JONES BULLSHIT JONES BULLSHIT JONES BULLSHIT

hype your way into the top 10. People either buy your record or they don’t. The point is that hype is bullshit and doesn’t really exist. Things didn’t really happen but we like to pretend they did and it’s all about the story, isn’t it?

Do you think that as Britpop flourished, artists became less authentic while portraying themselves? For example Damon Albarn exaggerating his ‘Cockney Credentials’ and playing into the concept of laddism.

Authenticity in academic terms is really problematic when you apply it to things like pop music. Eurovision’s authentic, if you happen to be in the culture of Eurovision. Damon wasn’t inauthentic, he just knew that being a sort of educated middle class kid wasn’t him. He was finding his identity, he wasn’t being inauthentic. He said to me when I raised it with him, “Look, I need to slip between these identities I don’t feel comfortable anywhere.” Some people are just like that, I don’t think it’s inauthentic. Inauthentic behaviour is only inauthentic to people outside a particular scene. Authenticity is something bestowed by adherence to an aesthetic.

Do you think that at the peak of Britpop, the most important thing a band could have was good press coverage?

You can’t manufacture press. You’ve got to be worthy of conversation. You have to understand that having hit records is a beauty contest. People have to fundamentally like what you are to have a hit record. They have to believe in what you are. Britpop wasn’t created by press, Britpop was created by people who wanted others to believe in something as strongly as they did. I believed everything I wrote about Oasis and Blur. If you read the last paragraph of both features that I wrote on both of those artists, you will see me talking directly to the reader saying why you need to believe this, why this is important. I think at the heart of it, the great journalists of that period were evangelists. We also believed that we owed it to British culture to celebrate British culture. I have to say that’s not jingoism, that is a celebration of a culture that gave birth to tea, crumpets, psychedelia and to The Beatles. There was an idea that somehow things are manufactured. You can’t manufacture success.

Ultimately, people have the audience have to love it. I used to call it a willing conspiracy between the audience, the labels, the bands and the culture itself. People want to believe. Your job, as a PR or a journalist, is to show other people why they need to believe. Journalists at that point had the power to filter the culture to say no, don’t focus on that bullshit over there, fuck your Genesis records and your Take That albums, this is why you need to put down all that bullshit, shitty pop that you’re listening to. This is why you need to believe in this. We tried to make people feel and think things and remind them of the culture that had given rise to The Smiths, for example. We wanted something new and that’s what the journalism was. This rounds up to perhaps the most important point of all: This movement was not about music. It just wasn’t about music at all. It was about it was about the reassertion of British culture and British cultural values in the music that we sold and gave to the world. It’s not jingoism this is people going actually Morrissey is much more fucking important than Kurt Cobain. In other words, it was it was a willing conspiracy to re-establish British culture on a global stage. The tabloids, the music press and the media in general, worked with the artists to create this kind of loose conspiracy of the willing. That’s why it’s such an important cultural force because at that moment, there was a sense that we were united as a nation that we had finally found a way forward politically, socio-economically, that we were thriving. We weren’t just surviving we were thriving and there was something cool about that.

What do you think ended Britpop?

I don’t think Britpop ended, it’s like any movement, it just kind of gets tired and people move on. It fragmented, I think it’s there in Blur’s 13 record, the re-looking to American music. In the same way that the Beatles began embracing wider musical forms. So did The Stones in 1968 and went back to a traditional American blues and folk music. In the same way Britpop kind of began looking back to America, and again Blur lead the way with 13. It was the exit soundtrack to Britpop. What ended it really was Knebworth. It was its big moment, but it also ended it for everybody.

And then what were your high and low points of Britpop?

The high point of Britpop for me is with a mate, Mike Leonard, the editor of Guitar Magazine, who’s now sadly died.