Now that the era has passed into the kitsch bricolage of nostalgia, with Zoomers dressed like Kevin the Teenager flocking to see Oasis’ stadium tours alongside nebbish politicians in bucket hats declaring that they’re “mad for it”, it is hard to see the mid-Nineties as anything other than a golden age. Paunchy aging dads — my own demographic, sad to say — fondly remember gelling down the fringes of their Caesar haircuts, donning their knock-off Ben Sherman shirts and drenching themselves in CK One before hitting the town with a tenner in their pocket. Yet it is a measure of Britain’s extended national decline that the mid-Nineties, today remembered as a halcyon era, was at the time experienced rather differently. 

In a 1996 speech, the aspiring prime minister Tony Blair warned that “I see two futures open to this country. In one, Britain’s communities follow the process that has occurred in some places in the US, where the affluent have retreated into fortresses with private security guards, leaving the rest to live in ghettos of low opportunity, crime and insecurity. But the cycle of decay and economic underperformance continues. This is the Blade Runner scenario.” The other scenario, naturally, was for the country to vote New Labour into office. The influential 1997 Demos paper, “Britain”, observed that abroad, “the general perception [is] that the UK, and London in particular, is not a safe place, with people living under the shadow of IRA bombs, homeless on the streets and racial tensions”, while “even the Union Jack has become an ambivalent symbol — at times a racist icon for skinheads and fascists”. Its solution, which we live with today, was to rebrand, and remold, Britain into a young and multicultural country, “the least pure of European countries, more mongrel and better prepared for a world that is continually generating new hybrid forms”. 

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Yet if the flags currently flying on lampposts across England, transforming suburban York and Birmingham into a simulacrum of the Lower Shankill, represent the reaction to this experiment, it is instructive to remember that the era, punctuated by racist murders and the rise of the BNP, witnessed its own contested politics of the flag, and conflicted attitudes to Britishness and Englishness. When, in 1992, the mournful Manchester-Irish troubadour Morrissey draped himself in the Union Jack, in front of a vast image of two skinheads, to perform “The National Front Disco” and caution his fictional “Bengali in Platforms” to “Shelve your Western plans/‘Cause life is hard enough when you belong here”, the response from the music press was not acclamatory. “Flying the flag or flirting with disaster?”, asked a rhetorical NME headline. Yet five years later, when the girl band bawd Geri Halliwell could strut on stage in a sequined Union Jack minidress, the national flag was not only not controversial, it had become ubiquitous in popular culture. What had happened in between was, simply, Britpop.

Was Britpop’s cultural nationalism ironic or sincere? As the brains behind Vanity Fair’s famous “Cool Britannia” cover, Toby Young — now firmly ensconced within the British Right — observed, a new generation had emerged that “had grown up loathing and despising American mass culture” and “felt a kind of nationalistic resentment”. Blur returned from a dismal 1992 tour of small-town America filled with loathing for the imperial hegemon and a conflicted love for England and home. “What is it about home we’re missing?” the group’s drummer Dave Rowntree pondered, “What is it we like and that we don’t like?” They set about working on their second album, Modern Life is Rubbish — its working title was Britain Versus America — which, with its inward-looking cultural references, both mocked and celebrated small-town English life, and defined the Britpop aesthetic. Choosing, as Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon notes, “a Ladybird Books-style painting of the classic Mallard locomotive” for its cover because “nothing could be further from what most people expected of an alternative rock LP”, the album had strangely conservative vibes which belied the group’s profession of Left-wing values. Drawn from the provincial lower-middle-class of Southeast England, the children of teachers, Army bandsmen and a South Coast BnB-owner-turned-rubbish-compactor, the group was shaped by the values of their upbringing. “My family, like most army families, was pretty conservative and patriotic,” Coxon remembers. “It was generally assumed that you supported England in everything it did.” Coxon’s autobiography is infused with the memories of a postwar English childhood, of grubbing for “smutty magazines” inside abandoned pillboxes at a time when “‘Tommies versus Jerries’ were popular pastimes in the school playground”.

Like his cultural distaste for America, Blur’s singer Damon Albarn’s self-professed political radicalism is likewise shot through with a very English conservatism, condemning his Essex peers for their crass Thatcherite materialism and lamenting that “The color and vibrancy of the countryside was destroyed… literally fields I was playing in one year were housing estates the next”. As John Harris observes in his excellent book on the Britpop era, Albarn’s Essex childhood home was in a rural hamlet where “the local accent has an archetypally East Anglian burr; when Albarn enrolled at the local comprehensive school, he rubbed shoulders with the children of agricultural workers”. Coxon remarks of the “Grantchester Meadows” quality of their childhood, “hanging out by the river at the back of [Albarn’s] house in the wilds of Essex”, that “our outlook was a little more bucolic and melancholic… A lot of that English local color flavored the music, right from the start.”

