The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

So then what? The phenomenon of ‘New Image Glasgow’ more or less disappeared, its ethos in decline. The painters didn’t sink without a bubble, but almost: they became Newly Marginalized as Reactionary, or whimsical, which would become the stock Nineties way of dealing with cultural opposition.

From this point on, to the closing years of the Nineties, Tom Wolfe’s phrase about the art scene of the late Sixties, and ‘Cultureburg’s’ need to be ‘cosily anti-bourgeois’ would seldom seem more relevant. For throughout the Nineties, as the margins became the mainstream – typified by television comedy and the mediation of Young British Art (the latter, in fact, being a complex and eclectic generational grouping of artists, who happened to comprise, as a phenomenon, a good story) – so the newly perceived Reactionary (for instance, a certain kind of painting itself being considered reactionary) would become the New Margins – the anxiety dumps, the unfashionably alcoholic, the not Post Anxiety …

When you saw those culture-vulturing city slickers, sitting there in the submarine twilight, you could have had the feeling that they’d been there for ever, and would just stay in one place, immobile, entranced … Would anything – as Pierre, with a slight, upward twitch of his right hand, summons up another staccato, slippery snooker ball, clunky chord – ever disturb them?

BritPop Revisited

To anyone over thirty, drifting with a faintly puzzled expression towards the reflectiveness of early middle age, the phenomenon of BritPop and its expansion into the BritCulture of neo-Swinging London could be tantamount to discovering a premature liver spot and being seized with a sense of one’s own mortality. Suddenly, popular culture, as the freewheeling go-kart of carefree youth, seemed to be pronouncing its disaffection with even those members of the older generation who had cut their teeth on Bowie’s glam angst, rallied to the energizing bloody-mindedness of punk and pursued the vertiginous mutations of ambient dance music with something more than casual interest. BritPop, as a vivacious new player in popular culture, seemed to source from past pop in a way that could bring on a chronic attack of déjà vu in anyone who could remember, however vaguely, the originals.

This was youth flaunting the shock of the old, and they did it with style and wit. True, there were going to be some other diversions on this magical mystery tour down memory’s dual carriageway, from the cul-de-sac of ‘nouveau romo’s’ reawakening of New Romantic synth-pop to the lay-by of Easy Listening revivalism, but BritPop was the real picnic at the end of the journey. And it was strictly for the kids – even if the adults tried to join in.

But the liberty of youth, as Elizabethan sonneteers never tired of mentioning, is a short-lived condition. The transatlantic triumph of the Spice Girls repositioned the banner of youth supremacy yet again. Liam and Patsy, as the John and Yoko of the National Lottery generation, might well be officializing the triumph of Brit-Culture on the cover of Vanity Fair, but it’s the navel-pierced girl power of Spice Girls that is really calling to the pocket-money. Spice was the fastest selling CD of 1996, and America had already fallen to the charms of its performers. The younger sisters of TopShopPop seem poised to oust the elder brothers of BritPop, thus marking yet another revolution of pop’s indefatigable loop, in which the prayers and protests of one generation are translated into the language of the next. Sally might wait – to paraphrase Oasis – but the Spice Girls won’t. And BritPop, in retrospect, for all its dismissive swagger, might prove to have been more subtle than we thought.

The story of BritPop all began, really, with Suede’s suburban urchin poetry of love, lust and loneliness on the streets of contemporary London. Suede were from Haywards Heath, and their mixture of limp-wristed petulance and deeply depressed meditation owed as much to the musical style of David Bowie as it did to the poetic anatomizing of Britain that had been put forward by Morrissey. They were like a pink marble mezzanine, generationally, between the melancholy notions of Britishness delivered by late indie groups, and the boyish exuberance that took off with BritPop proper. Suede, sexually ambiguous and dead clever, were the end of one pop sensibility and the launchpad for the next. And they wrote some great songs: ‘On a high wire, dressed in a leotard, there wobbles one hell of a retard …’ The oldies, at a pinch, could relate to that.

