Friday, April 29, 2005
On this day:

The perils of live theatre

The audience at Brussels' Irish Theatre Group's performance of 'Mrs. Sweeney' got more than they bargained for on Wednesday. Combine a male character changing into women's clothing with a loosely buttoned pair of boxer shorts and - voila - you have a recipe for a rather embarassing public exposure. At least the actor in question was able to laugh off the incident: 'Last night's audience will be asking for their money back', he deadpanned.

Sunday, April 24, 2005
On this day:

Be Here Now: Sources and appendices

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Discography

Adamson, Barry 1996 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis, "Oedipus Schmoedipus", Mute Records.

Baddiel & Skinner & The Lightning Seeds 1996 Three Lions, Epic Records.

John Barry Orchestra 1962 James Bond Theme, Columbia Records.

The Beatles 1962 Love Me Do, Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1965 Yesterday, "Help!", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1965 Norwegian Wood, "Rubber Soul", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1966 Eleanor Rigby, "Revolver", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1966 Tomorrow Never Knows, "Revolver", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1966 Yellow Submarine, "Revolver", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 Penny Lane, Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 Strawberry Fields Forever, Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 Good Morning, Good Morning, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 Within You, Without You, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 All You Need Is Love, Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1967 I Am The Walrus, "Magical Mystery Tour", Parlophone Records.

The Beatles 1969 All Together Now, "Yellow Submarine", Apple Records.

The Beatles 1969 Octopuses Garden, "Abbey Road", Apple Records.

The Beatles 1969 Polythene Pam, "Abbey Road", Apple Records.

The Beatles 1970 Let It Be, Apple Records, 1970.

The Beatles 1995 Free As A Bird, Apple Corps/EMI Records.

Black Grape (featuring Joe Strummer and Keith Allen) 1996 England's Irie, Radioactive Records.

Blur 1993 "Modern Life Is Rubbish", Food Records.

Blur 1994 Girls & Boys, "Parklife", Food Records.

Blur 1994 Magic America, "Parklife", Food Records.

Blur 1994 Parklife, "Parklife", Food Records.

Blur 1994 To The End, "Parklife", Food Records.

Blur 1995 Charmless Man, "The Great Escape", Food Records.

Blur 1995 Country House, "The Great Escape", Food Records.

Blur 1995 Globe Alone, "The Great Escape", Food Records.

Blur 1995 Top Man, "The Great Escape", Food Records.

Blur 1997 Look Inside America, "Blur", Food Records.

Bowie, David 1993 "The Buddha Of Suburbia", Arista/BMG International Records.

Branigan, Laura 1982 Gloria, Atlantica Records.

Chemical Brothers 1996 Setting Sun, Junior Boy's Own Records.

Collins, Edwyn 1996 Keep On Burning, Setanta Records.

Cornershop 1997 Norwegian Wood, "When I Was Born For The 7th Time", Wiija Records.

The Divine Comedy 1996 Becoming More Like Alfie, Setanta Records.

Dodgy 1996 Good Enough, A & M Records.

Dodgy 1996 In A Room, A & M Records.

Dreadzone 1995 Little Britain, "Second Light", Virgin Records, (more 'becoming British' beats).

Echoebelly 1995 "On", Rhythm King Records.

Elastica 1994 Connection, Deceptive Records.

Elastica 1995 Waking Up, Deceptive Records.

Embrace 1998 Come Back To What You Know, Hut Records.

Fatboy Slim 1997 Going Out Of My Head, Skint Records.

Gerry And The Pacemakers 1964 Ferry Across The Mersey, Columbia Records.

Goldie 1998 Tempertemper, Ffrr Records.

Kinks 1966 Sunny Afternoon, Pye Records.

Kinks 1968 'Village Green Preservation Society', Pye Records.

Lennon, John 1971 Imagine, "Imagine", Apple Records.

Lighthouse Family 1997 High, Polydor Records.

Lightning Seeds 1995 Marvellous, Epic Records.

Massive Attack 1998 Angel (Blur Remix), Circa Records.

Menswear 1995 Daydreamer, Laurel Records

Morrissey 1992 Glamourous Glue, "Your Arsenal", HMV Records.

Nirvana 1991 "Nevermind", DGC Records.

Oasis 1994 Cigarettes & Alcohol, "Definitely Maybe", Creation Records.

Oasis 1994 Slide Away, "Definitely Maybe", Creation Records.

Oasis 1994 Whatever, Creation Records.

Oasis 1995 Some Might Say, Creation Records.

Oasis 1995 Talk Tonight, B-Side of Some Might Say, Creation Records.

Oasis 1995 Don't Look Back In Anger, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", Creation Records.

Oasis 1995 She's Electric, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", Creation Records.

Oasis 1995 Wonderwall, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?", Creation Records.

Oasis 1997 All Around The World, "Be Here Now", Creation Records.