Oasis grew up in quite another England, if the Manchester-Irish milieu can be termed England at all: far from lazy summer afternoons, the group’s first incarnation was simply called “The Rain”. There is a particular recurring strand of Irish literature that focuses on unhappy households, dominated by a superficially charming but overbearing father, in which the devoted mother bears her lot unhappily and the sons plot their escape as revenge. The semi-official biography of Oasis by Paolo Hewitt slots right into the genre. The drunk, abusive Tommy Gallagher, from rural Meath, ruled his Manchester household through fear: divorcing him, against the priest’s advice, the family moved to a council house in suburban Burnage, “where each house has a garden”, and which “lies within walking distance of two golf courses”, as Harris notes with a Daily Mail-style eye for class minutiae wasted on The Guardian. 

The Gallagher brothers were raised in the Irish diaspora milieu of Gaelic football, church social clubs and Irish dancing — and long summer holidays at their mother Peggy Sweeney’s family farm in rural Mayo where Noel Gallagher reminisces about picking blackberries, bringing in the cows for milking and drawing water from the well. Appearing on Gay Byrne’s Late, Late Show — then a staple of both home and diaspora Irish life — the young Noel Gallagher presented himself as a good sensible boy to the avuncular presenter (not least in the knowledge that his mother would be watching) claiming sentimentally that tears would well in his eyes at the scent of burning turf. “If you look at Gaelic bands,” Noel would tell Hewitt, “they always had these rousing, fist-in-the-air choruses. And I suppose it’s also because we have this rootsy, folk feel on some of the other songs which you get subconsciously from your childhood.” Or as Gallagher would correct a reporter at the height of 1995’s Battle of Britpop, “We’re not Britpop, because we’re Irish, for a start.”

Yet when the founder of Creation Records, Alan McGee, first met the group in Manchester, it was with the Union Jack behind them, which the band had painted on the wall of their rehearsal room. “Noel had even written a song called ‘The Red, White and Blue’,” notes Hewitt. “Their fascination with the British flag caused a little consternation among some onlookers… and there were various mutterings about the band’s politics.” The Union Jack, in distorted form, soon made it onto the band’s demo cassette. As Harris notes, “when a passing Creation staff member inquired about the design on the cover of the Oasis demo — the colors of the Union Jack arranged in a vortex, as if being sucked down the plughole — Liam dispensed a snarling reply… ‘It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,’ he said. ‘We’re here to do something about it’.” And so they did: like the RAF roundel, the Union Flag, whether on Noel’s guitar or the PR ephemera of the era, would become ubiquitous, just as the laddish fusion of football culture and Sixties revivalist pop would revive the St George’s Cross in common usage for Euro ‘96. “17 years of hurt never stopped us dreaming,” Blair would declare, “Labour’s coming home.” The world of the Blairite “Britpopper” had been born. It is one which Fabian thinktankers have never left.

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For all its Blairite connotations, the first recorded use of “Cool Britannia” in British Politics was, improbably, by Virginia Bottomley’s Department of Media and Culture. But if the fragile mood of optimism inspired by a buoyant economy, recovering from the recession of the early Nineties, was the product of the Major government, the Conservative Party was in no position to capitalize on it. The attempted Rightward shift of Britain’s political culture, encapsulated in Major’s lyrical evocation of old maids cycling to church through the mist, had been wrecked, in a now familiar pattern, by the corruption, incompetence and sexual deviance of the party’s MPs: rather than being too conservative for the country’s voters, as contemporary accounts assume, the Tories were too libertine. In their wake would come Blair’s revolution, which co-opted Britpop, to gain a sheen of youthful credibility and optimism, with the eager collaboration of the music industry, in which, as Sleeper’s Louise Weber noted, “you could not criticize New Labour, you could not criticize Blair, it was verboten, not allowed”.

The many subsequent hagiographies of Britpop place great emphasis on the Sussex band Suede as the forerunners of the movement, also wrapped in the flag, against their will, by the music industry. It accompanied them on the 1993 Select magazine cover featuring Suede’s singer, Brett Anderson, beneath the title “Yanks Go Home”. Yet even Suede’s then-risqué androgyny and odes to amyl nitrate now seem curiously innocent, more Charles Hawtrey than Rimbaud. Indeed, all the frantic cosmopolitanism of the Nineties today seems quaintly parochial: Albarn’s increasingly cruel “social satires” of the small-town middle classes exude the status anxieties of the provincial FBPE activist, his various accents, careening all over the English class system, a Harry Enfield performance. Blur’s 1993 mockney stomper “Sunday, Sunday” plays with imagery of provincial ennui, Sunday roasts and war veterans, that while mocking, now reads almost as nostalgia for a world that then still existed. Even the Select piece that launched the movement, with its Dad’s Army graphics and declaration of a “Battle of Britain”, are products of that same insular postwar world, in which Noel Gallagher could reminisce about making Airfix models of Hurricanes and Lancasters, and the aging Graham Coxon spends his free time at Tunbridge Wells’ War and Peace Show re-enactments, buying military surplus. The Britpop movement, ultimately, drew from the same cultural wellsprings Reform does today: from Blur’s PR jaunts to what is now Farage’s Clacton seat, to Oasis’s suburban childhood, flanked by golf clubs on the edges of Stockport, the provincial England then invoked half-ironically has now swung sharply to the Right.

