Coming down from ‘Cocaine Socialism’
After their 1990s zenith, Britpop and New Labour were frequently evoked to denigrate each other, until a shifting political and cultural climate brought about a re-valuation of their relationship.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
Content warning: Narcotics; Rape analogy.
There are few episodes in British popular music history that have been so routinely revisited and retold as that of Britpop. This owes in part to the continued ubiquity of its key personnel and advocates in the media three decades on – a topic I have written about elsewhere – but also because of what it signifies: a mid-1990s moment of cultural optimism that intertwined with the rise of New Labour, and the briefly warm embrace between celebrity musicians and social democratic politicians.
I’m less interested in that particular relationship, extensively documented as it has been, as with what came after: the acrimonious aftermath as New Labour became distinctly less cool (though not less electable) before and especially after the turn of the millennium. Not only did Britpop and New Labour continue to be defined in relation to each other; they also set the paradigm for future discussion of music’s relationship with politics in the UK.
This is a long story, and I can only take it so far here – as far as 2015, through the downfall of New Labour, the revival of the Conservatives’ fortunes under David Cameron, and their time in government in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. There is a whole lot more that could be written about how that relationship shifts after 2015, not least with the leadership of 1990s throwback par excellence Keir Starmer; but that will have to wait for another time.
Britpop and New Labour
In the early 1990s, the British music press were in thrall to grunge, a subgenre of American alternative rock typified by abrasive guitars and angry lyrics. Some music journalists, however unable to identify with grunge sonically or thematically, instead began to champion unabashedly British bands, under the sobriquet ‘Britpop’. This term came to denote a wave of groups connected by a tendency to follow an orthodox guitar-bass-drums set-up; by their creation of music that was unashamedly melodic, and often downright anthemic, and heavily indebted to a classical British pop tradition; and by lyrics that strongly evoked ordinary British life.1
The early torchbearers were Suede, whose heavily anticipated debut album topped the charts in March 1993. The following April, Blur – who had responded to a career dip by reinventing their sound and image to effuse a more distinctively British aura – reaped the benefits when their third album Parklife went straight to number one in April 1994. That September, Oasis’s debut album Definitely Maybe likewise topped the album charts.
1995 brought even greater commercial success, with Britpop acts such as Elastica, Supergrass, Blur, Oasis, and Pulp all enjoying number one albums. August 1995 also saw Blur and Oasis fight a bitter and highly publicised battle for number one in the UK singles chart, with Blur’s ‘Country House’ triumphing over Oasis’s ‘Roll with It’. Yet it was Oasis who would become Britain’s most popular band, with their (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? becoming the best-selling album of the 1990s.
By now, Oasis’s Gallagher brothers, Blur’s Damon Albarn and his then girlfriend, Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker were fully fledged celebrities. Their popularity prompted New Labour to seek out their endorsement. Following Tony Blair’s election as party leader in 1994, Labour sought not only to convince the electorate that it could be trusted to run the economy while delivering social justice and better public services, but also that it encapsulated a sense of national optimism rooted in recent British cultural achievements and cast themselves as modernisers in contrast with an increasingly unpopular Conservative government.
During this period Blair’s inner circle courted the likes of Albarn, who attended a meeting with Blair, his director of communications Alistair Campbell and Labour’s deputy leader John Prescott at Westminster in 1995. At this stage Albarn was publicly favourable towards the party, stating his intention to vote Labour in the next election. Noel Gallagher was even more overtly supportive. At the 1996 BRIT awards, which Blair attended to present a lifetime achievement award to David Bowie, Gallagher claimed the then leader of the opposition was one of ‘seven people in this room giving a little bit of hope to young people in this country’ (the other six being Oasis and Alan McGee, head of the band’s label, Creation). Following Labour’s landslide election victory in 1997, both Noel Gallagher and McGee attended a reception at 10 Downing Street, with the former being iconically photographed shaking Blair’s hand.2
However, by the late 1990s the euphoric sounds of Britpop were being supplanted by rock music that was sometimes angrier and often more morose, with bands like Radiohead, the Manic Street Preachers and the Verve sampling critical and commercial success. Within this context, Blur and Pulp, both recoiling from the headiness and hedonism of Britpop’s zenith, released darker, more challenging albums.
Many of Britpop’s second tier bands found themselves unable to repeat their earlier relative commercial success, were dropped by their labels, and split up. Suede, Pulp and Blur also embarked on long hiatuses from the early 2000s, although all three eventually reformed. Oasis, meanwhile, persisted until 2009 and enjoyed commercial success throughout, albeit far less critical acclaim; following their split, Noel Gallagher has continued making music with his new backing band, the High Flying Birds.
