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Everyone's fighting. It's just like the good old days of Britpop, where you could get glassed over a discussion of guitar lines outside Camden's own The Good Mixer. I'm so proud to have brought the magic back.
Copey's Brick: There was certainly a buzz about nationalistic pride which for the first time i can remember didn't feel jingoistic - more a culteral identity of inclusion and celebration of ecentricity (Jarvis, John Peel etc. you weren't gonna get your head kicked in at a Pulp gig). It felt good to point out the pomposity of the whiney american grunge stars and have pop stars that liked to dress up again, it felt good to have the news talk about the bands that i liked.
This is approximately how I feel. It seems every few years bands decide, rather than eschewing the crass commercialism of the charts, that they'll embrace success instead. Rather than making music for themselves that if anyone else likes it's a bonus, they decide to reach people with a commercial poppy single (The Beach Boys are often invoked at this point) and then freak them out with uncompromised album tracks. Which means a lot of bands make a lot of pop singles and some of them capture a spark.
johnny enigma: However, most of those bands listed in the thread summary were pretty cack, weren't they?
Yeah, but that's the point. Sleeper will, at best, be a footnote in pop history. That doesn't stop a couple of their songs, in my perhaps over-generous opinion, being melodic and evocative and lovely. Because they're crap, almost, rather than despite of it.
As I said at the top, this was all inspired by The Sound of the Suburbs, a compilation you should check out if you like pop music. The title track, by The Members, is very close to failure. It squanders the energy and ideological capital of punk on moaning about the boredom of being middle-class and the next-door neighbour washing the car. And if you've got a pronounced lisp, singing a song called The Thound of the Thuburbs probably isn't a good idea. But despite that there's a spark there, something that makes it wonderful even though it's an unmistakable product of one specific place and time, when punk sank beneath the consumerism of the 80s. It's at once an epitaph and a summnation of what went wrong.
Inform the missing pingles act: Oh, and on the compilation, personal favourites from bands not yet mentioned would be The Auteurs and Marion. Oh, and Gene! Aww, Gene.
The Auteurs have made the first draft after the same song was suggested by a work colleague. Neither Gene and Marion are turning up on my searches. (Gene: didn't one of their singles supposedly have a limited run of 1996 copies or some shit?) That makes them in some way unobvious, I'm afraid.
And did you know your name's an anagram of Fetching Slim Impregnations?
Of course you know. You know only too well.
Saveloy: The request was for "the most obvious" and, well, I don't like it any more than you do but 'Wake Up Boo' was bloody everywhere, wasn't it? Your objection has been noted but, I'm sorry, it must be included.
My partner said it wasn't Britpop last night. I'm inclined to agree because I never want to hear it again, but inwardly I feel it rings all the bells.
This is what I've put together:
The Verve, Bittersweet Symphony
Catatonia, Road Rage
Suede, Animal Nitrate
Supergrass, Alright
Sleeper, Sale of the Century
Manic Street Preachers, A Design For Life
The Auteurs, Lenny Valentino
Kula Shaker, Tattva
Elastica, Connection
The Bluetones, Slight Return
Oasis, Live Forever
Pulp, Common People
Paul Weller, Wild Wood
Echobelly, Insomniac
Cast, Walk Away
Lush, Single Girl
Blur, To The End
Space, Me and You Vs The World
Shed Seven, Going For Gold
Don't assume bands are there because I like them. I hate some of what's above. And this is approximately CD length, so any new tracks suggested will require substitutions.
And Alex's Grandma, a visit to Wikipedia reveals that Rick Witter is fine. He's currently fronting a band called Rick Witter and the Dukes; a band whose selling point, bizarrely, is Rick Witter. Digest that. |
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