For whatever else Britpop was, it was a celebration, if a patronizing one, of England’s white working class, which would be far beyond the cultural pale today. As Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker would later note, “working-class culture was often sneered at as being crude and stuff like that but then people maybe cottoned on to the fact that it was a bit more alive than the supposedly highbrow culture”. Adopting an increasingly parodic cockney accent, in his war against the lower-middle classes that birthed him, Damon Albarn assumed that if there was hope, it lay with the proles. His then-girlfriend, the privately educated Justine Frischmann, likewise mars Elastica’s otherwise standout track Waking Up with the mockney suggestion to “make a cup of tea”, delivered in the tones of someone nervously appeasing a builder. Yet it was only under the Blairite consensus Britpop helped usher in that this very same culture became demonized: the cockney double-glazing salesman persona Albarn assumes in the Parklife video would very soon become Emily Thornberry’s St George’s Cross-hanging, white-van-driving nemesis.

Indeed, for all that nostalgic hagiographers of the era like Jon Savage can claim, ludicrously, that Oasis’s Some Might Say “captures the mood of the moment” of the Conservative defeat in England’s 1995 local elections, the band themselves were always ultimately an expression of Thatcherite social mobility, of conspicuous consumption and the polished Rolls-Royce in the driveway. The very cover of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, with its stripped floorboards, glass of red wine and paper lampshades, expresses a working-class aspiration towards middle-class aesthetics — the renovated Victorian townhouses of BBC’s This Life — that the band would soon swiftly transcend. Where Blur, 30 years ago, mocked the urge of the newly wealthy to move to “a very big house in the country”, Noel Gallagher rapidly transitioned from playing at a Home Counties country house to buying one, from where he now delivers his recollections of the era on a throne-like wing chair. Blur’s Graham Coxon has retreated to true-blue rural Kent to explore “English indigenous folk traditions” from a barn conversion; Alex James to life as a country landowner and cheesemaker: the lures of Deep England, and of romantic conservatism, always win in the end.

What was Britpop then? Perhaps, in the end, just a confection of the spin doctor era. Like New Labour’s political mood music, it was always empty at its heart: Blur’s lyrics were always less clever than claimed, and Oasis’ less profound. Britpop died in 1997, shortly after Blair came to power: it was as if the movement had outlived its purpose. And just as the original bands of the era brought about a flurry of uninspired imitations, it has been our fate since then to be ruled by a dismal succession of Blair tribute acts.

Blair’s social revolution, his New Britain, buried the cozy postwar England that had birthed the movement, and gave Britain a new aristocracy of judges and NGO activists yet to be dethroned. In reward for its services, the new Blairite order installed a new cultural establishment, the commentators from the Britpop-era music industry who write Guardian thinkpieces, judge books and arts prizes, present BBC radio shows, and feed the stultifying incuriosity of the Radio 6 dad. Instead of evading his threatened Blade Runner future, Blair accelerated it: Oasis’s Don’t Look Back In Anger would soon become the anthem of the British state’s “organized spontaneity” to dissuade Manchester’s white working class from reacting to jihadist mass murder with anything other than the empty, swaying sentimentality of a stadium sing-along. Yet as Noel Gallagher himself observed, “These people have the right to be radicalized. They have rights… That guy who set that bomb off sees the streets of Britain as a battlefield — our leaders don’t see it as a battlefield.”

The insular, homely English culture Britpop both mocked and celebrated was ravaged by the political order it soundtracked. Only in retrospect does John Major’s Britain, then imbued with themes of decline, seem like a vanished golden age, the political horizon, before it all went wrong, of the radicalized Right-wing Zoomer. The era’s nostalgia for the Sixties has been replaced by today’s nostalgia for the country the Boomers destroyed. Once again, the nation is asking “What is it about home we’re missing? What is it we like and that we don’t like?” The Union Flag is omnipresent in England once again, for quite different reasons: the white working class Britpop championed, like the provincial lower-middle class it mocked, is in open revolt against the political and cultural establishment it helped enthrone, and it is the bourgeois Right-wing dancing to their raucous tune.

I tried my best to blend in, but one moment in particular exposed the jig. Amid a hellish game involving ping pong balls and cups of flat Carling, a ripple went through the crowd and everybody started to act out choreo from a video I’d definitely scrolled past. I racked my faltering memory: I’d heard this song before, diced into infuriating snippets on social media. TikTok crack. A blonde apparition entered my mind: Sabrina Carpenter, the befringed, “Espresso”-crooning doll inflicted with Fifties swimming-costume outfits by an army of corporate promoters. Barry Keoghan’s erstwhile gf.

It rocks me to my core that these slick 23-year-olds, not yet ravaged by the horrors of 25, think this is cool — or, at least, don’t care whether it is or not. We insufferable elder Gen Zs are usually fiercely resistant to such mainstream intrusions, wanging on about Nick Drake and pretending we never liked One Direction (I swear I never did). But looking around me, I had to ask: has TikTok finally killed music?

