Be Here Now: Chapter three

Chapter Three

"I know that was then, but it could be again": Britpop, heritage culture and national renewal

In the long hot summer of 1995, the term 'Britpop' entered mass consciousness following a series of music press features and front covers (eg Melody Maker, 22 July 1997) and a media-hyped "battle" between the bands Blur and Oasis for the number one position in the United Kingdom singles chart (famously won by Blur) (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20). This rivalry was a conscious echo of that which had existed some 30 years previously between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and which "had briefly made this small island the epicentre of an altogether more innocent pop universe" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20).

For some critics, the emergence of a slew of new British bands "brimming with self-confidence, sexiness and style" and able to combine mass appeal with rock press credibility was a sign that "Britain had finally woken up to the sound of a second bright, brash new pop dawn" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20). (In
addition to Oasis and Blur, exemplars of this bright new age of Britpop were said to include Pulp, Cast, Lush, Sleeper, Supergrass, Dodgy, Elastica, Suede, Menswear, Lightning Seeds, Boo Radleys and Echobelly). Yet, as I have already suggested (see Intro; Chapter Two), other commentators perceive Britpop to be "not so much pop's bright new dawn, more its last flickering twilight" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20).

Before considering the validity of these competing viewpoints I wish to explain the circumstances out of which Britpop emerged. As I indicated in the Intro, poor sales of pop music were causing great concern both to critics and the recording industry earlier this decade. Of particular concern was the fact that British-made pop was faring especially badly in the marketplace (at one time in 1993 only two albums by United Kingdom acts were in the American top 50, whilst only 2 of 50 'essential albums' in London's Virgin Megastores were by British artists - David Bowie, 'The Buddha of Suburbia', (1993, sleevenotes, np).

Fears about the waning popularity and influence of British pop music can certainly be said to inform Britpop from the moment of its inception. According to Savage, the initiators of the genre were Suede, a group who counted among their major influences David Bowie and Morrissey (Savage, 1996, pages 413/414; pages 340/348). It is therefore very interesting that contemporaneous with the emergence of Suede, Morrissey was sardonically singing on the glam-rock style Glamorous Glue, "We look to Los Angeles for the clothes that we wear: London is dead, London is dead" (Morrissey, Glamorous Glue). The sense that British pop was in decline was also a motivating factor for Blur (the group which, says Savage, 'industrialised' Britpop with their 1994 album 'Parklife' (Blur, 'Parklife' - Savage, 1996, pages 413/414). This is patently obvious from the revelation of the band's bassist, Alex James, that:

Our first big tour here (USA) started the week Nirvana's 'Nevermind' came out … When we got home eight weeks later, it had just it the stores and every magazine had American bands on the cover. Britain had become a satellite country nobody was interested in. We wanted to reassert a British cultural identity that didn't exist at the time (Wallaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 2/Nirvana, 'Nevermind').

All the disparate groups lumped together under the Britpop banner were involved in this process of reassertion as they "sought to avoid second-hand Americanisms in favour of a pop that addressed more pertinently English structures of feeling" (Medhurst, 1995, page 67). In practice this meant discarding American words and singing accents in favour of English dialects and colloquialisms, as evinced by Blur
frontman Damon Albarn's 'Mockney' vocals and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp's rich Yorkshire brogue, and also by lyrics like "She's got one in the oven" (Oasis, She's Electric), "Bobby belting the ball/And Nobby dancing" (Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds, Three Lions and "'ave a cuppa tea, put a record on" (Elastica, Waking Up).

Musically, the movers and shakers of the Britpop milieu drew sustenance almost exclusively from a canon of successful British guitar pop bands of the past (as illustrated by Oasis's Gallagher brothers' list of all-time favourites - see Shelley, Melody Maker, 27 April 1996, pages 21/24). These groups (including The Jam, The Smiths, Stone Roses, Slade, Kinks, Sex Pistols, XTC, Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, Madness, The Who, and, especially, The Beatles) were not only from Britain, they also seemed to express a 'quintessential Britishness' through their use of regional dialects and vernacular language and the incorporation of musical traditions specific to this land. (For instance, XTC's Andy Partridge sang with a pronounced Wiltshire accent, whilst the vocals of Steve Marriott of Small Faces displayed a distinct cockney inflection - for proof listen to XTC, Senses Working Overtime; Small Faces, Lazy Sunday. Examples of the incorporation of traditional 'English' music are provided by the Kings' LP 'Village Green Preservation Society' and the Smiths' song Frankly, Mr Shankly, both of which absorbed elements from old-time music hall - Kinks, 'Village Green Preservation Society'/The Smiths, Frankly, Mr Shankly).

The Sound of Little England?
One of the principal criticisms hurled at the heritage industry is the assertion that it is a form of 'vulgar English nationalism' (which is ironic given the French origins of the word 'heritage' - Laing and Laing, 1995, page 146) (Ascherson, The Observer, 22 November 1987, page 9). Similar accusations have been levelled against Britpop, a genre whose "petty nationalism" disturbs Jon Savage, and which the veteran disc jockey and champion of new music, John Peel believes should rather be dubbed 'Eng-Pop' because of the absence of Welsh, Scottish and Irish bands from its canon of Great British Pop (Savage, 1996, page 414/O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20).

The parochialism of Britpop's influences and the nationalistic fervour with which it has been received in some quarters are obvious causes for concern. This concern can only be heightened by the fact that the ultra-right-wing Tory MP John Redwood has expressed his admiration for these "distinctive British" (read English) groups: "good bands carrying the sounds of Britain around the world, just as they did in the 60s" (Redwood, The Guardian, 20 March 1996, page 13). The fear that there is an implicit link between Britpop and the forces of extreme reaction is expressed by Simon Reynolds, who believes that "(f)or Britpopsters, the Sixties figure as a 'lost golden age' in a way that's alarmingly analogous to the mythic stature of the Empire vis-à-vis football hooligans and the BNP" (Reynolds, 1995, http://members.aol.com.blissout/). Similarly, Edwyn Collins bemoans the fact that:

…you switch on 'Top Of The Pops' and there's Noel Gallagher with a big Union Jack on his guitar … for my generation, the Union Jack was associated with the extreme right"2 (Melody Maker, 27 April 1996, page 5).

