Photo via
It was officially called the closing ceremony, but it really was one immense concert, featuring just about every Brit who has ever stood in front of a microphone.
Not my words, but the words of USA Today. However, although the global audience registered in the hundreds of billions, for large swathes of time, they must have had no fucking idea who most of these bozos were. Take That? The Kaiser Chiefs? Taio Cruz? Que? Qui? 对吧? Surely, they must have all registered that this spent and battered nation has completely run out of music and begun to plaster over the gaps by just paddying up a few leftover pub bands, some X Factor grist and filling in the final cubes of spare audio-space with an automated note-trilling machine called Jessie J.
Videos by VICE
While David Bowie lay dreaming in his cryogenic cool box, McCartney’s eyelids twitched involuntarily at the sight of his dead friend’s face reconstructed with paper mache and Kate Bush sat in her kitchen in the wilds of Norfolk, trying to get to grips with the instructions on her new washing machine, over in Stratford, someone very sinister had finally achieved their dream of fusing Rock Of Ages with The Brit Awards Ceremony.
And as Boris did the coital thrust to the Spice Girls, wondering how he might cosy up to Emeli Sandé later that evening, it became obvious that this was the London we all really know and love. Not Danny Boyle’s hallucinogenic phantasm of David Beckham on a speedboat racing to see Fuck Buttons at a rave staged the other side of the looking glass. The Closing Ceremony seemed to aim for everything Boyle nailed so well and ended up clumsily hammering at its own thumbs. This wasn’t a big reveal of how we all inhabit an Albion that remains magickal, it was Leicester Square writ large.
First we headed to some chain boozer who’d got Madness and Blur stuck on loop on the PA, where the staff were too apathetic and underpaid to even notice. Then down Ruby Blue for ladies night “featuring Cheesy 90s classics”, then we got some cut-price tickets to We Will Rock You from a booth and sozzled off to buddy-you’re-a-young-man clap-along with Bolivian holidaymakers. A quick snap of us posing by a black cab, down the London Eye and Big Ben, back up The 99 Club for some 2-for-1 lol-istry, then, inevitably, some prick was playing Tinie Tempah on the nightbus. All that was missing was a three-minute video montage tribute to the Angus Steak House.
Forget British Leyland – nothing is a more potent symbol of post-industrial British decline than Annie Lennox. Back in the darkest days of the Brits, the Fleetwood and Fox deathless MOR stodge for the shires, it was Annie who would inexplicably turn up every year and win nine gongs. She was The Establishment’s “diva” unit-shifter, and here she was again, yawning from the grave, plugging the self-same gap for people who formed their musical taste by analysing the hundred highest-selling albums of all time. Somewhere in the past fortnight, Clapham had done a putsch and embossed its musical tastes upon a nation’s.
From the first, “Oh God, they’re not actually going to let him do his new single, are they?” to the final: “FUCKING DIE ED SHEERAN”, via Lily Allen’s memorable “Vom”, the internet broiled, seethed and generally galvanised itself in a froth of anti-ness as we pissed the optimism we’d spent two weeks drinking in down the flue more effectively than a chimney-sweep who’d just hurled six cups of tea down his throat.
At this point, apparently we’re supposed to say something about how “normal service is resumed”, “Great British cynicism is back to its usual self”, “isn’t that a perverse blessing and don’t we always like our blessings perverse over ‘ere?” and generally rejoice in the fact that we’ve found our missing negativity. Well, it’s nice to be negative in a way. But it’s much nicer to be positive.
Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes
More Olympics:
The Olympics Turned Evil Last Night
We Interviewed Tommie Smith About the 1968 Black Power Salute
Confessions of an Olympic Cynic
The VICE Olympics Worst Dressed List