Sabrina Carpenter is the latest Venus to emerge from the great Disney clam. To extend this shaky metaphor, she has emerged from the severed testicles of a hit Disney Channel sitcom, Girl Meets World. She barely existed six months ago, but with the help of two hits and a relationship scandal — Keoghan supposedly ditched his ex and baby for Carpenter, the rat! — she is now front and centre. Her music is extremely polished, the performances perfected for vertical TikTok filming. She is shiny and new, with a distinctive haircut and a glowy face. And she has a new album out, Short and Sweet, which might as well be about the diminutive but amiable Barry.

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Observers outside the fanbase would be forgiven for thinking Carpenter and her ilk are all a bit, well, samey. But there has always been an element of fakery to the cult of pop stars; in the Sixties, EMI had teenage girls believing John Lennon didn’t have a wife (who he continually beat up). We like to think of the golden age of rock as an army of absolutely original geniuses inventing new sounds every day — but we forget the imitation bands history has kindly forgotten, not least the teenybopper flops (the Cyrkle, the Knickerbockers, the Beau Brummels). Yes, there was less filler and more terrible teeth, but the record label image-polishing was absolutely the same.

Even the news that Oasis are getting the band back together after 15 years of bitter feuding is not the “antidote” it may seem. The Gallaghers themselves shamelessly ripped off the Beatles with added simian swag; and though their original albums represent a rough-hewn, more interesting provenance than anything a former Disney star could conjure up, this “massive” tour is likely to be as corporate as they come.

And yet, we are much more accepting of trades in blokey nostalgia than in girly, attention-seeking glamour, though this is probably down to keenly felt snobberies about different calibres of fans. The Oasis Man and the Disney Girl couldn’t be further apart in terms of cultural prestige; one is a discerning and hard-bitten gig-goer, the other little more than a receptacle for glossy makeup products and plasticky tunes. But there is nothing exceptional about liking a band which dominated the charts for more than a decade, and for which middle-aged bores tune into Chris Moyles on Radio X. Besides, the vices of scruffy rock stars haven’t been shocking since the Seventies — whereas the dark arts of big studios are worthy of the name.

Disney is in the habit of belching out stars like Sabrina. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez — there is a surfeit of once-new kids on the block, still kicking about in West Hollywood like ageing teenagers. The formula is thus: five to 10 years of mainstream success with a few earworm hits, then a rocky patch (Justin and Britney break up, Britney goes bald, Christina and Demi gain weight, Selena gets some alleged immune disease which miraculously has the same effect as a boatload of facial filler). Then they are left to either drift, becoming sad phantoms of their former selves (see Amanda Bynes of Nickelodeon, or Justin’s inglorious mugshot after allegedly drink-driving in June) or redeemed, continually recreating their foetal pop star look (43-year-old Christina Aguilera’s recent re-teenifying makeover is nothing short of witchcraft).

The way we lap up these creations is so routine now as to be unremarkable. But for the teenage girls plucked into stardom, this process involves signing an unspoken deal with your loving public: you must remain a teenager for as long as you can. Taylor Swift, whose never-ending Eras tour finally wrapped up in London last week, is 34: she’s been on the scene since about 2006, beginning as a curly-haired country singer, warbling about trucks and princesses and the like. Now, at the height of her powers, there’s a quality of Blanche DuBois about her. A grown woman, she has spent the past innumerable months singing about long-ago break-ups to millions of teenage girls who haven’t yet had their braces off. She is forced to replay the heartbreaks of her tender years again and again, courting an image of vulnerability which in no way befits the steamrolling corporate machine she now represents.

Part of this performance of teenagedom involves recruiting younger versions of herself as support acts: Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have both appeared on the tour. In doing so, these artists are often accused of being industry plants, which is not strictly fair as to be plants they must come out of nowhere. Child stars are, by definition, already celebrities in their own right. But they certainly represent the decline of independent artists: most of them do not play instruments or write their own music or lyrics, but instead have embraced the TikTok music factory. As Paula Harper, a musicologist from the University of Chicago, told me: “Creators are thinking about making a song that has really audible, clear lip-syncable lyrics that are both weird, but can also be applied to a variety of settings.”

This system enforces a kind of creative dogma; even the most left-field talents never end up producing entirely whacky, inaccessible music. Consider Chappell Roan, the 26-year-old singer with a crimson-haired “drag” persona and a six-month-old career as a bona fide megastar. She has a startlingly original look compared to most TikTok-friendly singers; though her music has the sheen of homogenising big-studio production, her “performance art” is genuinely novel — something she confirmed by emerging from a giant apple as Lady Liberty at this year’s Governors Ball in New York, complete with assless chaps and what appeared to be a spliff.

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Yet Roan is simultaneously a blend of self-conscious artifice — the costumed garishness of drag — and authentic vulnerability. Last week, she went viral for a lengthy confessional post in which she, fairly graciously and understandably, bemoaned weird stalker fans. Social media did not sympathise: the new contract between fans and artists expects the latter to sacrifice any sense of safety or privacy because “you asked for this”, a haunting argument when trained on a woman. More than anything, our idols must be grateful.

This, then, is what awaits the Gen Z celebrity: fame, money, psycho fans and public breakdowns. And for women, there’s an extra kicker: the Disney machine bestows on them the curse of perpetual adolescence, which petrifies its princesses in a state of girlhood.

