This Fall's Must Have

Your laptop might have a chance in this.

currently playing: I'm From Barcelona – Chickenpox

Are You A Lesbian, Miss?

Oasis — Columbia (Live at Knebworth)

1996 was my year. The previous year may have been the 'official' start of Britpop, in as much as conventional history has decreed, but it wasn't until the year after that I got bitten completely by the bug. The Evening Session, Chris Evans in the morning, Radcliffe at night, Mayo during days off, and John Peel at the weekend.

Was it euphoria? The giggling optimism of a nation? We knew that as soon as the Tories stepped in front of a polling booth they'd be annilated; we laughed at them. Britain was going to be okay. A hollow, desperate last puff of greatness; deep down we knew that it would never last, that we could never conquer the world again, that all we had were pale imitators, reliving past glories by watching Anthology on a Sunday night and dreaming, as one, of a Britain that mattered. Or an England. For Cool Britannia meant Camden Town. And maybe Manchester if you were lucky. We were strong again, we were culturally significant; one of our stars heaped scorn and contempt on Michael Jackson and by extension America. Rule Britannia. Or something like that. Radio 1 even turned over a whole week to playing nothing but music from the British Isles, at least during daylight hours.

It was an interesting year. I remember screaming "LO-FI MUST DIE!" as I entered the common room one particular morning, buying a Dubstar cassette in Cambridge and having terrible dreams. Complex numbers, J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song, holding fear in a handful of dust, playing cards instead of studying, Dani asking the question in the title, running around in circles, and falling down the stairs.

The last one didn't happen, except in a dream I had one night. I woke up shivering, and spent the next six weeks with an odd illness that left me unable to enter school for any length of time. And yes, I know how that sounds. But I would feel physically sick whenever I entered the building. I remember Ms. Lancaster taking a look at me one afternoon and telling me to go straight home, I looked so bad. I got better. Just in time for the end of the school year. But I had August to look forward to.

There was no Glastonbury in 1996, so Knebworth filled something of a hole in the festival schedule, even though it lacked the camping experience (but I'd get that in 1997, during the Reign of Mud). It was the apex of a year of success for Oasis. Number 1s a-gogo, a plethora of Brit Awards, headlines in all the papers, rock'n'roll stars just like they always wanted. The weekend would be the biggest ticketed concert that the country had seen, and tickets sold out within hours.

I don't remember a huge amount about the day itself, oddly. The Bootleg Beatles were on first, and were rather poor. Then The Chemical Brothers, losing a lot of their appeal at three in the afternoon. Ocean Colour Scene. Ah. Yes, we knew back then. But it was sunny. And we were a little too far away to throw things at the stage. Our mistake.

The Manics always seemed a little out-of-place at Knebworth. But they were there, coming back to the fore after the loss of Richey Edwards. Less eyeliner from Nicky Wire, possibly in a show of deference to the rather robust Oasis crowd. "Libraries gave us power…

The Prodigy, who suffered the same fate as Oasis, really, in that they never managed to climb out from where The Fat of The Land placed them. This, along with their 1997 Glastonbury performance, was their last hurrah, the final time that Keith Flint and Maxim appeared as anything but a cartoon. You could feel the bass all the way to the middle of the park.

We got closer. Liam never looked more like John Lennon. This one goes out to The Cat In The Hat. Speeding up, faster and faster. Columbia, Supersonic, Noel singing The Masterplan, Don't Look Back In Anger and Cast No Shadow. The two NEW! NEW! songs, My Big Mouth and It's Getting Better Man!, which, then, at that time, sounded good. On a digital platter a year later, they were revealed as half-assed nothingness, but then, they kept us going. The end, Live Forever. Champagne Supernova and I Am The Walrus with fireworks going off. The end. The end of a night. Johnny Cigarettes reviewed them in the NME the next Wednesday, saying that it represented the high point of their career and perversely, the last time they would ever matter. At the time, I was disgusted. But he was right.

Oasis — Champagne Supernova (live at Knebworth)

It was their high watermark. But not mine. I went back to sixth form in September, as you'd expect, making a week's detour at Villiers Park, my most Rory-at-Chilton moment, living with a group of kids destined for Oxbridge, working hard and tossing around ideas about literature and life. Fabulous.

Discovering music past Oasis, and the beginnings of the exit, of Lauren Laverne, Marie Du Santiago, Emmy-Kate Montrose, and Johnny X. Of staying up all night on May 4th, coming in on Monday morning into English, cheering with Ms. Brooks, fist raised in the air. We'd got them out. Eighteen years of Tory Arse, they called it. We were free. We were also rather gullible.

Britpop, showing signs of serious wear and tear already, promptly imploded on August 21st 1997, when Be Here Now became the fastest-selling record of all-time in the UK, selling 650,000 copies in three days. And then we listened. And it was rubbish. Some of us tried, myself included, to live in denial, until we completed the escape. But it was rubbish. It wasn't until the release of Stand By Me and its atrocious b-sides that I started playing them less and less, and nothing they ever did after that rekindled the feeling of when I first heard Wonderwall on the radio.

