The Gallagher brothers are getting the band back together next year… Time is and remains a flat circle for British rock’n’roll.
What we’ve got in the 21st century is a confusion of the contemporary with the modern, in fact the contemporary cannot deliver the modern; there’s a kind of depthless contemporary.
I think this is something that really started to become clear to me in the ’90s actually. But in the ’90s there was a clear distinction between this emergent disavowed retro culture via Blur and Oasis – the pseudo opposition between Blur and Oasis that was more sort of a battle between mediocre class stereotypes. Students slumming it, as Ian Penman put it about Blur, versus this utter neanderthal cartoon of the working class, as if they were the only options available. But actually at the time the real opposition was between things like that and things like Tricky, jungle and various iterations of techno. There was an absolute plethora of alternatives to that disavowed retro culture of the ’90s. But it started to become clear to me then, that in 1995 the ’60s had been a lot closer than they were in 1980. I mean Oasis could have existed in 1980 more or less, but they would have been like fourth on the bill in a small pub. There just wasn’t that level of tolerance for ’60s throwbacks at that time. There was a sense of historical narrative and a sense of time having moved on. But time since the ’90s has got increasingly flattened out, such that exactly that kind of phenomenon can happen.
