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There has been some discussion elsewhere of the merits of Britpop – the music, the times, the people. Here’s a few things that I can still remember. My ‘Britpop’ era lasted from the moment in 1994 that I left home for a house with some friends, until two years later when I moved out again, although it never really took on the kind of Britpoppish sensibilities I associate it with until Steve split up with his long-term girlfriend, Liz, and she moved out of our house. So, was it one long weekend of "clubbing, drinking, writing, snogging, walking, smoking, driving and staying up all night", as I said somewhere recently? With an added dash of perspective, it was so much more and possibly so much less than that as well. Looking back now, nearly a decade on, there are lots of images of events but very few coherent memories of weeks, or months: One afternoon driving through Leicestershire chasing a storm as it moved across the county... Steve writing Darkdream, the best unpublished sci-fi story ever... Walking through a wood with a rocky hill hidden at the centre utterly reminiscent of Stephen King's Pet Sematary... Racing back from working somewhere miles and miles away to go and see Withnail And I in Nottinham... Hiding from a gang of yobs in the early hours of the morning on Beacon Hill, only to later discover one of them actually was a housemate of ours... Buying (What's The Story) Morning Glory... Wait a minute... how did that creep in there? Surely such a thing can't be a big event, can it? Oh yes it was. Oasis were the band of the era for me. When things were going well, the symbiosis of Oasis and the lifestyle we were leading was too good to be true. We could sum up our respective love-lives to Wonderwall, a good night out could indeed be Supersonic, we were, in effect, going to Live Forever. Some musical snobs will instantly dismiss this as ridiculous, but believe me, at the time, it was so true, and so right. There were many other bands in our heads, of course. Steve was a Pink Floyd devotee, and I was a New Order/Smiths/Morrissey/Suedehead. Alex liked all sorts of things. I remember Kim constantly singing songs from Tuesday Night Music Club by Sheryl Crow. Everyone liked the Stone Roses, the Beatles and the Stones, I think. When I think of some of our many driving trips to here, there, and everywhere, the memory that immediately surfaces is the Manics' Holy Bible, which always seems to be playing in Alex's car at midnight, in the pouring rain, as we drive towards Rutland Water for some unfathomably exciting reason. The first seven songs on Jollification by the Lightning Seeds seems to encapsulate every good moment of the era, and Blur's The Universal always seems to sum up every possible love interest of the time... "yes, it really really really could happen"... and sometimes, it did. But Oasis stood above everybody - we knew the songs, the lyrics, the tunes, we argued about b-sides, bemoaned how crap they'd been at Glastonbury, affected crappy Gallagher accents, smoked and drank, and vowed to form the next Oasis, because we could play all the songs backwards. Perhaps we should have done. Certainly at the time, it felt possible... at the time, anything felt possible. Yeah, there may well be an inkling of the old rose-tinted specs here, and of course there were bad times that have been airbrushed from the memory. But everyone has a perfect image of the greatest era of their life, and sometimes, it even happened. Britpop wasn't just music - it was a time of my life. Perhaps the time of my life.
I'd like to close, as they used to say, with a song. It's not actually by Oasis, but it sums up everything I felt, or ever will feel, about those halcyon days of Britpop, back in a world that is now, sadly gone, but still lives on through the songs. Perfect by the Lightning Seeds "See the rivers filled with rain
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29th January 2004 |
