4

Cool

‘It’s like a new generation calling’

Tony Blair’s speech brought tears to my eyes.

Noel Gallagher (1996)

 

Britain is now the place to be thanks to the likes of Oasis.

Melinda Messenger (1997)

 

The Britpop movement was wrong for us because it was so awash with this knowing irony.

Jonny Greenwood (1998)

Two weeks after the 1992 general election, the Melody Maker took the almost unprecedented step of giving over its cover to a group who had not yet released a record. The headline boldly announced the arrival of SUEDE: THE BEST NEW BAND IN BRITAIN, though that barely hinted at the effusiveness of the piece inside: ‘the most audacious, androgynous, mysterious, sexy, ironic, absurd, glamorous, hilarious, honest, cocky, melodramatic, mesmerising band you’re ever likely to fall in love with.’ Given that the weekly music papers were then championing the causes of groups as pedestrian as Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Kingmaker, while the monthly magazines were still in thrall to Simply Red and Crowded House, this might be seen as damning with faint praise.

Because for once the purple prose was justified. After many years of false starts and dead ends, Suede looked like the real thing, a big and important British rock group, potential saviours of a dying tradition, as they played a series of sell-out gigs in ever larger venues, provoking what Luke Haines, singer with their support band the Auteurs, called ‘genuine teen mayhem’. They released a self-titled record that became the fastest-selling debut album in British pop history and went on to win the Mercury Music Prize, and they established themselves as a familiar, swaggering presence on Top of the Pops. It had been a long time since a guitar group had broken out of the ghetto of indie rock with such intent and promise: in retrospect, that Melody Maker cover was to be cited as the dawning of a new era, a rebirth of British music that reached its fevered peak in August 1995 with a much-hyped chart battle between Blur and Oasis.

The arrival of Suede didn’t come a moment too soon for a music industry that was threatening to expire from sheer boredom. Sales of singles had fallen to less than half the level they had reached at their peak in 1979, a fact made only too plain by the indie group the Wedding Present, who released a new single each month in 1992 with a limited pressing of just 10,000 copies a time; despite the tiny numbers, every one of those records made the top thirty, and in May ‘Come Play with Me’ even scraped into the top ten.

Rumours of the imminent cancellation of Top of the Pops were so widespread that the BBC had an off-the-peg statement ready for when enquiries were made: ‘The future of the programme is secure and any reports of its demise are premature.’ It all sounded very defensive and the qualification that ‘clearly the programme will evolve’ didn’t help. The future, industry wisdom had it, lay not in singles, but in reselling the heritage of rock on CD to its original vinyl purchasers, now blessed with disposable income and new technology. ‘Pop is dead,’ sang Radiohead in 1993. ‘It died an ugly death by back catalogue.’ Suede turned that perception on its head.

In fact, they were not quite the first, for the early signs of what would become known as Britpop were already evident. Albeit a little awkwardly, a British response was emerging to the dominant American rock of R.E.M., Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, PJ Harvey was attracting critical attention and looked like a star of the future, while Pulp, a band who had made their live debut as long ago as 1980, were finally edging towards success; their record ‘O.U. (Gone, Gone)’ was jointly named single of the week with Suede’s first release, ‘The Drowners’, in Melody Maker. Even a self-consciously alternative phenomenon like the crusties (‘that neo-trampish, soap-loathing youth cult’, according to the Sunday Times) could claim some chart success in the form of Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, whose pop-punk was blended with programmed beats, politicised lyrics and a weakness for puns on songs like ‘Twenty-Four Minutes from Tulse Hill’, ‘Do Re Me, So Far So Good’ and ‘Sealed with a Glasgow Kiss’.

Most extravagantly, the Manic Street Preachers had released their debut album, Generation Terrorists, earlier in 1992, promising that they would sell twenty million copies and then disband, having completed their mission to rejuvenate music. In the event, the record achieved more modest, if respectable, sales of 350,000, with band member Richey Edwards left to explain what had gone wrong: ‘The world had changed, perhaps more than we realised. People didn’t care about such things anymore. It wasn’t like 1977, when you could make a statement and get taken seriously.’