The pessimism of late 90s British rock partly reflected disillusionment with the new government. A year after Blair’s election, the New Musical Express published a special issue with Blair and the words ‘Ever had the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ on the cover; inside, numerous bands voiced dissatisfaction with policies like the introduction of university tuition fees and the New Deal, which placed greater obligation on young recipients of unemployment benefits to find work, bringing an end to the option for young bands to survive on the dole until they could secure a record contract.3
That same year, Pulp released a B-side entitled ‘Cocaine Socialism’, in which Cocker took aim at New Labour’s courting of rock stars:
Well, you sing about common people,
And the misshapes and the misfits,
So can you bring them to my party,
Can you get them all to sniff this?
Another Britpop band, Gene, lambasted the party’s perceived betrayal of socialism in their 1999 single ‘As Good as It Gets’, which included the line ‘When red became blue/Hopes denied/Our dreams swept away with the tide’. Meanwhile, Damon Albarn also became publicly disparaging both of the new prime minister and the way he and his team had sought to exploit Britpop.4 Albarn also subsequently became a high-profile critic of the government’s decision to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003.5
Critiquing Britpop and New Labour
Many commentators consequently conflated Britpop’s dalliance with New Labour, and the Blair-Gallagher handshake especially, with its commercial and critical eclipse. Stuart Maconie, an early champion of Britpop in his days with Select magazine, wrote in a 2014 article for the Daily Mirror that ‘When the “mavericks” turned up at No. 10 in Rollers, and when Oasis started making records sounding like Superchunk [a grunge band Maconie had been particularly derisive of], it was time to move on.’6
Likewise, many bands labelled Britpop – willingly or not – during the 1990s came to see the Downing Street reception as emblematic of the excessive media hype that had engulfed British rock’s leading protagonists by the late 1990s. In 2014, the Bluetones’ Mark Morriss told an interviewer: ‘We never asked to become part of the Britpop club – all that Cool Britannia shit: Noel Gallagher shaking hands with Tony Blair. I thought: “It’s not meant to be cosy!”’.7
These narratives often emphasised the incompatibility of party politics and popular music. As Miranda Sawyer, another of Britpop’s original champions, wrote in 2002 that:
In the end, of course, politics and pop culture just don’t mix. Politics can, and should, create a society that cares for young people, educates them, opens their eyes and checks that when they set off on life’s roller-coaster the safety -belts work.
Pop’s job is very different. It provides the all-important soundtrack to the ride, the thrill, the noise, the lager and the shouting. And the identification, the issues, the desire for living, the design for life.8
At other times, Britpop’s engagement with New Labour was posited within a longer history of well-meaning but flawed instances of political activism by popstars, such as the Red Wedge movement of musicians established to support the Labour Party in the 1980s, or Live Aid.9 Albarn himself stated his own desire in 2003 to avoid what he saw as the ‘bullying’ tactics of those two movements, even while decrying a lack of political engagement among his contemporaries.10
More specifically, Britpop’s conflation with New Labour reflected a broader reading of the 1990s as an era when elements of politics and popular culture once wilfully oppositional, not least the Labour Party and independent music, embraced the mainstream. In his 2004 book, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of British Rock, music and politics writer John Harris drew parallels between Blair and Albarn as outsiders within their respective worlds, possessing ‘a fervent desire for power, success and influence, expressed by people who had tired of living the ascetic life of dissidents.’11
Writers’ and musicians’ ensuing expressions of discomfort over Britpop’s dalliance with New Labour reveal the subcultural capital invested in indie music, which as David Hesmondhalgh has argued, relied upon a business model designed to shield artists from the excesses of the market and prevent aesthetic interference.12 From this perspective, Britpop’s willing co-optation by the mainstream and untroubled pursuit of record sales was typified by its embrace of and by an ostensibly left-wing party similarly too comfortable with free market capitalism and enamoured with electoral success as an end in itself.
