The Nineties Danny Baker's Rockin' Decades

Tonight, our tuneful time machine through the rock decades

stops to look around the 1990s.

The 1990s - I know! That was, like, 20 minutes ago, right?

Well, I'm afraid not, shipmates. Think on this.

The current all-conquering heroes of the charts

turning on the youth just like Elvis, The Beatles, and Bowie did

are One Direction. Every member of One Direction

sat out part of the rocking '90s because...

they weren't born.

Well, sit down, Harry, Niall, Zayn, Liam and Louis.

Tonight, we'll tell you what you missed.

This programme contains some strong language.

MUSIC: "Step On" by Happy Mondays

# Back with another one of those block rockin' beats. #

Oh, my, to be young and British and independent in the 1990s,

when Britpop reigned

and rock fell under the narcotic spell of dance music,

when Happy Mondays acted daft,

when Radiohead light-heartedly shared a joke, when...

oh, you get the drift.

Was that how it was, though? A decade of two halves?

The first spent dancing, the second playing earnest rock?

Well, I and three other happy-go-lucky hipsters

intend to dissect the decade

and stress-test the notion that the '90s might just have been

the last great decade of British rock.

To this end, I will be joined

by the singer of the very Britpopular Sleeper,

an award-winning toppermost comedian

and the head rock and pop critic of The Guardian.

There's Louise Wener, once of Sleeper and now a novelist.

Music critic Alexis Petridis.

And comedian and occasional musician, scintillating musician,

Josie Long.

Let me test where you people are coming from for a start.

Louise, where was your local record shop?

The '90s are about the last time you could possibly have had one.

I remember buying Nirvana's Nevermind.

I was at home at my parents' house after uni.

-And it was in Barkingside in Essex.

-Yeah.

And I went in and I bought Nevermind.

I remember queuing up for it, went in and the guy behind the counter said,

"Take this home and play it really loud."

LAUGHTER

-"OK."

-"I will."

And was it a chain? Our Price, or one of those?

I don't think it was a chain. It was a little independent shop.

-It seems like...

-It seems like a lifetime away.

I played it and I did think it was the most brilliant thing.

He wasn't wrong. Alexis, your local record shop?

Would have been initially, the first part of the '90s,

I still lived at home so it would have been Record House in Amersham,

-which I assume is long gone.

-And a wonderfully groovy dell, was it?

No, but you could order anything, so it didn't matter what was in stock.

You could ask for stuff. They had an indie section.

It was like a local record shop.

And what were you, were you precocious?

Did you like stuff you shouldn't have liked?

-Were you ordering Sonny Rollins records?

-Yeah...yeah.

I don't like to...because you sound like a total dickhead.

No! That's what we're like and hopefully the audience, too.

Erm, I came across my music teacher from my secondary school on Twitter

earlier this year and he verified a story that I've always told.

I said, "I think you used to teach me music

"when I was 12 or 13." He was like, "Oh, yeah.

"You were the one that liked The Velvet Underground."

-So that was my great claim to awful, precocious...

-Well done.

..arseholery.

No, that's good, because I'm fed up of people, you know,

trying to pretend this ain't tremendous fun.

This is a free zone from all that sort of stuff.

Josie, where was your local record shop?

A record shop in Orpington, where I grew up, called Elpees.

-And it was spelt E-L-P-E-E-S.

-Of course it was.

-I didn't know what that meant.

-LAUGHTER

That's the guy who runs the shop - Mike Elpees.

It's a light shop now, I know that. It sells lights.

But it used to have this thing where you could sell unwanted CDs

and get cash back at the store.

I remember, all it was in 1995 or '96,

was a big pile of Kula Shaker albums.

Like that was the currency you couldn't sell, you couldn't get rid.

And of course, Kula Shaker was the son of, erm...

-Hayley Mills.

-That's right.

And that's cheered up all the family, hearing that...

That's not to do it down. It was a very popular record.

I think it was one that everyone had a copy or something.

It shipped gold but was returned platinum.

So, where to begin our geological dig

into the heart of rock's dance decade?

Well, that's a no-brainer, ol' Bez, my boy.

Let me take you back to a reclaimed toxic waste site in Widnes.

The 1990s began with, arguably, the gig of the decade.

The Stone Roses at Spike Island would be championed

as the Woodstock for the E generation.

# I am the resurrection

# And I am the light... #

They and their 27,000 pals convened at, appropriately enough,

the birthplace of the British chemical industry.

Here was the band of the moment from the city of the moment.

Manchester - previously famous for the Busby Babes,

Elsie Tanner and The Hollies,

was seemingly able to produce an endless list of bands.

# Don't need no skin tights in my wardrobe today... #

Some baggy, some druggy,

many great.

Inspiral Carpets, The Charlatans, The Mock Turtles

and, of course, the "bit too" Happy Mondays.

# Don't know what you saw

# But you know it's against the law

# And you know that you want some more

# I've heard it all before... #

When record contract disputes put The Stone Roses out of action,

there was a vacuum waiting to be filled

and a new wave of, let's be frank, shy and indolent bands

known as shoegazers began to emerge,

like Chapterhouse, here singing their melancholy classic Pearl,

which thundered all the way up to number 67 in the charts.

# ..to know her. #

Wake up, kids, here comes Nirvana.

# With the lights out it's less dangerous

# Here we are now

# Entertain us

# I feel stupid

# And contagious

# Here we are now

# Entertain us... #

The success of ABBA-loving Kurt Cobain's angsty thrash rock

as well as Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins

meant that we Brits had to just suck it up and salute Uncle Sam.

A lot of sighing going on around here, of a good kind.

But, Louise, how does that strike you now as somebody who was...

to be part of it, right in the heart of it, that period at the beginning,

did that feel like something that was yours and happening?

Not so much. I mean, I really like... I love Shaun Ryder, he's brilliant,

I love the Happy Mondays. It makes you smile when you see that stuff.

-It does, yeah.

-Morrissey called it "revenge of the daft", I think.

-Did he?

-Which I think is brilliant.

I loved that. I don't really get The Stone Roses that much.

I don't understand the deification of them. It seemed quite orthodox.