What’s new about the Sabrina Carpenters of this world, though, is that women for the first time have accrued the obsession-inducing power of a lone rock god without the need to involve men. Older female icons — Aretha, Madonna, Mariah — held some broad appeal; though love-centric, their music would not embarrass a sample or feature with a male artist. Now, the top female performers, the Swifts-in-waiting, are guardians of “girlhood” and resist even an appeal to gay men. Corporate pop has finally passed the Bechdel Test. The feminisation of the charts is complete. And as no doubt we’ll discover next summer, the division between Oasis Man and Disney Girl is irrevocable, crystallised in the diverging masses queuing to see American princesses or grungy Mancunians at Wembley.

“Imagine waiting 15 years for Oasis to reform,” wrote one snarky X user on Monday, “only to lose out on tickets to Chloe, 21 from Stockport who just wants to hear Wonderwall live.” Stick to your frilly pop, girls — we free-thinking individuals have Brewdog, bucket hats and bus passes to boot, and we aren’t afraid to use them!

Liam Gallagher recently headlined Knebworth twice, with more than half his set devoted to Oasis songs. There are new books about the period, too: Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That, an oral history by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, and Verse, Chorus, Monster, a memoir from Blur’s Graham Coxon. It’s slightly insulting to lump these artists together as Britpop when it was just a three or four-year slice of their careers, but it was the slice that made everything else possible.

Why can’t we let Britpop go? It certainly helps that the generation currently running the media grew up with it, and that, unlike the extraordinarily unfortunate grunge scene, all the key players are still with us. Aside from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (whose influence is audible in this year’s sardonic indie sensations Wet Leg), they are all still making music. The best songs endure. Beyond the music, it is a great yarn, with a tight-knit cast of characters and a full menu of drama: sex, drugs, money, hubris, vengeance and bitter rivalry.

Britpop is usually remembered as the musical component of a time when British culture was exploding with energy and optimism: in art, fashion, cinema, football, comedy, television, magazines, literature and politics. But the scene itself was full of rancour, gleefully stoked by the music weeklies. Oasis famously set themselves against Blur but so did Pulp and Suede. “It felt like whenever a new English guitar-based band arrived on the scene, the press would pit Blur against them, even when it wasn’t really appropriate,” Coxon glumly recalls in his book. And thanks to the warring Gallaghers, Oasis also hated Oasis. Music became a contact sport.

Britpop is still worth fighting about. When Blur tickets went on sale, one friend tweeted a savage (and simplistic) assessment by Suede’s Brett Anderson: a band “who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass”. This opinion wasn’t expressed in the NME in the heat of 1994; it appeared in Anderson’s 2019 memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn. Old feuds die hard. People still argue about who was the best band. They argue about whether Britpop was guilty of legitimising flag-waving and misogyny. They even argue about Oasis’s grand folly, Be Here Now, which many fans like rather more than Noel Gallagher does. Most of all, they argue about whether it deserves to loom so large, then and now. Was it really so special?

Britpop was an idea and an attitude rather than a genre, and it was born out of confrontation. The milestone April 1993 issue of Select magazine (“Yanks go home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain”) was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to sullen post-Nirvana rock and American cultural imperialism in general, against which it championed homegrown “glamour, wit and irony”. The Young British Artists had a similar sense of outsider ambition, greeting the post-Thatcher, post-Cold War Nineties with a determination to come roaring out of the sidelines and rewrite mainstream culture.

“Like it or not, we were Thatcher’s children,” Steve McQueen says in Faster Than a Cannonball. “When you realise there’s no safety net… people just tried to get on with it.” For the most part, these were not children of privilege (Blur’s Damon Albarn, the son of a university lecturer from Essex, somehow became the “posh” one) and they were reaching out to take what they had been denied. In Daniel Rachel’s oral history Don’t Look Back in Anger, radio DJ Steve Lamacq recalls his thoughts when playing Pulp’s 1995 hit Common People: “This is our victory; we’ve come from nothing and we’ve won.”

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Right from the start, though, there were sceptics. “One of Suede’s many achievements,” responded Keith Cameron in NME that same month, “has been to inspire some of the most outrageous examples of self-aggrandising tommyrot the British music press has ever seen fit to print… This is a small country, bedevilled with delusions of grandeur — not least of which that we invented pop music.” Suede and Pulp both hated the Union flag on the Select cover. Everybody hated the word Britpop, which didn’t actually appear in Select but soon became ubiquitous. “Nobody liked it,” Frischmann once said. “We knew it was trouble.”

This early definition of Britpop was a spiky, arty affair. “I was thinking of Philip Larkin not Phil Daniels,” Stuart Maconie, who wrote the lead essay in Select, told me a few years ago. “It was bedsits and being on the dole: a sort of pasty-faced underdog strangeness.” But that eccentricity did not survive the million-selling success of Parklife and Definitely Maybe in 1994, two albums which collapsed the wall between indie-rock and mainstream pop. The new generation in charge of Radio 1, Top of the Pops and tabloid showbiz columns was as keen as the weeklies to cheerlead the new breed, and that rolled into a bigger narrative (embarrassing in hindsight) about the branding exercise known as Cool Britannia.

