Dead On Arrival, The 90s Revival (Part 5)

My Life Story “(You Don’t) Sparkle” The question for future Britpop fans is how you revive something that was a revival in the first place, a mass act of will to recreate (albeit ironically) some imagined groovy London. It’s not a question that’s likely to trouble us for a few years – Britpop has only recently fallen out of favour, with the dwindling commercial fortunes of the main players and tell-all accounts like John Harris’ The Last Party combining to cast the whole affair in a rather tawdry, shabby light.

Oddly, though, the further away we are from ’94-’95 the less derivative the music seems. For foes of Britpop at the time the very idea of making jaunty pop music in a gtr-bass-drums-vox line-up was horribly played-out and gauche: now it seems obvious that it wasn’t JUST Pulp who had their own style. For all that you felt a band like My Life Story had to be derivative somehow, you actually have to work quite hard and dig quite deep to spot the exact influences: a bit of Anthony Newley, a dash of Peter Wyngarde, a smidgen of ABC… But even if you never heard them you could imagine what they sounded like – a mouthy londoner singing arch pop songs with a 12-piece orchestra playing backup. They put the brash “Sparkle” out four or five times trying for a hit that never really came: a typical story of the era. There wasn’t much depth of talent in Britpop – beyond the big four or five groups nobody was terribly successful. But the idea of it – handsome cheeky boys and girls making ‘proper’ pop – is so seductive and marketable that it’s sure to be back.

(A reminder: as some disgruntled readers have noticed my posts this week haven’t had MP3s attached. This one doesn’t either: this is a bandwidth thing. The idea is to do a thematic series of – hopefully interesting – posts with an associated poll and have people vote on what kind of MP3s I do finally post on Sunday. My apologies to anyone who feels their time has been wasted, hopefully you’ll enjoy the files when Sunday comes around.)