'Top of the Toffs': The long history of surprisingly posh rock stars
When Winston Marshall quit the band Mumford & Sons on Thursday, I couldn’t help but smile at parts of his resignation blog. He wrote wistfully about the group’s early days, sleeping in “hostels in Fort William” and “pub floors in Ipswich”. Life was tough for the four-piece.
Yet at the time when Mumford & Sons released their debut album, Marshall’s father, the hedge fund manager and philanthropist Paul Marshall, was worth a cool £300 million (according to the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List). He could have bought the hostel, the pub and the brewery that supplied it. When Marshall Jr wrote that “even the Travelodge in Carlisle maintains a sort of charm in my mind”, it was meant to sound warmly nostalgic... but – to my mind – sounded sneering and privileged from the former St Paul’s pupil.
Marshall is just one of countless rock and pop musicians who’ve been privately educated. In fact, the rock world is littered with people who went to public school, from The Clash’s Joe Strummer to Coldplay, from Florence Welch to Laura Marling, and from Radiohead to Pink Floyd. Writer and presenter Stuart Maconie wrote in 2015 that pop music “has become as essentially bourgeois as the Boden catalogue”. But – and here’s the rub – just don’t ask them to admit it.
Revealing one’s roots is a deadly sin in the pop game. Perhaps mindful that the genre morphed from the stark poverty of the blues, musicians are keen to cling to its working-class credentials. Authenticity, so the thinking goes, must come from struggle, even if the struggle is hokum. “They all pretend their upbringings were slightly less comfortable than they were,” says David Hepworth, the writer and broadcaster who oversaw the launch of Q and Mojo magazines.
However, it is extremely rare for rock stars’ middle class roots to stay secret for long – and, in the days of the internet, almost impossible. Often, the mask simply slips: a singer’s ‘mockney’ accent will dissolve, or the vowels of their estuary English become less flat.
It took no time at all for Lily Allen’s council-estate patter and dropped aitches to be diluted after she burst on to the music scene back in 2006, after it became known that she’d attended schools including Millfield and Bedales, and was the daughter of a famous actor. And it was mildly exciting to discover, back in 2009, that the nu-folk scene that spawned Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling (Leighton Park School, a private Quaker school) and Noah and the Whale (singer Charlie Fink also went to St Paul’s) had started life in a gnarly and authentic-sounding cellar bar called the Bosun’s Locker. Until, that is, you realise that this salty venue was in fact located on the ever-so landlocked King’s Road in London. This really was a scene made in Chelsea.
Privately educated musicians try to deflect attention from their background in a dizzying array of ways. The Clash’s Joe Strummer – the privately educated son of a diplomat – dealt with his cushy upbringing in the sneering, working-class world of punk by being angrier than his actual working class contemporaries. Strummer was “even more anarchic” than those around him, according to his biographer Chris Salewicz.
In 1981, Strummer gave a music press interview, headlined ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’, in which he claimed – at length – to be out of touch on money matters. “We were very naive when we started,” he said. “We didn’t realise what an advance was – we thought it was a free gift [from the record company]. Our finances are in a lot better position than they were a year ago. When we do get to a billion pounds, I hope that we’d use it to create opportunities. That’s what I want to achieve.”
Having refused to ever appear on Top of the Pops to promote their records, the band only made the top 10 once, with a reissue of a single, which hit number one single after it was used in a jeans commercial.
Most posh pop stars just shut their mouths. When Oxford band Radiohead (alma mater: Abingdon School) were profiled in the New Yorker in 2001, bass player Colin Greenwood was described as “lavishly well-read” and able to talk about “almost any topic under the sun”. However, the interviewer noted that Greenwood stopped talking when he became “embarrassed by his erudition”.
Others lose themselves in drugs. Pink Floyd is perhaps the archetypal posh British band, with David Gilmour attending The Perse School in Cambridge. Syd Barrett, the band’s troubled original singer who died in 2006, was described by writer Nick Kent as “nice, genteel and upper-middle-class”. However Barrett’s full-scale embracing of psychedelic drugs like LSD saw him slowly, and tragically, withdraw from the world. It led Gilmour to sadly conclude: “I don’t know what Syd thinks, or how he thinks.”
