Sunday 11 May 2014

Faking History

The real sign of ageing isn't the grey hair or balding, it's knowing the difference between your past and what is presented as history.

I grew up with a pop culture that wilfully misremembered the 1950s and 1960s - the mere act of putting fashion, music, cinema and other things in boxes labelled by decades is clumsy to start with, but what they are filled with is clumsier still.  My parents were the first to point out that "the swinging sixties" barely existed - and they were the people dispensing the contraceptives.  My father-in-law rarely saw Teddy Boys in full glory as seen in a thousand cheap television documentaries because few people in his home town were paid enough to afford the complete outfit.  I have had a love-hate relationship with some of this stuff over the years; as much as driving away with Jane Merrow in an E-type Jaguar may appeal as a fantasy, it's always a pain to have a recent Golden Age mythologised when you are trying to make your own mark on the world.

Of course, I was never around when Patrick McGoohan filmed The Prisoner and The Beatles recorded Paperback Writer and Rain, too young to read J G Ballard's novels when they were first published.  Rather like the television panelist who was a self-declared expert on the 1960s but had never heard of The Seekers, I'm only on holiday in someone else's past.  Living there is out of the question.

Sooner or later, it was going to be my own past that would be distorted.  My last post mentions the first time that it was - reading Ronald Reagan's obituary and barely recognising the man it described - but politics will always come up with extreme examples.  Now we have the twentieth anniversary of Britpop, with all the magazine retrospectives and broadcasts that brings.  As a keen record-buyer and concert-goer of the time, much of what is being commemorated has me puzzled.

It was only ever a loose musical movement in its day and many of the acts I was listening to - The Lightning Seeds, Super Furry Animals, Stereolab, Dubstar - now seem to have been left out.  It's not as though they were obscure cult figures - they all had hit singles - but mid-1990s British pop music has been reduced to its muddiest and least adventurous by cultural policemen.

Now Britpop means Oasis, particularly if you skip their first few singles and start at "Live Forever", or Blur at their laziest and most arch.  Suede tried their best to avoid the Britpop label at the time; I don't know if this was a lucky escape, or if it would restore some balance if they were included.

There's an article on The Quietus that says much of what went wrong; it was too London-based, too retro, too ironic to make any serious points.  This is true of its worst acts, but I don't want a genuinely interesting few years of British pop culture - cinema, television and comics also had a good patch at same time - flushed down the toilet because of such tunnel vision, or the fact that the dullest runners won the race.