Orthodox, chimey guitar.

I now quite like the album, but that huge gap till the next one

and I was on Radio 1, that's how long ago it was,

and I remember when it was announced, it was such reverence

that I must say I referred to them as the po-faces.

There was a little of that going on.

Does it seem more exciting now, looking back,

than you remember it at the time?

I think so. The whole grunge thing seemed exciting

because it came off the back of that shoegazing thing.

All those bands seemed completely allergic to tunes, you know?

Just write a melody. How hard is that?

-And then...

-Very hard, actually.

And then you had the grunge bands, it properly seemed exciting to me.

It really seemed like a brilliant thing and I loved it.

Alexis, I'm seeing it now...

And absolutely, it went past me.

My Lord, I was getting towards the early forties back then.

Now I hear it mainly reflected through edited packages

on football shows, because they're always putting those songs

behind these "Let's see how Everton's season's been."

-Grunge songs? Nirvana?

-Really.

-Yeah.

-I know nothing about football.

On Sky Sports, you'll hear all of that,

all of their things are cut to it.

It's what Kurt would have wanted!

So what...is it your period?

Would you say, "Yes, that's probably where I fit better?"

Yeah, to a certain degree,

because I was about, what, 17, 18.

I was a big fan of shoegazing.

People look down their nose a bit at it now

but I was a huge fan of My Bloody Valentine,

who I don't think were a shoegazing band at all.

Shoegazing was wafty, sort of floaty.

My Bloody Valentine was like having the top of your head ripped off.

I went to see them at the Roundhouse a couple of years ago and there was

this noise bit at the end and it was like everyone

was just trying to prove that they liked the noise.

It's become a bit of an endurance test.

It's rather like, as we record this,

King Crimson's Red, their real loudest, loudest album

has been released on a 23-disc set.

Do you remember it being a movement and being part of something?

I never really felt like I was part of something.

It seemed like there was a lot of... a constant supply of new stuff,

different sounding stuff, so that video we just showed

-covers effectively what, two years?

-Yeah.

And you go pretty quickly from the Happy Mondays

to Chapterhouse to Nirvana,

all of whom sound different from each other.

There was a sense of constant motion in music

that I don't think you necessarily get and things tend to develop

-at a slightly slower pace now.

-Yes, they do.

Josie, just looking at those images, how was it for you?

At that time...I was born in 1982,

so around that time I would have been eight, nine and ten

and I remember Nirvana Nevermind,

my sister had it on tape, and I stole it off her

and that changed my life.

At that time, I liked about four bands.

I liked Queen, Nirvana, Madness

and Sergeant Pepper era The Beatles.

Three out of four ain't bad. Forget all about Queen, thank you.

And then, so...

it was like an identity thing but that ill-informed thing

where you don't have a clue really what anything is

when you're 11, 12, so you cobble together what you think

is a coherent identity for yourself.

So we were like, "We're grungers and we're not townies."

That was the thing we were defined in opposition to.

-What's a townie?

-Someone who goes to Bromley and goes to McDonald's!

LAUGHTER

I'm thinking those wounds aren't closed yet, are they?

We would go to the Virgin Megastore, which is incredibly different.

But I think it was this thing of we decided that we loved music

and other kids at school... things like grunge and stuff.

But there were loads of other bands that, for some reason,

did or didn't pass the test.

For the majority of the British youth over the preceding decades,

rock and pop were pretty much the only forms of music

they took to in number.

Sure, you could dress it up and mess it about

but an older sibling could always say,

"You know what that sounds like? A bit like..."

And that's disappointing.

But suddenly, in the '90s, as Viv Stanshall once said,

there were new horizons in sound.

# Rhythm is a dancer

# It's the soul's companion... #

By the early '90s, dance music was pretty much inescapable in Britain.

MUSIC: "What Time Is Love?" by KLF

From warehouses to fields, forever somewhere off the M1,

right into the charts, where one in three of the Top Ten hits in the UK

was a dance record.

It was only a matter of time before the solid rockers got in on the act.

The Shamen, a sometime indie group from Aberdeen,

diligently put in the necessary personal research.

"This could be psychological dynamite."

# Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode He's Ebeneezer Goode... #

And lo, they reached the highest position in the charts

with Ebeneezer Goode.

Historians still argue over what the song actually meant.

# Very naughty! #

Primal Scream, who had been channelling the MC5,

went to their first rave, dropped E and met DJ whizz, Andy Weatherall.

His remixes gave them a hit album, Screamadelica,

and a hit single, Loaded,

which this time channelled Peter Fonda's voice

from the 1960s film Wild Angels.

We want to be free to do what we want to do.

MUSIC: "Insomnia" by Faithless

As the decade progressed, the government legislated

to restrict rave culture and clubbing moved indoors.

# And you just groan boy

# She said come over, come over

# She smiled at you boy... #

# Back with another one of those block rockin' beats. #

Glastonbury and T In The Park gave ravers fresh air again

when they opened festival dance tents in 1995.

Dance acts were happy to share the stage with rock bands

and show how repetitive beats could move a festival crowd.

The following year, 2.6 million people

tried to buy tickets to see Oasis at Knebworth.

Also sharing the bill were The Prodigy, Dreadzone

and The Chemical Brothers, proving rave culture had well and truly

infiltrated part of the rock mainstream.

Let's not ignore the 300-pound gorilla in the corner of the room.

I've never taken E, so I felt excluded

from the plain ecstasy that the people there did.

I could hear the music, "This is great", but I was plainly not

-completely absorbed in it.

-"On one", as they used to say back in the day.

What did it do? What did it enhance?

Was it absolutely necessary?

I don't think it's ever absolutely necessary. It certainly changed...

you don't want to say this because it sounds dodgy

but the first time I went to a rave

was in glamorous Margate on Margate Pier.

It was called Seduction, in 1991, I think it was.

I took ecstasy for the first time at this rave.

-That experience totally changed my life.

-Why?

Because I hadn't really been interested in dance music before.

To be completely honest, I went because I wanted to take ecstasy

and I completely got the sense of the communal experience,

I completely got what the music was about. It was hardcore,

that era of Charlie by The Prodigy and Sweet Harmony by Liquid

and those records

and it just, it completely changed my perspective on music.