Despite the initial failure of the Manic Street Preachers to break through to the mass consciousness, their statement of ambition was significant, signalling a change of priorities in British rock. Suede matched that level of self-belief. ‘We always knew the kind of band we’d be,’ explained their bassist, Mat Osman, a whole two singles into their career, ‘which was an important, celebratory, huge rock band. A really old-fashioned thing.’

The new bands’ influences were also old-fashioned, with echoes from the glam rock of the early 1970s. The first live review of the Auteurs compared them to Cockney Rebel, while Suede were signed by a record label boss impressed with singer Brett Anderson’s charisma. (‘I thought: He’s a star, he’s like Bryan Ferry.’) Suede’s first feature in Q magazine was illustrated by a picture of Anderson under posters of David Bowie, with a headline taken from an old Marc Bolan song: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TEENAGE DREAM? Also attracting attention was the singer Lawrence, who had enjoyed very minor cult status with Felt in the previous decade on delicate albums like Forever Breathes the Lonely Word, and who now reinvented himself with the stomping pop of his new group Denim; their debut album, Back in Denim (1992), was so authentic in its evocation of the 1970s that it employed members of the Glitter Band to contribute shouts of ‘Hey!’ at appropriate moments.

Song titles from the time indicate the extent to which the early Britpop bands plundered the lexicon of glam: ‘Stay Beautiful’ (Manic Street Preachers), ‘Lipgloss’ (Pulp), ‘Show Girl’ (Auteurs), ‘I Saw the Glitter on Your Face’ (Denim), ‘So Young’ (Suede). At a time of recession, there was something entirely appropriate about drawing on the influence of the soundtrack to the three-day week.

The presence in these groups of performers like Lawrence, Luke Haines and – from Pulp – Jarvis Cocker, all of whom were veterans of the indie days of the 1980s, suggested a deliberate turn towards the mainstream. And in this regard, rock music was far from being alone, for the move from the fringes of what had been alternative culture was everywhere evident in the early 1990s, nowhere more so than in comedy.

The emergence of a new generation of comedians had been perhaps the most marked feature of the 1980s counterculture. Starting in 1979 with the Comedy Store in Soho, a network of clubs had opened in London and then across the country, providing space for a wave of performers from Alexei Sayle to Alan Davies, some of whom were explicitly political, and virtually all of whom consciously eschewed what was perceived to be the racist and sexist nature of mainstream entertainment. Attracting a predominantly young, college-educated audience, alternative comedy – as it became known – found a media foothold on the newly launched Channel 4, with an occasional foray onto BBC Two, but seldom got much further. British television still only had four channels and was in constant search of entertainment that could appeal across classes and age ranges.

The first to attempt a crossover into a wider market was Ben Elton, the best known of the alternatives. As the star of the influential, though still niche, Friday Night Live, he had, to the irritation of some of his contemporaries, become for the public and the media the pin-up boy of anti-Thatcher satire. In 1989 he stepped in as the presenter of Terry Wogan’s thrice-weekly chat show on BBC One while the host was on holiday – a stint which included an interview with former Conservative MP turned novelist Jeffrey Archer – and the following year he progressed to his own series, The Man from Auntie, on the same channel. The format was familiar, a mix of stand-up routines and sketches not dissimilar to the work of Jasper Carrott, and though it was still suffused with the right-on personal politics with which he had made his name, it wasn’t entirely effective. It was also starting to look a little dated. ‘Ben Elton thinks he’s a supporter of feminism in his Man from Auntie series because he knows what a clitoris is,’ one viewer wrote angrily to the Daily Mirror.‘The fact is, he’s being downright patronising. If women want to educate men on the female orgasm, I’m sure they don’t need Ben Elton’s hints.’

He also branched out, more successfully, into writing novels and West End plays but, as the decade wore on, he was increasingly criticised for what was seen as the loss of his political edge, though he professed himself unconcerned. ‘I’d had ten years of being told I was a bigoted, loudmouthed, left-wing yobbo,’ he noted in 1998. ‘Suddenly it was: Where’s his claws? Where’s his teeth? You can’t win, so frankly, fuck the lot of them.’ He had moved on. Indeed, he even showed a certain frustration with those who clung to the bogeymen of the past; as a character in one of his novels observed: ‘We can’t blame Mrs Thatcher for everything like we used to when we were young.’

