There’s only one Cincinnatus in the Cotswolds, and it’s not Boris Johnson. Over the Rainbow tells the story of how, once again, Alex James was torn from his life in a very big house in the country to fulfil his national duty to play bass with Blur. The tale comes in the form of a diary, like Brian Eno’s wonderful A Year with Swollen Appendices, except that this is a year with inflated egos. To make sure our sympathies are in the right place, it begins with a preamble at the end of December 2022, during which the author attends a series of parties, each more wearisomely smug than the last.
Then he sets up the stakes of the plot. James – who has just turned 54 when the book begins – is responsible for the running of a farm and food business where, at the end of August 2023, he will be organising and hosting his annual food and music festival, Feastival. He has also agreed to rejoin his former bandmates to record a new album and play two concerts at Wembley Stadium in July – a commitment that has grown into a run of festival dates almost every summer weekend across Europe and South America – although he and they have not played together for nearly ten years or even spoken in two. His children yawn at his records. One of his fields is full of human sewage. Worst of all, he has grown so large that his trousers – his ‘Britpop trousers’ – don’t remotely fit.
Happily for him, but less happily for the reader, all these problems evaporate a little too easily. His long-suffering wife Claire and their teenage children rally to the task of organising Feastival. Any cloud over the reunion – ‘Don’t think it’s gonna happen,’ mouths Dave Rowntree, the drummer, as they wait for the pilot rehearsal – passes immediately and the four band members slot seamlessly back into their groove. Late night and early morning sessions with a personal trainer slim James to fighting weight. At the concerts he, his children and around a million other people have the time of their lives.
James is sharp on the challenges facing both farmers (just emerging from a year lost to Covid) and musicians. His bankers refuse him a loan to bridge the gap between incurring tour costs upfront and getting paid in arrears, leaving him temporarily skint. But a page later, a royalty cheque arrives for ‘Vindaloo’, the nugatory football song James wrote with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst that, every year England make the late stages of a football tournament, somehow produces earnings way in excess of anything he makes from Blur’s back catalogue, and all is well. James’s delight in introducing his children to the tour life in Peru and Eastbourne and the ramen bars of Osaka is so heartfelt it’s hard to begrudge him.
His embrace of the term ‘Britpop’, both for those 1990s trousers and for a sparkling wine he produces, having cannily trademarked the term, makes him an outlier among his contemporaries. As Miranda Sawyer notes in her guide to that era, nearly everyone denies being covered by the description and no one can quite decide what it even means.
Most 1990s bands deny being ‘Britpop’ – and no one can quite decide what the term even means
Let’s try. Britpop was high-energy, accessible, guitar-based indie-pop, either genuinely or ironically or at least deniably retrograde, a reaction against the dance music that had dominated British life since M/A/R/R/S reached number one with ‘Pump Up the Volume’. It was made by clever people pretending to be stupid, if not by stupid people pretending to be clever people pretending to be stupid. Of the bands Sawyer covers, Blur were peak Britpop for one album, Parklife, but previously too baggy and subsequently too arty; Manic Street Preachers were too Welsh; Garbage too Scottish and American; Pulp too knowing; Suede far too knowing; Supergrass too… well, all right, Supergrass very clearly fit the bill. Oasis (who have considerately boosted Sawyer’s topicality by announcing their first reunion in 30 years) are credited for their ‘sweet and tender hooligan soul’.
Sawyer was a journalist for Select magazine and the Observer during Britpop’s mayfly heyday, and slips easily between her own reportage and interviews from the time and her memories of the wider scene. Coming from Manchester, albeit smart Wilmslow, she found herself dispatched north to interview bands of whom her colleagues were too scared. She witnesses Tricky throwing out a photographer for having just snapped pictures of Madonna; she takes cocaine with Noel Gallagher and later publishes his wish that James and Damon Albarn should die of Aids; she ends the book curled up on the ground, mildly tripping, as the Prodigy play Glastonbury. When she goes drinking with Blur long before they are famous, James is ‘super-friendly and impossibly good-looking, with a fringe to die for, so tall and thin he had to stand in an S-shape. He laughed a bit like Muttley.’
Her account is a reminder of how much of the best music of the time fell outside Britpop’s retromania. Here is Polly Jean Harvey unsettling the metropolitan press by talking about the bloody realities of farming; there is Radiohead trying wilfully and failing pitifully not to have a career; there is Sleeper’s Louise Wener facing frankly horrendous sexism. Cornershop are pure Britpop, except that their nostos is to the post-war Indian diaspora. The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers represent the dance scene against which Britpop defined itself; Tricky and Massive Attack’s murky, elliptically angry trip-hop ran counter to the time’s’ frenetic cheeriness.
But the sharply delineated rivalries of the time have now simmered down into generational nostalgia. Sawyer, watching Blur at Wembley last year, finds the audience ‘a carbon copy of a 1990s Oasis devotee: bucket hat, band T-shirt, jeans, Gazelles. Some were in Fred Perrys and boots. All now the uniform of the British middle-aged.’
Comments