A friend of mine has started listening to mid-90s NOW! albums in the car. The NOW! series was the epitome of Capital Radio, chart pop. I was surprised then, looking through the track lists, about how much Britpop is on those CDs. I shouldn't have been as Oasis et al scored plenty of Top 40 hits. More than that, you realise (or remember) how these songs fitted very happily alongside boy and girl bands, one hit wonders, and those 'grown up' pop groups that don't really exist anymore, like the Beautiful South.
'Don't Look Back in Anger' isn't a world away from 'Back for Good'; it's a thin dividing line between Supergrass and Hanson. Sure, the boy bands were pushed for a specific female market, but its two sides of the same coin really.
So maybe the angst about Britpop stems from a misunderstanding that it was for the 18 to 24 crowd. Surely, the core record buying public for it were 10-14 year olds and their mums, united by a need of breezy pop you can sing along to in the car.
If it was part of a 'push back' it wasn't against American alt rock or Penman n' Morley era NME, but against dance music (and to a lesser extent hip hop). A handful of sixth formers at my school were into 'serious' dance music or rap. Those were adult music scenes, which a 13 year old couldn't participate in.We all need a gateway drug in, and for most early teens it was never going to be 'Terminator' (although I reckon most of the audience for 'Scatman' or 'I Like to Move It' were kids.)
It IS strange that men in their mid - 20s with art school educations started making singles for children, or magazine editors in their 30s were pushing this stuff. But that is, unfortunately, something of the dark thread running through the British entertainment industry.
‘I’ve never written about Welsh
identity before: these days, I’ve got to search for things to write
about, whereas in the past everything would be driven by anger and all
the rest of it. Now I’ve got to delve more… Ready For Drowning is the
most complete song I’ve ever written, I think…’
After Everything Must Go, This is my Truth Tell me Yours
is the best album of a mediocre bunch – even with its overblown and
airless moments, even with Wire’s retreat behind domestic lines and
po-faced earnestness replacing their early half-articulate,
all-encompassing ire. Ready for Drowning is perhaps not the best
but the most interesting song on the album: its rippling chapel-service
introduction; Bradfield’s precisely rendered Valleys diction on the
line ‘Said ‘e’d y’eard it in a tacsi’; the second verse’s
disappointing touch of that chronic Nineties disease whereby ‘proving
you care’ feels like more of an imperative than actually caring; and the
climactic sample, amidst the song’s drunk-sounding central lurch, of
Richard Burton’s misanthropic telekinesis master in The Medusa Touch. As the early Manics were and remain a band only a teenager could
properly love, so this, their first album produced entirely post-Richey,
is inescapably the product of a band forced to grow up, but unsure what
to grow into – a state reflective of, among other things, the
post-industrial stasis and stagnation still affecting much of their
homeland.
Released in 1998, This is my Truth is a deeply Welsh
production. Its cover photo was taken on Black Rock Sands in Gwynedd, a
tourist-friendly beach which in the cover shot manages nevertheless to
look as desolate and featureless as an abandoned slate quarry or the
surface of the moon. The album quotes, references or eulogises Aneurin Bevan; the impressively irascible North Wales poet and
Anglican priest R. S. Thomas; and the Welsh who left to fight fascism in
1930s Spain. In 1998, of course, at the end of a decade marked by the pushing of
confected ideas of ‘Britishness’, ‘Welshness’ was also getting big
(everything’s relative). As explored in Wales Off Message, Patrick Hannan’s
occasionally amusing compendium of devolutionary culture and its
cock-ups, the taking root of specifically Welsh political institutions
gave rise to broader debates on how national identity was to be
characterised and defined. The Welsh Assembly’s establishment took place
alongside a very Nineties shift of focus from economic issues to the
nation’s performance on various cultural stages; for Wales, this meant a
cathartic concentration on the national team’s improvement on the rugby
pitch and the consolidation of a dubious ‘New Welsh Cool’, based around
the sudden commercial success of the Manics and the emergence in their
slipstream of other Welsh bands of varying quality and longevity.
Around the time of this album the Manics, never having previously
appeared to endorse flags as anything other than combustible material,
began draping their amplifiers and themselves in the red dragon. But,
just as 1994’s The Holy Bible had been a refusenik splinter in the side of Britpop, so in Wales, when everything surrounding This Is My Truth
seemed to indicate a post-Thatcher, post-imperial, post-devolution sigh
of forward-looking relief, the Welsh album of the year was steeped in
backwards-looking pessimism, quietly if resentfully resigned to despair,
and old before its time. Well, of course it was. It’s Welsh.
In late-90s South Wales at least, the experience of having had work
first defined as one’s purpose for living, then abruptly removed but not
replaced with anything meaningful, was cemented by the shallowness of
Blairite triumphalism, which, despite Kinnock’s unenviable place as New
Labour’s handmaiden, had little time for Wales. The dispiriting and
bathetic micro-machinations surrounding the attempt in 1998 to impose
Alun Michael as London’s man in Cardiff, against Rhodri Morgan’s
positioning as the people’s choice, exemplified this distance. In
addition, New Labour’s post-socialist direction and the Welsh Assembly’s
lack of tax-raising powers both militated against any commitment to
concrete economic improvement. No longer condemned to an industrial
past, vast swathes of the country remained condemned to a
post-industrial future, against which the New Welsh Cool rang as hollow
as a lot of other Nineties rhetoric. Against this backdrop, Ready for Drowning has no solutions and little
hope to offer, in accordance with the quietly bleak defeatism,
resignation and pathos that riddles the album.
On This is my Truth, lacking roots in older, more established
ideas of Welshness tied to custom, place and language, Wire’s casting
around for a secure identity finds him latching on to specific
traditions of Welsh political history. From the Bevan quote in the
album’s title to Welsh participation in the Spanish Civil War, these
aspects of Welsh identity are more modern than ancient, more southern
than northern, and more industrial than agrarian. They are also,
crucially, based in class rather than national consciousness, and they
are, equally significantly, things of a heroic and romanticised recent
past – stuff of history rather than myth, but just as irrecoverable. The
album derives its few comforts and securities from the past,
reinforcing the present lack of either. Ready for Drowning, like If You Tolerate This…, is almost unbearable in its yearning for what’s lost –
for principles, potential and power that, by the end of the twentieth
century, were all over bar the shouting.
*
[A much longer version of this, if you're so inclined, is here, here, here, here and here.]
