Well Meet Again in Popular Media
F rom Helm Tom Moore'due south nautical chart-topping You'll Never Walk Alone to Katherine Jenkins' clemency have on Vera Lynn's Nosotros'll Encounter Over again – a embrace version as grey and sickly every bit 1940s rationed margarine – 2022 has been a year in which nosotros've been reminded, more ever, that British culture is unable to escape the long shadow of the 2d globe war.
Information technology was during that war that the beautiful We'll Meet Once again, all soaring optimism and poignant nostalgia, became ane of the first cracking popular hits. Information technology had a profound bear on on the servicemen who, in a 1940 take on contemporary fandom, voted Vera Lynn their favourite musical artist. The 16m-Spotify-streams incarnation version nosotros know all-time today is slightly unlike from the 1939 original, which began with a unproblematic scale and the line: "Allow's say goodbye with a smile, honey." This was somewhen edited into a perfect 3-infinitesimal pop song, instantly recognisable from the Roland Shaw Orchestra's swinging intro, with the master lyric coming in earlier the 10-2d mark. In this simplification, at that place's an echo of how the significant of the vocal has evolved over the decades.
Like all perfect pop songs, We'll Meet Again became something more than than itself. Information technology undoubtedly meant so much to millions of women and men, uniformed or in civvies, as they faced situations that are unimaginable to us even today. That most popular version of the song is redeemed in the deeply affecting section in which Lynn's vocalisation is joined by a massed choir of servicemen.
Yet as the generation who fought the war have died, and so a romantic view of the conflict has become weaponised in the structure of the myth of a plucky United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, fighting alone against Nazi foes. Britain in 1940 wasn't alone at all, with the resources of an empire backside it, but that hardly serves the war-evoking narrative that formed the cadre of so much discourse around Brexit and today'south culture war. The examples are numerous: Matt Hancock, at present the Great britain'southward bumbling wellness secretary, invoked D-day in a spoken language to launch his abortive Tory leadership entrada, and on "Brexit twenty-four hour period" in January the Daily Mail printed a front page image of Dover's white cliffs, immortalised in another of Vera Lynn'southward wartime hits. In recent weeks, the tediously polarised argument over Churchill'south legacy has become tied up with discussions over monuments to our imperial by.
This jingoism has oft been deployed as a smokescreen for authorities ineptitude over coronavirus and Lynn, the "forces sweetheart", hasn't been immune. On 28 May, the Sun published a forepart folio with the headline "Ale Come across Again" in a higher place a flick of Boris Johnson brandishing a pint. On the same twenty-four hour period, it was appear that the official death toll from Covid-19 had reached 37,837 – more than the number of Londoners killed past German action in the entire second globe state of war.
I wonder now, reflecting on Vera Lynn's life, if she was always entirely comfortable with the song that followed her through to the end of her 103 years. After all, when she appeared on the Morecambe & Wise 1972 Christmas special (and Morecambe got her confused with Gracie Fields), she refused to sing. As comedian Barry Cryer later recalled, Wise said: "Vera doesn't know we want her to sing. How can we get her to sing?" with Morecambe replying: "Brusque of starting some other war, I've no idea." A comedy sketch, yes, but inside it there might lie a kernel of truth. For Lynn, and for Britain, the war was never over.
In 1952 she became the first Briton to have a U.s.a. No i with Auf Wiederseh'n, Sweetheart; 30 years later her single I Love This Land was released when martial fervour was over again stoked by the Falklands war. In 2009, as Britain reeled from austerity, she became the oldest living person to have a No 1 anthology with a compilation of her hits called, of course, We'll Encounter Again. As the UK thrashed effectually in mail-Brexit turmoil in November 2018, the choral group D-Day Darlings – finalists on Britain'due south Got Talent – reached No 5 with an anthology featuring a encompass of We'll Come across Again, illustrated the singers dressed in 1940s RAF uniforms. Whatever honouring of the expressionless had tipped into a tacky, nostalgic martial fetish.
Throughout her postwar career, Lynn'south fame was trapped in symbiosis with the anxiety of a nation in pass up, forever doomed to look into the by, to the fourth dimension when Uk had its "finest hour". Coincidentally, her death comes 80 years to the 24-hour interval since Churchill made the voice communication in which he coined that term.
Pop as good as We'll Meet Again will always have a presence – information technology provides gravitas to whatsoever cause. Perhaps the most powerful use of the song is in Stanley Kubrick's always-timely Dr Strangelove, when in the final scene information technology drifts out, with barbarous irony, beyond a world disappearing into atomic fire. The version used by Kubrick also features a soldiers' chorus and as I listen to it now, I think non but of the long life of Vera Lynn, but those millions of men and women from U.k. and beyond to whom information technology gave so much promise, and whose memory we at present meet being so terribly driveling.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jun/18/well-meet-again-vera-lynn-pop-masterpiece-second-world-war
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