Oasis 1997 Don't Go Away, "Be Here Now", Creation Records.

Oasis 1997 Stand By Me, "Be Here Now", Creation Records.

Pulp 1995 Common People, Island Records.

Pulp 1995 Mis-Shapes/Sorted For E's & Whizz, Island Records.

Pulp 1995 I Spy, "Different Class", Island Records.

Pulp 1995 Disco 2000, "Different Class", Island Records.

Pulp 1995 Pencil Skirt, "Different Class", Island Records.

Pulp 1998 Glory Days, "This Is Hardcore", Island Records.

Pulp 1998 I'm A Man, "This Is Hardcore, Island Records.

Pulp 1998 Seductive Barry, "This Is Hardcore", Island Records.

Pulp 1998 Cocaine Socialism, B-side of A Little Soul, Island Records.

Richard, Cliff 1988 Mistletoe & Wine, EMI Records.

Right Said Fred 1992 Deeply Dippy, Tug Records.

The Rootsman 1998 General Synopsis, "52 Days To Timbuktu", Third Eye Music.

Sleeper 1995 Inbetweener, Indolent Records.

Small Faces 1968 Lazy Sunday, Immediate Records.

The Smiths 1986 Frankly, MrShankly, 'The Queen is Dead', Rough Trade Records, 1986.

Spice Girls 1996 Spice, Virgin Records.

The Stranglers 1977 No More Heroes, United Artists.

Suede 1992 The Drowners, Nude Records.

Supergrass 1995 Alright, Parlophone Records.

The Verve 1997 Bitter Sweet Symphony, Hut Records.

The Who 1965 My Generation, Brunswick Records.

Williams, Robbie 1997 Old Before I Die, Chrysalis Records.

XTC 1982 Senses Working Overtime, Virgin Records.

Other Audio Visual Materials

Alfie 1966 Lewis Gilbert, United Kingdom, 114 minutes.

The Brit Awards 1998 United Kingdom, February 1998, ITV.

Evening Session 1997 (Presented by Steve Lamacq), United Kingdom, August 1997, BBC Radio 1.

Heartbeat 1992/1998 United Kingdom 1992/1998, Yorkshire Television, ITV.

Heartland 1995 United Kingdom, 18 November 1995, Wall To Wall Television, Central ITV.

The Hours And Times 1991 Christopher Münch, United States, 60 minutes, black and white.

The Money Programme 1998 United Kingdom, 22 February 1998, BBC 2.

Music Of The Millennium 1998 United Kingdom, 24 January 1998, Channel 4.

Night Waves, "Heritage" 1996 (Presented by Patrick Wright). United Kingdom, 16 May 1996, BBC Radio 3.

The Party's Over 1998 United Kingdom, 21 May 1998, Channel 4

Pearce, Dave 1998 United Kingdom, 2 June 1998, BBC Radio 1.

Poumtchak! The Story Of French Disco 1998 United Kingdom, 31 May 1998,BBC Radio 1.

Quadrophenia 1979 Franc Roddam, United Kingdom, 120 minutes

Rockin' Around The Clock 1995 United Kingdom, 14 October 1995, Channel 4.

The Rutles 1978 All You Need Is Cash, d. Gary Weis & Eric Idle, United Kingdom, 72 minutes, Broadway Video, VHS

Stars In Their Eyes 1990/1998 United Kingdom, 1990/1998, Granada Television, ITV.

Trainspotting 1996 Danny Boyle, United Kingdom, 93 minutes.

Undressed: Fashion In The 20th Century 1998 (Part One), United Kingdom, 15 February 1998, Channel 4.

You'll Never Be Sixteen Again 1986 p. Peter Everett, BBC Radio 1.

Other Material

Australian Doors Show, attempted interview.16 October 1996. Rock City, Nottingham 1996 Appendix 3

The Beatles Story, Liverpool.Visited on 28 January 1997. 1997

The Bootleg Beatles, Empire Theatre, Liverpool.24 August 1997. 1997

Danson, Jack, private interview, 25 October 1997.Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 10 minutes. 1997 Appendix 2

Euro '96 Launch Party, Old Market Square, Nottingham, June 1996.Performance by The Fab Four. 1996

http://members.aol.com/blissout/

http://www.xs5all.nl/~steim

International Beatle Week, Liverpool.Visited from 23 August 1997 to 25 August 1997. 1997

Magical Mystery Tour, Liverpool.Rolled up for on 28 January 1997. 1997

Oasis, Cigarettes & Alcohol T-Shirt.As worn by Lucie Bodle, ILF, Nottingham, June 1996. 1996

Rock Circus, London.Visited on 2 September 1997. 1997

Tyrrell, John, private interview by telephone,22 November 1996. Approximately 30 minutes. 1996 Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Interview with John Tyrrell, Bjorn Again Manager. Friday 22 November 1996 at 4.30 pm.