Meanwhile, in political writings, references to Britpop were frequently shorthand for New Labour’s own sense of hubris and lack of substance. When Oasis split up in 2009, George Pitcher, a longstanding critic of the ascendancy of PR in business and politics, drew an analogy in a column for the Daily Telegraph between the band and New Labour, identifying parallels between the warring Blair-Brown and Noel-Liam axes, the vacuity of Oasis’s lyrics and of New Labour’s rhetoric, and their shared greed and contempt for their fans and the electorate respectively13. Right-wing commentator James Delingpole made a similar comparison in the Daily Mail, portraying both as victories of ‘style over substance’ and as embodying ‘an age where the whole world seemed to have lost all perspective and judgment’.14
The following August, Daily Express columnist Nigel Burke wrote a scathing piece on the recently deposed Labour government entitled ‘Why We Never Warmed to Cool Britannia’, locating Britpop within ‘Blair’s crudely manufactured vision of Britain as a “young country”’, and accusing the former prime minister of disregarding the nation’s heritage.15 In these socially conservative critiques, Britpop and New Labour were linked within a broader adverse reaction against the postmodernist values of the 1990s – its emphasis on image, its moral relativism, its sense of historical schism – that in some ways echoed liberal-left appraisals of them both.
The Cameron comparison
The Britpop-New Labour connection was also utilised from the late 2000s onwards as a historical reference point in interpreting the cultural politics of David Cameron’s Conservatives. Firstly, following Gordon Brown’s succession of Tony Blair as prime minister in 2007 and the subsequent decline of public confidence in his government amid an economic downturn, numerous articles appeared in the press noting that the Conservatives appeared to be becoming fashionable again, attracting several celebrity endorsements. In May 2008, the Independent’s Oliver Duff wrote:
Mr Cameron’s celebrity-studded revelry evokes those halcyon mid-Nineties days of Cool Britannia; of Britpop, the Spice Girls and that electrifying image of Noel Gallagher and Meg Matthews in Downing Street. When – in the shape of Tony Blair, who some consider to be Mr Cameron’s natural soul-mate – a political leader was last well-and-truly “trendy”.16
In the Guardian the following year, Patrick Barkham responded to the alleged defection of artist Tracy Emin to the Conservatives by asking whether this was ‘Cameron’s Cool Britannia moment’.17 Moreover, when Cameron as prime minister held a reception at the Foreign Office in 2014 for leading figures from Britain’s creative industries, some newspapers unsurprisingly drew parallels with Blair’s 1997 party.18
Yet press accounts also highlighted contrasts between the celebrities Cameron’s Conservatives were associating themselves with and those that New Labour had embraced, and the broader cultural trends these connoted. In 2009, Andy Beckett wrote a feature for the Guardian noting the revived vogue for all things upper-class, from leading Conservatives like Cameron and Boris Johnson, through TV personalities like Kirstie Allsop and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, to clothing brands like Barbour and Jack Wills. He characterised this as a reaction to New Labour’s ‘demotic, sometimes toff-baiting aspects – from Tony Blair's glottal stops to the hunting ban to the huge yobby hits by Oasis’.19
Two years later, Clare Heal began an article for the Daily Express on the poshness fad by highlighting its deviation from the mid-1990s, when she argued it was de rigueur to affect working class roots in order to be perceived as possessing artistic credibility. She also drew a contrast between popular contemporary band Mumford and Sons and their Britpop predecessors, noting that ‘Unlike Blur…who had to pretend to be Essex lads to gain credibility, they can happily admit that one of their founder members, Winston Marshall, is the son of a hedge fund millionaire and nobody blinks an eyelid.’20
Moreover, in his Times piece on Cameron’s 2014 creative industries reception, music writer Will Hodgkinson identified significant differences between its guest list of stars from wealthy backgrounds and the air of meritocracy that invitees to Blair’s party 17 years earlier were intended to effuse, noting that ‘Where once there was Noel Gallagher, now there is Eliza Doolittle, a chirpy, unthreatening pop star beloved of the royal princes’.21
Nostalgia for Britpop and its politics
This is illustrative of the place Britpop has come to hold in narratives about the gentrification and de-politicisation of British popular music. Such concerns were being voiced as early as the turn of the millennium. Scanning back in 2000 over the past decade of British music history, The Observer’s Sam Taylor identified Blur’s Parklife album as ‘the sound of British guitar pop facing up to its own magnificent history and incorporating it into an exciting present of economic boom, social liberalisation, mass hedonism, and the decline and fall of the Conservative Party’. He contrasted this with the sound of present-day British rock bands like Travis and Coldplay, concluding:
…if you listen closely you can hear its subliminal message: don’t get your hopes up. These are just songs, we are just bands, it’s pointless to expect more. We live on a sad little island, the drugs don’t work, the news is always grim, the government will always be Tory, our sportspeople will always be losers. And it’s raining.22
Five years later, contemporary indie bands drew the ire of Brendan O’Neill, in a piece for the Spectator that described Noel Gallagher’s Downing Street visit as ‘the end of Britpop as we know it’, but contrasted Oasis’s ‘laddish abandon’ with what he deemed to be the true sound of New Labour’s Britain:
From Coldplay to Keane, James Blunt to Franz Ferdinand…the independent music scene is dominated by the most insufferable, middle-class, non-smoking, anti-drugs, safe-sex-observing bunch of Blairite bores and arse-kissers you could ever have the misfortune to clap eyes on. We’ve gone from Britpop to Blairpop.23
From 2010, the return of the Conservatives to government to pursue a programme of spending retrenchment, and growing concern over declining social mobility and the spectre of popular music becoming an increasingly closed shop, has facilitated the fuller rehabilitation of the Britpop era as a high watermark for working class achievement and period of political optimism, its own internal class conflicts being retrospectively sanitised and marginalised.