Did it work outside of the E? If you played it in the car the next day,

-did you think, "I don't know what I was thinking"?

-No, no, no.

I think it completely works. It works as pop music.

You know, those records went really high in the charts.

Loads of those records were massive hit singles,

they weren't just being bought by people on ecstasy all the time.

Dance music, to my mind, is the most important thing

that happened in the '90s, full stop, in terms of pop culture.

It totally... it's the most impactful thing.

It had a social impact in a way that no other music did.

-Did dance music do it for you?

-It really didn't, you know.

I feel I missed out on it, looking back and hearing that stuff again.

As Alexis said, it works as pop tunes,

it's just so brilliant on that level.

But if the '80s was all about individualism

and this was all about being the collective mind,

it always felt a bit like group-think for me.

Were you suspicious of it?

I was suspicious that everyone was going out

having the same euphoric experience and ending up

making this sort of shape in a field.

You've got this benign dictator with the lasers and the four-on-the-floor.

It was counter-cultural, but what was it saying?

It just seemed to be saying, "Let's have a hedonistic time",

so I didn't know...

There's worse things to say in music than that.

Of course there is, but at the time for me, looking back,

I feel like I missed out in not experiencing that, frankly.

But at the time for me, it was sort of dividing, it was tribal.

You were either into that or you weren't.

I think it's interesting

because it's the last great rupture in pop culture,

like in the same way punk was and, you know,

required a certain readjustment of your thinking about music

if, like me, you basically came from like an indie background

and got into that,

and I completely immersed myself in dance culture for most of the '90s.

-Were you much of a dancer before it?

-Oh, God, no!

The first rave I went to, I had to borrow my mate's clothes,

my mate's raver clothes in order to go,

because I looked like Bobby Gillespie in that clip.

Tight jeans and pointy boots and '60s hair, and all that.

-He said, "You can't go like that."

-When you danced, how was it?

-I'm not doing it now!

-But did you surprise yourself?

-Was that the liberating thing of it?

-Yeah, absolutely.

It felt totally liberating, it didn't feel like anyone

was going to laugh at you or think you were a dickhead because of,

you know, how you looked, how you were dancing.

It felt like a really....

It's chemically induced and you can say it's false or whatever,

but it felt like a really warm, communal experience.

Absolute precedent because you can see at some of these things

in Hyde Park in the '60s, the Third Ear Band would be on stage,

not one of the great moments, but there's somebody there just...

Yeah, they're wigging out but it's, again,

when you say about the communal,

it's not so much about the band any more and God knows,

perhaps not even the music. I think that's what I thought

when I used to look at those barns and think,

"I can't think of anything worse."

And then if you look at the individual you'd think,

"He couldn't care less, he's having the time of this life."

-It must have felt amazing.

-I thought it was totally like punk as well.

One of my theories about it at the time was that it was like,

if punk was an attempt on some level to break down the boundary

between performer and audience, this had really happened

because the stars were the people who were dancing.

-The DJs weren't until later.

-It's all pirate radio... Sorry.

It's all pirate radio as well when it's all like samples,

it's really taking control and like, going for it.

By 1995, rock 'n' roll was fully 40 years old.

The original bobby socks and youth culture

could now have grandchildren.

40 years of rocking, that's a lot of noise.

That's a lot of hellraising. It's a lot of back catalogue.

And for quite a few modern bands it offered a whole new way

to plunder - I mean, re-imagine a song.

Although invented in the 1970s,

it was the 1990s which became the decade of the CD.

Record companies wisely persuaded us to pack up our vinyl collections

and repurchase them all over again on compact disc.

By the early '90s,

70% of all music sales in the UK were from back catalogues.

# I was always thinking....

Rock's entire musical heritage became easily accessible.

And once rediscovered, it was reinterpreted.

# But only love can break your heart

# Try to be sure right from the start. #

The biggest selling single of the decade

was Wet Wet Wet's cover of a '60s hit by The Troggs.

# Love is all around me... #

Oh, no!

# There she goes

# There she goes again... #

The La's were one of the first in a long line of '90s groups

to evoke The Beatles,

obsessively sourcing vintage mixing desks for the perfect sound.

# This feeling that remains... #

# I'm free to be whatever I... #

Oasis were fans of The Beatles and, we presume, The Rutles too.

# How sweet

# To be an idiot... #

Which contained Neil Innes, who was a big fan of The Beatles.

Don't laugh, that's actually the shape of Neil's head!

# No more heroes any more... #

And as the old line between homage and stealing became blurred,

some people took exception.

# ..But I'm lazy.. #

The Stranglers sued Elastica for plagiarism.

A sample from The Andrew Oldham Orchestra was "overused"

by The Verve.

It was a bittersweet success when 100% of their royalties

were awarded to The Rolling Stones, who wrote the original.

# We are young, we run green... #

As well as musical similarities,

there were noticeable stylistic comparisons.

As a result of all this borrowing, the '90s became the first decade

when the same music appealed to both teenagers and their parents.

Which doesn't sound like a good thing, Josie,

and yet you said the '80s meant nothing to you.

-Did you discover the '60s or the '70s before the '80s?

-Yeah, I did.

My mum had a record collection that was quite modest

but I used to go through...

I got Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob Dylan.

Erm, this Ella Fitzgerald Live In London record.

It's still one of my favourites ever, it's incredible.

-She forgets the lyrics...

-Yes, I've heard that.

-She's so charming.

-It's amazing. Er, like Donovan.

-Oh, well done, your mum.

But she had loads of Rolling Stones,

but for some reason I took against the Rolling Stones

at about age eight or nine and I've never been able to get over that.

-Really?

-I've always been like,

"Nah, don't like them." I have no idea why.

She had Jethro Tull, loads of cool stuff. So I had all of that stuff.

That was some of the first music I found.

When my parents were out I'd put it on the record player and be like,

-"What is this?"

-Well done.

It must have been a bit of a drag when a song was a hit

and somebody else would say,

"That's a cover version, let me play the original."

Nobody wants that either, though.

Me and friend had this game this summer.

