William nominates Tim Burgess and his bleached bowlcut
Phil, just getting warmed up, zeroes in on another televisual moment of awkwardness, this time involving Bobby G.
I dunno - I feel Bobby was caught between a rock and a hard place here. How else was he supposed to negotiate this moment of absolute idiocy? Join in? (And what the fuck is that record and the dance that went with it? Was this some kind of UK-only Macarena craze I completely missed?)
Stylo swipes Jarvis Cocker (I think you have to scroll in a ways before you get to the embarrassing bit, JC's imitation of Rolf Harris)
Phil points to another example of the indie/cheese interface - "what we've got here is proto-cheese" says Alex from Blur.
Creator of The Big Feastival - for food, music and drink enthusiasts, hosted at his Cotswolds farm - and of a Britpop cider.
I suppose the Feastival is the logical corollary of expensively-priced vinyl being on sale in Whole Foods. The embourgeoisifcation of rock. But also only a slight extension of the family-friendly and foodie-friendly evolution of Glastonbury and other summer festivals.
Straying off topic really, but a couple of examples of indie / Britpop parody, from Tyler and that man Phil again
After I expressed mild amazement that the words "Ian" and "Brown" had not come up yet, people came with the goods
Strangeways, there he went (Stylo)
bizarre Welsh nationalist monkey protest (Phil)
Phil piles on the Libertine again, with this story about another associate who met a sticky end, drugs-related as opposed to tumbling off a balcony in cloudy circumstances.
Tragic.... what struck me also was the extraordinary background of the deceased, which includes extreme wealth and arty bohemia.
"The photographer and film-maker had spent the past few years making Road to Albion, a documentary following Doherty after he left The Libertines. She had become the unofficial photographer of Doherty's new band, Babyshambles, and was reportedly working on another film about the singer in recent weeks.
"She is the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, and great-niece of the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith.
"Her mother, Dido Whitehead, is a cousin of Jemima Khan and Zac Goldsmith, and her father is the 1960s film-maker Peter Whitehead"
The latter most known for his psych-era Pink Floyd-soundtracked film Tonight Let's All Make Love in London.
Another example of the entanglement of the upper classes with the counterculture / bohemia...
Good grief: I didn't know that about the Robyn Whitehead / Peter Whitehead connection. "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London", featuring Pink Floyd, led by Syd Barrett, another long-term drug casualty. Talk about the Eternal Return.
ReplyDeleteFor the sake of clarity, I think "A Northern Soul" is one of the greatest records ever made.
ReplyDeleteDive in, Simon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UthXR8NAn_Q
I slightly resent your employment of the word "swipe". It makes me sound actively mean to Jarvis.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you didn't mention this photo: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2011/sep/15/day-the-festival-dream-died
Really? I thought the point of the exercise was to be mildly mean.
DeleteRe: Justine Frischmann, made me think of the dude, Kurt Ralske, from Ultra Vivid Scene (they of that one album, 'Joy 1967-1990' that was semi-known in American alterna-scenes for a bit) who became a multi-media artist but also a full-blown academic, now a professor at Tufts: https://kurtralske.com/about/
ReplyDeleteAlso, Chris Mars, drummer from the Replacements has a very successful career as a painter and visual artist, and from what I understand refuses to talk about his time in the band in interviews: https://www.chrismarspublishing.com/
Post-rock, both as career choice and aesthetic.
As an aside, I've always been fascinated with the late career middling-downward spiral of pop/rock stars, especially the albums they cobble together way, way past their already middling prime. If I had the energy for a podcast (I never will), I would dedicate it to 'The Later Critically Ignored Stuff.' There's something deeply revealing about the human condition in a reunion album of a band that was already shit to begin with. The guest stars, the multiple variants of the record, the even shittier bonus tracks, the redemption arc of the lyrics, the interviews with the weathered singer, the guitar player noting pointedly that he (always a he) is a better more skilled player now, and the quick disappearance of the album from any discourse. '90s guitar bands from Britain for some reason do this very well, laboring on into the 2010s and 2020s.
I assume the Mr. Show clip was posted for this very reason, but as I haven't seen it actually called out...in case no one watched the clip in full, at about 2:02 Bob Odenkirk says "We love cheese". Heh.
ReplyDeleteThat surprised me too!
DeleteIt was definitely what pushed it over the line
DeleteMaybe I'm just thick but I don't see how Frischmann's post-music career in any way qualifies as "Britrockers in a bad way". What she's done is interesting, and the way she's gone about it is kind of commendable. What am I missing?
ReplyDeleteWell, it's not my selection. but there's something a bit half-assed about it. The "competitive fencing" bit. Not that continuing Elastica and playing a couple of festivals every year would be any more purposeful.
DeleteFrischmann just sounds like an art student who was serious about her craft and making a life for herself beyond Elastica.