Meanwhile, the Libertines’ Pete Doherty, a rock ‘n’ roll scoundrel if ever there was one, had well-documented drug problems. He may have looked like an artfully scrawny street troubadour, but Doherty was the progeny of an army major and a lance corporal.
Many public school bands are ridiculed by other bands who feel they’re somehow faking it. When Keane singer Tom Chaplin (Tonbridge) suffered from addiction issues, the Kasabian guitarist Serge Pizzorno spread a cruel rumour that he’d become addicted to port. The founding members of Genesis met at Charterhouse, as – perhaps – befits their intelligent, mysterious and progressive rock sound. However, Peter Hammill, the singer of Van Der Graaf Generator, was said to have likened the band to prissy schoolboys after a tour, thereby torpedoing any mystique. And during the Britpop wars of the mid-1990s, the Gallagher brothers from Manchester’s Oasis used rivals Blur’s middle-classness as a brutally effective weapon against them; three out of the four-piece had attended south London art college, Goldsmiths.
There are, of course, reasons for the large number of public school pop stars. The gulf in the provision of music lessons between state and private schools is one. Then there’s the affordability of gear and of touring, which is one of the famous loss-leaders of being in a band. It takes serious money to be a struggling musician. Add to this the liberal leanings of many wealthy parents, the confidence that private education instils in its pupils and the opportunities for entrepreneurship, and you can see why the scene is skewed. Richard Branson, whose Virgin Records famously signed The Sex Pistols when no one else would, was reported to have read in the 1970s that music publishing was the easiest way to make money known to man. It probably wasn’t, but it took a Stowe education to give him the conviction to try.
Of course, class is often wrongly weaponised. John Lennon famously wrote Working Class Hero. But the art college-educated Lennon was actually considered posh by his fellow Beatles, the authentically working class Paul, George and Ringo. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, meanwhile, went the other way: he made moves to climb the class ladder. Educated at Dartford Grammar School, Jagger once attended a dinner party at the Cheyne Walk house of antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, an old Etonian who arguably invented shabby chic. According to a 2017 article in Tatler, Jagger told designer Michael Fish at that party: “I’m here to learn how to be a gentleman.”
Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry is the son of a Durham farm labourer, and yet he went to study fine art, taught at Holland Park School and came to epitomise a certain type of suave English gentleman. But despite becoming Mr Smooth, Ferry was keen to remind pop fans where he’d come from. He told Smash Hits in 1980 that he’d worked on building sites in his summer holidays and done paper rounds, too. It’s fine to rise up the social ladder in the pop world, so long as you jog people’s memories about your roots.
There are, as in any walk of life, the true rebels. No one could accuse Pogues singer Shane MacGowan of slumming it. With a voice like sandpaper and (before he got them fixed) rotting teeth, he’s the real deal. And he went to Westminster. And you’d never guess that punk-folk singer Frank Turner went to Eton.
Privilege is also a factor in the US, where class is, admittedly, less of an issue. Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift come from relatively wealthy backgrounds. But status is still used as a tool. Bob Dylan was from a family of affluent department store owners, yet he spent his early years pretending to have hoboed around America, jumping trains like his hero Woody Guthrie.
Maybe the best way to deal with class is to ignore it. It is so prevalent in pop and rock that it’s almost daft not to. Singer James Blunt has got it right in this respect. He once accused musicians who cover up their accents of hypocrisy (he said Damon Albarn had “an orchard full of plums in his mouth”, which isn’t quite true). The Old Harrovian cleverly plays up both his poshness and the fact that people resent him for it. Blunt knows he’s won: he’s successful, rich and he seems happy. In February 2020 he posted a photo on Twitter of himself standing alone in front of a vast, empty concert arena. “I love my fan,” he wrote. Over 67,000 people ‘liked’ the picture. Perhaps poshness and pop are nothing to be ashamed of after all.
