Author: Lucy Atkinson

By Lucy Atkinson

There’s something about George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass that feels uncannily British — not the old empire kind of British, but the rain-soaked, quietly resilient, half-resigned version. Released in 1970, the triple album came out just as the country began to feel the slow ache of decline: post-Beatles, post-utopia, post-swinging-sixties London. Even its title felt like an elegy for a fading Britain. 

Fifty-five years later, the sentiment lands harder than ever. All Things Must Pass now plays like a requiem for a country trying to convince itself it’s still special — a soundtrack for the long, unglamorous hangover after the party of empire, of cool Britannia. 

When Harrison wrote All Things Must Pass, he wasn’t being cynical. He was being spiritual. He’d seen the machinery of fame and ego up close and come out the other side searching for something gentler, truer. The song’s calm acceptance of “sunrise doesn’t last all morning” felt like wisdom at a time when Britain still thought the sixties might never end. But in 2025, it sounds more like a prophecy. It seems like the sun’s been setting for a while now. 

Public services are crumbling, rivers are filling with sewage, and politics has become performance art for bitter men with microphones. Reform UK gains traction by promising renewal but selling racial resentment; Labour promises competence, not hope, yet fails to deliver on both. Everyone’s tired, and the rain keeps falling. 

Harrison’s voice, patient and forgiving, may hum through the noise like a counterpoint: It’s not always going to be this grey. But yet, it is — for now. 

Britain has always excelled at melancholy. We make poetry of drizzle and drama of decline. From The Waste Land to The Crown, we aestheticise decay until it almost looks romantic. Harrison, though, wasn’t interested in performance. His melancholy wasn’t self-pitying; it was cleansing. He offered resignation not as despair, but as liberation, which is a lesson the modern political class could use. Today’s leaders — Farage shouting from a pub, ministers performing contrition on breakfast TV — cling to power like it’s still 2012, still possible to summon optimism with a slogan. “Levelling Up” has become a punchline; “British values”, a meme. 

Harrison would have recognised this noise for what it is: pure ego. 

Beware of Darkness, one of the album’s most haunting tracks, could be mistaken for a sermon to the electorate. “Beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go.” In 1970, that might have sounded like Eastern mysticism. In 2025, it’s practically the daily news cycle. 

The album was partially recorded at Friar Park, Harrison’s eccentric gothic estate, and the iconic album cover was shot there — half-mansion, half-monastery. The walls, lined with gargoyles and silence, gave him the distance to write a work of self-reflection, something Britain rarely manages. Today, the country feels like it’s still living in that house — ornate, damp, haunted by the past. We’ve filled the rooms with nostalgia: wartime mythologies, royal weddings, Great British Bake-Offs. It’s charming, but it’s also claustrophobic. Every institution, from Parliament to the BBC, feels like it’s decaying in slow motion.

Harrison’s mantra — all things must pass — isn’t just an observation; it’s an instruction. Empires fall. Economies falter. Cultures shift. The task isn’t to stop it happening, but to let it happen, and then begin again. 

But Britain doesn’t let go. We polish the relics instead. 

But for one moment, imagine if we actually took Harrison seriously — if the country released its grip on the fantasy of exceptionalism. Reform UK wouldn’t exist; it depends on the illusion that decline is reversible, that we can simply vote our way back to the 1950s. Nor would the endless nostalgia industry that props up our media — the monarchy, the Blitz spirit, the Beatles themselves — work without the promise that the past can be restored. 

Harrison’s message was the opposite: transcendence through impermanence. Growth through surrender. The idea that endings aren’t failure, but natural order, and maybe that’s the radical politics we need now — not rage, not revival, but acceptance. To look honestly at what’s rotting and stop pretending it can be repainted. 

Listening to All Things Must Pass in 2025 Britain feels like stepping outside the chaos for a moment. The songs drift like prayer — full of humility, humour, resignation. Harrison’s slide guitar sounds like light breaking through fog. It’s an album that insists, even amid decay, on grace. 

And perhaps that’s the hope we’re left with. Not a new golden age, but a quieter one — where kindness outlasts the slogans, where humility replaces bluster, where we stop shouting about greatness and start doing small good things. 

Because if Harrison was right — if all things must pass — then this too will. The populism, the cruelty, the endless decline. The question is what we’ll build in the silence that follows. 

Until then, the rain keeps falling. The records keep spinning. And somewhere, faintly, George Harrison’s voice reminds us: 

“All things must pass away.”

Featured Image: Barry Feinstein

By Lucy Atkinson

There’s a moment on every student’s walk to a 9am lecture- mist hanging low over the river, your headphones in, tote bag swinging, when you catch your reflection in a café window and think: yes. This is cinema. 

You’re the protagonist. The world revolves around your inner monologue. You are misunderstood, artfully exhausted, and probably wearing something that attempts to look like it was stolen from a 1970s film student. 

Then the bus splashes you. The moment’s gone—the soundtrack cuts. You’re suddenly an extra again — damp, anonymous, and late for French grammar.  

We are a generation raised on The Main Character Moment. TikTok taught us that any walk can be romantic if you tilt the camera up 10 degrees and add some Phoebe Bridgers. Instagram captions whisper, “romanticise your life.” Pinterest boards promise “dark academia” as if tragedy and stress were an aesthetic rather than a cruel reality. The result? A cultural obsession with being seen, even if no one’s actually watching – the art and behaviour of constant performance.  

It’s tempting to laugh at it — the earnestness, the self-mythologising — but this desire for narrative coherence isn’t new. Virginia Woolf did it with stream-of-consciousness; Baudelaire did it in a crowd. As Joan Didion famously wrote in The  White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The main character complex is simply our generation’s spin on that instinct — to turn chaos into continuity, to edit experience into meaning, more often than not through the lens of social media.  

Didion’s insight lands differently in the era of the front-facing camera. We still tell ourselves stories in order to live, but now we do so publicly, performatively, with filters, and the perfectly chosen snippets of songs in our stories. We construct our lives like screenplays — plot arcs, redemption moments, personal soundtracks — as though meaning can be manufactured through aesthetics alone. 

Didion goes on to say, 

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” 

It is human nature to romanticise the tragic and mundane. And now, more than ever,  it is expected to do so for the viewing pleasure, or envy, of others. As Didion states,  we are affected by “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience”. 

But what once felt like an act of defiance — the assertion of interiority, and the forceful reigning of the self’s own ‘story’ — now feels like a performance review.  How’s my narrative arc going? Am I developing as a character? Have I had my midpoint crisis yet? Ultimately, how do people view me? What am I worth if people don’t see my aesthetic? 

To be a main character today is to curate the illusion of intimacy. It’s to drink an overpriced flat white and pretend it’s plot-relevant. To view a breakdown as nothing  more than “character development.” To confuse aesthetic coherence with emotional authenticity. 

And yet, beneath the irony, there’s something tender in the attempt. To romanticise one’s own life is, at its core, to refuse invisibility. Maybe filming your sunset walk isn’t narcissism, but a tiny rebellion against banality. Perhaps the self that’s performed online isn’t fake, but aspirational — a draft of who we’d like to become, a fake-it-till you-make-it projection.  

So perhaps the real question isn’t “Am I main character enough?” but “Am I paying  attention?” 

The main character is not the loudest person in the room — it’s the one who happens to notice the way the light hits the library steps at 4 p.m., the one who finds narrative in the in between. To live like that — alert, romantic, a little ridiculous — might actually be the most honest kind of protagonism there is. 

So yes, maybe you are the main character. Just don’t forget that today, everyone else is too.

Featured Image Credit – Teresa Zabala / NYT / Redux