There's a band, Tame Impala, now who sounds like '60s R&B, I think.

They did a cover of Remember Me, which goes,

-# Remember me... #

-Blue Boy.

Yeah. But Blue Boy did it - it's just samples from another song.

If you were to listen to Blue Boy, the '90s dance song,

the Tame Impala, the 2012 cover, and the samples it's from,

you would assume that Tame Impala is the original

and Blue Boy was the cover

and the third one was some sort of reinterpretation.

And I think it's kind of lovely

that that was the start of boundaries being blurred like that.

I mean, I find it both refreshing and obviously comforting.

Tame Impala, particularly, when I first heard them, you think,

"Wow, Man are back." There's a reference.

I don't know whether people care any more like we did

about owning stuff like that.

You, plainly, Alexis, had more of an idea of heritage.

Yes, to a certain degree.

But I think there's a fundamental change in the way that,

and it's partly down to sampling

and partly down to something else, I think,

in the way rock music and pop music work, and it happens in the '90s.

Up to that point for the most part, rock and pop music tries to ensnare

an audience by means of novelty, it's something new,

you've not heard anything like this before. You know what I mean?

In the '90s, and it's something that still goes on now,

it starts to ensnare an audience by familiarity,

there's something comforting about it.

It sort of recalls stuff you've heard in the past.

Oasis sound a bit like Slade or whatever.

You know, that kind of thing.

I don't quite know what brought that on.

Partly, it's down to sampling,

partly it's down to the sort of growth in this notion of a,

growth in this notion of nostalgia.

Is there an argument there, it's also, perhaps,

symptomatic of an exhaustion of the form?

Is there much more you can do with it?

That doesn't disenfranchise what they're doing

but they hear it and think,

"That may not be perfected upon. We can do it differently, but..."

I think that's a really dangerous thing to think, though,

if you're a band. As people have been constantly told

since the mid-90s,

if you set out your belief that, basically,

all the great things have happened in the past

and the best you can hope to do as a new band

is Xerox something from the past

in the hope that a bit of the magic will somehow transfer itself to you,

if you tell kids that enough, they'll believe it.

That's the worst.... That's the worst thing that I've heard.

It is, but by the same token, nobody said it would last for ever,

what we are discussing as rock music,

in the same way as vaudeville or silent movies, or even television.

It can be finite.

On the one hand, you've got this flood of information

and you've got access to every record ever released at all times,

so that's incredible and intimidating.

Obviously, there's more and more things stacked up

but there's always going to be people who want to make music

and be creative and there's infinite complexity to that.

But at the same time, if anyone had ever told me

when I was younger, "You're going to grow up

"and people are not going to play or know who Frank Sinatra is",

I'd have said, "It's too big." It's happening.

Coming to Louise, when you first started making records,

were you aware...

"Does this sound new or am I too much a product of my influences?"

I don't think you think about that so much.

You sort of look at more about what's going on around you

and you start to form part of the movement

that you see other people doing

and you start to feel a part of the movement.

But I think part of that nostalgia

and that celebration of British music was a reaction against grunge,

wasn't it, as well as all these teenagers that won't tidy their room

making alienated music.

You know, it's all, like, complaint rock, they called it,

and then the British response was,

"Look at our heritage, look what we've got", which is great,

but then you had these well-behaved teenagers

that would come down from their bedrooms

to sit with their mum and dads to share the same music,

which is kind of nice, but maybe this was the first generation

that grew up with their parents' records that were great.

If you grew up and your parents were playing The Beatles

and The Stones and The Kinks and XTC and all that kind of stuff,

then it's quite hard to then say, "Actually, that was shit,

"let's go and have something else", because it was great.

But your initial approach to making records, who did you want to be?

-When I first started ever? Bananarama.

-There you go!

-Yeah.

-That's pretty cool.

-Yeah. That's what I wanted to do.

I was pure pop when I was growing up.

Is there footage of you perhaps in a Bananarama-eqsue mode anywhere?

We've burnt it.

LAUGHTER

For much of the '80s, the roaring rhetoric of punk rock

was still too raw to be reasoned with.

Old farts and past fashions were still only fit to be sneered at.

But in the '90s, The Beatles, The Kinks

and even Deep Purple were heard as if fresh.

New bands said, "You know, you guys, don't be modern.

"Do what you used to do. You're brilliant! Oh, and so is Britain!

"Oh, and so are we!"

MUSIC: "Cool Britannia" by Bonzo Dog Band

Cool Britannia, the "UK is OK" brand,

was first launched in the Swinging '60s,

and celebrated by the Bonzo Dog Band.

# Cool Britannia

# Britannia, you are cool

# Take a trip

# Britons ever, ever, ever shall be hip

# Hit me, hit me! #

After that, the idea sat it out for a couple of decades,

until the Brit hit the fan all over again.

Now there was Britpop, Brit cinema, Brit fashion, Britt Ekland,

and even Brit art.

Everybody seemed to be everyone else's chart,

swept up in a typhoon of media swoon.

Look, there's Damien Hirst,

directing a video for his friends Blur.

Britpop bands thumbed their noses at grungey Americana,

and focused instead on the more exciting aspects of British life.

# Cigarettes and alcohol. #

# I want to live like common people

# I want to do whatever common people do. #

To be cool, you had to be a working class person,

or at least do a thundering good impression of one.

You could make videos in supermarkets, like Sleeper and Pulp.

# I took her to a supermarket

# I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere

# So it started... #

British comedy, which was, of course, the new rock'n'roll,

was not to be left out.

Baddiel and Skinner sang that English football was coming home.

This was the era of lads behaving badly,

and enough Union Jack bunting to circle the globe.

# You got to roll with it

# You got to take... #

The music press took to stoking the fires of a North-South feud...

The Manchester band Oasis

and their archrivals Blur released new singles today.

# You're taking me over... #

..and declaring a band such as Suede

to be approaching the best in the world,

even before they've released a record.

# Moving on up, you're moving on out... #

Even Tony Blair, who probably hadn't thought about rock

since quitting his college band Ugly Rumours,

invited Noel Gallagher back to his place for a drink,

and possibly a jam.

For a year or so, Union Jacks were inescapable.