Nonetheless, Elton’s subsequent attempt to create a traditional, family-friendly ensemble sitcom in The Thin Blue Line was widely panned as being unworthy of the man who had co-written The Young Ones and Blackadder, and his original audience gradually melted away. What critical standing he still enjoyed on the left finally disappeared altogether when he announced he was working on The Beautiful Game, a musical about football, with Andrew Lloyd Webber, a man who was not only irredeemably unfashionable but a loyal supporter of the Conservative Party – he had written their campaign anthem for the 1992 general election. ‘I was never a big fan, but at least at some point he had a little, tiny sliver of principles and talent,’ reflected Mark Steel. ‘Whatever made him give all that up and go and work with Ben Elton?’

Elton’s move into mainstream entertainment, and his consequent abandonment of overt politics, came at a time when the nature of the comedy scene was changing anyway. By 1990 Arnold Brown, a survivor of the alternative clubs, was getting laughs with his parody of a comic style that had often been characterised more by its political engagement than by its humour. ‘Why did the capitalist elephant cross the road?’ he asked. ‘Because the working-class chicken had been made redundant by that woman Thatcher.’ Meanwhile John Thomson was developing a character named Bernard Righton, a ‘reformed stand-up comedian’ who managed to lampoon both the now unfashionable style of the northern club entertainer and the new world of the anti-racist, anti-sexist alternative. ‘My mother-in-law, I’m not saying she’s tight,’ ran a typical Bernard Righton anti-joke. ‘She’s not, she’s very generous. She bought me and the wife some lovely wedding presents, and she’s actually helping out with the mortgage. I love her.’

The new critical favourites were the likes of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, purveying an anarchic style that owed as much to the old days of the music hall as it did to the alternative 1980s. ‘We’re just your bog-standard vaudeville,’ explained Reeves. ‘We’re no different from Morecambe and Wise – it’s just that they never sang songs about muesli.’ There was also the deadpan Paul Merton, a traditionalist who would later remake a selection of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s most cherished scripts, including some originally written for Tony Hancock. When asked in 1994 which comedians he admired, the veteran comic Ken Dodd paid due tribute to such figures: ‘Vic Reeves and Paul Merton really tickle me.’

Most successful of all in reaching out to the mainstream audience without losing his original appeal was Jack Dee, whose 1992 series The Jack Dee Show was a hit on Channel 4. Grumpy, dissatisfied and witheringly sarcastic, he avoided material that might be sexist or racist, but he also had little time for overt politics. ‘I’m interested in stylish comedy with an edge,’ he told the press, ‘not with scoring political points.’ Instead there was a series of jokes about everyday subjects like pets, motoring and exercise regimes. In Dee’s world, modern life was full of frustrations and petty annoyances, mainly because it was populated by other people, who were invariably infuriating.

If the implied attitude was alternative, however, the presentation was resolutely old-fashioned. Wearing a well-cut suit, Dee stood almost motionless, leaning into a vintage microphone in a mocked-up 1960s nightclub, and from time to time he introduced musical guests such as Georgie Fame, Sam Brown and Alison Moyet, all of whom would have been equally at home on an ITV variety show at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. His live act of the time was much the same, with just the rare foray into more dangerous territory. ‘How are you going to get people in this country to stop smacking their children?’ he mused about a government initiative. ‘It’d be nice to stop fucking them first of all, wouldn’t it?’

