Britpop - Part One

Britpop was a brief moment of light, when out of the decay of eighteen arid years, something beautiful flowered. The energy and passion of the movement that was to be christened Britpop was at heart guttural and raw: a desire to escape the prison of urban mediocrity, or in the immortal words of Noel Gallagher, to Live Forever.

Britpop was also elegiac, wistful and quintessentially English: from the Sheffield sagas of Pulp's Different Class to the oddly soothing shipping forecast metaphors of This is a Low by Blur. The movement captured not only a moment but also a time and a place that has now sunk into memory and mythology. The story has been told most eloquently and poignantly by John Harris in The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock.

Britpop formed the last flowering of indigenous British music before it was submerged in a tidal wave of manufactured acts and the American hip-hop invasion. It coincided with a rare moment of optimism; a belief that, in the words of the Labour's 1997 election theme song, "Things could only get better". The sobering reality of what followed forms a sad epitaph to the hopes of this British musical renaissance.

The dreams may be gone, but the music remains. Here are a few of the best.

The finest Britpop music has a cultural and geographic specificity that stamps it out as truly authentic. Mile End, as ever Londoner knows, is the second stop on the Central Line beyond Liverpool Street. Today it is an arty and gentrifying area; but in the early Nineties it was a byword for urban squalor and a grimy, decaying city environment.

Immortalised by its inclusion on the Trainspotting soundtrack, Mile End is a gripping story in itself: a witty ditty of a group of friends who decide to squat on the fifteenth floor of a tower block in the area. Gradually they come to terms with the despair and emptiness of their new home environment. Burdett Road, incidentally, is a real arterial road in the area.

The lyrics are sly and cutting: "The lift is always full of piss,the fifth floor landing smells of fish - not just on Friday but every other day". The anomie and hopelessness of the urban tower block squat are captured in some of Pulp's finest lyrics that cleverly ellide the concept of a pool shot and casual violence."Below the kids come out at night, they kick a ball and have a fight, and maybe shoot somebody if they lose at pool".

Yet the refrain is typically stoic and quintessentially English, "It's alright - it's Mile End". The cheery Cockney xylophone refrain, reminiscent of music hall knees-up in a mythical East End drowned forever, though the pearly king in this refrain is no saint. In contrast to the eulogising of East End life that Blur epitomised at this time, Jarvis is committed to telling things as they really are.

"I guess you have to go right down, before you understand how low a human being can go",he comments.It is the schizophrenic quality of the track,the forced jollity of the Hammond organ against a backdrop of desolation,that makes this a truly great pop song.

Jarvis Cocker, like Philip Larkin before him, plays the part a sad chronicler of the English condition. Yes, Jarvis should be Poet Laureate.

Disco 2000 is a song about all of us.To borrow Neil Tennant's opening dedication from Being Boring, "This is a song about growing up.The ideals that you have when you're young and how they turn out".

The song hums not merely with a powerful synthesiser but with feelings of loss, regret and sadness. A man looks back at his teenage sweetheart and the unrequited crush he had on her, and wonders how his life actually has turned out. She is married,and he is alone.The tune is anthemic but the sadness is genuine and quite affecting.

"Let's all meet up in the year 2000. Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown?" The next line is a child-like "Meet two o'clock by the fountain down the road", and immediately conjures up that old world without mobile phones - when people actually had to arrange times and places or would pass like ships in the night.

The narrator laments the time that has slipped away, and the strange domesticity of the lyrics referencing "wood-chip on the wall" immediately anchor the song in a long lost world of childhood and old Britain. This is a strange, melodic and haunting story; I would classify it technically as a lament.

The promotional video is a work of art which begins to tell a different but parallel story, opening with the words "Once upon a time". The viewer is catapulted straight into the saga of a young man and a young woman living in parallel worlds, who meet and mate following an encounter in a neon-floored nightclub.

This video is set in a seedy Seventies landscape, and silhouettes of the band are superimposed on the images like ghosts. The young man "pulls" a girl a night club and takes her back to his place, but soon questions whether they will ever meet again. As the metaphorical and literal climax of the video approaches, the camera pans to a biography of George Best (the iconic but alcoholic Belfast footballer) that is totemically displayed on the mantelpiece. Are the protagonists in this video embracing glory or tragedy - who knows?

Pulp remains, for my money the single most talented and under-rated band of the Nineties, I remember they played this song when I saw them live in 1996, and it was just sublime.

Get ready for a Proustian rush as certain as if you'd scoffed a whole tray of madeleines.The opening beats of this track propel you into the heart of Nineties London, to a world as reckless and crazy and open to possibility as Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree must have enjoyed at the time.

The city is depicted here as a personality, no less forceful than the guardian angel of the RHCP's Under the Bridge, except that the city here is a capricious and wilful god. The synthesised rhythm pulsates like a hearbeat, rigidly fatalistic and relentless. The crowd in the arena bay for blood. The crowds want to watch lives and loves crash and burn."London loves, the way people just fall apart". I am reminded of the London mobs that used to cheer the public executions at Tyburn,

The concept of elasticity ("the mind is elastic") powers the "speeding heart" which is the propulsive force in this track. The lyrics cleverly elide the "mystery of the speeding car" with the "mystery of the speeding heart". So in this song, the city itself is organic, with traffic circulating like blood along arterial routes. The traffic news bulletin that segues into the final moments of the track is therefore actually a kind of love letter to the city. The song is a tribute to the city and its immense creative and destructive power, a cauldron that creates and also burns.

Now if only I had been a fly on the wall in the Goldsmiths College bar back in 1988...

"On" is one of the most elusive and catchy slices of Britpop. Sonya Madan is gifted with a captivating and piercing voice and her verbal dexterity, lyrical skewering and sarcastic anger of this album form a perfect soundtrack to the mid-Nineties. The French language version of this track is the best, as existential angst and the desire to escape sound so much better in the Romance language. The track is of course the introduction and perfect foil to "King of the Kerb"; an anthem of epic proportions and the flip side to the dark vision of Suede's "The Asphalt World" which deals with similar subject matter. Glen Johannson's guitar work is superb throughout.