#10 National Anthem

Every country has one, sometimes bellicose, sometimes wistful, occasionally jaunty, and usually intensely patriotic, but what makes a good one, a good national anthem? The journalist Alex Marshall has written a book on the subject called Republic or Death, Travels in Search of National Anthems, and he spoke to Nick Higham about some of the world’s best-known anthems, some of them more unexpected and why he dislikes our own quite so intensely.

The French Marseillaise by common consent, says Alex Marshall, the world’s most powerful national anthem.

It’s this ludicrously over-the-top, bellicose, rambunctious tune and once you’ve heard it once you literally can’t get it out of your system.

But it’s also flawed. Listen to the words.

I think a lot of French people today are more than embarrassed by it. Look at what happened after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy recently, people were singing it, and most of them were doing so with a look of great discomfort knowing this is a song that’s unifying at that moment, but whose chorus is, let impure blood water our fields, it’s hardly the message you want to send out to the Islamic world at that time.

Many national anthems are like that, and the surprising thing is how few countries feel they are inappropriate now and should be changed and more reflective of our values today.

But some countries have changed their anthems. Nepal’s national anthem used to sound like this, but then the monarchy was overthrown and now they sing this.

The Nepalese anthem is probably the world’s bizarrest by quite some way because it sounds like the sort of song you would hear in a south Asian takeaway. It’s this joyous folk tune about how all the different ethnicities in Nepal should unite together as one garland.

And it’s a very gentle song, yet it was born of the Maoist Revolution?

Yes, which is something you wouldn’t expect.

The title of Alex Marshall’s book comes from the words to the Paraguayan anthem, written as it happens by a chap from Uruguay during the struggle for independence from Spain. There’s a paradox about many anthems, today they are prized by patriots and conservatives, but often they were written by radicals and revolutionaries to boost morale among underdogs. Even Islamic State, Alex Marshall maintains, has a national anthem.

There is one song called My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared, which is all about establishing, you know, the Islamic State has arisen by the blood of the Martyrs, Islamic State has arisen by the jihad of the pious. Its leaders clearly recognise there is power in music and in a song to unite and to inspire and to drive people to achieve its goals. Now that’s incredibly uncomfortable, it shows that ISIS is trying to create a state, it’s trying to unify people, it’s trying to make people identify with it, and that makes it all the more dangerous and all the more harder to combat.

One chapter of his book is about Lichtenstein’s national anthem which to British ears sounds eerily familiar. It seems lots of countries in the 19th century borrowed God Save The Queen, only, Lichtenstein has kept it. Alex hates it.

If I was trying to be political I’d say the reason I don’t like God Save The Queen is just because of overuse and because of its slightly plodding melody. I mean, when people bellow it, it really does sound like a dirge. To me it just says nothing about Britain, about England, about my experience today. Those words, they say nothing about our characters, they don’t even say anything about our landscape. I mean, most anthems at the very least say we’ve got nice hills. It’s an appalling song.