JPT: Could you tell me about the origins of the tribute band phenomenon?

John T: I would say that in the early '80s in Australia there were a lot of cover bands … and then because of the competition in the live venues - because in Australia you've got to realise that there are so many live venues in each capital city, you know, the corner pub in Australia would have a room with five hundred to a thousand capacity. You can open the paper on any night, say Saturday night, and there'll be fifty or sixty cover bands playing, so many bands, and they're really good quality. Now, in the mid-to-late '80s these tribute bands started, they just came out of the competition - 'how can we become better'. I can't remember the first one but, I mean you've always had your Elvis Presley and your Beatles bands, but they never played in
pubs, they were more cabaret. So the rock 'n' roll sort of bands started coming up. There were glam bands, The Doors, they were about the only two I really knew. Then we thought, or Rod Woolley who created the idea of Bjorn Again, he thought, 'gee, if we did Abba this could really go well'. And once we started and got a lot of media; I mean we got so much media because we really pushed the band - we were doing TV. There was no Abba revival, we didn't spring up out of an Abba revival, we just thought it would be a fun idea to do on the weekends. 'Cos all these other bands were getting so serious. You can imagine all these cover bands and they've got their long hair and their guitars, acting like Bon Jovi. I mean they were very pretentious in a way. And we thought 'let's turn it on its side and do something funny', so Rod thought Abba would be perfect. So let's do the music well, but dress up in the costumes, have Swedish accents, do radio interviews with Swedish accents and all this sort of stuff, and we got so much media attention and our gigs started going from one to two gigs a week to bigger capacities, and then we started touring interstate, to Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and it just got going bigger. Now once people thought, 'gee, this Bjorn Again, they're doing really well', then, all of a sudden, everyone thought of a tribute act and started doing it. And about 1990 I rang around a few agencies and said 'look, I want to get a list going of all the tribute bands that are touring' - I got 53, that was ridiculous, you know. I didn't bother counting after then, it probably went up to more from there.

JPT: Do you think the number's still growing even now?

John T: I don't, I think it's died a bit - it's died a lot in the last two or three years definitely because you've got to pick a band that's got a lot of songs, a lot of hit songs and then you can make a stage show out of it. And some bands were picking bands that were just dreadful, that had had like two hit songs. So you get a lot of them doing it, and a lot of them had clever names - I would say we started the clever names thing with Bjorn Again.

I'd say by '93 you could safely say they were really dying and only the good ones remain.

And also another factor was a lot of the big international acts just don't get to Australia. A lot of acts have never been to Australia. It's second best but some of them were doing really good shows.

It's hard to know exactly how something starts, but that's my opinion.

JPT: Would you say the tribute band thing is now a worldwide phenomenon?

John T: You can't generalise like that, like I know it has really picked up in the states. I know in Canada it's big, but I don't know for how long, when I got there I thought we're here starting it off, but no, there'd been quite a few around. In the UK I didn't really know of any tribute bands, except, if you look in stage and television, there's hundreds of 'em, but they're sort of Stars in your Eyes lookalikes and they do cabaret and functions whereas we've done Albert Halls, The Forum … and this sort of thing … Rock Concert Hall venues and we're doing really good media. Plus, something what helped us in '92 is when we released the single Erasure-ish in response to Abba-Esque by Erasure, and that sort of was the joke. You know, you'd have to research other countries, I don't think it's that big in
Europe.

JPT :When I was in Prague I saw a few but they were mainly Beatles things.

John T: But you'll always get Beatles, Elvis everywhere, but we're sort of different in that regard. I think the value of Bjorn Again - we're not just tribute, we're actually sending it up as well.

JPT: So it's more tongue-in-cheek?

John T: It's very tongue-in-cheek and just by getting up and doing Abba perfectly is in itself a send up 'cos you're doing it in the '90s (ha, ha!).

JPT :What sort of people go to, well I s'pose you'd know more about Bjorn Again, but, sort of tribute shows in general?

John T: Well, obviously the fans, but a lot of people just assume the fan of the original band goes and that's not true because a lot of the real fans of the real bands really despise, you know, plagiarism, I s'pose … copying. But on the whole you get just people who like that music and never saw the original act and if there's one other thing going for the tribute act then they'll go along as well, like 'oh you
should see Bjorn Again - they're really funny', they do an Oasis song and a Nirvana song, you should see how they carry on with the audience.

JPT: So they need some originality of their own in a way?

John T: Yeah … although any tribute band that puts their own original songs in gets crucified.

JPT: Do you think many people go an see tribute bands lots of times, or is it the case that for most people once is enough, that there's nothing to sustain their interest?

