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DARRENPOP : THE 90's AND ME Five albums:
Primal Scream - Screamadelica Suede - Dog Man Star Massive Attack - Blue Lines Saint Etienne - Fox Base Alpha Cornelius - Fantasma |
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Anyone selecting their favourites from a period of time as long as ten years, is bound to be influenced by a time a) when they were most into music, and b) when they had the time to do so, and c) when both of these coincided with a real 'zeitgeist'. I make no apologies for admitting that for me, it was the initial Britpop boom of 1994-5, when for a year or so the most significant pop musicians in the UK were so-called 'indie' bands, most notably Blur, Oasis and Pulp. It's so easy to mock now, but back then it was incredibly exciting: a mix'n'match of mod, punk, electro-pop, Bowie, Beatles and dance music all in cute and fashionable baskets, that appealed to both 'girls and boys' equally. I would argue anyway that all the best fashion movements are androgynous.
Five years earlier, Madchester had been the first 'movement' since 2-Tone to truly excite me. Largely because, after an over-long adolescence of devotion to Orange Juice, the Smiths and the Wonder Stuff, it was an introduction to the buzz of indie music with funk, that you could genuinely dance to, even if most of us ended up looking like Bez imitators. This, and the possibility that indie bands could aim higher than just winning the NME poll. |
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Britpop (there, I've said the 'B' word again) was all that, plus it appealed to the basic Mod within me - the Roses rather than the Mondays, Blur rather than Oasis. And yet my 'year dot' here actually predates the so-called 'year of Britpop', that Pop history will dictate ran from the week of Country House v Roll With It, through the summer of "Trainspotting", until Gareth Southgate's Euro 96 penalty miss meant that football didn't quite come home after all.
You might think it odd then that not one of my top five albums come from that period. Well, Blur, like the Charlatans, have always been a fantastic singles band but have yet to make a truly flawless album, while Pulp's 'Different Class' and Oasis's first album, both inspirational classics of their time, just miss out on my five. My top choice, Primal Scream's 'Screamadelica' was, I think, the blueprint for everything cool and original about 90s pop. This album's collision of influences was directly responsible for the entire 'indie' world widening its horizons, (it certainly changed the way I saw things), and still sounds as modern as it ever did. Suede's 'Dog Man Star' is worth its place simply for its staggering ambition. It's THE Suede album - towering torch songs, using orchestras way before the Verve & the Manics did, and gloriously overblown drama from a band on the verge of imploding, so at odds with the whining of the grunge bands around them. |
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But being part of the zeitgeist isn't just about number one albums: it's about feeling that you yourself might just be part of Pop history writing itself, and realising that you're present at a scene from the Book of Great Pop Moments.
That's why I'll forever say that the most wonderful Pop experiences of the 90s, for me, were not just albums (it's so easy to be so typically "knowing", and say in retrospect how significant an album was). No, they were big but intimate gigs, at great venues, that I was lucky enough to be at. Blur live in 1994 the week after 'Park Life' was released, and Pulp live on Christmas Eve 1995, the year of 'Common People'. They were different yet similar experiences - the Blur gig was a declaration of intent, a head-spinning feeling that we were witnessing a phenomenon about to explode, a hungry and confident band at the peak of their rise, at a wonderful ex-music hall that seemed to sum up the band's appeal. When Phil Daniels bounding up to join the band was still a novelty. When the glitterballs that appeared at the intro to 'To The End', just as the lights all went down, induced a mass, involuntary gasp of "Oooohh !" from the entire audience. When … when Blur themselves still had a sense of their own Popness, before Damon and Graham went sour as a career move. (I still like Blur, but don't you think they've lost something ?) The Pulp gig, on the other hand, was a celebratory, valedictory night of high camp but with substance so thick you could build a house from it, a year-end feeling that we, the 'mis-shapes' that Jarvis was writing about (and for), had won. (We were, to an extent, wrong of course - most of the lager louts who 'wanna keep us out' merely adopted Oasis as their own, and the second-rate artisans that followed after them - Stereophonics, Embrace, even Travis - you're all guilty). All this plus bucketloads of classic pop songs, of course. Which in my opinion proves that Pop means one thing more than anything else - when the "moment", and the "personal", cross paths and make something unimaginably special. My name happens to be Darren, so I guess I call it darrenpop … |
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