The news that Oasis may or may not be reforming fills me, as Peter Cook put it, with inertia. That said, the varying responses from those who were around in the 1990s does rather reinforce my belief that Britpop was in fact two parallel movements, one populated by people whose first musical memory was Bowie, the other by pre-pubescent Slade fans. (And as Lester Bangs said of Slade, when they were trying to crack America, “Sure they’re the new Beatles – they’re all Ringo.”)
PS: Lifted from the Threads (I joined this week) account of a vicar (you meet the strangest people):
The great thing about their songs is you'd learn the lyrics after hearing them once. That is a gift Noel Gallagher has.
But is it, though? A great thing, a gift, whatever?
PPS: There’s been acres (or however we measure it now) of coverage given over to the news, but this takedown by Simon Price is probably the best thing to appear:
...nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.
Intriguing research here about the extent to which the teenagers of today recognise, or don’t, the music of the 1990s. “Song decay” is the term Matt Daniels has coined to describe how a track that’s hugely successful at the time of its release fades away – or, more accurately, never gains traction – in the consciousness of successive generations. That said, looking at the list (Phil Collins, Celine Dion, Ace of Base, et al), I’m a tad envious of Generation Z in their blissful ignorance...
I’ve started reading Triptych, a book containing three separate works responding to the Manic Street Preachers’ album The Holy Bible, and already I wish I’d been a bit less sober when tackling my own sturdy tome about another key album of the 1990s, or maybe had another couple of voices in there, weaving in and out of my waffle.
And, so far (about half-way through the first study, by Rhian E Jones), it’s good; I particularly like her comment that the album “can feel like a disapproving judgement on the listener”; which musicians today could get away with casting themselves as stern-headmasters-cum-hellfire-preachers, piercing you with a kohl-rimmed stare while setting a reading list of Plath and Ballard and Mirbeau? But what’s this?
The 90s are a decade with little online record, and it can be difficult to reconstruct the texture of 90s fandom, particularly compared to the level of activity now possible among contemporary fans.
I had to read this sentence several times, because at first it felt like a millennial excuse, a “before-my-time-Alexander” from someone for whom, if it’s not Googlable, it’s not there; and if the 90s have a patchy online record, good luck with, say, the 1340s. And this feels especially inappropriate when considering a band so didactic as the Manics; “libraries gave us power” and all that. But clearly it’s not that, because Jones was there at the time and speaks of it, an analogue fan in the Manics’ south Wales heartland, devouring the NME, having to get her local branch of Woolworth’s to order the album. In fact, it’s pretty easy to reconstruct 90s fandom from the mound of paper and plastic and ratty feather boas; what’s hard is to get the texture of the stuff that’s going on now, beyond mere likes and algorithms and zeroes and ones. And although obviously people are having their hearts and heads and lives changed by, say, Beyoncé or Childish Gambino today, I wonder whether in 20 years time enough texture will remain of those experiences to be able to create something akin to Triptych?
I’ve been wondering what, if anything, to write about the 20th anniversary of Britpop and then Taylor Parkes comes up with his glorious more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger piece for The Quietus so I think I probably won’t bother. But one passing reference in Parkes’s piece does trigger a memory: the NME’s overview in the last issue of 1989, titled “The Eighties: Thank God It’s Over”.
Because, in so many ways, music in the 1980s was indeed horrid, especially the second half. Sure, there was Madchester and C86 and acid house and rare groove but the dominant note was a sort of bombastic, chest-beating post-Live-Aid earnestness with ghastly haircuts, as expressed in T’Pau’s China In Your Hand. I spent a year of the decade in Canada, which was at the time in thrall to the likes of Glass Tiger, Heart and the egregious Loverboy, responsible for this abomination...
In case you can’t bear to watch it, this is the gist: a louche, quirky lounge band performs a version of Loverboy’s earlier hit Working For The Weekend, to general indifference, so the venue manager calls up Loverboy themselves, who are variously partying with hot chicks, playing strip poker with hot chicks and jamming – without hot chicks, because hot chicks aren’t actually into music – and they come and redeem the situation, to the disgust of the lounge band.