The Spice Girls jumped aboard

when Geri Halliwell's sister made her a dress for the '97 Brit Awards.

All from tea towels, too!

And what news of the Dane?

Well, he was flaunting an Alexander McQueen Union Jack coat,

but sensing the suspension was beginning to go a bit

on the Brit bandwagon, Bowie was now down with the drum and bass crew.

You know, floundering a bit.

# Wonder you. #

-Alexis, here we are, 1990s. Britpop.

-Yeah.

There's a really interesting thing that happens to Britpop.

If you look at that... You showed the famous cover of Select magazine

with the guy from Suede and the Union Jack.

The bands that were featured in that issue of Select,

the only ones that went on to become a huge Britpop band were Pulp,

and all the other bands, Pulp included,

were not... They were interested in the past, they were interested in

looking back at Britain's past,

but it definitely was not in this Union Jack waving,

"Whoa! Wasn't 1966 amazing", good old, you know,

"We won the World Cup." It was a sort of really interesting,

I thought, interrogation of stuff about the early '70s.

It was a lot murkier, it was a lot darker. You get a hint of that.

-Who are you talking about, then?

-The Auteurs, Denim.

They're not much thought about these days, but, you know,

Pulp did it to a certain degree.

Common People is held up as this big Britpop hit.

It's not some sort of flag waving...

This is a serious song about the class system in Britain.

It's one of the few, in inverted commas, "protest songs"

to come out at that time,

and there's a really intriguing, slightly depressing shift, I think,

in the mid '90s. Initially, you have bands looking back at Britain's past

in a slightly... Looking at it slightly askance and going,

"That's a bit peculiar" and sort of picking at it a little bit.

And somehow, by the middle of the '90s,

that just becomes waving a Union Jack

-and "Isn't everything wonderful?"

-Yeah.

But do we blame... We don't blame,

but do we look at the bands for that,

or because rock and pop had become industry, everyone thought,

"That's what we're going to sell.

"We can sell this angle." Louise, by the time you're up and running

and making records and doing all the shows,

did you feel part of anything, or even you were being, perhaps, pushed

-towards a certain style, look, movement?

-It felt mostly

like a media construct, I think, because I don't think...

Like you said, we weren't all going home

waving our Union Jacks in front of the telly.

It just wasn't about that. I think it was a slight re-examination of what

it meant to be English and the notion that, instead of writing pop music

or rock music which escapes the suburbs and all that stuff,

you could actually re-examine it,

write about it, write lyrics about what the experience was like

and you could be sort of parochial, I suppose, on some level

and that was acceptable and it was OK

and you could hark back to, again, a lot of that nostalgic stuff.

But did it come naturally if you wrote upbeat,

or did you feel a pressure

to release something of a piece with the country's mood?

When we began, we were quite grungey

and it moved, became more and more sort of Britpop,

and I think there was certainly that pressure to do that,

and everyone became more and more cartoonish and concentrated,

until you get to that Country House video

and suddenly it's like Benny Hill, isn't it? It's oompah music.

And all of a sudden, you find yourself pressured

-to do goofy sketches on TFI Friday.

-Exactly!

-Who wrote those?

-I apologised before the show began. It's all right.

Josie, how do you look at Britpop?

Does it resonate with you quite as much as it does

with everybody else here?

Yeah, I mean, definitely, and weirdly, considering, like, the way

that, I suppose,

what my identity was at the time, I think I thought I was riot grrrl,

but I didn't really know any riot grrrl bands

and I was really into, like, zines.

I was into little bits of culture

I'd managed to find in Orpington without the internet, you know,

so, like, I was really into zines

and I was really into small bands up in London. So I really liked...

I liked Kenickie a lot,

and I liked things that were kind of just that little bit more...

I suppose, like, smaller scale.

Was there enough around for you to find a nourishing base of music,

-or did you feel left out of it?

-No! We were so excited by it.

Like, there were so many kind of...

Because we were just down the train line

from Bromley coming up to London, we were just so lucky

that we could go to little gigs at the Borderline

and the London Astoria too, and you would find out things

and then you would get the NME and you would find out another gig that

you could go to and stuff like that, so it was actually one of the things

that was less prohibitive, because you could only book tickets

for gigs if one of your parents had a credit card and would let you.

Whereas if you're at a smaller gig and it's three or four quid,

-you could potentially get to that.

-And of course,

you may have felt a little pressure from the incredible recent

pop heritage of that Bromley set,

the Bromley set who were huge in punk rock,

and then with the whole New Romantic scene,

that Bromley line you were travelling had a heritage.

We thought that we were the best for being from there.

We were like, "David Bowie's from here, so we're the best."

-We were just teenagers doing nothing.

-Siouxsie Sioux, you know...

old Billy Broad, who went on to have a few hits himself.

We were into that.

But it's so funny as well,

because that ended quite clearly in about 1981,

and then we're there in 1997 like,

"Yeah, we're all part of that." But, you know.

Part of the Swinging Britain thing, and here's the extraordinary thing.

It remained British. It did not conquer America

as a previous British fever had.

Why do you reckon that was?

Um... I don't really know. I think...

Pulp, Oasis couldn't get arrested in America...

You can see that Pulp is something that's very bound up

with kind of, a certain kind of arcane Britishness

that's not going to play in Ohio - it just isn't.

You've got to know these kind of references they're making

to quite arcane '70s telly and things like that. That's not going to work.

Why Oasis didn't take off, I've absolutely no idea

because Americans could have had the pick of British bands,

they all went over there.

They didn't like their stroppiness very much.

They didn't like Oasis's stroppiness.

Also, if we're looking at an antecedent being in Slade,

they didn't happen in America either.

By 1997, though, the Britpop party was still in session

but to be fair, being so upbeat all the time can be exhausting.

Tell me about it.

If rock was going to emerge vital and strong into the millennium,

it was going to have to sober up a bit, and sober it got.

Aided and abetted,

as Phil Daniels had so ironically bellowed in Parklife,

aided a bit by the by the old Vorsprung Durch Technik -

advancement through technology.

# Things can only get better... #

When the fizz of Britpop faded in 1997,

a less joyous mood seemed to take hold.