For Neal Ascherson, 'heritage' is a political project which invokes the past to suggest "an immemorial and accepted English national order, which is being renewed rather than radically altered" (Ascherson, The Observer, 22 November 1987, page 9). An uncomfortable parallel can be drawn with Britpop's 'project' to renew British pop if one accepts Redwood's claim that the "Lightning Seeds reassure us that there is still an England under that English sky" (Redwood, The Guardian, 20 March 1996, page 13). In fact, this arch Euro-sceptic links Britpop to his crusade to "defend Britain against senseless change - against political vandalism which would demolish our constitution, giving away powers to Frankfurt and Brussels … 'Things could be marvellous' if only we did that" (Redwood, The Guardian, 20 March, 1996, page 13/Lightining Seeds, Marvellous). This is clearly a piece of political opportunism, but one that through its existence reveals a kernel of truth about Britpop, an antipathy, or rather, an ambivalence towards Europe. Thus, on the one hand Pulp have obviously been influenced by Serge Gainsbourg, Oasis ride around on Italian scooters and Blur have released a bilingual single collaboration with the Swiss-born Stereolab vocalist Laetitia Sadier (Blur, To The End). Yet, on the other hand, there is Phil Daniels' proclamation on Parklife that "it's got nothing to do with your 'vorsprung durch technic'" (Blur, Parklife), a line which hints at a certain Europhobia and/or technofear (of which more later).

If Britpop is ambivalent about Europeanisation, it is openly hostile towards the USA. Evidence of this attitude comes in the shape of the Blur song Magic America (Blur, Magic America) a sarcastic dismissal of the 'American dream', and also from the film Trainspotting (1996, Danny Boyle, United Kingdom, 93 minutes) in the scene where Begbie and co beat up an American tourist (the film's soundtrack features Britpop luminaries Blur, Pulp and Sleeper). Musically too, Britpop bands displayed a hostility towards America that stands in stark contrast to the attitude of their British pop heroes; "take Blur, whose homage to the United Kingdom's music-hall pop tradition manages to sever the Kinks from R & B" (Reynolds, 1995, http). Or take Oasis, whose singer Liam Gallagher proclaims "The Beatles talk to me totally" (Shelley, Melody Maker, 27 April 1996, page 21). Gallagher is far from alone in this belief (see Intro), but then, as Astrid Kitchherr explains, The Beatles talked to so many people (inspiring and gaining inspiration in the process):

(We met) some youngsters from England who felt the Germans are our enemies. They came to play music, and suddenly they found Germans were creative people they could be inspired by - and we felt the same ... All our influences were from France: literature, paintings, artists. The Beatles' influence was more from the States: that's what was so exciting about our relationship. We could pass our experiences on to each other (Savage, 1996, page 355).

This internationalism is a far cry from the parochial set of influences drawn upon by Oasis (see above). Whether Oasis can touch people All Around The World in the same way as their heroes The Beatles with such a 'local' sound and outlook is a question I shall be addressing later in the chapter (Oasis, All Around The World). For the moment however, I wish to mount a defence of Britpop's obvious insularity and nationalism on the grounds of mitigating circumstances.

To my mind, the internationalism and thirst for novelness of The Beatles (and to a lesser extent The Kinks) can in large part be attributed to the fact that they were making music during "a rare moment of confidence and expansion" (Hewison, 1987, page 29 - see also Intro). In making this claim I am drawing on the work of the historian David Cannadine whose analysis of three periods of (economic) depression leads him to the conclusion that such times foster "a recognisable and distinctive public mood … withdrawn, nostalgic and escapist, disenchanted with the contemporary scene", with the inverse being true during boom times (Cannadine, 1989, page 258).

Of course, one of the features of a conservative sensibility is an antipathy towards the 'new' and 'foreign', something which was evident in the 'claptrap' patriotism' (expressions of British superiority and anti-German sentiment) popular in Britain's music halls during one of the periods of depression studied by Cannadine, the late nineteenth century. And as Russell notes, "(t)he halls and their allied purveyors of popular conservatism preached their message at the very moment when the power of Britain was waning" (Russell, 1987, page 130/see also Cannadine, 1987, pages 258/259). That the anti-German attitudes of 1890s music hall have transmogrified into the antipathy towards American and ambivalence towards Europe of Britpop can thus be attributed not only to the dominance of American pop (culture) and the weakness of the United Kingdom economy, but also, as Norman Davies reveals, the fact that since the war Britain has been:

… a country whose traditional identify was quietly disintegrating … As the Empire sank from view … Britain's principal dilemma lay in the need to choose between her precarious 'special relationship' with the USA and the prospect of closer links with her European neighbours … sooner or later, the British would be forced to make their choice (Davies, 1997, pages 1074/1075).

For critics of the heritage industry, that phenomenon is founded on a refusal to face up to the need to make this choice. One critic, Adrian Mellor, tempers the more extreme anti-heritage arguments by suggesting that "in itself, it is not so much a weapon in the ideological war which is being fought, as part of the terrain over which the battle is taking place" (Mellor, 1989, np). I feel that Britpop should be regarded in a similar light; as an 'argument' over Britain's future which recognises and tries to resolve the competing pulls of Europe, America and indigenous traditions. The question of whether this 'argument' has been settled and in whose favour is one I shall return to later in the chapter.

'White, male, middle-class', or critics talking through the arse?
Some critics have written Britpop off as "white, male and arthritically traditionalist", a genre made and consumed by "mostly middle class bands and fans" (Sweeting, G2T, The Guardian, 8 December 1995, page 11/ Reynolds, 1995, http). These Brickbats are reminiscent of Hewison's claim that in the hands of the heritage industry, "the open story of history becomes the closed book heritage; where the cultural values are predominantly white, male and middle-class" (Hewison in Uzzell, 1989, page 22). Since my intention is to discover whether or not Britpop should be considered a part of the heritage industry, a close reading of the genre is required in order to ascertain whether or not it embodies as alleged this trident of
purportedly conservative values.

