So, BBC FOUR cleared an evening of programming to celebrate the career and ideas of John Harris, what with it being ten years since Blur battled Oasis and so on. What we got was mostly a shake-down of old material, including Live Forever, the official move history of; Britpop Now, the 1995 BBC TWO music special, Pulp's No Sleep Till Sheffield and (long after everyone had gone to bed) another chance to see the Later Paul Weller Stanley Road special. Kicking off the line-up, there was also a new half-hour recap of Britpop from Mr. Harris. Poor John; where some music presenters get to fly out to Barbados, or maybe a trip to CBGBs, he was lumbered with the taxi ride to the Good Mixer and a schlep down to the Astoria for his tale.
It was nice to see Britpop Now again; ten years ago we were watching TV on a nine inch black and white screen, although they'd decided to put TOTP2 style captions all over the place. It's curious why they thought this would be appropriate - we've watched classic dramas on BBC FOUR and they didn't feel the need to slap banners over the picture with them (You can picture it in Threads, can't you: "Nuclear war is one of five ways people expect the world to end"); they could have put them behind the press red button, as they'd done with the Prom notes - and the extra expense that would have incurred might have caused them to think a little more deeply about just how much value "Dave is still Dave" style observations provided the viewer.
What stuck out most in the evening was what was missing - no word from Steve Lamacq or anyone from Select, who surely would have more useful insights than Toby Young; barely a sniff of Suede, besides in a still shot of the Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Cobain Select cover. And, most striking of all, not a single word of dissent.
You'd have hoped that, ten years on, BBC FOUR might at least have turned up someone who wanted to offer a different perspective on what is fast becoming part of our national myth. It's been a decade; must we accept Harris' view of those time so unquestioningly?
There are several claims about 94-95 which are now accepted wisdom that, really, don't add up. Key amongst these are the very idea that Blur and Oasis were at the heart of a coherent and cohesive scene. Louise Wener was allowed to utter a small objection to this, suggesting that Oasis were totally unlike anybody else - "they were like a thing on their own" - but, as at the time, nobody paid her very much attention. But if you look at the ragbag of cultural ephemera both Harris and Live Forever assembled, it's a venn diagram with very little in the parts where the world intersect.
This is partly why Suede's presence in the 90s music scene gets written off quite swiftly in this sort of retrospective - trying to suggest that Britpop could easily include Brett Anderson spanking his arse with a microphone, Loaded magazine and Liam Gallagher bent double with his big orange coat on really throws doubts onto how wide the foundations of this scene really were. You can make out a good case for Menswear and Supergrass being part of a continuum; but in what way were Pulp and Oasis fellow-travellers?
It's no surprise they built the night around the time Oasis and Blur released records on the same day: there's precious little else that, viewed from this distance, links the two bands together.
The Britpop narrative also demands that the bands suddenly appeared from a vacuum - the accepted wisdom being that before Britpop, British acts had withered in the face of American opposition led by Nirvana (although, at one point in the evening, we're informed that they were the only grunge band who were even worth paying attention to, apparently - news to Pearl Jam, we guess). The bands who had battled on bravely, of course, are snorted at as being shoegazers, with barely any stage presence; equally, we're told that prior to Parklife, no British acts were singing about their lives, their country. Because, see, we were all in thrall to the Americans. Even although only Nirvana were any good. Then, of course, Britpop came from nowhere to save us all.
But this is arrant wasp toss, in virtually all directions. The shoe/scene that celebrates bands did have stage presence, of course, and did write songs which reflected the Britain in which they lived - Lush were singing about drinking in Camden before Graham Coxon had ever heard of the Good Mixer; Ride even wrote a hymn to their OX4 postcode.
More crucially, there was certainly no sense of a new wave hitting when Suede turned up - they were exciting, but because they were beautiful and considered rather than something so totally different in a world filled with Boo Radleys and Auteurs and Pale Saints and Saint Ettienes; Blur, of course, snuck in the back door disguised as the last wave of baggy and part-shoe anyway. However much it might spoil the story, the Good Mixer scene wasn't a year zero; it was much more business as usual than might be comfortable for some to admit.
Much more to the point, one band was not mentioned at all during the evening, because they did sing about the everyday and the ordinary; they did have stage presence; they had ambition writ large. They're still going, too. The 90s were as much about the Manics as they were about Oasis, and yet the Britpop frame really collapses if you try to factor them in. They were the reason why Brett Anderson wasn't alone in dressing soft and girly and talking a bisexual storm; they were the reason why Damon Albarn wasn't alone in stomping around the stage like he owned the place. And when you start to wonder about the Manics, you find yourself also questioning how the pre-Britpop void was able to accommodate the Primals as well, and where abouts Teenage Fanclub's bandwagonesque fitted into things. And how there could have a lack of groups singing about their home country before '94 when Gene turn up on Britpop now some ten years into their career.
And all that, of course, assumes that you accept that dance music doesn't count at all, as if the kids who liked guitars were totally separate from the dance music fans.
Britpop as a Beano style scrap between the Blurites and the Oasises is a fine, cartoon view of the times, and it worked for the too-early, superficial I Love The 90s franchise. But from BBC FOUR? It would have been nice to have had something a little more considered.
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