DeleteI chose Justine Frischmann. For start I was mildly tickled by her marrying a meteorologist.
DeleteBut more broadly, her trajectory is exactly what you would expect from an art-adjacent child of privilege. Elastica was just another art project.
She feels like a character from a Nicole Holofcener or Noah Baumbach movie.
@Matt M, I can see the humor in the fencing and meteorologist bits, but I guess I don't see her fitting the post headline/premise. Same with @Asif's mentions of Kurt Ralske and Chris Mars. They're just people who went on to have careers -- seemingly respectable ones at that -- outside of music. Big difference between them and Burgess/Ashcroft.
DeleteNobody's mentioned Bruce Dickinson yet, and at one point he was ranked 7th in the UK at men's foil. Yes, I can see the mild absurdity of a rock star with such a hobby, but the absurdity fades with the realisation that they're actually pretty good at it.
DeleteAlso, I'm struggling to find the actual sources claiming Justine Frischmann's fencewomanship. Could it be a standard bit of Wikipedia misinformation? I'd appreciate a more concrete authority.
Bruce Dickinson's done a bunch of solid post-fame things, including writing a bunch of comic novels. He also learned to fly airplanes - which I suppose is not that uncommon as rockstar hobby (Gary Numan) - except I remember reading that he would sometimes be the pilot on the plane during latterday Iron Maiden tours.
DeleteUnexpected sporting achievements for rock and rollers - Steve Albini is like a top level player of billiards, right? And also a very successful poker player?
DeleteThe upper-class connection - there's definitely something to be written about 60s London as the notionally 'classless society', and Britpop/Blairism as an intended revival that became more like a grim parody (not realizing that the reason the 60s were even notionally 'classless' was because of the welfare state and government-funded education)
ReplyDeleteHave you read Alwyn W. Turner's excellent series of books on British politics and culture from the seventies to 2020? The volume on the nineties is called A Classless Society; the title actually comes from a 1991 John Major speech. The nineties' notion of apparent classlessness was not just a Blairite formulation, but one which had significant roots in Thatcherism. The Tories had a campaign ad in the 1992 election that was a picture of John Major with the slogan "What does the conservative Party offer a working class kid from Brixton? They made him Prime Minister." Taking it further by comparing Blair and Major, one was a grammar school kid who had known poverty in youth and never went to university, and the other was a boarder at Fettes who went on to read law at Oxford, but which was which?
DeleteIt seems to be drugs that get the upper classes into social mixing, rather than any putative lower class cultural vibrancy. Both the 60's and 90's were notable for being shaped by new types of drug (LSD and Ecstasy primarily, but there were others).
DeleteThe upper classes certainly seem to love their drugs, and will tolerate any degree of social degradation in order to get hold of them. It would be very easy for the naive to mis-recognise this phenomenon as the diminution of class barriers.
"There's definitely something to be written about 60s London as the notionally 'classless society', and Britpop/Blairism as an intended revival..." True, and it would be particularly timely now we are about to undergo a Blairism reboot under Starmer. The 20-year rule of revivals is pretty reliable in culture; in British politics it seems more like a 30-year rule.
DeleteSo if Wilson had The Beatles and Blair had Oasis, who is the equivalent for Starmer?
To Stylo's point: it's interesting how the contrasting social backgrounds of the party leaders have flipped back again. The Conservatives seem post-Thatcherite in the sense that nowadays their leaders are mostly aristocrats and plutocrats, rather than self-made middle-class strivers like Thatcher and Major.
DeleteI remember one commentator's crack when David Cameron became PM in 2010: It's a sign that Britain is at last a truly classless society, when anyone can become Prime Minister, even an Old Etonian.
Edward Heath was also like John Major, from a humble background. He went to a grammar school and from there to study Philosophy Politics and Economics at Balliol (PPE + Balliol = practically a direct route to the Cabinet). But his dad was a carpenter and his mum was a lady's maid.
DeleteI suppose the Prime Minsters from Wilson to Major are emblematic of the social mobility enabled by grammar schools, and the decline of grammar schools is a significant reason for decline of social mobility over the last 30 years.
DeleteNot to say the earlier system was flawless, far from it, but the re-entrenchment of the posh in power just feels like the grandest exercise in taking the piss.
in the second blond bowl cut picture tim is a dead ringer for myra hindley...
ReplyDeleteThe 2023 picture on his Wikipedia page indicates that the cheese may finally have caught up with Alex James: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_James_(musician)
ReplyDeleteThe gift that never stops giving, etc.
Deletehttps://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Cheeses-Great-Small-Blurry/dp/B007NZB1I0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PB5L1GN5I2BV&keywords=all+cheeses+great+and+small&qid=1707050154&s=books&sprefix=all+cheese%2Cstripbooks%2C76&sr=1-1