A white noise?
Earlier in this chapter I pointed out that for some commentators Britpop's national pride is dangerously reminiscent of the racism and xenophobia of the far right. One of these critics, Simon Reynolds, believes that Britpop is marked by "a nostalgia for a lost white ethnicity" now embodied only by the "vestigial remnants of authentic white trash" that Damon Albarn in particular fetishes in his songs (e.g. Top Man, Parklife - Blur, Top Man/Blur, Parklife) (Reynolds, 1995, http). More generally, Reynolds suggests that "the sheer WHITENESS of (Britpop's) sound … is staggering" (Reynolds, 1995, http), a criticism echoed by Jon Savage, who asserts that "(w)ithin a multicultural metropolis, where the dominant sounds are swingbeat, ragga or jungle,
Britpop is a synthesis of white styles with any black influence bled out" (Savage, 1996, page 414).

It is hard not to concur with these arguments given the limited range of influences that Britpop drew upon, yet equally I feel it is counterproductive to counter one essentialist argument (concerning nationality with another (concerning race). It is also fatally flawed since just as it is a mistake to believe that the symbolic totems of nation have a single, stable meaning (eg the cross of St George is the flag both of England and of the city of Milan - Seacombe, The Observer, 5 July 1998, page 1), so it is a fallacy to assume that racial characteristics can be transcribed in sound (Booker T and the MGs, one of the 'blackest' sounding groups ever had two white members - see Gillett, pages 230/233).

Reynolds's suggestion that Britpop implies "the symbolic erasure of Black Britain" should thus be seen as something of an exaggeration for, as Sweeting notes, "(j)ust because Britpop has seized hype's high ground, that doesn't negate the assorted forms of music being made elsewhere" (Sweeting, The Guardian, 8 December 1995). Yet equally, the fact that two of those forms, jungle and tri-hop "speak eloquently if non-verbally of the emergence of a new hybrid British identity, a mongrel mutational mix of black and white" seems like a fitting riposte to the narrowness of Britpop's idea of Britishness3 and as we shall later see, it was a challenge that the doyens of Britpop were to take on board.

Britpop, 'New lads' and feminists
Jon Savage reads as significant the fact that Britpop's emergence as a force in popular culture coincided with the 'new laddism' of Loaded Magazine and Skinner & Baddiel's Fantasy Football (BBC 2, 1994/1997) believing that the two phenomena share certain values. Drawing a parallel between Blur and Loaded Savage suggests that, "(i)n their different ways, both espouse a male machismo that is not authentic and which, with a thin veil of irony, seeks a return to more traditional masculine values" (Savage, 1996, page 388). The inference is that (just like the heritage industry) Britpop is marked by a hunger for the male privilege which was taken for granted in the days before the rising tide of feminism challenged old certainties (see Theweleit, 1987, for elucidation of my watery metaphor).

The laddish behaviour of Oasis (numerous instances including offering to fight The Rolling Stones on top of Primrose Hill - Evening Session, Radio 1, August 1997 - and expressing contempt for Yoko Ono: "I agree Lennon lost it later on, oh yeah, totally - when she come in" - Shelley, Melody Maker, 27 April 1996, page 21) and David Baddiel and Frank Skinner's collaboration with Lightning Seeds on the football anthem Three Lions suggest an aspect of unreconstructed masculinity about the genre, but look closer and a more complicated picture emerges (Baddiel & Skinner & The Lighting Seeds, Three Lions). For instance, on the debut single by Britpop pioneers Suede, "Brett Anderson sang of a masculinity where surrender, being 'taken over', was the most pleasurable thing possible" (Suede, The Drowners). Furthermore, filed under 'Britpop' were groups such as Elastica, Lush, Sleeper and Echobelly, each fronted by female vocalists/songwriters and featuring female musicians.

The very fact that women were muscling in on the male-dominated guitar-powered rock band format can be seen as a form of empowerment, particularly given the inherent sexism of much of the Merseybeat/mod/glam/ new wave music from which Britpop drew succour.

Indeed, Elastica's plagiarism of the Stranglers' No More Heroes (The Stranglers, No More Heroes) on their hit single Waking Up (Elastica, Waking Up) has been interpreted as a transformation of misogyny into a "triumphal female statement", even if, as Savage recognises, "any power that it might have is immediately called into question by the undeniable fact that it sounds like an 18-year-old song" (Savage, 1996, page 395/see Reynolds & Press, 1995, pages 33/37 for a comprehensive account of the Strangers' risible attitudes).

The vagaries of Britpop's relation to pop's modernist heritage will come under scrutiny later in the chapter, but for the moment I wish to focus on the question of gender. Although none of the female-fronted Britpop bands were musically innovative (in contrast to punk precursors like Kleenex or The Raincoats, the maverick original Kate Bush and their contemporary PJ Harvey), each offered a distinctly female, sometimes explicitly feminist take on the Britpop motif, (for instance, Echobelly's LP 'On' (Echobelly, 'On') was so titled in reference to menstruation). Having said all this it is nonetheless the case that the three most significant Britpop groups (in terms of commercial success and cultural impact) were the all-male Oasis and Blur, and Pulp, who featured a lone female in keyboardist Candida Doyle. Yet each of these groups problematises/deconstructs masculinity as much as they celebrate it.