Despite such occasional transgressions, it was clear from the outset that this was something new: an accomplished, funny comedian coming out of the alternative clubs who was undoubtedly of his own time, yet destined for much wider consumption. By the end of 1992 Dee had started making guest appearances on more mainstream programmes and had been approached as a possible compere for the Royal Variety Show. He declined that offer, but achieved a real breakthrough early the following year when he made the first in a celebrated series of adverts for John Smith’s beer. In the spirit of postmodern playfulness that was then obligatory in the advertising industry, the commercial showed Dee insisting that he wasn’t prepared to do anything to compromise his image as ‘the hard man of comedy’, before being offered a sack of money, at which stage he capitulated and took his place amongst a swarm of all-singing, all-dancing giant ladybirds. A later advert introduced tap-dancing penguins into the scene, while Dee continued to sneer about the ‘widget’ that enabled the beer to pour smoothly with a proper head.

He was the first alternative comedian of any standing to star in a major advertising campaign and it made his name. Having been used to an audience of two million on Channel 4, he was now being broadcast nightly on peak-time ITV and becoming a national celebrity. As 1993 drew to a close, the brewery claimed that sales had doubled, while the campaign was voted Advert of the Year by readers of the Daily Mirror.

This crossover was a conscious move by Dee. ‘I know I’m doing a good job when I’m appealing beyond my peer group,’ he told the press even before his Channel 4 series. ‘I love it when people my parents’ age compliment me.’ In 1995 he was rewarded with his own prime-time variety show on ITV, Jack Dee’s Saturday Night, featuring guests as diverse as Freddie Starr and Lily Savage, Pulp and the Chinese State Circus, all of whom he said he’d personally approved; this show, he insisted, was his creation. ‘I think it’s time light entertainment got up to date a bit,’ he explained. ‘In the past, stand-up has always been put under a kind of youth umbrella. But I see it as a legitimate form of entertainment for everyone to enjoy.’ Meanwhile younger comics were queuing up to appear on venerable Radio 4 institutions like Just a Minute and, after the death in 1996 of Willie Rushton left a vacancy on the panel, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.

Similarly Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders’s sketch show happily featured guest stars – particularly women – from an older tradition of entertainment: Betty Marsden, Eleanor Bron, June Whitfield and Lulu amongst others. After four series on BBC Two, the show transferred to the more mainstream BBC One in 1994 at around the same time that the two main stars were launching themselves into hugely successful sitcoms: Absolutely Fabulous (1992) and The Vicar of Dibley (1994).

Having started as a deliberate reaction to the light entertainment establishment, alternative comedy was now becoming hard to distinguish from its erstwhile enemy. In the process, however, the battle over content had been won, as Benny Hill, the most internationally renowned British comedian of the 1980s, recognised. ‘When you and I started in this game, you couldn’t make jokes about politics and the church,’ he told Bob Monkhouse shortly before his death in 1992. ‘Now we can’t make jokes about women and race. All these politically correct geezers have done is change the taboos.’

Some of the older comedians thrived in this world. By the time of his death in 1995, the resolutely apolitical Peter Cook had been elevated to the status of Britain’s greatest comedian by fellow comics and critics alike. Less predictably, Bob Monkhouse responded enthusiastically to the new wave, making a career-changing appearance on the topical panel show Have I Got News for You in 1993 where he was so good that rumours spread of him taking a team of scriptwriters along to the filming. It wasn’t true, he just happened to be one of the best ad-libbers in the history of British comedy, and his appearance won him a solo series on BBC One, On the Spot, in which he proved just that. He went on to host Gagtag, where Frank Skinner mixed with older club comics like Frank Carson, Jim Bowen and Ted Rogers (‘that feels about right,’ observed Skinner of the line-up). Similarly Barry Cryer, who had spent many years as one of the most respected writers in the business, returned to his early incarnation as a stand-up and became revered as an elder statesman of the form.

It was significant, however, that Cryer and Monkhouse had both in their early days met opposition to their presence on the comedy circuit, on the grounds that they were middle-class and educated. A cockney comedian named Leon Cortez once took Monkhouse to task: ‘Variety’s for the working class, on the stage as well as in the seats. Do yourself a favour and fuck off out of it.’ Now variety itself was on its last legs, and the new comedy was coming almost exclusively from graduates, with the inherent danger that it might prove too distanced from the masses. BBC One, fearing unfashionability, had dispensed with the services of Les Dawson and Russ Abbot at the start of the decade, but in 1993 Alan Yentob, newly appointed controller of the channel, appeared to be having misgivings about the policy: ‘We should broaden its appeal to the CD [social classes] who like light entertainment.’ The following year, Jim Davidson was to take over as host of The Generation Game.