But by the time that the BritPop princelings Supergrass, with a rubber-mouthed assurance that touched on the brattish self-confidence of the adolescent Mick Jagger, had rocketed up the pop charts with the simple slogan ‘We are young! We are free!’, it seemed as though a historic marker had been planted with jaunty arrogance in the massive sandbank of sensibility that separated the consumers of pop who were born in the early 1960s, from those who had first blinked into the light towards the middle of the 1970s. What was being proclaimed was a kind of heritage pop, in which the styling and values of an earlier England – the England of the Beatles and brand-new Wimpy Bars – was evoked by Thatcher’s grown-up children to offer a cultural database of received ideas of Britishness, from which a response to the realities of Major’s classless Britain could be impishly composed. For the kids, it was rather like running riot in an interactive museum of English popular culture. BritPop, importantly, seemed to lack the anxiety and self-referring irony of the pop that had come just before it. It seemed, somehow, deeply materialistic.

But pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the landscape of the national mood and marking those points where the major trade routes of social trends are traversed by the underground tunnels of the zeitgeist. In the case of BritPop, the phenomenon as a whole could be seen to combine an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of its practitioners’ adolescence, with the born-again maleness of laddism nouveau.

This was demonstrated by Oasis, who just missed literalizing, by a single letter, their justifiable claim to enjoying yet another annus mirabilis in 1996, when a Gallagher brother mimed the insertion of his Brit Award into his backside. The maleness of BritPop took the healthy irreverence of the young Beatles and mixed it with a dollop of Viz comic’s reactionary humour. And, once again, both BritPop and the laddism of Viz – or Loaded – seemed to be yearning for the freedom of a second adolescence in a younger and less complicated Britain.

In their vastly differing ways, the superstar groups of BritPops – Oasis, Blur, Supergrass and Pulp – were reworking the pop heritage they had inherited as teenagers. Fairly soon, it would be claimed that if Oasis were inspired by the Beatles, then Pulp were impersonating the Kinks, Supergrass were doing a passable imitation of the Spencer Davis Group and Blur were somewhere between the Small Faces and Georgie Fame. Small wonder that the movement should rally to a reinvented Paul Weller as the godfather of Mod revivalism. As Tony Parsons remarked in his review for Prospect magazine of Martha Bayles’s Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music: ‘BritPop is traditional rock. Its appeal is that it is at once shiny and new while also replete with nostalgia – pop music is coming home.’

And BritPop was coming home at a time, during the slow recovery from the Recession of 1990, which had seen the end of designer elitism and the fetishing of new technology as a viable chassis for the pop and Fleet Street style press. As the adult heirs of Thatcher’s Britain, more or less force-fed the reality and consequences of rampant cultural materialism, it seemed as though the BritPop kids could only look back to an England before Prozac and a pop before post-modernism. As their one-word names suggested, these groups were half in love with the simplicity of a Sixties childhood or Seventies rites of passage, when the colours on colour TV were too hot to watch without eye-strain, and the tank-topped dolly birds of situation comedy were bubbling with suggestiveness to the damp innuendo of their mutton-chop-sideburned suitors. Hence the assertion by Simon Reynolds, in his essay on BritPop for Frieze magazine, that the movement could not justify its label as ‘the new Mod’ because it was based almost entirely on personal and cultural nostalgia. The original Mods would sooner have handed back their button-down shirts than admit to a nostalgia for anything.

Partly an infantilist comedy of recognition, and partly a defiant rejection of cultural anxiety, BritPop put forward a pop ethos that Blur summed up in the title of their CD, Modern Life is Rubbish. With a founding theology of apolitical infantilism, the movement had distanced itself from both the multiculturalism of dance music and the white nihilism of grunge’s screamed de profundis from the teenage bedrooms of middle-class America. What BritPop promised, with a disingenuous simplicity that belied its subtle protest, were some catchy tunes and a rattling good time.

As such, amid the fiscal neurasthenia of the early 1990s, in a pop cultural climate that revived archaic notions of gender and sexuality by turning young men into lads and young women into ‘babes’, BritPop was attempting to reclaim a lost innocence on the one hand, but indulging a new hedonism on – or with – the other. Or, to quote Blur, the complexities of sexual politics could be reduced to the seemingly infinite chant of ‘Boys who like girls who like boys’, and so on. And so BritPop, in many ways, was like a suburban teenage party as it might be reconstructed by today’s young adults from their memories of youth.

