I’ve just been reading ‘Rue Britannia’, a collected volume of the first six comics in the Phonogram series created by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. It was a fascinating short read. The narrative revolves around these people called Phonomancers, sort of magical beings whose power emanates from music. The protagonist of these first issues is David Kohl, a phonomancer whose power is centered on the music of the Britpop era. The story begins, as with most fiction, with a turn of bad events for our hero; David bags himself some seriously bad karma by attending a Riot Grrl convention with nothing but the seediest of intentions. Instead of getting is end away he manages to get cursed by a feminist musical deity. Unlucky; but this is just the beginning of his problems as soon David discovers that his very essence is under attack. Retromancing interlopers (Retromancers are a lower grade of Phonomancer, feeding off of the power of memories FYI) are attempting to ressurect Britannia, the mod Goddess of Britpop, to whom David owes his powers and was also in some way instrumental in her downfall.
To summarise the guy has two pissed off godesses to contend whilst coping with a severe existentialist funk; BAD TIMES! As you’ve probably gathered the plot is pretty tricky, but the writers not only succeed in making it navigable but also ‘Rue Britannia’ exudes cool, smarts and charm, which is a very difficult combination to manage. David is an utter music snob and has a reprehensible personality, he seems to value his personal relationships very little and doesn’t seem to have second thoughts when it comes to using women (the manifestation of Pulp’s Disco 2000 mantra “drink, dance, screw…”). Characters flaws aside David is still one charming bastard, mainly because he dislikes Echobelly as much as me, and his rants are terribly entertaining reading. David’s spiritual journey through a remanifested wreckage of Britpop, with Luke Haines (he’s awesome too) as guide, is more heart-warming than you’d anticipate. The writer’s poisiting of the heart of the story around the dissapearance of the Manic’s Richey Edwards as some sort of key event in the ethereal texture of the Britpop landscape (though the Manics with Edwards in tow could never be considered to be truly a Britpop band; their black themes in stark opposition to the care-free pogoing of Park Life.) creates a poetic depth to the work culminating in the triumphant final scenes.
Putting all of that aside what you really have is an essayists’ treatment of Britpop. Not only is it an outlet for the author’s personal taste (I think he really dislikes Kula Shaker) but also it charts one person’s journey through that era, starting from it’s idealised prozaic dismissal of a pervasive national indolence to the final redemptionless rut it ran into. The story begins in 2006, a musically dreary landscape and one which Kohl confronts, embittered by the fashionista affectations and intellectual void of modern music, to see if any legacy is evident. Of course after reading this and having being the musical tourist I am and taking in some of the lesser-remembered Britpop stuff I had to beg the question;
Just what was Britpop? And why the hell does it matter so much?
Was it an phenomenon, a rejuevenation of sixties youth culture, a continuation of subversive counter culture, or an eventual trademarking of rebellion and transformation of individualistic punk ideals into mainstream pop aesthetics, marketable and sold in quantity to a generation which simply had nothing of its own to feel?
I guess it is a little bit of all these things, what it most definitely wasn’t was just a bunch of bands playing jangly guitars. As with any artistic movement it rises from some unrest, which is felt in social, political or existential plains; reverberating through the culture, encouraging those with the inclination to pick up an instrument (not only musical ones) and say something about it. Consider examples throughout history, Romanticism, Marxism, Futurism; just about any movement you can think of has its roots in this principle idea. So what was the beef with Britpop’s progenitors?
Well the story goes that a bunch of British musos were just fed up of American bands getting so darned popular in the UK, a kind of retalliation to the British Invasion of the sixties. So these enterprising young sorts, did what young sorts do, and formed bands. Referencing the guitar laden pop stirrings of great British music from the sixties and seventies, these bands set themselves apart by penning lyrics about very British problems and concerns of which the American barabrians knew very little of indeed.
The point of ejaculation occured in the spring of ’92, so is held the popular idea, when Suede and Blur both released singles at roughly the same time thus issusing the clarion call; a new age in British pop. At this time Suede were leading the charge to stop the spread of yankee doodle drawl over this sceptred isle, however, Luke Haines from The Auteurs (something of a maladjusted first wave band) would tell you that it was his song American Guitars which light the fuse on the whole thing. But then Mr. Haines has always been a brash self-proclaiming, quintessentially English gentleman who loves nothing more than to put his articulate tongue to derogatory ends (God bless him).
He came out of the whole experience feeling rather bitter about BR_T P_P in particular early rivals Suede who he has said had, “the bum boy aesthetics” (homoeroticism; very British, contrarily valued as being effette but yet highly intellectual). To be fair to the chap, despite The Auteurs creating some of the best music of the period they never met much in the way of mainstream success and have now been largely forgotten, also the guy spent a year in a wheelchair after an unfortunate accident, nothing to do with Suede or any other band for that matter, but a frustrating experience nevertheless I should imagine. (Though lucky for me and you this contributed to the excellent and angry album After Murder Park.)
Luke wasn’t the only person to end up feeling let down by the direction that this ninteties love-in had taken; descending into chronic tabloid masturbation and cacophonous drug use, Britpop was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that just didn’t have a clue as to what to do once the prediciton became true. This wasn’t a cataclysmic conclusion so much as a timpani drum roll which someone slowly turned the volume down on. As the Britpop youth grew up and got jobs working in branches Natwest, Barclays, Midlands and Lloyds (most likely) the new youngsters were given a different vision of Britannia in the shape of five spicy ladies. All in all proving that you can’t ever own the zeitgeist, only rent it,and that the music business is a fickle and cynical mistress who enjoy nothing more than exploitation and class tourism.
Nowadays you can still hear Britpop’s legacy in some of today’s new music, but the spirit of that time is now an elusive ghost. Guitar music became more serious and the fans even more so with bands such as Radiohead transcending from one-hit wonders with a badly rehearsed rock schtick, to the perennial music press luvvies and figureheads of rock experimentalism; loved for their miserablist, careerist outlook and the cold, sparse new soundscapes they were forging, one could hear the final vestiges of The Second Summer of Love washign away in the sonic storm and with ti the ears, hearts and minds of the mainstream audience. And so the mantle of pop was assumed by exceedingly trivial and ephemeral boy and girl groups whose legacies have long been overwritte.
Britpop still holds a certain power on the popular consciousness. Most people will tell you about the tabloid feuds between Oasis and Blur but on further reading you will uncover a thriving scene as full of radical ideas and attitudes as there were drug-fuelled non-entities. I guess after all this rambling I’ve decided that I can finally resonate with Britpop, something which I had never considered possible, and I’m captivated by the subject matter, because for as little as that generation had to commune over, culturally, I feel ours has even less. Music is something we appreciate in a retroactive context, appraising it only in the shadows of those giants which stand before us in the past. New music seems only want to replicate past glories; Britpop is as guilty of this as any other movement, the difference is that the response was genuine and not a contrivance of the painfully hip and breathlessly enthused. Some twelve years after Britannia’s death I think that we may be in need of influence again, a new age of straightforward British music, uninterested in courting an international ear and focusing on the here and now instead of this referential bullshit. And that I think is enough for now.
If anyone is interested in reading the Phonogram series check out the official website and be sure to take a look at the continuing Phonogram saga in The Singles Club.
M