# Like a cat in a bag

# Waiting to drown... #

Ironically, many of these more sober-sounding bands

who had watched Britpop from the sidelines

would go on to be more successful

than most of their red, white and blue-bedecked cohorts.

# Know I'll see your face again... #

After a dry afternoon at Glastonbury in 1999,

Travis caused an almighty downpour.

# Why does it always rain on me? #

They embraced the moment, though, and each raindrop signalled a sale.

The MO of such bands was businesslike and unflashy.

The North/South divide was over.

These bands came from Glasgow, Wigan, Birmingham, Liverpool.

45% of them were outright Welsh!

Perhaps the most well-known of the Cool Cymru exponents

were the Manic Street Preachers.

After the strange disappearance of their guitarist Richey Edwards,

they regrouped to find even greater success

playing to 80,000 fans on New Year's Eve in 1999.

As pre-millennial tension manifested itself,

the music industry was grappling with a new digital future.

# No alarms and no surprises... #

For many, Radiohead's OK Computer

was one of the greatest achievements of the decade.

Appropriately, singer Thom Yorke said

the album had been inspired by the speed of the '90s.

And few would have predicted that Coldplay,

a band who sold just 50 copies of their debut EP,

would soon become one of the biggest bands in the world.

This was the dawning of yet another new age for British rock.

# I swam across

# I jumped across for you... #

For some, it represented phenomenal growth and opportunity.

For others, it was the end of an era.

# Cos you were all yellow... #

And I don't know about you, Josie,

it may have been the last twitching of the corpse

where perhaps a youth was in charge of its culture.

After that, it dissipated somewhat, no?

You see, I'm such an optimist

but I think about things like grime music now

and I think about how many young people

are making their own music electronically and just how...

I feel like it's always there.

But where's the tension not to?

Up until perhaps that period, there was a resistance by the culture.

Really, pop music? But now, it's yeah, sure. Here's your grant.

Grant?! There's no such thing!

No, nowadays there's the big, really, really...

where all the money goes to the massive acts

and then there's everything else for you to find

and there's loads of people out there doing things

where they know they can't make a living from it but they love it,

where they know they are battling all kinds of circumstances

to make something incredible.

How do you view that change from "It's a great party"

to "Let's sober up and try and do something serious"?

Forced jollity, you know, wears on your nerves after a while.

Um, that's one reason why it happened

and if you look at that latter part of the '90s,

the rise of bands like Travis and Coldplay,

I think what that is is... there was a fundamental change

in the way "alternative" musicians thought in the '90s.

Up to that point, they were always a bit embarrassed

about being famous or wanting to be successful.

With Oasis, a certain rapaciousness becomes the norm.

"We want to be the biggest band in the world, da da da da..."

It became acceptable, totally.

Before, if an indie band went on Top Of The Pops or a punk band,

you would take the piss a bit or look embarrassed or not go on at all.

We saw Nirvana earlier on, goofing around.

Whereas... so, the quest is for a mass market,

to sell as many records as you possibly can

and inevitably with that,

there's going to be a certain watering down, a certain dilution

because you're not necessarily going to want

to make the most ground-breaking music ever,

that's going to put people off.

That's probably why it went to...

Do you suspect, then, that the musicians we were talking about,

I mean, Radiohead plainly are making the music they want to make,

but do you think they will sit down with a business plan

and a bunch of managers and say "This would be a smart move"?

-I know they do.

-They do now.

To be fair, they did in Britpop as well

and everyone was obsessed with that stuff.

It was a pretence that we didn't care about that stuff

but everyone was sitting down with focus groups,

fretting about their midweeks, it wasn't...

How did you feel about that?

Was there a muso inside you saying, "I'm selling out"?

No, because I didn't grow up like that,

I just wanted to be a pop star and I didn't grow up with that notion.

I find that hard to fit into, that "I have to be credible".

I just wanted to sell lots of records, that's what I wanted to do.

I think part of the come-down

was a response to the whole post-modern thing in Britpop

where everything was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Everything was all a bit wry.

Do we really mean it, do we not really mean it?

And then you get Coldplay and Travis and it was

"I know where I am with that."

It's sentimental balladry, singing about things that are yellow.

It's earnest.

It's earnest, but I can see the attraction to that

off the back of what had gone before.

That irony had increasingly become a cover for doing things

that were actually quite naff.

-If you look at the Country House video, it's crap.

-Of course it is.

-It's a crap, embarrassing video.

-It was at the time, to be honest.

It didn't find...I remember when Country House came out,

they pretty quickly disowned that style

and the public thought, I think,

"This might be a Cockney walk too far."

And so I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

In fairness to Blur, nobody backtracked more dramatically

-or more successfully than Blur did.

-And brilliantly.

And proceeded to make three really credible albums.

Beetlebum came out how long after Country House? Not that long.

'98, the next year.

And yet we're talking as if it was an all-pervading style,

what we've just heard, and of course it isn't.

There were still a lot of old bands being welcomed in,

a lot of mixing going on and there were a bunch of bands

who wonderfully don't quite get it right and pop up and fizz and go -

Shed Seven and all of these groups...

Kula Shaker, who used to come through TFI Friday

and just have a go.

Josie, who took you into the millennium

-and you thought, "I thought that was going to last for ever"?

-Oh, gosh.

For me, there's a lot of things from 1996 to 1999

that I was so in love with and it was like a hard lesson for me

to learn that not every band I loved was going to make it.

And also that thing of the injustice of it,

"These people are incredible, why are they not number one?"

and not being able to understand, bands like Strangelove.

I went to see Strangelove at the London Astoria

and I got on stage with them.

He got loads of people on stage with him and he was whispering,

"I love you all"

and it was one of the most incredible experiences of me,

being a teenager, because it felt beyond our dreams

to be on stage and I expect people still appreciate them

but they aren't one you'd be like,

"In the '90s, there was Strangelove",

and then the Longpigs, I loved.

Richard Hawley was their guitarist.

I could list you 10 or 15 or 20 bands that were so meaningful to me.

I thought Honeycrackle were going to be enormous.

In fact, I saw a member of them the other day

and I bought some laces off him...