Taking Blur first, it is evident from listening to songs like Top Man and Charmless Man (Blur, Top Man/Blur, Charmless Man) that the group are mocking stereotypically 'male' behaviour, even if Albarn's "pseudo-yob accent" (Reynolds, 1995, http) suggests a certain affection for those macho stereotypes. Another song, Globe Alone
(Blur, Globe Alone), derides those monadical males whose individualism and lack of regard for others means there might as well be no-one else on their Earth. If, as Robin Morgan claims, this "disconnection" 'is the genius of patriarchy'", then Blur's mockery suggests an affinity with the principles of principally female peers like Elastica (with whom a "vital connection" is made! Elastica, Connection/ Reynolds & Press, 1995, page 63).

A similar sense of the importance of connectedness is expressed by Oasis (revealing "a distinctive sensitivity" beneath their gruff exteriors which tempers their machismo somewhat - Savage, 1996, page 394). This is evident from the unabashed romanticism of songs like Slide Away and Don't Go Away (Oasis, Slide Away/Oasis, Don't Go Away) and especially on the song Talk Tonight where Noel Gallagher sings "I wanna talk tonight/Until the morning light/'Bought how you saved my life". Yet at the same time recognising that he is a typically insensitive male in the line "I'll never say that I won't ever make you cry" (Oasis, Talk Tonight).

Pulp's oeuvre also indicates a complex relation to traditional masculinity. Singer Jarvis Cocker often takes on the timeworn male role of sexual predator in the band's songs, adopting (usually for laughs given his appearance) the persona of a lecherous lotharia, for whom "birds are something you shag" (Pulp, I Spy - see also Pulp, Pencil Skirt/Pulp, Seductive Barry amongst others). The 'laddish loverman' persona is reminiscent of no-one so much as Alfie in the film of the same name (1966, Lewis Gilbert, United Kingdom, 114 minutes) (an appropriation also made by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy on the 1996 hit Becoming More Like Alfie - the Divine Comedy, Becoming More Like Alfie). As Bracewell points out, "Alfie challenged the male position on male authority. And it was all the more effective for making Alfie the typical geezer in the pub - as opposed to a liberal, artified modern male" (Bracewell, 1997, page 88). Pulp pull off a similar trick on I'm A Man (Pulp, I'm A Man) when Cocker adopts his 'lad' persona to expose the emptiness of male machismo asking "what it takes to be a man", Cocker sings "Well I learned to drink and I learned to smoke and I learned to tell a dirty joke. If that's all there is then there's no point for me" (Pulp, I'm A Man).

Cocker's ambivalence towards the norms of blokehood is also evident from his identification with those "misfits" who "could end up with a smash in the mouth just for standing out" (Pulp, Mis-shapes). This revenge fantasy with its knowing reference to Monty Norman's 'James Bond' theme (John Barry Orchestra, James Bond Theme) unconsciously echoes the theories of Miles and Wheatman that patriarchy is legitimised by (and legitimises) male violence (Myles, 1988/Wheatman, 1988, Male Violence and the Oppression of Women).

What my analysis of the attitudes of these key Britpop bands reveals is that rather than being unambiguously 'radical' or 'reactionary' they display an ambivalence which seems to reflect the contemporary 'crisis of masculinity' (resulting from changing employment patterns in a post-industrial economy - see Intro; Chapter One - and from the impact of feminism).

Different Class?4
Simon Reynolds has suggested that "its covert class struggle that underpins the Britpop phenom: the fetishising by mostly middle class bands and fans of a British working class culture that's already largely disappeared" (Reynolds, 1995, http). Whilst the working classness of Oasis makes them an obvious exception to this rule (see Savage, 1996, pages 392/394), Blur, an avowedly middle-class combo (Sullivan, Friday Review, The Guardian, 7 February 1997, page 15) are to a large extent guilty as charged, as evinced by the sleeve photos of dog racing which adorn the 'Parklife' CD (Blur, 'Parklife').Similarly, Pulp's reminiscences about homes with "woodchip on the wall" also point to a nostalgia of this kind (Pulp, Disco 2000).

Reynolds believes that such misty-eyed evocations are "really a means of avoiding the real nature of modern prole leisure which remains overwhelmingly shaped by rave" (Reynolds, 1995, http). Certainly, Pulp's Sorted for E's and Whizz aside (Pulp, Sorted for E's and Whizz) (which is in any case a record about rave culture rather than a part of that culture), Britpop showed little interest in incorporating the sounds of the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene (although bands associated with the genre have since changed their tune, a point I shall expand upon later in the chapter). The critic John Mulholland amplified this disinterest into antipathy, positing a binary distinction, between dance music and "what we might refer to as the United Kingdom's heritage rock" (meaning Britpop bands like Lightning Seeds, Suede and The Divine Comedy and purveyors of a similar guitar-based, "literate, soft-focus, pure pop" such as Teenage Fanclub and Texas - Mulholland, Friday Review, The Guardian, 18 July 1997, pages 14/15).

The inference is that dance culture is radical and future-oriented as opposed to Britpop's reactionary nostalgia. Superficially this suggestion appears to be upheld by the fact that whereas Blur released a jolly piece of knockabout pop (redolent of Madness) entitled Country House (the victorious single in their chart battle with Oasis - Blur, Country House), rave sound systems like Spiral Tribe saw the British countryside as a "politically charged environment, a historic arena for a clash between rebels and oppressors" (Collin (with Godfrey), 1997, page 202).

The problem with celebrating the country house is that it "is the most familiar symbol of our national heritage" (Hewison, 1987, page 53) and, as Patrick Wright avers:

National Heritage involves the extraction of history - of the idea of historical significance and potential - from a denigrated everyday life and its restaging or display in certain sanctioned sites, events, images and conceptions … Abstract and redeployed, history seems to be purged of political tension, it becomes a unifying spectacle, the settling of all disputes (Wright, 1985, page 69 - as seen in the tourist trade's 'normalisation' of The Beatles - Chapter One).

Continuing his critique of the country house, Hewison states that "(i)t may well be that the century is less egalitarian than it might have been, not because the buildings and their contents have survived, but because of the values they enshrine" (hierarchy, private ownership, individualism and privilege) (Hewison, 1987, page 53).