In the lead-up to the 2015 general election, shadow arts minister Chris Bryant warned music was overly dominated by the likes of old Harrovian James Blunt, with Blunt retorting that Bryant was a ‘classist gimp’.24 In the wake of this spat, Stuart Maconie wrote a lengthy article for the New Statesman warning that the music world was becoming the playground of the privileged, as less generous further and higher education and welfare provision priced the working classes out of the arts; fittingly, the article was accompanied by a photo of Jarvis Cocker – a poster boy for a more egalitarian yesteryear.25
A piece on Definitely Maybe in the NME in 2014 made similarly bleak contrasts between Britain in 1994, where Labour resembled a government-in-waiting, and the contemporary moment, in which they looked anything but. Definitely Maybe was a fitting soundtrack for 1994:
…not the sound of working-class rage, but working-class triumphalism. Gallagher’s songs from this period are full of references to dead-ends, blocked exits and denied opportunities, but these were only obstacles to overcome, not stumble over; instead of being a leftist musical soapbox, the album remains a celebration of a social caste the Tories had been trying to turn into an underclass for decades.26
Within this context, Noel Gallagher successfully carved a niche for himself as a grumpy, middle-aged, proletarian spokesperson, decrying the state of both modern music and politics. Being interviewed on Radio 4 in 2014, he asserted:
The working classes have not got a voice anymore, there doesn't seem to be a noise coming from the council estates, you know what I mean? Music is very middle class, I’d have eaten [the band] Bastille alive in an afternoon in the '90s, one interview, destroyed, gone, never to be heard of again.27
Furthermore, while continuing to stand by his decision to visit Blair at Downing Street in 1997 and to defend pre-9/11 New Labour, Gallagher has regularly expressed his scorn for the present-day political class. In 2014, he told the Quietus music website that Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband were ‘career politicians’ who ‘don't stand for anything’ and that ‘politics is mirroring society: it's bland’, while harking back to the vibrancy of the arts in the 1980s and the oppositional certainties of its politics: ‘Thatcher’, he asserted, ‘was just like, “I’m fucking you in the arse, fuck what you say”. You can kind of respect that.’28
Gallagher therefore presents something of a contradiction: on the one hand, playing the working-class survivor of the 1980s done good and openly flaunting his success and wealth in a manner reflective of New Labour’s own lack of unease with these two things; on the other, expressing alienation with the era of post-ideological politics New Labour had ushered in and longing for the more clearly drawn battle lines that preceded it.
Music, politics, and the Britpop mould
The ‘Cool Britannia’ narrative of the 1990s, emblemised in that image of the Blair-Gallagher handshake, was for so long been an ironic one. A tale of disillusionment with both New Labour and late twentieth-century culture, a rejection of the perceived postmodern values they embodied that resonated across the political spectrum. This tallies with the arguments some commentators have advanced that we have since entered a post-postmodern age, marked by a renewed emphasis on earnestness.29 However, the Conservatives’ return to power, and growing concerns over social mobility and cultural gentrification prompted a re-evaluation and rehabilitation of Britpop and the 1990s, reimagined as a period of rejection of conservative values, of national ascendancy, and of meritocracy.
Moreover, despite the short-term cynicism that Britpop’s dalliance with New Labour bred over the possibility of pop and politics colliding, it was subsequently posited within a longer-term tradition of British popular music’s engagement with the social and political issues of its age. This was what alternative music should do, in contrast with the apparent apoliticism of the contemporary rock. In this context, the likes of Noel Gallagher, Albarn, and Cocker retained a cache as maturing artists and public figures whose statuses were reinforced by their performatively holding forth – often in response to interviewers’ questions – on such matters, reifying an idea of what British indie rock stars have been and ought to be, when they had once been seen as breaking the mould for what that entailed.