I think that is an eternal motif, where you think of this period

and you can try and back who the winners are going to be.

Is there anyone who's come through to rule the world?

Did you see it coming with Coldplay?

Did anyone see it coming, particularly with Radiohead?

The thing people forget is that there was a stage, Louise,

where Radiohead were seen as kind of a joke in Britain.

Creep was laughed at.

He had stupid hair and they never looked right.

And they went to America and got big in the States.

It was like, hold on...

I remember hearing the band, having completely dismissed them.

I was working in an office at the time on a Saturday

and somebody brought The Bends in and I thought, "This is really good.

"It's Radiohead!" And you could tell there was a degree of motion.

I had no idea Radiohead would go on to do what they've done.

I went to see Radiohead last year at the O2

and without a shadow of doubt, it was the least commercial music

I have ever heard played in a venue that size.

This is the biggest venue in Europe.

They didn't play any sort of classic material,

they didn't play... I think they played one song off OK Computer.

It was all new, it was all really experimental and strange.

I didn't think they would do that, no.

The pressure to be successful was pretty much inescapable in the '90s,

yet despite the stultifying effect of this way of thinking,

there still remained performers determined to do their own things

in their idiosyncratic way and in doing so - perversely -

some of them also became uniquely successful.

MUSIC: "3am Eternal" by the KLF

Self-confessed purveyors of "stadium house music", the KLF

brought a goodly dose of cynicism to the business end of pop.

One of the biggest-selling singles acts of the decade,

they also wrote the manual, How To Have A Number One The Easy Way.

Here they are, giving their last ever performance

at the Brits in '92,

after which, in a magnificently insane gesture,

or possibly Situationist protest,

they set fire to £1 million of their royalties

on the Scottish Isle of Jura.

# My lovely lovely lovely horse

# My lovely horse... #

Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy wonderfully reminded us

that pop could be both clever and really funny,

co-writing the equine-themed, sort-of Eurovision entry

for Father Ted and Dougal.

A flurry of gifted foreigners rather sweetly believed that Britain

might be a nice place to set up shop, and we duly rewarded them

by giving them hits.

Iceland's Bjork perplexed and enchanted.

Closer to home, Bristol took over from Manchester

as Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky

got intensely moody with trip hop.

# Really hurt me baby

# Really cut me baby

# How can you have a day without a night? #

But fellow Bristolian PJ Harvey thrillingly chose to deliver

intensity of a very different kind.

Her '90s albums established her as one British artist who would

continue to intrigue her audience well into the next century.

# 50 foot Queenie

# 50 foot Queenie. #

Louise, watching the outro of that,

do you think in some ways it can be easier to be a maverick

than it can to be just someone who tours and writes hit records?

Because always, the benefit of the doubt

is given to the uncompromising.

Yeah, good point, you can stand out and plough your own furrow,

do your own thing, you don't have to join in with anything.

"That's how they are" - given the freedom.

And that must have been hugely liberating, I think.

Although watching that and seeing the KLF burn the money,

it just seemed like such a brutal, nihilistic thing in retrospect.

It's one of those things everyone's glad they did,

just because it's a great piece of lore,

but every time you actually see it going into the furnace

and knowing how members of the KLF feel about it since,

you just think, "Oh, my Lord!"

I just went, "Ooh! I haven't seen that for a long time."

It's an old expression, but is that rock'n'roll?

No! It's really...

Your face, particularly, during that was...

Coming back from it, away from the mavericks and stuff,

you - am I right here? -

have more respect for someone who can write hit after hit?

No, not at all.

I think it's both, I just don't feel so judgemental about it.

People that do the pop thing...

it's a skill in and of itself, and people like PJ Harvey,

I think is marvellous, obviously, and, you know...

Did you and do you envy anyone from that period,

you thought, "That's the way to have done it"?

I think someone like PJ Harvey,

I don't think I appreciated at the time, but in retrospect

like much more than I did at the time.

Just having the balls and the confidence to say,

"We're doing our own thing and all be damned".

To have this confidence to stand up and do that is a fabulous thing.

Is that a bravery that record companies, as they were,

could accommodate? And would you have been able to get away with it

if you weren't selling records, Alexis?

If you're not selling records, you can't get away with anything,

-cos you get dropped.

-In the '70s, you could.

I suppose so, yeah. Certainly, the Britpop era was the last time

I can remember record companies just signing...

it was a like a bit of a gold rush.

I remember a band called Earl Brutus - brilliant band,

got signed to Island, a major label.

This was not a group that anybody in their right minds thought

was going to sell any quantities of records.

Most of their gigs used to end up in fights.

The two amazing bits of stagecraft they had,

they had one of those revolving signs

that you get outside of garages,

and on one side, it said "Music" and on the other it said "Chips".

I saw another gig where they played in front of a huge funeral wreath,

where they'd made words out of a funeral wreath, "Dad" or whatever,

and it said "Fuck off" behind the stage.

-Who's this? Earl Brutus?

-Magnificent band.

And I remember going to the gig,

there was Island going, "Look at this band we've signed."

And it ended up in a fight with the audience, it was complete chaos.

You just thought... On one hand, I'm very glad they gave them money

because their records are amazing and brilliant pieces of art.

They sound like the Deviants of their day.

There is a certain element of that, yeah.

They're like the Deviants crossed with Mud.

LAUGHTER

Magnificent band.

Josie, do you see someone doing that and think,

"I couldn't do it but thank God someone is."

Definitely, absolutely.

I was thinking, when I was a teenager,

there was a band called David Devant & His Spirit Wife

who did really silly, funny, performance art stuff on stage.

He had this thing where he poured a big vat of custard over himself.

I don't even know why you would... and he had loads of wheat stalks

that he sheathed at one point during it,

-and he had an LED, LCD, I don't know...

-The dot thing?

Yeah, it was like a ticker.

And it would say things across the top of it during the songs.

Sounds like an episode of Tiswas or something!

It was, it was like Saturday morning TV!

And were there records behind this?

Yeah. Work, Lovelife, Miscellaneous - classic album!