Such values were anathema to those "techno travellers" whose sound systems threw free parties and who were determined to make some noise until their voices were heard" (eg Spiral Tribe - Collin, 1997, page 203). As one Sound System member explained, our rulers' "value system is money, and ours is nothing to do with money, it's free" (Collin, 1997, page 209)., This concern with values rather than value-for-money is, for Hewison, a necessary condition for the emergence of a critical culture which can stop the rot spread by the heritage industry (Hewison, 1987, page 145; Hewison, Section 8, Sunday Times, 20 March 1994, page 10). By contrast, the guardians of the national heritage seek not to change society but to preserve the status quo, for instance, as Wright has written, "(o)ne doesn't have to take a completely negative view of the National Trust" (whose primary purpose is the maintenance and protection of country houses) "to see that the inalienability of the Trust's property can be regarded (and also staged) as a vindication of property relations" (Wright, 1985, page 52).

Given their opposed value systems it is unsurprising that the upholders of 'our' heritage and the free party movement came into conflict. As Collin reports, prior to the 1992 summer solstice:

English Heritage, the National Trust and some local landowners took our an injunction against sixteen named people, preventing them from approach (Stonehenge). 'Fourteen out of the sixteen named are ravers who are a new breed' … said their solicitor (Collin, 1997, page 215).

Yet, despite the evident radicalism of the free party movement, it remained just one element of a dance culture whose central core, its apolitical hedonist heart was slowly assimilated into the British leisure industry" (Collin, 1997, page 265). Just as dance culture is not altogether as radical as its champions may claim5, so Britpop is less a form of 'heritage rock' than its detractors aver. Blur's Country House is excellent proof of this as my content analysis will make clear (Blur, Country House).

On the sleeve of "The Great Escape" album, Country House is illustrated by a photo of a fairytale Mittel European castle beneath which (in a parody of a fag packet's government health warning) is the legend "warning: private property" (Blur, 'The Great Escape'). This clearly implies a critique of the values enshrined in the country house which, like the actions of the 'techno travellers' reminds us that the National Trust has it roots in an organisation (the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society) whose main aim "was not the protection of buildings or private property, but public access to the countryside" (Hewison, 1987, page 56). As we shall see this critique is expounded in the song itself:

Country House tells the tale of a "successful fella" (reputedly David Balfe, the boss of Blur's record company) who has "a lot of money" but little happiness and wishes to give up being a "city dweller" who's "paying the price of living life at the limit" in favour of a peaceful and happy existence in the country (the fact that his 'new money' can buy him a country house symbol of inherited privilege, itself reveals the destabilising of tradition wrought by capitalist modernity - see Intro/Harvey, 1990). However, having moved to "a very big house in the country" and swapped the stresses and strains of metropolitan life and the executive lifestyle for days spent "watching afternoon repeats and the food he eats" the protagonist still feels a sense of discontent and futility, an emptiness he tries to fill by "reading Balzac, knocking back Prozac", but which cannot be shaken, as is evident from the repetition at the coda of the line "Blow, blow me out I am so sad I don't know why" (Blur, Country House).

The overriding message of the song seems to be that 'modern life is rubbish' (as Blur titled their second album - blur 'Modern Life Is Rubbish') because it is meaningless (which explains the Balzac reference since his "la comedie humaine" is noted for its lack of spiritual content in its representation of a world ruled by "(m)oney the only god that people believe in nowadays" - Balzac, 1990, page 31). This void cannot be filled by any prescription of pills (e.g. Prozac) (a belief also expressed by Pulp on Sorted … - Pulp, Sorted Out For E's and Whizz), nor is it possible to escape the problems of the modern world and live out a fantasy of the past, since contemporary ills will continue to intrude (Blur, Country House).

What my reading of this text suggests is that rather than playing 'heritage pop', Blur are actually critiquing heritage solutions, and that rather than repeating the past, this song (with its musical and thematic echoes of the Kinks' tale of the woes of the idle rich, Sunny Afternoon (also a number one) - Kinks, Sunny Afternoon) transforms tradition to make a critical comment about present-day realities (Blur, Country House). So why has Britpop been repeatedly connected to the heritage culture (see Bracewell, Mulholland, O'Hagan)? I believe the answer has to do with Britpop's relation to modernism.

Post-modern Optimists
Britpop is undoubtedly nostalgic, but it is a nostalgia for the modernism of the "swinging sixties" and its new wave 'revival' (as revealed by oasis's association with Paul Weller (e.g. on Champagne Supernova - Oasis, Champagne Supernova), Pulp's hymn of praise to the retro-modern Bar Italia (Pulp, Bar Italia) and Blur's collaboration with Quadrophenia (1979, Franc Roddam, UK, 120 minutes) star Phil
Daniels - Blur, Parklife). This is clearly problematic for those who equate pop music with modernism's quest for the new, as evinced by Reynolds' assertion that "today's mods" are not the "mod revivalists" of Britpop but the kind of kids "you'll find at drum and bass hang-outs like speed and AWOL" (Reynolds, 1995, http). In one sense he is right of course, since "Mod originally meant 'modernist', meant having utterly contemporary tastes in music, clothes, everything (Reynolds, 1995, http).

However, I would argue that the retro-modernists of Britpop do have an utterly contemporary attitude, one which can be characterised as post-modern optimism.

As I have previously noted, post-modernism has been equated with the heritage industry and viewed as anathema to pop music (see Intro; Chapters One and Two). Now Britpop certainly is post-modern in the sense that it is marked by a playful and knowing sensibility, a "self-referring consciousness of medium" expressed through such techniques as collage and pastiche (Hewison, 1987, page 133). This is evident from such evidence as the litany of Beatles references in Oasis songs (e.g. Oasis Wonderwall/Oasis, She's Electric/Oasis, Be Here Now/Oasis, Don't Look Back In Anger, Pulp's appropriation of Laura Branigan's Gloria for Disco 2000 and Elastica's aforementioned Stranglers steal (Pulp, Disco 2000/Laura Branigan, Gloria/ Elastica, Waking Up/The Stranglers, No More Heroes).