John T: Well, if I can speak on behalf of Bjorn Again, what happens usually is when we start in a new country we get a lot of girls coming along then the guys realise there's all these girls at this gig so they go along too. All the girls go back to work and say 'you've got to see this band I saw, they're fantastic!' So they go back again but bring more friends, and the friends that came along they tell their friends, and the people that saw them first they do come back but with their friends, so the Bjorn Again crowd's like a party atmosphere, remember when little girls had the hair brushes back to back in the mirror.

So, we know for a fact by people who write to us and e-mail and all that sort of thing that they come back time and time again, and we know when we put on these December shows in England they just sell out so quickly, and we see a large proportion of the people who were there last time - we can see them in the crowd.

JPT :Do the band(s) find it hard to sustain their interest, I mean, I dunno if I'm right in thinking this but I imagine a lot of tribute bands would have started off playing their own material and switched to the tribute thing because they couldn't find any success through their own material.

John T: I think that's a fair call, a lot of people see this as a stepping stone - they don't say I've given up on my own tunes. I know a few members of lots of different tribute bands and they don't play all year - they might do say six months or eight months and the rest of the time they'll work on their other projects, so it funds other projects or other interests whether it's music or whatever. But sometimes it's come out of failure - 'I can't get a deal' or whatever, 'I can't get in a band' or whatever, and they start it up or they join one, yeah, definitely. With Bjorn Again, we've always thought in the band what's kept us going for so long, 'cos we do a lot of touring, that's our only source of income, is that it's hard to play when the audience doesn't get into it; you really do it for the audience more than yourself, because when you've got a gig where, which is rare for Bjorn Again I might add, you go to a place and, they're just not getting into it then it's really hard work. Most of the members of Bjorn Again, it's usually what happened, the girls are big fans of Abba and the guys who've joined Bjorn Again didn't like it originally when it came out, so they're more objective about how we do it, and it's harder for the guys I think when the show's not going down that well; but I'm only talking about one, two or three shows here out of hundreds.

JPT: I'm going to quote you a couple of things people have said about the tribute phenomenon and I wondered what you think of these. It's been called 'the thinking man's karaoke'. (John T: Yeah, I remember that one.) Do you think that's a fair assessment?

John T: (thinks) … The thinking man's karaoke … that's just one … Bjorn Again are a lot of things, there are a hundred things about Bjorn Again, that's just one. I wouldn't say that's all that Bjorn Again was. It's a lot of things to different people.

JPT: Do you think part of the appeal is that people think, 'well I could be up there doing that'.

John T: No, I don't actually. I think they think it but I don't think they could do it, definitely not. I mean when we auditioned, and we've had this line up for six years, I mean it's hard, you've got to look like it, they've got to be able to dance and sing well. People say it's simple music but just 'cos it's simple doesn't mean it's easy. I mean we're still learning harmonies and chords and stuff like that now, still perfecting how it's done, I don't think anyone can get up and do it. They think it because it's just so easy, it's like when you're watching the soccer, you go 'oh I could've done that', but you can't, the same thing.

JPT: The second quote is from a guy from Who Two called Martin Dimery who said 'tribute bands will be the chamber orchestras of the future.' Do you think this is a fair assessment?

John T: How could we become chamber music if we're copying someone? Am I on the right track here?

JPT :I think what it means is that you'll be playing definitive versions of the music, it'll be like classical music is now, something more respectable I s'pose.

John T :I would say that about Abba but not about Bjorn Again 'cos
we're playing Abba's music.

JPT: My final question is what do you think the future of the tribute phenomenon is?

John T: Well, as long as the crowds like this sort of thing, then they'll keep going, and it'll depend on the quality of the acts, you know it's getting absurd when you've got Oasis who've kicked on and No Way Sis are huge, they're doing really big business. I reckon that's the absurd extreme of what's happened with the tribute phenomena, because Oasis, the real thing, do a handful of gigs and then I don't think they'll tour for a long time, that's paved the way for this band to come in and do it.

As long as there's the demand and the audiences have gotta like it, 'cos I really think it's all about entertainment, you know let's go along and have a good time watching Bjorn Again play, it's not like they see it as a serious thing or even rationalise it to the original. I don't think people think that. I don't think a lot of people go along and go 'right, I'm gonna compare this to the real thing', I don't think they do, they compare tribute bands, like what's Bjorn Again like to Voulez-Vous or the Abba Gold, but I don't think you know… there's a future as long as you've got those elements.

I mean I remember when we did our first two tours of Holland and we did really well there and then I think it was the start of '93, we wanted to go back there and our agent was looking into it and he got a call from the venue, one of the big venues in Amsterdam, this venue in Amsterdam, pulled a stunt whereby they advertised there was a Queen band playing and there was a good crowd there, they opened the curtains and there was a cardboard cut out of each of the Queen members and they said we just want to stamp out tribute bands like Bjorn Again … we want to stop that in Holland. And we haven't been able to tour there, in three years we haven't been there but they're
interested again - because all the Dutch bands are boring. I don't know (!) (ha!). So, some places don't like it, but our whole year next year is paved out.