In rejecting the political earnestness and low commercial horizons of alternative culture in the Eighties, Britpop overcorrected. The music industry and media, more than the bands themselves, became obsessed with size and success, to the detriment of many careers. When outsiders become insiders, values change and the initial blast of subversion fades into assimilation. The same story played out simultaneously across British culture. Chris Evans, Loaded and the Spice Girls have become looped into the Britpop story while the Manic Street Preachers, Tricky and Radiohead have not.

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As a synecdoche for Britain in the Nineties, Britpop’s reputation rises and falls with that of the decade in general. When, in 2003, John Harris published The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, a tale gradually swamped by cocaine, heroin, depression and disappointment, he struck an elegiac note: “Britpop is as uncool as could be imagined.” Britpop’s key bands broke up or lost momentum in tandem with the decline of New Labour and the YBAs, and they were all bundled together into a metaphor for squandered promise, arrogance, excess, conformity and apolitical escapism: what were we thinking? Britpop was also blamed for hogging the narrative and occluding other developments in British music, such as trip hop and drum’n’bass, which were more futuristic, more anxious, and less white. Come 2016, when the roots of Right-wing populism were traced back to Nineties Third-Way complacency, some people even blamed Britpop for Brexit — an absurd idea but a briefly popular one.

I sometimes feel like Britpop has to be either the best or worst thing that ever happened. The generation that grew up with simplistic received wisdom about the Sixties and punk rock has lived long enough to see its own youth culture reduced to a cartoon. That’s karma, I suppose. But Britpop had an unfortunate talent for self-caricature, producing images that did it no favours: Noel Gallagher at Number 10; Jarvis Cocker waggling his bum at Michael Jackson; the gruesome video for Blur’s “Country House”, directed by Damien Hirst in the style of Loaded. Such tabloid moments enabled Brett Anderson to dismiss Britpop as a “cheap, beery, graceless cartoon bereft of passion or rage which cravenly hid feeling behind a brittle mask of irony”.

Needless to say, the music was more complicated than that. “Common People”, for example, is neither jaunty social comedy nor a straightforward anthem of working-class pride but a mounting howl of rage and panic from someone who feels himself to be stranded between classes. Parklife’s studies of British life are satirical or elegiac rather than affirming, and the ghastly sitcom oom-pah of “Country House” has that ghostly cry for help in the middle eight. And even Oasis’s give-me-everything confidence was laced with apprehensions of loss: “Slide Away”, “Fade Away”, “Half a World Away”. Perhaps the only example of undiluted youthful vim is “Alright” by Supergrass. But narrative beats close listening every time. “I was singing out my slightly dystopian vision of the future, of the country, and everyone was going, ‘This is brilliant! It’s great!’,” Damon Albarn says in Don’t Look Back in Anger. “It became a nightmare. I suffered profound anxiety for years after as a result.”

These musicians were also more curious than they were given credit for. “Ultimately, Britpop was a reaction against new ideas; it was against rave, hip hop and R&B, wrapped in a Beatles/Stones comfort blanket,” alleges Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. But Noel Gallagher, a former Hacienda clubber, made records with the Chemical Brothers and Goldie, remixes abounded, and it’s hard to find a British musician less parochial than Albarn, from Gorillaz to Africa Express.

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I always feel drawn to these wrinkles in the Britpop story but Faster Than a Cannonball leans into the myth with gusto. Whether the choice of interviewees dictates the story or vice versa, it is a robustly anti-revisionist amen to the mid-Nineties. We get rosy memories from those, such as Noel Gallagher and Blur’s Alex James, who had a spectacularly good time but not people like Graham Coxon, who found much of it unbearable. The “Country House” video, he writes in his memoir, “seemed to confirm what I was afraid of — that Nineties culture had become tacky and cheap. For me, the decade wasn’t as golden and beautiful as my idea of the Sixties were like — which, of course, would have been very different to the reality.”

Ah, the Sixties. At first, Britpop seemed to owe far more to the seedy glamour of the Seventies (“it was a bit off, a bit eccentric, a bit wrong”, explained Jarvis Cocker) but Dylan Jones argues that “the Nineties chimed with the Sixties in being a decade that was almost uniquely British”. Blur vs Oasis harked back to the Beatles vs the Stones and Euro ’96 to England ’66. Swinging London characters such as Michael Caine, Ray Davies and John Barry become icons all over again. “London Swings! Again!” shouted Vanity Fair. Driven too hard, the comparison ended up making all the excitement about British culture feel second-hand: an echo of the real thing. “With Austin Powers the decade was already lampooning itself as a kind of shit Sixties,” the usually upbeat Alex James complains in Jones’s book.