For Hewison, the trouble with post-modernism is that it "is modernism with the optimism taken out" (Hewison, 1987, page 132). Since we cannot live without hope it is therefore unsurprising that people seek solace in nostalgia. This explains why the crowd gathered to witness the switching on of Manchester's Christmas lights, in 1982 sang Beatles songs rather than ABC hits, preferring the hope of amodernist
past to the arch cynicism of a post-modern present (Savage, 1996, page 143). A salutary comparison can be made with an event I attended in the summer of 1996, a launch party for the Euro '96 football tournament held in Nottingham's Old Market Square. Once again, Beatles songs were sung as the crowd accompanied the performance (amidst a terrific thunderstorm) of tribute band, The Fab 4. However, this time the communal singing did encompass one of the hits of the day, since the band's set climaxed with a well-received rendition of Wonderwall by Oasis (Oasis, Wonderwall).

What this anecdote reveals is that Britpop, as well as being post-modern, is essentially optimistic. This is not the blind optimism of pop's modernist phase (as evinced by, for instance, the assertion that All You Need Is Love - The Beatles, All You Need Is Love), it is a knowing optimism, an optimism in spite of the facts. Hence, Oasis recognise that "times are hard" but remain hopeful (Oasis, Stand By Me). Pulp demonstrate a similar fortitude in adversity when inviting the listener to "come share this golden age with me in my single room apartment and if it all amounts to nothing - it doesn't matter these are still our glory days" (Pulp, Glory Days). (Such defiance is the stock-in-trade of Oasis, their worldview neatly summed up in the line "these are crazy days but they make me shine" (Oasis, All Around The World). This refusal to abandon all hope is exemplified by Britpop smashes like Whatever and Alright (Oasis, Whatever/Supergrass, Alright) whose insouciant attitude of 'so what if we're unoriginal, who cares?!' pre-empts criticism and makes it seem churlish.

This new attitude (recognising pop's age whilst realising that it must be young and contemporary) pervades Britpop, a 'double-coding' (Jencks, 1989) typified by Oasis's appropriation of the 1960s maxim 'Be Here Now' with its message of living in the present for the title of their 1997 album (Oasis, 'Be Here Now' - see MacDonald, 1994, page 151 for the origins of the slogan). A similar sensibility is identifiable in Robbie Williams' Britpop style hit Old Before I Die, whose inversion of The Who's legendary tenet "I hope I die before I get old" is indicative of pop's maturity, yet which in the next line reaffirms the youthfulness of pop music, as Williams proclaims "tonight I want to live for today so come along for the ride" (Robbie Williams, Old Before I Die/The Who, My Generation).

This attitude is quite understandable to pop's classic constituency, as Giles Smith avers: "Today's teens listen to Hendrix. They have none of the contempt I had then and felt obliged to have, for 'old stuff'" (Smith, 1995, page 86). Similarly, Ellen notes that today's students and twentysomethings "have 30 (surely 40? - my parenthesis) years of rock 'n' roll at their disposal and, unlike a lot of their elders, have no problem with the past. To them it's merely 'a wider present' (Ellen, G2T, The Guardian, 20 June 1994, page 57). Yet the drawback of this situation (as those old enough to have lived through pop's modernist youth rightly assert) is a loss of cultural power, as the ageing and fragmentation of the pop constituency means that "the sense of some unified culture has gone forever" (Parsons, SR.4, The Times, 21 November 1992). Britpop's reaction to this realisation is to challenge the idea that "all that remains is a series of parlour games for a dis-empowered generation" (Savage, 1996, page 395). One of the ways it does this is through recognising that the under 30s do constitute a 'dis-empowered generation', that we are part of what Douglas Coupland has famously labelled "generation X" (an appropriately post-modern appellation since it belongs also to a sociological study of mods and rockers and a punk rock band of the 1970s - Coupland, 1991/Hamblett and Daverson, 1964).

According to Coupland, "gen X" displays a profound ambivalence towards work as it becomes increasingly insecure and unable to satisfy demands for both personal satisfaction and adequate fiscal reward (Coupland, 1991). This ambivalence is evident in such lyrics from Britpop hits as "avoiding all work because there's none available" (Blur, Girls and Boys), "there's nothing worth working for" (Oasis, Cigarettes and Alcohol), "I'd work very hard but I'm lazy/I can't take the pressure and it's starting to show" (Elastica, Waking Up), and most potently:

Oh we were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect you to clean toilets. When you have seen how big the world is how can you make do with this? If you want me I'll be sleeping in - sleeping in throughout these glory days (Pulp, Glory Days).

This apathy contrasts with the demonstrativeness of youth culture in the 50s, 60s and 70s, times when struggle seemed appropriate because a palpable sense of 'us' and 'them' (aka 'the generation gap') still existed. One of the ways in which this sense of difference was expressed was through clothing (e.g. the drape jackets of Teddy Boys, punks wearing safety pins), by contrast in the 90s "we wear the same clothes 'cause we feel the same" (Blur, End Of A Century). That is we feel part of "'The Gap' generation", part of a global consumer culture to which there seems to be no alternative. For Malcolm MacClaren this is why:

Fashion has become so much a business and so less an art … we don't have the binary oppositions, we don't know the difference, we don't know who the enemy is. If you don't know who the enemy is what are you designing for? (Undressed, Channel 4, United Kingdom, 15 February 1998).

Francis Fukuyuma suggests that there is no alternative and that we are witnessing "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution", that being "(t)he triumph of the West, of the Western idea", an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" (Fukuyama, 1989, pages 3/4). Of course, for Hewison, the heritage industry is a living embodiment of this (bogus) idea, in that it presents "a history that is over", meaning that the past becomes "a resource not of memory, but if marketing" (Hewison, 1987, page 141/Hewison, Museums Journal, April 1991, page 25). Britpop however, is a resource both of memory and marketing, indicating the presence of pop's characteristic dialectic of liberation and control, and illustrating the truth that "living cultures are generated from the tensions generated around clusters of contradiction" (Home, 1995, page 17).