JPT: So even if some of the others fall by the wayside Bjorn Again will still be going?

John T: Year, because Abba's music will still … if there's an Abba Gold just released, and then Muriel's Wedding and Priscilla came out … we don't … we don't rely on those things.

Appendix 2

Interview with Rod Stewart tribute, Jack Danson. Saturday 25 October 1997.

JPT: Could you tell me how you became a tribute performer?

JD: Yes … my management suggested that I did that 'Stars in their Eyes' programme.

JPT: How much research or practice have you had to do to get your impression of Rod Stewart accurate, or as accurate as you can?

JD: Quite a lot … videos; I went to see the guy a couple of times.

JPT: Was that over a period of months?

JD: Yeah I would think so, but then I've been doing it for about five or six years, so when I first started I was a bit green, I was going off the videos, but as you move along your act matures.

JPT: Do you think the audience are bothered if you're not one hundred percent accurate, or do you think that really matters?

JD: I think it really matters 'cos there's so many people doing it if you don't do it bang on then they just laugh at you and jeer you off the stage.

JPT :How much of your own personality do you put into your performance, or are you always thinking 'how would Rod have done this?'

JD: It depends on the venue. If it's a crappy venue I just do it my way, if it's a big time venue like this then I do it as Rod Stewart would have done it.

JPT :Some people have called tribute shows 'the thinking man's karaoke'. This suggests that anyone can do a tribute. Do you think that's fair?

JD: Well there's so many people out there doing it badly that could be a viable criticism, but to put it as this level that's total nonsense.

JPT: Do you think there will still be tribute shows in, say, ten years time, or do you think people will grow tired of them?

JD: I think there will be, but there won't be as many. It will only be the ones that do it perfectly.

JPT: What are your personal ambitions as a performer?

JD: Well, I don't really want to do tributes for the rest of my life. I'd like to get into television on a regular basis: singing, or whatever comes up. I've piloted a couple of chat shows, I've done a bit of work with Reeves and Mortimer, so I'm going along those lines, but at the moment this is lucrative.

Appendix 3

Abortive interview with the Australian Doors Show. Rock City, Nottingham. Wednesday 16 October 1996.

The band were an hour late and I'd started spending the money that the electricity company were demanding of me in a sports theme bar as I sat watching football replays and sympathising with an overworked barmaid. Returning to the foyer of the venue the first thing I heard was Adam Booker, the tardy Tour Manager for this final tour by the Australian Doors Show, saying that 'the band hate interviews'.

'Fucking brilliant', I thought as I introduced myself requesting once again the interview which was meant to have been signed, sealed and delivered. Some agreement! It seems that the singer's not feeling too well. How about the others, will any of them do it? Booker reappears a few minutes later with the bad news: no can do.

A glimmer of hope - he offers the possibility of a phone interview later in the tour. Doubting very much that this will happen I nevertheless leave my name and number and stomp off home.

Needless to say, that phone call never came.

Be Here Now: Outro

Outro: From Heritage To The Creative Industries

Post-Britpop, I have suggested that the UK pop scene is dominated by a new sensibility: "What it marks is the growth of national self-confidence, and hence a diminishment in the need for self-assertion (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13).

The critic George Walden is here referring not to pop music but to Tony Blair's more relaxed attitude towards Europe in comparison with his Tory predecessors (as evinced by his decision to holiday in France and Italy and the unselfconsciousness with which he converses in French) (Walden, Prospect, Observer taster, 1997, page 13). The applicability of Walden's comments to either circumstance is a coincidence which nevertheless reveals a truth: that there is, as Pat Kane avers, a connection between the project to revitalise British pop and (new) Labour's plans for a New Britain:

The popularity of Britpop could be linked to the coming politics. It's Blairism in action. He's looking for a positive British nationalism that isn't right wing and, in the classic prophetic tradition of pop, Blur and Oasis anticipate that (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20.1

Speaking in the summer of 1997, Damon Albarn, the Blur singer, goes along with this argument, suggesting that:

Clinton got it on the back of a wave of new consciousness in America with grunge. There was a feeling that things were changing. And I think the same happened in Britain. It is extraordinary how music does precede political change (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 5).

In Chapter Three, I outlined the Britpop sensibility and the extent of its restorative powers in some detail, concluding that it was optimistically post-modern with a nostalgia for a national tradition that it used as a springboard to change and renewal. A similar sensibility is evident in some of the projects embarked upon by the newly incumbent administration, notably their plans to mark the arrival of the year 2000 with both a series of Millennium Greens and the Millennium Dome Experience.