But despite its seeming espousal of a wanton dumbness, a few BritPop tracks were both musically accomplished and lyrically clever.

For all its opacity and pouting, the movement produced some glorious pop moments, from Pulp’s ‘I Want to Live Like Common People’ to the thunderous title track of Oasis’s second CD, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, which confounded its detractors with their impassioned articulations of defiance in the face of modern life’s rubbish. At their best, these were serious and sincere pop songs, which used archaic formats and styling to pass comment on society as they found it. The message, in BritPop, was subordinate to the medium – a neat reversal of the up-front conscience raising of traditional protest songs.

This mixing of intentions was much in evidence on Pulp’s controversial Sorted for Es and Whizz, which was seized upon by anti-drugs lobbyists to represent a massive misjudgement on the part of the group with regards to its ambiguous handling of a sensitive subject. It might have been one small step for Jarvis Cocker on to Michael Jackson’s heavily defended stage at ‘that’ awards ceremony, but it was a mighty leap for BritPop as the scourge and cartoon folk devils of the transatlantic pop establishment. Rooted in the past but sniping at the present, BritPop made its political points by never referring to politics. Noel or Damon might offer a cursory nod to New Labour, but there was none of the community knees-up and flag-waving which had typified the politicized pop events laid on by Red Wedge or Rock Against Racism during the early years of the 1980s. Rather, the politics of BritPop were summed up in the lyrics of Oasis’s ground-breaking single ‘Whatever’ (1994), with its demand for personal freedom – ‘I’m free, to do whatever I, whatever I choose,’ – being snarled by Liam over Noel’s evocative homage to the reversed orchestration on the Beatles’ psychedelic nursery rhyme of 1967, ‘I am the Walrus’. And, ironically, this plea for individualism would breed a new breed of conformism within BritPop’s massive fan base. In the end, the democracy between the performers and fans that punk had attempted to instigate, and that dance music simply took for granted, was wholly dismantled by BritPop’s reawakening of an earlier rock and roll orthodoxy. Jarvis and Co. might have been the Citizen Smiths of modern Britain, but their triumph lay in a powerful coalition between media and marketing.

As BritPop spilt over into the ‘BritCulture’ of BritArt and the heavily over-mediated ‘neo-Swinging London’, as championed by British glossy magazines from GQ to the Telegraph Magazine and Elle, so a new aristocracy of wholly metropolitan socialites, art dealers, PR gurus and restaurateurs would benefit from the mini-boom. For Noel and Liam Gallagher, from the depressed suburb of Burnage, south Manchester, there must have been a delicious sense of victory in realizing that the old escape route from working-class drudgery through football or pop was still open – and it could still make the toffs dance to their tune. As is traditional in English popular culture, from Mick Jagger’s charming of the British aristocracy, the yobs were calling the shots to the snobs. Hence Noel Gallagher, on the television programme ‘TFI Friday’, displaying his neatly shoed foot to a fawning Chris Evans and barking the one word, ‘Gucci’. BritPop had not merely come home, it was thinking of buying the house. Which was rather why Liam Gallagher cancelled an American tour.

What did become evident, however, was that by invoking both the sound and sensibility of English popular culture of earlier eras – be that the High Psychedelia of Sixties opulence or the cheerful cheesiness of Seventies kitsch – the ultimate destination of BritPop’s targeted revivalism was a kind of ‘virtual’ pop, in which the stars and the fans appeared like holograms of their distant and mutated originals. And, ironically, the Beatles themselves would release what amounted to a ‘virtual’ single, ‘Free as a Bird’, with Lennon’s vocals collaged into new material, just as Oasismania was nearing its peak. With a sigh of relief and a power surge on the National Grid, the country was once more united in its traditional twin obsession with northern working-class pop and the Royal Family – Princess Diana having screened her ‘Panorama’ special just minutes after the world première of the Beatles’ virtual video. This, if ever there was one, was a triumph for Sixties revivalism, and the Beatles had descended as though from Pop Heaven to anoint Noel and Liam – within air-space of Royalty – as the successors to the original BritPop throne.