Some of this disconnection was simply a function of age. When Rob Newman and David Baddiel climaxed their 1993 British tour with a gig at Wembley Arena, it was rightly seen as a ground-breaking event that lifted live comedy to a new level of success. Their fan base, built from their origins in The Mary Whitehouse Experience on Radio 1, was younger even than the frequenters of the comedy clubs, and the atmosphere was little different from that of a pop concert. ‘Fourteen-year-old girlies can say they’re going to a Baddiel and Newman gig because they fancy Dave or Rob,’ wrote Caitlin Moran in The Times, ‘but in reality they’re hoping to meet a sixteen-year-old boy who looks a bit like them. Just like going to a T. Rex gig.’ Stewart Lee, one of those who remained a cult act with a strong political edge, observed the same phenomenon: Newman and Baddiel’s ‘sassy pop-literate acts and shoe-gazers’ haircuts were about to create a whole new audience for Alternative Comedy – girls’.

In time, much of this audience, like that of the alternative comedians, would be found in the massed ranks at, say, a Michael McIntyre gig, when he played six nights at Wembley and four at the O2 Arena in 2009, or amongst the purchasers of the ten million DVDs sold by Peter Kay in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The enormous mainstream success of such comedians was rooted in the breakthroughs of the early 1990s, as Stewart Lee concluded: ‘When Rob Newman flew up in the air at Wembley it changed comedy in Britain for ever, probably for the worse. Suddenly stand-up looked like a career option for ambitious young people, and a cash cow for unscrupulous promoters.’

If the extraordinary success of live comedy in the post-alternative era was unprecedented, it did at least grow out of an established path, with a comic gigging up and down the country before graduating to television as a guest on the time-honoured format of the panel show, a multitude of which had sprung into being. For one of the other great cultural success stories of the 1990s, there was no such model to follow.

It had been a long time since the visual arts in Britain had produced a figure who could truly be called a household name. In the 1950s the nation’s favourite sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour, could make a joke about Henry Moore and expect the audience to share the laughter, but scarcely anyone since had been able to command that degree of recognition. There was little public interest in modern art, so that despite the storm of controversy caused in 1976 by the American Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, the artist himself had remained largely anonymous; for every thousand who knew the phrase ‘the Tate’s bricks’ there was one, at best, who could hazard a guess at his name. And while Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Lucian Freud were feted by broadsheet critics, their work was not sufficiently known to warrant attention in the tabloids or on prime-time television. Margaret Thatcher once dismissed Bacon as ‘that artist who paints those horrible pictures’, but most of the population would have struggled to get even that far.

There was little promise here of riches to be made, no expectation that stardom might beckon, but a diverse and creative art world had thrived in the 1980s, from the painters Thérèse Oulton and Stephen Conroy through the film-makers Derek Jarman and John Maybury to the performance artists in the Mutoid Waste Company and the Neo-Naturists. ‘Everybody in the late 1980s accepted that you were never going to make money so you might as well do what you wanted,’ commented Millree Hughes, then working in the ‘organic and messy’ art scene in London.

The same had been true, of course, of much of the music at the time. ‘We had so little commercial ambition,’ noted Luke Haines of his time in the indie band the Servants. ‘We really were in it for the art. The aim was just to get the record out.’ Just as that attitude changed in the music of the 1990s, so it did in art, with the emergence of a highly visible, controversial and profitable wave of practitioners, making Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, in particular, the best-known living British artists for generations.

Two things were notable about the Young British Artists (YBAs), as they became known. First, much of their most celebrated work was created at the start of the decade, before they became famous: Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde; Marc Quinn’s Self (1991), a sculpture of his own head made of frozen blood; Rachel Whiteread’s extraordinary concrete casts of living spaces, Ghost (1990) and House (1993). Second, their success came despite, not because of, the art establishment as represented by the publicly funded galleries; Hirst didn’t have his first Tate exhibition until 2012. Rather it was the result of the very visible patronage of a handful of wealthy collectors, most famously the advertising executive Charles Saatchi, and the support of a select few art dealers, headed by Jay Jopling, whose White Cube gallery opened in 1993.