The village green is (along with the country house) one of the most familiar symbols of the traditional English countryside. However, in practice village greens have largely disappeared under pressure from the demand for new housing and commercial developments away from the cities where people still work but increasingly choose not to live (see Hewison, 1987; Coupland, 1991). The new government, echoing Britpop's nostalgia for a lost sense of community (itself an echo of the Kinks' nostalgia for the same, as expressed on 'Village Green Preservation Society' - The Kinks, 'Village Green Preservation Society')2, have earmarked national lottery cash for a scheme to reverse this trend: (t)he Countryside Commission has been given £10 million to create at least 250 Millennium greens around the country" (Nottingham Evening Post, 8 October 1997, page 5). What this project reveals is not that that nostalgia has gone out of fashion as Hewison predicted (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996 - see Chapter Three), but that nostalgia is now being applied to revolutionary (restorative) ends - it is a future-oriented nostalgia (implying both a continuation of and break with the socialist tradition since "(a)lways and everywhere the left has defined itself as being progressive and future-oriented - Mellor, 1989, np).

The Millennium Dome project is predicated upon a similar post-modern optimism, in this case expressed as a nostalgia for modernism analogous to that found in Britpop (see Chapter Three). The building itself suggests a return to 'high modernist' architecture's "prevailing passion for massive spaces and perspectives" (even if it rejects Le Corbusier's belief in the straight line's superiority over the curve - Harvey, 1990, page 36). Similarly, its rationale (to embody "at once the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain and the spirit of the future of the world" - Tony Blair in Lister, The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 1) is redolent of the grand ambitions of such modernist events as the Brussels world fair of 1958 and (especially) 1951's Festival of Britain (see Toop, 1995, page 82/The Independent, 25 February 1998, pages 1/8/9/18). Yet, for its critics, this project is flawed because it is trying to recover a modernist sensibility in a post-modern age" (The Independent, 25 February 1998, page 18). The projected contents of the dome seem to bear out the futility of its ambition, its thirteen themed zones suggesting a post-modern pick 'n' mix sensibility rather than a unified vision (The Independent, 25 February 1998/The Times, 25 February 1998). This does not deter the administration from (like their Britpop counterparts - see Chapter Three) flying in the face of the 'facts' to defend the validity of their project, in the hope that, as Peter Mandelson asserts, "if the Millennium Dome is a success, as I am confident it will be, it will never be forgotten" (Whitworth, The Times, 25 February 1998, page 6).

To take a wider view, what this new sensibility implies is not the demise of the heritage industry, but its continuation and transformation. Transformation was necessary because, on its own terms, the heritage industry has failed, as Tim Shadler-Hall observes:

I don't know a single successful museum that was opened for economic development purposes that's lasted more than ten years really and has done the job that it was supposed to do according to people who are into economic development (Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996).

The continuing problem of unemployment in Liverpool ("a city where 35,000 men (17 percent of the potential workforce) (were then) jobless") in spite of the application of the heritage solution (see Chapter One) testifies to the accuracy of this observation (Hetherington, The Guardian, 25 April 1996, np) (I shall come back to the reasons for this failure shortly). Rather than abandoning its exploitation of culture's economic potential as Hewison suggests (Hewison, 1987, page 9/page 145), Liverpool is actually increasing its investment in cultural activity as a means of renewing the city. Only now this investment is primarily in new forms of culture.

Recent years have therefore witnessed the introduction of schemes such as the Merseyside Arts, Culture and Media Enterprise, "a £2.97 million development programme for Merseyside … with the aim of creating more than 100 jobs in the creative industries by 2000" (Museums Journal, January 1998, page 13). In 1995, at the site of his former college, Paul McCartney opened LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), an institution conceived as "a late twentieth-century version of the Bauhaus, where skills are transferable across disciplines" (Colin Fallows in Savage, 1996, page 301). Liverpool City Council also got in on the act, becoming "the first local council to establish a dedicated Film Liaison Office", a move which has had the effect of "(increasing) production activity in Liverpool by 600%. To this day Liverpool remains the most filmed city in Britain outside London "(Cavern City Tours, 1997, np).

Sheffield has adopted a similar strategy and is in the process of building new museums, art galleries and a Winter Garden (Hugill, The Observer, 21 September 1997, page 15). As part of this project of redevelopment a National Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) is under construction. Due to open late 1998/early 1999, the NCPM's development director claims that it will be "a museum for the future, an educational centre that celebrates the success of popular music as a cultural form" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8). In terms of content what this will mean is that the centre "will contain little that is tangible but will place music in a wider social context through high-tech sound and vision exhibits" (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).

These projections are rather reminiscent of those already existing pop tourist attractions Rock Circus and The Beatles Story, a resemblance reinforced by the fact that corporate sponsors, Philips, are meeting part of the start-up costs for the venture (Murdin, Museums Journal, November 1995, page 8).