Faster Than a Cannonball is too bullishly celebratory for my taste but perhaps it is well-timed. While the 30-year-olds I know are likely to regard Britpop and the Nineties with disdain, the teenagers are enthralled by the last great music scene before the internet was everything. It speaks to the lost centrality of pop music in British life, when it could pull together art, sport, fashion, cinema and even politics. Britain still has great rock bands, fascinating pop stars and thriving scenes but not that same unignorable convergence of all three. We certainly don’t have that sense, overblown and self-congratulatory though it may have been, of national rejuvenation and positive movement. Britannia doesn’t feel very cool right now, does it?  The music industry feels more sombre, too. Now that we are acutely aware of the psychological and financial strains on musicians, perhaps the misleading notion that it was all non-stop fun in the mid-Nineties is more attractive than the messy reality.

So is it any wonder that the myth of Britpop continues to exert such fascination? Even if the hard-earned optimism of the early Nineties soon gave way to boorish triumphalism, the memory of that enviable optimism still appears to burn bright. Faster Than a Cannonball suggests that you had to be there but I wonder if it is, in fact, easier to see that time as simply “golden and beautiful” if you weren’t.

It wasn’t one of Morrissey’s more successful gigs. He was the support act at a much-anticipated reunion of Madness, a band who drew a very different crowd to him, and he wasn’t entirely appreciated. He looked increasingly displeased, truncated his set, and then withdrew from the second of the two nights, complaining about “the abysmal behaviour of a small group of loathsome yobbos”. (He later refined this to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners”.) Meanwhile in America, tickets for his forthcoming show at the Hollywood Bowl sold out in 23 minutes, beating the record set by the Beatles. Now he knew how Jesus felt: a prophet being without honour in his own country and among his own kin.

It was ironic, then, that “Glamorous Glue” should have been, in part, a lament for a lost British culture, swamped by a wave of Americanisation. “London is dead,” he sang — to fans of the most London act this side of Ian Dury (also on the bill).

It wasn’t the Union Jack that irked the hostile sections of the crowd. Their reaction was more to do with long hours of drinking, an impatience to relive their younger days with the Nutty Boys, and a suspicion of a bloke from Manchester wearing a gold-lamé shirt, split to the waist, prancing about in front of images of androgynous-looking skinhead girls. The previous year Morrissey had said his perfect audience would be “skinheads in nail polish”, but there weren’t many of them in Finsbury Park 30 years ago.

On the other hand, it very definitely was the Union Jack that provoked the NME to devote its front cover and five inside pages — some 6,000 words — to that question of whether he’d gone too far this time. Because the flag had been seen as deeply suspect in Leftish culture for some time. It conjured up images of the Empire, now regarded as a Bad Thing in progressive circles, and it had become associated with extreme-Right groups. There was a fine line between patriotism and racism, and the national flag was seen to sprawl all over it. There was, proclaimed the NME, no room for irony when it came to “the Union Jack, with all its ambiguities”. The paper’s charge sheet against Morrissey cited song lyrics and quotes from interviews, to show that he had long been “toying with far-Right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself”, with the flag as the last straw. Stopping short of calling him a racist, the paper concluded that “he has continued to pick away at the scab of race relations”.

Revisited three decades on, the striking feature of the NME’s denunciation is how dated it all seems for the time. The reference points are those of the Seventies: skinheads, football hooligans, the National Front. And there’s mention of previous transgressors Eric Clapton and David Bowie, whose comments in 1976 had prompted the creation of Rock Against Racism. (Clapton had spoken in support of Enoch Powell; Bowie nominated himself as a fascist dictator for Britain.) It feels like a rear-view mirror, looking back to the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when post-punk pop could be both oppositional and successful, and when the circulation of the NME was twice what it now was. It’s like the last shout of a passing era.

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The rise of Cruel Britannia

By Alwyn W. Turner

Ten months later, a new Manchester band, Oasis, began circulating a demo tape, the cover of which had an image of the Union Jack swirling towards the centre as though disappearing down a plughole. “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,” explained Liam Gallagher. “We’re here to do something about it.” It wasn’t long before the Union Jack was all over popular music, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar and Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress to David Bowie’s distressed frock-coat designed by Alexander McQueen. A new day had dawned, had it not?

In this era of cultural branding — Britpop, Cool Britannia, the YBAs — the Union Jack was flown proudly as the national trademark. The associations now were with the Swinging Sixties, when Britain was losing an empire and finding a new role as purveyor of music, movies and style to the world, when the flag had been ubiquitous, celebrated as a classic design by commerce and culture alike. In the Nineties resurgence of popular culture, the Union Jack spoke of Peter Blake and The Who rather than Enoch Powell or the Raj.

And where culture went, politics was sure to follow. Tony Blair’s speech to the 1996 Labour conference ended with a projection of the flag, much to the horror of the old Left. “It was the National Front,” shuddered Tony Benn, in his diary, “and it made me absolutely sick.” But Benn was stuck in the past as well, and couldn’t appreciate that things were different now. The title of Blair’s recently published book spelt it out: New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The Union Jack was the symbol of this reborn nation. “We have reclaimed the flag,” declared Peter Mandelson. “It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.”

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By Alwyn W. Turner

It was fun, it was colourful, it had no baggage, none of those “ambiguities” that once troubled the NME, because New Labour memories were too short to include the imperial past. Admittedly, there was a moment when one of Blair’s speeches in the 1997 election campaign was initially written to address a longer history, but only in celebratory terms: “I am proud of the British Empire.” And even that didn’t happen, because Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, had the sentence deleted from the draft.

