John Harris (4) (1969–)

I've had to restart this review several times, because it keeps turning into a sort of personal playlist of my favourite tracks of the 90s. I'm going to try and keep the impulse in check, but it's hard, because Britpop came along at the perfect time for me. I had hardly been interested in current music, growing up – by my early teens, when everyone was music-mad, the prevailing genre was grunge and the prevailing mood was a concomitant affectation of moody self-loathing and unwashed fringes. It just didn't speak to me at all. Then, suddenly, everything changed.

I can't remember who induced me to get a copy of Modern Life is Rubbish but I do distinctly remember listening to it for the first time in 1993. I was so unused to hearing people sing in English accents that I actually burst out laughing during ‘For Tomorrow’ – it almost felt like a comedy album to me, which is amazing to think now. And not just the accents – the words, too, were about the experience of London and suburban Britain that I recognised. The opening bars of ‘Colin Zeal’ still give me a vision of my bedroom that afternoon.

I never quite appreciated how deliberate this enhanced Englishness was to the inception of (what would be labelled as) Britpop – Blur wrote the album after a disastrous American tour and all of the major players were animated by a desire to oppose American grunge with something home-grown. At the time, to be honest it felt more like a happy coincidence than anything strategic. Harris sets out the chronology really well – from the first flutterings of the Manchester scene with The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, through the transitional early work of Suede, and into the full Britpop explosion with Blur's second album and Oasis's first.

But, as Damon Albarn reflects later, far from being Britpop against the world, it was every band for themselves. It's astonishingly acrimonious from the inside – they all seem to have loathed each other with a fiery hatred.

‘[Blur's] guitarist I've got a lot of time for. The drummer I've never met – I hear he's a nice guy. The bass player and singer – I hope the pair of them catch AIDS and die because I fucking hate them two.’
—Noel Gallagher

‘We felt a common cause with Pulp at first. We really supported them. But in a lot of ways, they were even bigger cunts than Oasis. They were in our birds' knickers: devious little fuckers.’
—Alex James

It was a bit disconcerting finding out quite how obnoxious some of my teenage heroes really were. On the evidence of this book, they were all unremittingly awful to each other, and the bitchiness is exacerbated by an incestuous fluidity between band-members. Justine Frischmann, of course, originally part of Suede and dating Brett Anderson, left him for Damon Albarn, thereby prompting Albarn's gargantuan competitive streak; her guitarist Donna Matthews started off dating Elastica's drummer but dropped him for the guy from Menswear. Albarn himself was so extravagantly and consistently unfaithful to Justine that, when she went to visit him in Reykjavik, she stopped into a local comedy club and found someone performing a sketch about how all the new babies born that year were called Damon.

Her own band was one of the wittiest, most joyful pop-punk groups around in the early-mid nineties; the fact that they only managed one decent album before falling apart is as good an illustration as any of the deleterious effects of drugs on the 90s music scene. Unlike the mind-expanding 1960s, the 90s was all about cocaine, originally – which at least kept people fairly productive – and later, heroin, which just kept them sitting in the corner of a bedsit staring at the insides of their eyelids. Donna spent nights on tour getting beaten up or worse in crack dens; she tried Naltrexone implants to curb the cravings, but her addiction got so bad that she would just yank the stitches out, jam her fingers in her abdomen, and gouge the implants out so she could shoot up again.

As Harris says, ‘only the most talented minds could successfully navigate all this: in many cases, the basic chapters of most careers – aspiration, achievement and rapid decline – were enacted over little more than three years’. Damon Albarn is still around and still making interesting music, but it's hard to think of anyone else who's survived into the 2010s. OK, Noel Gallagher is still recording, but…meh. Oasis were the soundtrack to my last years of school, but I could never get over how feeble the lyrics were and they kept writing the same (pretty fun) song over and over again. (‘It was difficult to think of any group whose career had combined stratospheric success with such stubbornly limited horizons.’) Noel was always a talented songwriter but you kind of felt sorry for him; watching him drag his brother around always put me in mind of Clint Eastwood with that orangutan.

When it comes to assessing the music itself, though, Harris is as hit-and-miss as any other music critic; you either share his taste or you don't. He can be quite dismissive of bands that weren't in the top tier of Britpop; I loved Sleeper and Echobelly and Gene and several other groups that get pretty short shrift here, and other bands are excluded on the grounds that he does not consider them Britpop. So there is barely any mention of Radiohead (who did not have the kind of decline and fall that Harris considers emblematic), and no reference to my own favourite music of the time, namely triphop and the Bristol sound. I suppose he's right that they're all different genres, but at the time it felt like part of one big renaissance to me.

At any rate, by the time it was big news, it was already all over: the fuck-you female leads like Frischmann and Louise Wener were diluted into the ‘girl power’ of the Spice Girls, Alan McGee went cold turkey, and Blur wrote their best work (the self-titled Blur (1997) and the brilliantly miserable 13 (1999)) when they ditched the music-hall vaudeville and finally opened themselves up to American influences. But while it lasted, the whole thing was glorious, and reliving it through this book will have you flicking through your old CDs with melancholy, nostalgic glee.… (more)

In the summer of 1995 I had just graduated Dartington, was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, and about to move to North London. Against this backdrop of hope, fear and success/excess a war was breaking out between two bands whose music I will always associate with that time. Taking the Blur vs. Oasis chart rivalry as a central theme, author and ex-NME journalist Jon Harris goes on to chronicle a period of time which saw pop stars at Westminster rubbing gin & tonics with John Prescott, and magazines proclaiming London once more being the most ‘happening’ place to be. As well as the political elements (as Blair courts various musicians in an attempt to get the ‘youth vote’), Harris plots the histories of all the bands of the time, from the great-and-good to the never-heard-of-again. For those of us with fond nostalgic memories of ‘Britpop’ it is an essential book to own. For everyone else it is at the very least a cautionary tale of why music and politics are rarely successful in the same sentence.… (more)