This illustrates my assertion that investment in the creative industries is a continuation of the logic of the heritage industry. Instead of going "to the knacker's yard" (Hewison, Night Waves, Radio 3, 16 May 1996), heritage culture has been incorporated into an expanded 'culture industry' (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). Hence, Wigan Pier is still showing visitors 'The Way We Were' (Hewison, 1987,
page 24), John Lennon continues to sing Imagine over and over at The Beatles Story (John Lennon, Imagine - see Chapter One) and tribute bands are still treading the boards. However, as John Tyrrell points out, "by '93 you could safely say that (tribute shows) were dying out and only the good ones remain" (Appendix One). The decline of the tribute phenomenon coincided with the emergence of the (as yet unnamed) 'Britpop' sensibility which incorporated its communal spirit and nostalgic evocation, whilst adding a progressive intention (see Chapters Two and Three). The transition from tribute shows to Britpop (and then from Britpop to post-Britpop) strikes me as prescient of a wider cultural trend well-illustrated by patterns of new investment in Liverpool.

More money is being ploughed into exploiting the heritage of The Beatles (the opening to the public of the National Trust owned former home of Sir Paul McCartney at 20 Forthlin Road/a New Cavern City Tours' hotel in the 'Cavern Quarter' - MTCB, 1997, np). This however pales into insignificance next to the investment in contemporary and future culture, illustrated not only by the developments I have previously mentioned, but especially evident from the proposal to:

Transform the Bold Street/Slater Street/Duke Street area into a centre for tourism and creative industries similar to the Temple Bar area in Dublin. Wolstenholme Square which is home to the Nation night-club and Cream would be the centre of the plans which would upgrade the streets and squares. English Partnerships have pledged £30 million for the plan, while with grants and private money, the scheme could finally be worth £100 million (MTCB, 1997, np).

Indicative of the shift from heritage to the creative industries (a process of transformation and continuation) is the decision of the Labour government to subsume the old administration's Department of National Heritage within a new, expanded Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Indeed the present government seems particularly keen to recognise and encourage the development of the creative industries, which are deemed to be of value for two reasons.

The first of these is, as Labour peer and Millennium Dome architect Richard Rogers asserts, the belief that "investment in creativity is fundamental to economic competitiveness" (Rogers, The Guardian, 25 January 1997). This notion is born of the realisation that "overseas earnings from rock music are now bigger than from the steel industry" (Tony Blair - Music Week, 20 September 1997, page 3). Culture Secretary Chris Smith takes up this theme, stating that, "(l)ike America, we are finding that the value added from these (creative) industries is outdistancing traditional manufacturing industries. The creative industries are where much of our future lies" (Music Week, 1 November 1997, page 7).

Earlier I quoted Tim Shadler-Hall saying that museums for economic development (aka heritage centres) have conspicuously failed in that task. Given the connection I have made between the heritage industry and the creative industries is there any reason to believe that the latter are any more capable of replacing manufacturing concerns than the former? An analysis of the failure of the heritage industry may give us a clue.

This failure should be attributed not to the fact that such attractions exist (after all, as Hewison admits):

The statistic that the number of museums in Britain has doubled since 1960 is not in itself a symptom of decline, for a similar explosion has taken place elsewhere. Japan has opened 500 museums in 15 years (Hewison, 1987, page 84).

The problem has been a failure to integrate the demands of develops with the needs of the local community, as Dr Fred Robinson indicates:

It's easy to spend huge amounts of money developing waterfronts, but on the other hand I think the real needs of local people are elsewhere. They're not in these decayed waterfront areas, but rather in the existing town centres and the rest of the conurbation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).

The high level of unemployment in Liverpool (see earlier) is a testament to this since, as Savage notes with regard to the city's leading heritage attraction, "there is a strong sense of the theme park about Albert Dock: a good place to visit, but curiously divorced from the city" (Savage, 1996, page 299).

A similar leisure-industry based development on Teesside has had a similarly limited impact in terms of providing permanent jobs for the local populace. By contrast, a very successful urban regeneration programme in Tyne and Wear has created over 30,000 jobs in a range of industries (creative, tourist, manufacturing, ancillary services) through a policy of partnership between local government, the local community, business, academia and the Urban Development Corporation (The Money Programme, BBC 2, 22 February 1998).

Beyond the leisure principle
Just as the success of urban renewal schemes depends on going 'beyond the leisure principle', so too the vitality of pop is predicated upon it meaning more than another source of income (see Intro; Chapters One, Two and Three). As Creation Records' boss Alan McGee avers, "(w)ith no ideological point of view, ultimately music has no soul" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). These comments by a member of the government's Creative Industries Task Force imply a cooling of the relationship between the (Brit)pop scene and the Labour administration (an orgy of mutual congratulation which reached its apogee with Noel Gallagher's visit to 10 Downing Street - The Brit Awards 1998, ITV, February 1998). This impression is borne out by the Pulp song, Cocaine Socialism, a vicious diatribe against the new order (Pulp, Cocaine Socialism). Damon Albarn meanwhile has said that he "found it a bit disappointing when Tony Blair started talking about making Britain great again" (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3). This is somewhat ironic given that those were precisely the aims of Blur (and cohorts) Britpop project (see Chapter Three).

