexit on local farmers with something close to arrant nonsense, the co-founder of a supposedly anti-elite party told me that if I interrupted his flow again, the interview would be “terminata”. Ten days later, Tice became an MP with a majority of just over 2,000. The turnout was 53%.
By the late summer, the riots that followed those senseless killings in Southport had not only ended any political afterglow from the election, but provided an object lesson in the reach and clout of the modern far right. Tice, Nigel Farage and their friends have now befriended a US multibillionaire who wants to colonise Mars (shades here of an English Teacher song titled Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space), seemingly aiming to channel his riches into the south Wales valleys, South Yorkshire and the post-industrial Midlands. We seem to be stuck in ever-weirder replays of 2016, with a restive, bitingly cynical public, and mainstream politicians who don’t seem able to connect. Meanwhile, millions of everyday lives chime with what This Could Be Texas portrays.
In September, the album won the Mercury prize. The judges paid tribute to its “originality and character”, and “a winning lyrical mix of surrealism and social observation”. I still play it almost every day: just about everything it contains continues to perfectly capture the feeling of absolutely everything being in flux, and constantly waiting for answers that never come. It speaks volumes about the band’s shining talent and Britain’s confounding condition that its songs express our predicament as powerfully as any podcast, documentary or piece of writing: if you want to understand everything that 2025 will only intensify, this is a perfect place to start.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