The joke is (presumably) that first band is everything that is antithetical to great music, in that they are arch, laconic and include a female member who actually plays a proper instrument and probably doesn’t enjoy strip poker. Whereas the real Loverboy have big hair, tight jeans and huge, fistypumpy choruses. Oh, and did I mention those hot chicks? This was the triumph of jock rock over foppery, Top Gun over Blue Velvet, and the fact that I hated Loverboy’s preening, ball-grasping idiocy and rather liked the pink-suited geeks at the beginning – I rather thought they resembled the LA outfit known only as X – suggested that I was on the losing side.
Well, for the time being, at least. In the following decade two American bands – Nirvana and REM – that thrived on their outsider status and attracted fans who felt the same way, suddenly achieved massive worldwide acclaim and commercial success. They were followed in due course by British acts such as Oasis, Radiohead and Coldplay. Music that would once have been identified as indie or alternative, implying a certain otherness to the mainstream, was front and centre stage. The nasty strain of arrogance that Taylor Parkes identifies in Britpop was a sort of Revenge of the Nerds effect: suddenly the geeks in pink suits were playing strip poker with the hot chicks. Britpop, for all its ills, was about the skinny kids who’d finally got tired of having sand kicked in their faces and demanded their piece of the action. Even if we never actually wanted to go to the beach anyway, but you get my point.
The only problem was, as soon alt-rock became the dominant form of popular music, it ceased to be alt, ceased to be indie, ceased to be other and pretty much lost its reason to exist beyond offering a sense of beery camaraderie – I saw Oasis at Knebworth, I know of what I speak – that was eerily similar to the sort of crap that Loverboy had served up. Essentially, in order to save the pink-suited lounge band, it became necessary to destroy it. Loverboy lost a few battles but they ultimately won the war. And in a funny sort of way, that’s how I like it.
I’m reading – do forgive me – Volume 4 of Philip Sandifer’s Tardis Eruditorum (Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years) and this pops out:
...the charmingly dated phrase “information superhighway.” This phrase rightly serves as a sort of memetic tombstone for a particular historical moment in digital technology: the last point where it was possible to talk about it without actually knowing a single thing about it.
It’s about a novel by Justin Richards called System Shock, published in the years when Doctor Who wasn’t really a thing for most people, but that’s not particularly relevant and I haven’t read it anyway. But it did get me thinking about the way in which the web sort of oozed up on people throughout the 1990s. I’d had a bit of a conceptual head start over many of my contemporaries because the company I worked for at the beginning of the decade marketed a vast database that clients were able to access remotely from proprietary terminals (which were forever breaking down and always reminded me of Etch-a-Sketches). Towards the end of my time there we installed an intranet and I’m pretty sure that the first e-mail I ever sent was directed to one of my colleagues with whom I’d just endured a rather messy break-up.
But the first time I ever properly used the world wide web must have come in about 1995 – coincidentally the same year that System Shock was published. It was in an internet cafe (remember them?) somewhere in central London and you paid not just for your time online but also for the assistance of some bright young thing who’d tell you what to do while also bringing your coffee, a sort of browser barista. And the first thing I typed into a search engine, prompted by all the smut and innuendo that attended the protracted death rattle of the Major government, was:
MICHAEL PORTILLO GAY?
The problem is, I can’t for the life of me remember what answers came up.
Anyway, over to you, my dwindling band of heedless bots and casual passers-by. When you went on the www for the very first time, what did you do, where did you go, what did you ask?
Christy Wampole’s interesting article about ironic hipsterdom in the New York Times includes this paragraph, suggesting that in the last decade of the 20th century, sincerity ruled:
Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the
1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings —
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems
relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics
and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the
punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory,
feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained
widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all
of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and
euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial
changeover.
Now, I’m a little older than Ms Wampole, but I’m not yet quite so senile that I’ve forgotten that decade completely. And my 1990s may have included a bit of grunge earnestness at the beginning (incidentally, Wampole seems to have overlooked Cobain’s wit, and that of the smarter punks), but it was also about the pop postmodernism of The Modern Review and the raised-eyebrow laddishness of Loaded (before it became just another vehicle for tits), the louche poses of loungecore, Jarvis Cocker vs Michael Jackson, Madonna when she was still funny, the Young British Artists ditto, Tarantino in his trash-referential pomp, Trainspotting, the hilarious implosion of John Major’s government, Monica Lewinsky, Lorena Bobbitt. Irony wasn’t just a desperate pose to fend off the reality of economic and environmental omnishambles by growing a moustache. It was just how it was. With great big air quotes around it.
