UNCOMMON PEOPLE -
BRITPOP AND BEYOND IN 20 SONGS -
MIRANDA SAWYER
There are some who say - and I've met them - the Nineties was the greatest ever decade for music. Can you imagine that? I won't deny there was indeed a lot of spine-tinglingly great music being made during that period but over and above any accolade such as 'greatest' I would say the Nineties was the decade when music finally left the planet, launched by a rocket and then jettisoned to become a satellite - another piece of space hardware - circling the Earth forever. The decade when music became an accoutrement. When any attributes such as music or specific bands being 'relevant' or 'political' came with a wink as if to say 'but not really'.
The Nineties was the decade when music considered to be 'outside' of the mainstream became the mainstream. It was the decade of the last hurrah when the music business thrived and partied for all its worth and that arguably, with the advent of streaming and social media it's been downhill ever since until plateauing at its current state of being just another cheap (and not so cheap) product for the consumer's head.
Miranda Sawyer used to write for Smash Hits and Select magazine, and was at the heart of what became labelled as 'Britpop'. I used to sometimes see someone around Bristol during the Nineties who looked like her but I presumed it was just a look-alike. It turns out it probably was her as in her chapter about Tricky in her book Uncommon People - Britpop And Beyond In 20 Songs, she says she had friends in Bristol who she would visit. 'I was always struck by how laid-back everything seemed, how little got done, how packed full it was of attractive hippy-tinged stoners knitting their own yoghurt, ho ho.' Ho, ho indeed.
But hang on a minute. What does Tricky have to do with Britpop? And what even is Britpop, anyway? According to Miranda, Britpop is a word. A feeling. A sensation of 'this is our time'. It is also, moreover, a search term. A category for retailers signifying UK indie-pop music of the mid-'90s, which means the net can be cast wide. And when you add 'And Beyond' to the word 'Britpop' which is what Miranda does in her subtitle to her book, then the sky's the limit.
Uncommon People is Miranda Sawyer's trawl through the 1990s and the bands and songs that (in her eyes - and ears) defined that era. It's a book that in many ways could almost have written itself, the difference being that Miranda was there, interviewing, dancing, witnessing and - though she never says so - I would hope, drug taking. I mean, it's a bit like that saying 'If you can remember the Sixties, then you weren't there', but rather 'If you weren't taking drugs in the Nineties, then you weren't there'. Remember, this was the last hurrah of the music business thriving. The decade when even Chumbawamba became massive.
All the usual suspects are here of course: Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede, Elastica, and also others such as PJ Harvey, Stereolab and The Prodigy. Twenty bands in total, and so twenty ways of reflecting on the 1990s. There aren't too many insights proffered, it must be said, but then this was a time when the music press was at its height and you could hardly move for the amount of music magazines and papers available - Select, Q, Smash Hits, NME, Melody Maker, Mixmag, DJ, Mojo, Vox, The Word - so pretty much everything was being covered.
Surprisingly, the most interesting insight Miranda gives is in regard to Oasis, a band you'd think everything there is to say about them has already been said a thousand times over. She tells us, however, exactly what made them so good and so successful, and what she says is pretty convincing.
One thing I'd forgotten about is that it was Miranda who'd conducted the interview with Noel where he said he hated Blur (or two members of Blur, to be precise) and that he hoped they would catch AIDS and die. It was a comment that went ballistic, causing a lot of upset - and rightly so.
Miranda tells us that a few days later she saw Noel at the Q Awards and went over to him and said sorry 'though now I wonder what for'. It leaves me wondering why she would have done that as well. In hindsight, this was Noel's 'David Bowie giving a Nazi salute at Victoria Station' moment. Proof, if needed, that mixing a pop star's egotism with excessive cocaine use should be avoided.
For anyone with an interest in 'Britpop and beyond', Uncommon People is a pleasurable enough read though to be honest, it doesn't really leave you with anything at the end. The reason for this is not because it's badly written or anything but more to do with who it seems to have been written for, meaning it seems to be aimed at those who weren't actually there in the 1990s. Those who weren't even born then. For example, why else would an explanation in brackets be given of who Valerie Solonas was when she's mentioned? Or an explanation in brackets be given of who the riot grrrl bands were when mentioned? Or even when saying about how The Prodigy learnt their craft of how to get a crowd going by playing live over and over again, adding in brackets 'It's how The Beatles learnt'. I mean, really?
The most insightful comment, however, comes from Irvine Welsh when he's quoted as saying: 'Britpop was a celebration of British culture, everything you'd seen before all rehashed again, but also like a requiem for British culture. Like: all this is gonna go, from Teds to ravers and everything in between, it's all gonna be sold off to the internet to the global market place and sold back to us in chintzy Instagram influencers. There's gonna be a fire sale of youth culture. The party's over.'
And though I don't totally agree with that, I do tend to sympaphize with it quite a bit.
John Serpico
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