And so here we are. The Britpop era is a little strange. With other pop culture movements like the '60s, punk, rave, and the like, you get a hardcore cluster of people who insist that their era was the greatest. And I don't think that really exists with my era. I bear affection for some of the songs of the period, but I have no nostalgia for the period itself. In the main, it was a terrible blight on British music which buried interesting bands like Disco Inferno, screwed up many independent labels, and left a nasty, hollow taste in the mouth. It was our time. But it wasn't really a good one.

Come back in a few months when I explain how Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, and In Your Car saved me…

currently playing:

PowerPC, We Knew You Well

It took less than a year for the Macintosh line to move to its third line of processors, a process completed today by the release of the Intel Mac Pro and Xserve processors, consigning the PowerMac name to history (sob).

But the main part of Steve Jobs's keynote address today was dedicated to showing off a preview of Mac OS X 10.5, codenamed Leopard. They didn't show everything ("to stop Redmond's photocopiers" - just one of many cheap shots thrown Microsoft's way), but there's quite a few impressive new features in the next update, to whit:

  • Time Machine is the new system's backup method, and a likely scourge of children trying to hide porn on their family's computer. It allows you to skip back in time to see what you hard disk looked like a day, a week, a month, or any arbitrary time ago (I'm hoping that it also allows you to set the background music to the Doctor Who theme, as the graphical Time Machine display is halfway to its title sequence already). Basic support for this is already in Windows XP and Linux, but the Apple implementation looks a lot friendlier, as usual.
  • Mail and iChat are getting lots of new features. Not entirely sure about Mail's 'stationery', as I have an aversion to HTML mail, but the notes and to-do items look handy. iChat gains tabbed chats, multiple logins (at last!), and the ability to create your own Daily Show correspondent reports with its auto-bluescreening feature.
  • Spaces — ha! Apple steal from Unix/Linux! Excellent!
  • CoreAnimation. Oh my.

No new shiny stuff. I imagine that new iPods will probably be announced in January when Leopard ships, and aside from small performance increases, the Macbook/Macbook Pro lines won't change until the middle of next year. We're all ready for Leopard now. Who needs Vista?

Oh yes, and my Macbook is on its way back to me!

currently playing: Cat Power – I Found a Reason

Introducing Vista 2.0

Ouch!

Days Like Television

You should head over to Sweeping The Nation to get yourself some Life Without Buildings MP3s. One of my favourite bands of this decade, I had a scary infatuation with The Leanover throughout 2003…

currently playing: Oasis — Supersonic

DEATH TO IRONY.

Come on now. Aren’t we past this yet? Like it? Then don’t feel guilty. Unless it’s Ronan Keating. Then you should feel shame. Tremendous shame…

currently playing: Bob Dylan – Lay Lady Lay

Jelly Eggs!

Jelly Eggs!

Wibble, wobble!

Mel Gibson's Breakdowno!

One does not abruptly decide, between the first and second vodka, or the ticks of the indicator of velocity, that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are valid after all.

If nothing else, Hitchens still has a deft turn of phrase once in a while…

currently playing: Brassy – Micstyle

Out With A 4m Whimper

If nothing else, the final edition of TOTP showed that even at the very end, the BBC didn’t have a clue what to do with the show. It was a very embarrassed affair, like the producers knew they should be doing something special, but all they had to offer was a selection of clips long worn-out by repeated showings on TOTP2 and the increasingly-scary sight of Jimmy Saville. To fill in the gaps, the horrors of the 1980s Radio 1 team were dug out of commercial radio hell, making inane and self-satisfied comments until you were begging for Matthew Bannister to make a surprise cameo and fire them all over again.

(some of the choices during the decade compilations were a little odd too - why would you stick Prince in the 90s? Where were The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays? The Reynolds Girls? Bis? etc.)

Could it have been better? Well, given ten minutes, anybody who'd watched the show at any point during the last forty years could have come up with somethign a little better than a documentary that ended with Jamie Theakston saying "and Top of The Pops is going from strength to strength", followed by a 10-minute "oops" coda.

2006, then. The death of Smash Hits and TOTP. A nation weeps. Or shuffles its feet and gets on with things. But mourning for TOTP seems a bit pointless. The brand is still alive, shows with its name on are still being made, and I have no doubt that a BBC1 controller will bring it back within the next ten years. It's just a little break *sniffle*.

And the less said about the final episode of The West Wing, the better, really…

currently playing: The Art of Noise - Close (To The Edit)

Too Ugly For BBC2!

No Mark & Lard! A nation weeps. Or shrugs its shoulders and moves on…

currently playing: Regina Spektor – On The Radio