Meanwhile, the fear of neo-Nazis had receded so far that the Euro 96 football tournament even saw the Cross of St George adopted by England fans. This wasn’t a reclaiming, since it had never been much-used except by the far-Right. It became sufficiently popular to attract politicians, and, come Euro 2004, Downing Street itself was flying the St George Cross — believed to be for the first time ever — to celebrate England’s triumphant progress to a quarter-final defeat on penalties. It annoyed some Scots, but it was typical of Blair’s gesture populism.

Just as characteristic was that Gordon Brown should decide to fly the same flag over Downing Street on St George’s Day 2008. Brown worried a good deal that the English might take against him for being so Scottish, but his fears were just an acute form of New Labour’s wider obsession with being seen as patriotic. Seeking to spike Tory guns, Blair’s party laid claim to the entire nation. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” declared the manifesto in 1997. “Our values are the same: the equal worth of all, with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities.”

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By Alwyn W. Turner

If that seemed a little vague, there was no greater precision forthcoming. Blair later talked about “standing up for British values — for example, rights coupled with responsibilities, duty, fair play and open-mindedness”, which got us precisely nowhere. His spokesperson blurred the picture even more: “Britishness to us is about issues as varied as how you manage the economy, the approach you take to issues like unemployment, your vision of society.” And Brown merely reheated the same thin gruel, speaking of “common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is.” If none of it quite made sense, you could always clutch at the flag to cover a multitude of meanderings. For a while, bolstered by the imagery of Cool Britannia, it did help deflect criticism of a government that sought greater integration into the European Union, that encouraged immigration on an unprecedented level, that allowed the US to set its foreign policy.

But the tide was turning, both culturally and politically. There was a slow Tory resurgence: from their low-point in 1997, they increased their share of the vote in the next six elections. And by the time of the 2009 European Parliament elections — when Labour was beaten into third place by Ukip and the BNP picked up close to a million votes — the talk was of recession, illegal war, MPs’ expenses and grooming gangs.

If the NME’s attack on Morrissey provided a full stop to a period of politically engaged, alternative culture, then Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics did the same for Cool Britannia and New Labour. Which is why it’s so fondly remembered by so many, a last hurrah for a happier time. The Industrial Revolution, the NHS, post-1960 popular culture — it was enough to make you feel proud of a creative, communal, cool nation.

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Morrissey will never be cancelled

By Douglas Coupland

Things are different now. Flags are different.

On the day of the Rochester & Stroud by-election in November 2014, Emily Thornberry tweeted a photo of a white van parked outside a nondescript yellow-brick house, on the side of which hung three St George flags. The picture was captioned “Image from #Rochester”, and it was widely seen as being a patronising, Islingtonian sneer. Even as Ukip was winning the by-election, Thornberry resigned from her post as shadow attorney general, and historian turned Labour MP Tristram Hunt spelt out the official position: “We are hugely in favour in the Labour Party of people expressing pride in their national identity and national symbols.”

No one was convinced. No one believed for a second that Hunt, let alone Thornberry, would ever dream of draping a flag from their own houses. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was done in polite society, and anyway the flags — both the Union Jack and the St George Cross — were again being treated with suspicion: they were, to put it bluntly, a bit Ukip-y.

This is all the more so since the 2016 referendum, of course. The Union Jack is now seen by some — on both sides — as anti-European. A photo of it on Twitter will prompt a wave of denunciations of “flag-shaggers” (often from those with an EU flag in their profile). And since the creative industries — to use Blairite terminology — were and still are predominantly pro-Remain, popular culture takes a less celebratory line. The modern equivalent of Geri Halliwell’s frock at the 1997 Brit Awards was Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, designed by Banksy, at Glastonbury in 2019, a much darker vision of the nation. The artists and musicians have moved on.

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By Ian Martin

All of which gives Sir Keir Starmer a problem. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, like Blair he’s anxious to assert his patriotic credentials. But popular culture isn’t with him, and the brazen flag-waving of the Nineties isn’t appropriate now. Instead, he treats the Union Jack with reverence, a furled flag on either side of the quasi-presidential podium for a speech, or next to him behind a statesman’s desk as he talks frankly and seriously to the nation. It’s meant to be prime ministerial, but that also means that he’s using the same imagery as the actual prime minister, both the current incumbent and his likely successor. In his glory years, Blair went further than that, arguing that it was the Tories who were unpatriotic: “It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”

On the other hand, the Union Jack has made a notable comeback in retail circles. Culture and commerce have parted company. As the post-Brexit advertising for Vauxhall cars — “a British brand since 1903” — suggests, the market is convinced that there’s mileage in the old flag yet. The meat aisle in Aldi is adorned with the Union Jack, and it appears on products from milk and chicken thighs to Shreddies and strawberries — even on sugar that has been grown and refined abroad but packaged in Britain. It’s also to be found on Scotch beef, to the irritation of those Scottish nationalists who would rather see the use of the Saltire. And, presumably, to the fury of the militantly vegan Morrissey.