Revolutionary Nostalgia
What Britpop is remembering is a lost sense of power and authenticity embodied in the notion of community. This is expressed not only in terms of a national pride or a pop 'scene' but also as a non-specific desire to belong. Evidence of this comes in the form of the Oasis song Some Might Say (Oasis, Some Might Say), whose community spirit is inclusive, encompassing a belief in justice and equality ("if you don't get yours, I won't get mine as well"), a concern for the underdog ("go and tell it to the man who cannot shine") and a conviction that "we will find a brighter day" (Oasis, Some Might Say)6. Similar sentiments are also evident in the work of Oasis's contemporaries (especially those from northern England - i.e. Lightning Seeds, Cast, Pulp, Boo Radleys - their southern counterparts tend to express contemporary anxieties without offering solutions - cf Blur, Country House; Sleeper, inbetweener; Menswear "Flounder drowning on Daydreamer (Menswear, Daydreamer) - even if their retro sounds suggest an implicit agreement about the need for roots)7.

Britpop's memories of community do not indicate a refusal to face up to present realities so much as they "provide the critical yardstick by which we may judge the present and act to change it" (Mellor, 1989, np). A prime example of this is the song Three Lions which gives the lie to Hewison's notion that "nostalgia has no use as a creative emotion" (Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds, Three Lions/Hewison, 1987, page 138). This record (the official England team song for Euro '96) is nothing if not nostalgic: musically it sounded like it could have been written 30 years earlier; lyrically it mainly consists of a series of reminiscences. Written from the perspective of the average England fan, the song recalls the pleasures and pains of being a football supporter, the highs ("that tackle by Moore and when Lineker scored") and lows ("30 years of hurt") experienced by followers of the national team. Yet this is an optimistic nostalgia where England's greatest triumph (winning the world cup in 1966) is remembered ("Jules Rimet's still gleaming") in the hope of a repetition ("I know that was then but it could be again") "Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds, Three Lions).

This sentiment not only embodies the spirit of Britpop as a whole, it also reveals a more general truth about nostalgia: that it can be revolutionary ("(t)he most revolutionary innovators hark back to some legitimising past" - Lowenthal, 1985, page 41). Rather than a sign that "art has lost its revolutionary vigour", Britpop's nostalgia is revolutionary in the original sense of meaning 'revolvement' or 'restoration' (Hewison, 1987, page 135/ Lowenthal, 1985, page 394). And, in an adjunct to Cannadine's argument that depression breeds nostalgia, Cannadine, 1989), Lowenthal points out that such revolutionary nostalgia "often happens in hard times; during the 1930s Americans viewed Founding Fathers with renewed respect, shoring up battered self-esteem by identifying with a successful past" (Lowenthal, 1985, page 394).

As I mentioned in the Intro, Britpop's nostalgia had the desired restorative effect, to the extent that 9 out of 10 biggest selling albums in the United Kingdom in 1997 were by British acts (Ashton, Music Week, 10 January 1998). Of these, only one (the top-seller: Oasis, 'Be Here Now') was by a band associated with Britpop, illustrating Damon Albarn's belief that "Britpop as an idea is no longer valid" (Sweeting, G2T, The Guardian, 8 December 1995, page 11). Drawing on the work of Cannadine (1989) I would suggest that the concept of Britpop had outlived its usefulness as depression gave way to economic expansion (both for pop and the country as a whole) and renewed international prestige, not only for pop music, as evinced by the success of the Spice Girls ("Spice" was the top-selling album in the USA in 1997 - Spice Girls, 'Spice'/Jones, Music Week, 10 January 1998, np), but for British culture as a whole (a revival flagged by the concept of "cool Britannia", an idea also deemed to have now run its course - see Marr, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 24/Outro).

'Exotic Blooms'8
Post-Britpop, British pop music has been marked by a more expansive and experimental sensibility9 fulfilling Savage's prediction "(o)ut of this seemingly arid culture, exotic blooms will grow" (Savage, 1996, page 414). This is exemplified by the new directions taken by Britpop's players, including a number of collaborations with musicians from the more innovative dance sector (Pulp with Neneh Cherry, Noel Gallagher with the Chemical Brothers, Blur to work with William Orbit - Pulp, Seductive Barry10/Chemical Brothers, Setting Sun/Dave Pearce, Radio 1, 2 June 1998)11.

Other collaborations have attempted to subvert the reading of Britpop as racist by showing a willingness to engage in a musical dialogue with black British acts (Noel Gallagher has worked with the junglist Goldie, Blur have remixed a Massive Attack track, Jarvis Cocker sang on a Barry Adamson CD - Goldie, tempertemper/Massive Attack, Angel/Barry Adamson, Set The Controls For the Heart Of The Pelvis).

The most significant change is a lessening of Britpop's nationalistic fervour, best illustrated by the new attitude of Blur (the genre's most fervent wavers of the union flag12), whose antipathy towards the USA has altered to the extent that the group now suggest we "look inside America" (as they have done drawing inspiration from groups
like Pavement and Sebadoh) even if they still "don't want to make her mine" (Blur, Look Inside America/Sullivan, Friday Review, The Guardian, 7 February 1997, page 15).

Parallel to these developments, other musicians have responded to Britpop's argument about national identity to posit a 'Britishness' which is less about reasserting a disappearing tradition than about looking to the future (in Heideggerian terms, more about Becoming British than about Being British - Heidegger, 1978). I am thinking here of Cornershop's Punjabi version of Norwegian Wood, The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony (with its loop of a fragment of a version of a Rolling Stones song), The Rootsman's dub version of the shipping forecast and the Big Beat genre of dance music (which transforms the same guitar pop sources that Britpop drew upon by re-imagining them for the dance floor13) (Cornershop, Norwegian Wood/The Verve,
Bitersweet Symphony/The Rootsman, General Synopsis).