BritPop, as a media phenomenon attendant on the supposed rivalry between Blur and Oasis, had arrived at a time when years of Conservative government had all but conditioned several generations of young people into believing that politics were irrelevant – save as a distant force of despotism, reflexively acknowledged in a half-hearted way to challenge the legality of raves or keep homeless people in the streets. Now, it would seem as though the maturing establishment of BritPop can either follow the formulaic patterns of rock orthodoxy – the ‘difficult’ new album, solo projects, rumours of overdose, and, to quote Blur, ‘a big house in the country’ – or batten down the hatches in the face of the Spice Girls and the pre-teen pop parade.

Like Boyzone and Take That before them, the Spice Girls are an arch-conservative construct whose media-friendly sex appeal is shot through with the commonsensical philosophies traditionally ascribed to well-behaved but fun-loving teenagers. The Spice Girls are naughty but nice, with a vote-winning dash of cosmetic militancy. Need we look any further than the coy chorus of, ‘If you wanna be my luvah, first you gotta be my friend’ to realize that they follow in a long line of safe pop phenomena that stretches all the way back to Cliff Richard and his pals in Summer Holiday? If BritPop plundered from pop’s past, in the name of Prog Mod revivalism, then the Spice Girls look back to the Mop Top era of Beatlemania, before the music turned weird, and the youthful Fab Four were cheeky professionals on the stage of the Royal Variety Show.

And so this latest phenomenon in British pop is retreating yet again, in terms of its ethos, from the psychedelic garden of 1968 to the positive Eden of 1964. After all, the Spice Girls approached Richard Lester, who directed the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, to create their first full-length feature film. Who knows, if BritPop gives way to girl power then Britain might need the Spice Girls like Russia needed a communist Elvis. They could yet become the official state pop of advanced democratic consumerism – the sound of a bright new Britain.

‘… on an ever tightening coil …’

In the big grey apartment, the submarine light seemed to turn moss-green. The grey-painted frame of one of the tall sash windows rattled suddenly, buffeted by the wind. There were going to be some changes around here. During the next ten years, certain … ideas would emerge from the culture, pretty much organically, the sheer brute force of which would take some getting used to. The list would run something like this:

1. Throughout the 1990s, many of the very qualities being demonized as evil Thatcherite 1980s acquisitive competitive cultural bullishness – the whole yuppie arrogance of ‘greed is good’, for instance, or ‘second is nowhere’ – would be simultaneously rehabilitated by popular culture, media and advertising as ‘Attitude’.

2. Pop, for the most part, would cease to be a venue for new ideas and become a site for recycling old ideas.

3. Anxiety and doubt, as an energizing force within cultural practice, would be domesticated and disarmed by a) the comedy of recognition and b) market-formatted cultural production. The effect of these factors produced a culture that appeared to have been designed, by media, retail and advertising. Contemporary art would become fixated on issues of pre-mediation and mediation itself.

4. Brute Authenticity would replace Brute Irony as the temper of the zeitgeist.

5. A consequence of the above would be a pan-media return to gender stereotyping.

6. As the 1990s became fixated on brands and retail culture, so the Trojan Horse of cultural materialism would be Infantilism – seducing the consumer with cosy treats: the caffe latte and the loft conversion. By the year 2000, frothy coffee would appear to be the multi-purpose signifier of urban, credit-based consumer society – the Death by Cappuccino effect.

7. In the 1990s, the cross-cultural pursuit of Authenticity would also provide the ‘bread and circuses’ (most importantly, Popular Factual Programming – ‘reality’ and ‘conflict’ TV – an obsession with ‘celebrity’ and confessional journalism) with which to distract the consumer from the sheer fragility (as demonstrated by the near civic panic during the petrol shortages) of consumer society.

