The British Invasion! – Hervé Bourhis Documents the Long Cultural Shadow Cast By the United Kingdom

It sometimes feels as if this began with The Beatles and then simply forgot to stop. By ‘this,’ one refers to the cultural force that was once an Empire. It may be a shadow of its former self on the political and economic stage, but it is impossible to write off Great Britain when it comes to art, music, cinema, and literature — in short, the stuff that really matters. From Olivia Colman at the Oscars to the continued (if inexplicable) fandom of Coldplay, the British invasion that Hervé Bourhis tracks from the 1960s onwards doesn’t seem to be running out of steam.

There is something obsessive about the way Bourhis chooses subjects to work with. He has gone down this road before, with little books of rock, and black music, but has also focused on The Beatles, heavy metal, our environment, and the White House, over the course of a long career as an artist. The British Invasion! is only the continuation of a journey of documenting cultural movements in granular detail.

Translated by James Hogan, Bourhis uses his foreword to explain how Brexit prompted him to list what he loved and hated about the UK. He refers to it as a Shakespearean tragedy, using the book to highlight what that little island has given the rest of the world. His process is interesting but ultimately inadequate though, because the pages mostly end up looking like visual footnotes. It feels like an appendix in pictures. Then again, that may just be the point.

Bourhis begins with Ian Fleming’s first James Bond film, Dr No, in 1962. From there, the statistics pile up thick and fast, with everything from references to Beatles producer George Martin, to the first show played by the Rolling Stones, the appearance of actress Petula Clark, the film Alfie, fashion icon Twiggy, then straight into the 1970s and the rise of Roxy Music. Every year gets a couple of pages, incorporating births and deaths, the top 5 British albums, movements like Gay Pride, the first instance of streaking during a soccer game, then on through the Eighties and Nineties, and Brexit at midnight on January 31, 2020. It all ends, appropriately, with the death of Elizabeth II on September 8, 2022.

The Encyclopedia Britannica refers to this invasion as a ‘musical movement of the mid-1960s composed of British rock-and-roll (“beat”) groups whose popularity spread rapidly to the United States.’ It points to the arrival of The Beatles on February 7, 1964, as the kicking open of a door through which a truckload of British exports then ploughed through. There have been multiple explanations for this, made mostly with the benefit of hindsight, but this is not the book for those revelations.

As facts and figures accumulate, one is left with a sense of loss. It’s hard to say what tomorrow’s Britain may look like but, at least while flipping through these pages, one gets some measure of how colourful and interesting its recent past has been. It makes for a perfect gift for Anglophiles, as well as anyone interested in the history of a country that once ruled much of the world.

Hervé Bourhis (W/A) • NBM Publishing, $34.99

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Review by Lindsay Pereira