So Britpop is over having (at least in part 14) inspired renewal, but what of the future of pop? And what price the heritage industry given a (new) Labour government who, like Robert Hewison, have "great faith… in the Millennium"? Is Hewison right to believe that "nostalgia is going to go out of fashion and the heritage industry will go to the knacker's yard", and, if so, what is to replace it? Follow me dear reader, the next chapter awaits … (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996; The Times, 25 February 1998; The Independent, 25 February 1998).

Notes

1. Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds, Three Lions, Epic records, 1996.

2. Or as he put it more succinctly on the Britpop mocking single, Keep On Burning: "Claiming back the Union Jack, my arse/We've got to get together now to counteract this farce" (Edwyn Collins, Keep On Burning).

3. Both of these points are illustrated by the fact that during the Euro '96 football tournament the number one single in the UK charts might have been the official England team song, a prime slice of Britpop (Baddiel and Skinner and Lightning Seeds, Three Lions), but this did not preclude the co-existence in the top ten of an alternative anthem with an alternative vision.

4. England's Irie by Black Grape was a musical and lyrical hybrid, "a mongrel mutational mix of black and white", whose sense of being in opposition to the dominant culture was clearly expressed in the lines: "I live in a land of crass hypocrisy/We're going to win the national lottery/ee-aye-addio, I don't think so! (Black Grape, England's Irie/Reynolds, 1995, http).

5. Pulp, 'Different Class', Island Records, 1995.

6. Not as future-oriented - witness the current nostalgia for Old Skool Hip-Hop, or the hope that "the house scene could revive 'the noble Albion dream of a golden flowering of civilisation" (Collin (with Godfrey), 1997, page 190).

7. Dance music can also foster a nostalgic sensibility when it focuses exclusively on its 'groove' because most people want to hear songs (for their 'emotional truths') Hence, not only the song-based reaction to rave culture of Britpop, but also the 'cool groups' revival of 1960/1961 (see Gillett, 1983, page 210). In the light of this observation it is not surprising that Berry Gordy jr, boss of the most successful exponents of dance music, Tamla Motown, "always insisted on the song being the prime focus of every record" (Gillett, 1983, page 197).

8. The universality of those sentiments perhaps goes some way towards explaining why for all the parochialism of their strictly delineated sources of inspiration, Oasis sold over eight million copies of their album "(What's the story) Morning Glory?" outside the UK (Oasis, (What's the story) Morning Glory?/Evening Session, Radio 1, August 1997).

9. Paradoxically, the parochialism of Oasis (and Britpop in general) is also something of a universal sentiment. This fact can be attributed to the influence of global capitalism, as Harvey notes (1990, pages 284/307): one of the contradictory effects of capitalist globalisation is to increase the importance of the local; since
capital can be moved about freely, small locational differences determine where multinational corporations choose to locate. This has two consequences: firstly places become more alike in their desire to attract investment; secondly places magnify the small differences between themselves and other locales, not only for economic purposes, but also out of a desire to hold onto a sense of difference, of distinctiveness (Harvey, 1990, pages 284/307). In terms of pop music this fetches up in "a global record industry that is becoming ever more parochial" (Music Week, 8 November 1997, page 4) (as evinced not only by Britpop, but also the 'French Disco' of Air, Daft Punk et al, and statistics which reveal that "(i)n the Netherlands local
repertoire's share of sales has increased from 14% to 23% and in Germany from 22% to 50% since 1991" - Poumtchak!: The Story of French Disco, Radio 1, 31 May 1998/Music Week, 13 December 1997, page 1).

10. An obvious exception to this rule (revealing the inherent instability of all oppositions) are Kingston, Surrey's Dodgy, whose community spirit is in evidence on songs like In A Room and Good Enough (Dodgy, In A Room/Dodgy, Good Enough).

11. Savage, 1996, page 414.

12. Even if the success of optimistic dirges like The Lighthouse Family's High and Come Back To What You Know by Embrace suggest that for many people times are still hard and uncertain (Lighthouse Family, High/Embrace, Come Back To What You Know).

13. You may wonder how I can give this recording as an example of a post-Britpop sensibility when I earlier cited it to describe one of the characteristics of Britpop. The answer is that, following Raymond Williams and Jameson, I consider Seductive Barry (Pulp, Seductive Barry) to contain 'residual' traces of the former dominant cultural form (James, New Left Review, 146, July/August 1984, page 57).

14. Perhaps a recognition of and response to criticisms such as that of Savage, who observes that "the Beatles worked in the studio with an incredible dynamism and willingness to experiment that, for all the claims made on their behalf, it is not yet possible to hear in Blur or Oasis" (Savage, 1996, page 420).

15. Whereas Oasis, despite their 'union jack' guitars, were as proud of their Irish heritage as of their 'Britishness' ("(i)t makes a difference to yourself that you have an Irish background … I think it makes you more passionate about music" - Noel Gallagher in Savage, 1996, page 394). A visual signifier of this is the band's Cigarettes and Alcohol T-shirt, where the red, white and blue of the British flag have become the orange, green and white of the Irish tricolour (Oasis, Cigarettes and Alcohol T-shirt).

16. For instance, Fatboy Slim's Who-sampling Going Out Of My Head (Fatboy Slim, Going Out Of My Head). The origins of this genre's name also give a clue as to the intentions of its protagonists, coming as it did from a Brighton dance club, Big Beat Boutique, who took their name from a 1960s Merseybeat venue (Evening Session, Radio 1, August 1997). And, in an appropriate coincidence, new wave champions Chiswick Records operated at one time under the name Big Beat as well (Home, 1995, page 28).

17. The end of the longest recession this century was probably the major contributing factor behind the British pop revival since, as Lea notes, "(s)ales of music are closely linked to the economic health of the nation" (Lea, 1997, page 276). However, the extent of that revival and the particular form that it took would not have been the same without the idea of Britpop and its practical manifestations.