This new antipathy between the doyens of Britpop and New Labour would seem to stem from two sources: the first is the characteristic aversion of pop music to the establishment (see Simon Bates quote in Chapter Two); the second is the fact that the idea of Britpop is passé - post-Britpop the shared sensibility I have outlined has largely disintegrated. Hence, Alan McGee lays into the Prime Minister, moaning that "(i)t's all surface with Blair" (Yates, The Review, The Observer, 1 February 1998, page 1). This criticism largely stems from the second reason for the government's promotion of the creative industries:

… to help shape a new, younger image of Britain abroad. Rather than John Major's vision of warm beer and cricket, (Arts Minister, Mark) Fisher says the Prime Minister wants the focus to be on successful industries such as the music business as Britain moves into the 21st Century" (Williams, Music Week, 11 October 1997, page 4).

To this end, the British Tourist Authority has begun promoting the attractions of contemporary pop culture, producing a UK Guide aimed at 18-30 year olds which was all about "Leeds club culture and the rock band Oasis", and including sites associated with the likes of Oasis and the Spice Girls in a new map of Britain's pop heritage (Collin, 1997, page 268)/The Review, The Observer, 15 February 1998, page 4).

Yet within pop music (and elsewhere in the creative industries) this idea of 'rebranding' Great Britain as 'Cool Britannia' has been greeted with derision (see Elton, Radio Times, 18/24 April 1998/The Party's Over, Channel 4, 21 May 1998)3. This is because such a notion taken together with the praise for the economic importance of the creative industries indicates a failure on the government's behalf to grasp that the primary value of culture is (as Hewison rightly proclaims - Hewison, 1987/1991) its value, that indeed without a meaning value it has precious little economic value (hence pop's sales slump of the late 80s/early 90s - see Intro/Chapter Three).

The assimilation of Britpop (and rave culture - see Collin 1997) into the mainstream of a global leisure industry nevertheless does not mean that O'Hagan was right to view the genre as pop's "last flickering twilight" (O'Hagan, The Times, 2 December 1995, page 20). For instance, even though songwriter (and successful litigant in a
plagiarism case against Oasis) Roger Greenaway believes that "we have saturated the possibilities in the pop music area … we are genuinely running out of tunes" (Wroe, The Observer, 11 December 1994, page 9 - see 'All Saints Ponder Cost of Album Samples', Music Week, 7 February 1998, page 1 for further evidence), hope springs eternal that a raft of new technological developments in the areas of instrumentation, production and distribution will lead to as yet unheard of ways of writing and listening to music (see Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23/http://www.xs4all.nl/~steim).

Of course, technology itself is empty of meaning (see, for instance, Collin, 1997, and for Alan McGee the music industry's problem is that "(r)ock music no longer stands for anything, people are losing interest in it" (Wroe, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 23). Even if this (unsubstantiated) claim has any validity it is already the case that signs of decline are being met by signs of resistance: Pulp have been calling for A Little Soul (Pulp, A Little Soul), Damon Albarn has begun 'talking about heavy issues' (cf also Radiohead); in rave culture there are attempts to revive the adventurous, collective, spirit on 1988's 'summer of love' - revolutionary nostalgia in the area! (Wollaston, Friday Review, The Guardian, 20 June 1997, page 3/Osbourne, Friday Review, The Guardian, 25 July 1997, page 15).

These acts of resistance indicate that pop music is still (as ever) characterised by a dialectic of liberation and control. Pop music will not die so long as its 'emotional truths' continue to resonate with the day-to-day realities of our lives, our dreams and desires. Even if it is not the case that 'everybody hates a tourist', pop music nevertheless must continue to go beyond the leisure principles to become the music of the common people (Pulp, Common People).

Notes

1. As Attali has observed "Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society … Listening to music is listening to all noise, realising that it's appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political" (Attali, 1985, page 113).

2. Illustrating that nostalgia was a feature of pop music even when it was a feature of pop music even when it was dominated by a modernist future-orientation.

3. The government has responded to this opprobrium by ditching the 'Cool Britannia' concept and scrapping a number of museum charges (Marr, The Observer, 14 June 1998, page 24/Woodward, The Mirror, 25 July 1998, page 2). Whether developments are simply more examples of image manipulation or a sign that Labour do value culture in and of itself remains to be seen. For the moment I am not prepared to say that they have definitely moved beyond the leisure principle.

Thursday, April 21, 2005
On this day:

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.

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