Oh! Now, that, I would hazard a guess, has gone,

because I don't think anyone is going to say,

"parlay my money up with your eccentricity,

"and do what you want with it" - is anyone going to do that?

There is a huge market, I think for...

Yeah, but no-one's going to - record companies are scared

and understandably so. And these are timid times,

and you're not going to give money to Earl Brutus

or whatever the millennial equivalent of Earl Brutus is.

Janelle Monae is really experimental and really successful.

I'm not knocking her, but there is a commercial potential in her records,

she's got duets with Prince...

Always with us, because I don't think

you can always tell a studied eccentric from...

whether it's a Wild Willy Barrett, a Viv Stanshall,

an Arthur Brown, right up to your Earl Brutus there.

The late Nick Sanderson, the lead singer.

There you go. So I don't think it's a choice to go

into the record industry.

It used to be somewhere where it was their last resort,

perhaps would like to think it still is. Here's the bit I like best.

After all the examination, it's like taking off tight shoes.

Having coolly dissected the decade in question,

here come the warm jets. It's our flight case to the future.

Regular viewers of all three shows will be well aware of what it is.

We ask each of our guests to put an album and a piece of memorabilia

in it that best describes for them the decade we've been talking about.

Josie first.

I've got Belle and Sebastian, If You're Feeling Sinister.

-Why?

-Because I love this album and I still love this album,

I love every track on it.

Also for me, Glasgow in the 1990s - you've got Belle & Sebastian,

Arab Strap, Mogwai, the Delgados, Bis, Urusei Yatsura,

that's like so... I'm barely touching on it,

I feel like Glasgow, now still, but since forever

has been the most exciting cultural city.

Thank you for bringing Belle & Sebastian, somebody needed to.

What have you got there?

These are albums... Can I say I've never liked the Spice Girls,

this was just from the Pound Shop and I've never covered it!

This is my albums with pictures and gig tickets of gigs I went to

when I was a kid. This one here, I'm really proud of.

-All your tickets!

-Helen Love and Period Pains, bands I really loved.

-You are the indie-est person I've ever come across!

-Nada Surf...

David Devant and His Spirit Wife! Look at this one - Urusei Yatsura,

Helen Love, Superstar Disco Club, Strangelove...

If we had a red button facility, that's an entire programme there,

Josie goes through... Including Helen Love and the Period Pains!

Sebadoh, Elliott Smith, Hefner, Quasi, that is a bill!

LAUGHTER

Alexis, what have you brought?

I've brought in Be Here Now by Oasis.

What, no Helen Love and the Period Pains?

Alas, no. Is this my favourite album of the '90s? No.

But if you want to know what Britain was like in 1997,

a year where this country temporarily appeared

to lose its mind in the wake of the death of Princess Diana,

this is the album that soundtracks it.

It's the sound of coked-up stupidity on a mammoth scale.

Is it any good?

It's perversely enjoyable, in a kind of gonzo way.

But, just as a kind of, as an artefact of the '90s

just sort of tipping over the edge into complete insanity.

What's your memorabilia?

It's just some stuff from the Heavenly Sunday Social,

which was a club I went to when I first came to London.

It used to be on a Sunday night, the Chemical Brothers -

the Dust Brothers, they were then called - were the resident DJs.

It was a sort of meeting point of dance music

and the nascent Britpop scene. It felt like Swinging London.

-That was the moment...

-And you have Polaroids to prove it?

-Absolutely.

-Well done.

That's one thing I could never get my head round.

Louise?

I've got Garbage, from 1995,

and in the midst of Britpop which was all happy and positive and lovely,

this was this dark album I absolutely loved.

And I loved Shirley Manson,

cos she seemed to be in a permanent state of premenstrual tension.

She was constantly on day 26 of her cycle, which really appealed to me!

It seems to be for both genders,

comes with the territory being called Manson, one way or another.

Great songs, they still stand up, I love the darkness of it

-and the toughness of it.

-Yeah. And as a piece of...?

My memorabilia is this T-shirt, I felt like I wore it

for the whole of 1995, it says "Another female-fronted band" on it

because at the time, female-fronted bands were a thing

to be put in a zoo to be looked at, "Ooh, girl with a guitar!"

-It also smells of Britpop.

-Does it?

-Yeah. Chip shops, greyhounds, sugary tea.

-Cocaine...

Great T-shirt - I suspect even as this goes out,

somebody is now manufacturing copies of that. That's brilliant.

I've tried to keep the thread going through the programmes

we've been doing.

One band who seem to have come up in the '70s programme,

the '80s and '90s programme

and seen it out really well despite the demons they seem to fight

is XTC. Not the most surprising of choices

but it's about time we said, "Well done",

because they are still with us.

This is a pretty good album, it's psychedelia on an old format

but it was recorded in the '90s

and they are still pretty astounding.

Hit after hit after hit, a very undervalued British band.

Britpop even tipped the hat to them.

But the memorabilia, again, straddles all the decades.

This is David Bowie, of course,

who we've had to try and bet without

every time we've had a conversation here,

so it's Bowie, '70s,

and the film he made, on a format none more early '90s, the laserdisc.

And after meeting virtually everybody in television and rock,

I finally got to meet him on TFI Friday,

which I worked on in the '90s

and there it is. He signed it. "Bowie, '99".

If you're going to encapsulate everything we've been talking about,

you can do it in pretty much two words - David Bowie.

Thank you very much for being with us - Louise, Alexis, Josie,

it's been terrific. Thank you.

We began this trilogy of programmes hoping to legitimise

the often derided concept of decades.

But in musical terms at least, you really can hear them.

'20s - trad jazz, '40s - Glenn Miller and bebop.

'50s, Elvis.

In the three decades we've covered - bizarrely if conveniently,

we've seen musical movements really do sometimes break down

into neat ten-year segments, which brings us to today.

What is rock music doing now? Well, listen.

I can't hear a thing.

Well, Mr Bowie?

Well?

# Look into my eyes he tells her

# I'm gonna say goodbye he says yeah

# Do not cry she begs of him goodbye yeah

# All that day she thinks of his love yeah

# They whip him through the streets and alleys there

# The gormless and the baying crowd right there

# They can't get enough of that doomsday song... #