1991 was a golden year for dance-based chart pop - the KLF, SexKylie,
N-Joi's Anthem - but less so for guitar-based bands. Manchester and
baggy were past their best, shoegazing was an intriguing but niche
noise, and self-absorbed but extremely loud American acts like Mudhoney
were beginning to dominate indie discos. This isn't too surprising when
you consider the UK alternatives, which were mostly grimy, colourless,
and entirely unambitious: Ned's Atomic Dustbin, the Wonderstuff, Mega
City Four, the great unwashed. The Family Cat had a single out called
Colour Me Grey and that set the tone. It was dire and, with Saint
Etienne just finding their feet after two singles in 1990, gave us a
target to take out.
There were exceptions. 5.30 had prescient
mod leanings but wrote songs with titles like Cuddly Drug, Catcher In
The Rye and Junk Male ("I'm just a junk male, I'm just a junkie"). The
equally angular but far better Manic Street Preachers were eminently
quotable, despised the "toilet circuit" and wanted, rather charmingly,
to go "straight to the medium-sized venues".
Then there were a
few groups who Simon Reynolds tagged 'retro futurist' and in my eyes
they were true modernists - taking the best bits of the past to create
something new. World Of Twist had emerged from the Madchester scene but
would quote northern soul motifs rather than Funky Drummer loops, and
put on a stage show that blended Peter Gabriel-era Genesis with working
men's club satin and tat. At a party at Gordon King's Whalley Range
flat, he put on Slade Alive, a move even I'd have been scared to make.
Then there was Denim, whose singer and leader Lawrence had a penchant
for Stephanie de Sykes, Lynsey de Paul, and Rings Of Saturn by
Underground Resistance project X-102. "It's a new kind of music"
Lawrence would say, excitedly, and often.
Lawrence seemed like
an obvious pop star to me, as did Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. Saint Etienne
and Pulp toured together in early '93, by which time their set included
future classics like Babies, OU, She's A Lady and My Legendary
Girlfriend. Jarvis was on such a roll that he had handed over Babies as a
single for my 'boutique' Caff record label - we got as far as cutting
an acetate before he realised its potential and changed his mind.
At
a forgotten venue called the Gass Club off Leicester Square, Carrie and
Jacqui Shampoo, Lawrence Denim, myself and Pete Wiggs were in attendance
when Jarvis played Lio's Le Banana Split, Love Sculpture's Sabre Dance,
and Lieutenant Pigeon's Mouldy Old Dough in succession, the most
barking mad DJ selection I've ever heard. Kindred spirits, we all bumped
into each other at gigs, all nighters, greasy spoons and ephemera
fairs.
I remember seeing Bernard Butler at the Camden Underworld
one night in 1993, having a quiet drink with his girlfriend. I strode
up to him and started haranguing him about how we had the future of pop
in our grasp, how we really could shape what happened next: Suede, Saint
Etienne, Pulp, Denim - I mean, hadn't he seen that Select cover? People
expected us to show them the way! 'You're quite drunk', said his
girlfriend. 'I think you should go now.' And yet, Suede's next
move was the epic Stay Together which, if it wasn't quite as skyscraping
as it could have been, at least indicated grand designs. Released in
February '94 it reached no.3 but somehow felt slightly out of sync.
Something was changing at ground level.
Right now, in 2013, Oasis are at
their lowest critical ebb, and it is fashionable to point to their
bludgeoning noise and Beatle piracy as indicators that things were about
to go awry. Their ascent from Creation's
seven-inch-singles-in-a-plastic-bag act in '94 to biggest band of the
nineties exacerbated their basic problems of self-regard and
conservatism: Oasis have come to represent and emphasise Britpop’s
limitations and its folly.
Noel Gallagher revealed the narrow
parameters of his classicism in a Mojo interview; he recalled how a fan
had given him a cd of sixties baroque pop group the Left Banke, and that
– to his surprise – he loved it. Would it be an influence on the next
Oasis album, asked the journalist? "Nah. The idea of Bonehead dressed in
a cravat and a frilly shirt playing a harpsichord doesn’t do it for
me." Nobody expected Oasis to collaborate with Metalheadz, but you
wouldn't have thought the Left Banke was a massive stretch.
This
startling lack of adventurousness was mirrored by Paul Weller's
mid-nineties retreat into classic Britrock, the deification of the La's,
and Ocean Colour Scene's switch from baggy voyagers to nu-generation
Merton Parkas. A less obvious turning point in Britpop's swing from
Caught By The Fuzz fizz to Drugs Don't Work dirge was the arrival of
Elastica.
Elastica appeared at Britpop's peak. Drummer Justin
Welch's belched percussion throughout Line Up on their Top of the Pops
debut in February ’94 predicted the art-school sniggering of the
late-nineties Hoxton scene, and took Blur’s sneering superiority to a
colder level. They looked to the past to create a future but in a rather
more blunt way than Pulp or Denim - all of their songs seemed heavily
indebted to the late seventies, and debut single Line Up was so close to
Wire’s I Am the Fly that they were forced to settle out of court.
Their
arrival on the scene had a similar effect to Johnny Thunders and the
Heartbreakers' impact on the London punk scene. Like the Heartbreakers,
Elastica brought heroin to the party: they were cool, ergo heroin was
cool. Pulp and Denim quit their wood-chipped interiors to party at
Elastica's Kings Cross pad, a stones throw from where the new St
Martin's would open two decades later. What had been speedy and boozy
became a smacky scene. Ultimately, the art school strand was just as
responsible for Britpop's decline into reductivism as Oasis's
shortsightedness.
Early '94 gave us Elastica's steely-eyed
magpie pop, Oasis's first two single and, most depressingly, Primal
Scream's ultra-conservative Give Out But Don't Give Up. Screamadelica
had been a launchpad for future pop just three years earlier - they
followed it with a lame collection of rockist cliches, wrapped in a
Confederate flag sleeve, which couldn't have been further removed.
'Yanks go home!' had been Select's cheeky rallying cry a year earlier.
But were the Americans impressed when they heard Jailbird and Cry Myself
Blind? No, they were laughing at us.
It seems rather naive in
retrospect that I thought combining modern house and techno beats with
forgotten corners of the past - whether it was Joe Meek's (only just
released in '93) I Hear A New World, Giorgio Moroder's The Chase or
ESG's You're No Good - was about to lead us into a dazzlingly fresh pop
nineties. Once the box marked 'the past' was open, other people were
bound to cherry pick rather less recherche inspirations - why bother
drawing on forgotten Lynsey de Paul album tracks when you had the
Beatles, the Stones, the Jam? With the first wave of Britpop we
unwittingly set everyone up for Union Jack sweaters and endless re-runs
of Quadrophenia. Sorry about that.