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For a fuller account of Britpop itself, and its relationship with New Labour during the mid-1990s, see John Harris, The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (London: HarperCollins, 2003).
Ibid., Chs. 12, 18, and 20.
New Musical Express (14 Mar. 1998).
‘There Was No Other Way…’, Q (Apr. 1999).
Emma Warren, ‘Rock Crusaders’, Independent on Sunday (9 Feb. 2003).
Stuart Maconie, ‘Britpop Was More than Just Guitar Bands Showing off – It Was a Celebration of British Life’, Daily Mirror (9 Apr. 2014).
Interviews by Paul Lester, ‘Britpop Casualties: ‘It Felt Like We Crashed Someone Else’s Party’, The Guardian (24 Apr. 2014).
Miranda Sawyer, ‘Why the D:Ream Died for New Labour’, Daily Mirror (6 May 2002).
Nicholas Barber, ‘What’s the Story? Mourning Tories! Forget Luvvies for Labour, Now It’s Britpoppers for Blair’, Independent (3 Nov. 1996); John Harris, ‘Tony, It’s Over’, The Times (29 May 2004); Lauren Booth, ‘It’s Not Your Ideas We Want, Noel, It’s Your Money’, Daily Mail (5 Dec. 2004); Rhian Jones, ‘Not So Cool Britannia’, Morning Star (4 May 2010); Edward McCann, ‘Days of Pop Creating Real Political Ding Dong are Gone’, Belfast Telegraph (16 Apr. 2013).
Warren, ‘Rock Crusaders’.
Harris, The Last Party, p. xvi.
David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999), pp. 34–61.
George Pitcher, ‘It’s Farewell to Noel Gallagher – and Goodnight to Gordon Brown’, Daily Telegraph (31 Aug. 2009).
James Delingpole, ‘As Oasis Split Up, One Critic Bids a Very Unfond Farewell’, Daily Mail (31 Aug. 2009).
Nigel Burke, ‘Why We Never Warmed to Cool Britannia’, Daily Express (17 Aug. 2010).
Oliver Duff, ‘Right On! So, Is It Finally Cool to Be a Conservative?’, Independent (10 May 2008).
Patrick Barkham, ‘Are the Tories Having Their Cool Britannia Moment?’, Guardian (5 May 2009).
Richard Marsden, ‘Now David Cameron Plans His Own ‘Cool Britannia’ Bash: Emma Watson’s on the List...but Will Gary Barlow Be Invited?’, Daily Mail (9 Jun. 2014); Will Hodgkinson, ‘The No 10 Guest Lists Show How Britain Has Changed Between ’97 and Now’, The Times (10 Jun. 2014).
Andy Beckett, ‘Tory Chic: The Return of Poshness’, Guardian (16 Dec. 2009).
Clare Heal, ‘It’s OK to Be Posh Again, Yah?’, Daily Express (29 May 2011).
Hodgkinson, ‘The No 10 Guest Lists Show How Britain Has Changed Between ’97 and Now’.
Sam Taylor, ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years: You Can Tell Something about the State of the Nation at Any Given Time from Which Rock Bands Are the Most Popular. So What Do Coldplay and Travis Say About Britain in 2000?’, Observer (30 Jul. 2000).
Brendan O’Neill, ‘The Shaming of Britpop’, Spectator (15 Oct. 2015).
Rowena Mason, ‘James Blunt Attacks ‘Classist Gimp’ Chris Bryant over Diversity Comments’, The Guardian (6 May 2003).
Stuart Maconie, ‘The Privileged Are Taking over the Arts – Without the Grit, Pop Culture Is Doomed’, New Statesman (4 Feb. 2015).
‘Oasis: Definitely Maybe at 20’, NME (23 Aug. 2014).
‘Noel Gallagher (the A-Side)’, Mastertapes (Ser. 4; Ep. 9), BBC Radio 4 (8 Dec. 2014).
Jude Rodgers, ‘The Apolitical Party: Noel Gallagher Interviewed’, The Quietus (16 Feb. 2015).
See, for example:
Joe Kennedy, Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness (London: Repeater Books, 2018).
Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (New York and London: Continuum, 2009).
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2 (2010), Art. 5677.