So is this divergence between Wampole’s memories and mine a matter of age or gender or nationality? Or was everybody’s decade just entirely different? In my book about the Noughties, I suggested that it’s very difficult to find a generic image that sums up the 1990s, which distinguishes it from the preceding decades (mini-skirts and flowers; flared trousers and picket lines; power suits and Filofaxes). I even posited the idea that the decade never happened at all, existing merely as “a history-free buffer zone between the ideological polarities of the 1980s and the socio-religious anxieties of the Noughties.” So there. And lest I be accused of even more egregious touting of my wares than is normally the case, I’ll balance it by recommending John Robb’s excellent tome about the 90s, aptly subtitled What The F**k Was All That About?
Helen Love had one song (essentially 'Sheena is a Punk Rocker' played on a knackered CasioTone) but it was a good one, and they occasionally gave it some new words, some of which were pretty funny. This is 'Long Live the UK Music Scene', which identifies Shed Seven as a cause for celebration. A different world...
Ah, Urusei Yatsura. Dismissed by too many as Sonic Youth wannabes, they had so much more to offer: specifically, their obsessions with manga (hence their name) and the tacky detritus of sci-fi (hence the title of this early single, 'Phasers on Stun'). So, like Sonic Youth, but even less socially adept. What's not to love? Beam 'em up:
I first saw Ultrasound at a showcase for unsigned bands in about 1997. One of the other outfits on the bill was managed by the drummer from Dodgy, which was enough to recommend the Geordie oddballs by default, even before they'd played a note. They briefly became critical darlings, partly because their singer (Andrew 'Tiny' Wood) was very fat, and nobody wanted to be seen to be sizeist, but eventually their prog tendencies made them uncool, a sin compounded by the immense length (a triple on vinyl) of their sole album, Everything Picture (1999). Maybe they should have gone the Radiohead route, and identified a dance element within their meandering Floydian wibbles.
In this clip, Tiny seems to be auditioning for the lead role in The Sydney Greenstreet Story, although I think they were trying more for a Death In Venice effect. Good tune, though.
Coming from the same general direction as Pulp (but they were from Oxford, not Sheffield, and tended to sarongs and melodicas rather than crimplene and Jacko-baiting), TBTG smeared the kitchen sink with mascara to a fairground soundtrack. Here's 'Mum Steals Boyfriend' from 1996.
Been watching bits of this year's Glastonbury, and it's a bit depressing. Apart from the entertaining Ting Tings (a Flying Lizards tribute act, but what's wrong with that?) most of the bands were so generic, they may as well have been concocted for an episode of Midsomer Murders, in which John Nettles infiltrates the seedy underworld of provincial indie rock, after an aspiring bass guitarist is found crushed to death under a crate of blank contract forms and hair product.
But I don't want this to turn into a Jeremiad about how horrible pop music has become these days; as Theodore Sturgeon put it, 90% of everything is crud. An equivalent string of clips from the 1997 festival, now fondly remembered by hacks for Radiohead transcending myriad lighting cock-ups blah blah blah (Paul Trynka: "...it's been galling to hear the odd person describe it as merely 'a good gig'. It wasn't. It was something far more profound.") would have to include Ocean Colour Scene, Cast, Dodgy, Echobelly, the Longpigs, 60 Ft Dolls, Reef, the Seahorses and Kula Shaker (twice).
The problem is, it's Kula Shaker and the like that come to mind when we recall that era, like an obstinate turd that won't be flushed. This galls me particularly, because Small Boo and I spent much of that time in stinky Camden backrooms, bulking out the audiences for a band she was managing. It was the comedown from Britpop (as depicted in Pulp's This is Hardcore, the best album of the decade), and bands still desperate to be the new Menswe@r rubbed various body parts with acts that had no idea where they were going, and would probably never get there.
It's these Stars That Never Were (how's that for the name of a 90s revival package tour?) that tug the memory strings for me, and once again I'm disobeying my own manifesto, in a new, regular CS feature, to highlight a few decent bands that never sported ironic Union Jacks.
To kick off, here's Tiger, who I first saw at the Camden Crawl in about 1996. Bad name, technically inept, listened to too much Krautrock, came from Princes Risborough and oh, those mullets. But they possessed a certain shambolic charm that was conspicuously absent in some of their more lauded contemporaries.
(If this whets your appetite, here's the band appearing on The Big Breakfast. Not quite as good, but you do get to see Frank Carson shaking his not inconsiderable thang down the front.)