8. This obsession with Authenticity would declare realism to be synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

9. As a site for cultural production, all aspects of the middle classes would be deemed toxic, if not radioactive.

10. By the year 2000, Call Centre Britain would be firmly established. The rhetoric of advertising and retail – the slogans of the Benign Corporation (‘Because Life’s Complicated Enough!’, ‘Every Little Helps!’, ‘What Can We Do to Make It Happen?’) would be based on an idea of intimacy, empathy and personal contact with the customer. The reality behind the rhetoric would be a culture of endlessly deferred accountability, in which there was no one, ultimately, whom the consumer could challenge as responsible for the fair running of The System. Translated into the dynamics of a family, the consumers became children (remember the Trojan Horse of Infantilism a little earlier on?) to the parents of the Benign Corporation, who promised comfort but handed out abandonment.

11. The end result of these ideas would be the feeling that, we, the consumer democracy, were in fact post-political – and afflicted with a Fear of Subjectivity.

The lost young men of Campbell and Wisniewski just didn’t seem hip to the Attitude of the Nineties – they were too awkward, too obscure, too strait-laced, too fey. As culture-vulturing city slickers, all they could do was carry on sitting there. Sighing, perhaps. Fairly soon, all the elitist smarty-pants twiddly bits of Eighties post-modernism – Style Culture, atria, nouvelle cuisine, Jeff Koons – would be declared (in public, at any rate) An Enemy of the People.

The culture of self-conscious artifice had been replaced by a culture of self-conscious authenticity. And as the margins of culture were fed into the conservative, market-dictated flow of the mainstream, it would take some fancy footwork to remain oppositional. But oppositional to what? What did the term mean nowadays? In many cases, the only way to become culturally confrontational was to make a choice to cease your cultural production – to culture strike, as the writer, punk historian and activist Stewart Home would declare and demonstrate.

Howard Devoto

Of all the icons assembled in the pantheon of punk, Howard Devoto could most probably lay claim to being the most enigmatic and the most revered. He was described by Pete Frame (the creator of the Rock Family Trees) as ‘the Orson Welles of punk’, and pronounced in a tribute song by Momus to be ‘The Most Important Man Alive’. Morrissey stated that it was Devoto whom he had in mind when he wrote ‘The Last Of the Famous International Playboys’, while Paul Morley claimed that Devoto introduced a ‘new literacy not just into punk, but into rock as a whole’. He has also been cited as an influence by novelists as different in style as D. J. Taylor and Jeff Noon.

And yet Devoto himself remains mysterious. His guru-like status has been all the more respected for the dignified manner in which he has allowed his body of recorded work and published lyrics to represent him. Having co-founded and founded, respectively, two of the most influential groups of the punk period, the Buzzcocks and Magazine, he then went on to record a solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream, before forming his third and final group, Luxuria, in 1986.

He ceased recording professionally in 1990, preferring the anonymity of a day job to some kind of honorary position in the music business as an elder statesman of cultural revolution. He could therefore also claim to be ‘the T. E. Lawrence of punk’. With regard to his current employment, Devoto has little to say. ‘I am the manager of the archive at a leading photographic agency in central London. I also receive royalties from my recordings.’ He is neither open nor defensive about his working life beyond music, except to say that his work with Luxuria did not deliver the support he required to proceed.

‘There was something very limiting about punk,’ he states, in a tone that is both assertive and measured – Alan Bennett without the soft edges – ‘and in the early days that was punk’s strength. You knew your themes, you knew how to look and you knew your musical style. And there you were, for a while. But I’d loved all kinds of other music up to that point. There was some big elemental thing that happened with the Sex Pistols, but in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff which I had liked, and which, in the realm of ideas, were not totally different tins of biscuits – Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in, really.’

In the spring of 1976, in Manchester, Devoto co-founded Buzzcocks with guitarist Pete Shelley. They recorded the massively influential Spiral Scratch EP, and a highly collectable official bootleg, Time’s Up. Heard now, these recordings have lost none of their fizzed-up, self-aware energy, driven by Shelley’s sublime reinvention of jagged, high-speed pop guitar playing. On machine-gun-tempo songs such as ‘Friends of Mine’, ‘Boredom’ and ‘Orgasm Addict’, Devoto delivers his smarter-than-smart lyrics with an edgy petulance that disguises their wit and biting acuity as a kind of pantomime of dumbness. ‘You’re making out with schoolkids, winos and heads of state,’ he lashes out on ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘You’re making out with the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cake.’