Both men were, as it happened, closely connected to the Conservative Party. Saatchi’s agency had created much of the Tories’ advertising since 1978, while Jopling’s father, Michael, had been chief whip in the first Thatcher government. The associations didn’t entirely escape notice: Tracey Emin initially refused to sell her work to Saatchi in protest at his political track record, though happily this principled opposition didn’t last long enough to damage her career prospects.

The other key to the YBAs’ success was the revival in 1991, after a year’s absence, of the Turner Prize, now under a sponsorship deal with Channel 4. As part of that arrangement, the prize money was increased to £20,000 and the terms of the competition were changed, so that there was an upper age limit of fifty for nominees. The television channel provided coverage of the shortlisted work as well as the ceremony itself, and turned the award into a major media event. Or, in the words of Stephen Bayley, co-founder of the Design Museum in London, it was ‘a classic pseudo-event in that it exists for the media and for no else except its own beneficiaries’.

Its rise to public prominence was, somewhat ironically, assisted by the noisy intervention in 1993 of the K Foundation, an extension of the pop duo the KLF, who announced that they would be giving their own prize to ‘the worst artist of the year’. Their shortlist coincided with that of the Turner Prize, as did their winner, Rachel Whiteread, who was prevailed upon to accept the £40,000 award, for donation to charity, after the K Foundation threatened to burn the money if she refused to take it. The fact that they were serious about the threat was demonstrated by their subsequent performance artwork, the self-explanatory The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (1994).

Despite this distraction, the Turner Prize and the YBAs went from strength to strength and over the course of the 1990s changed the parameters of public debate, so that the familiar cry of ‘But is it art?’ was heard less frequently even in the tabloid newspapers. Luke Haines argued that the more pertinent question – ‘But is it good art or bad art?’ – should perhaps have been asked more often, though the YBAs shied away from it themselves, ‘because they were essentially afraid of calling themselves artists’. In a 2001 book review, Craig Brown quoted Damien Hirst’s own definition: ‘Great art is when you just walk round a corner and go, “Fucking hell! What’s that!”’ Brown went on to point out: ‘Hirst is, in any real sense, far closer to an entrepreneur than to an artist; little separates him from, say, Sir Bernard Matthews of Turkey Roasts, a man who has also, incidentally, glimpsed the profit to be found in corpses.’

Nonetheless, with the temporary celebrity of the YBAs, the British public acquired a taste for modern art such as had never existed before, and when the Tate Modern gallery opened in London in 2000, it was an immediate and unexpected hit, attracting over five million visitors in its first year. Three-quarters of those visitors were British, rather than the foreign tourists who had been anticipated, and half were under the age of thirty-five. The changing perception of contemporary art was one of the most striking features of the decade.

A similar transformation was to be found in British attitudes to food. Again the development had roots in the preceding decade, when the word ‘foodie’ had first appeared and Keith Floyd had ushered in a new age of television chefs. But it was in the 1990s that there was a noticeable rise in the standards and diversity of food offered in public establishments across the board, rather than merely in a small number of fashionable restaurants.

Much media attention was given to the new phenomenon of the gastropub, but less elevated hostelries also began to include hitherto exotic items on their menus. In 1996 Clive Aslet, the editor of Country Life magazine, noted the fare on offer in an unexceptional pub in Hampshire: ‘the dish of the day was Mexican pork, the ploughman’s lunch came with chorizo (appropriate only if the ploughman was called Miguel, one might have thought), and the blackboard showed that Sunday lunch was served with a vegetable called kabosha squash.’ Whether this was necessarily a good thing was debatable; much of the food thus presented was the product of a microwave, and there was a suspicion in some quarters that gimmickry was taking the place of proper cooking. In a 1995 episode of the television series Pie in the Sky, Richard Griffiths’s character Henry Crabbe, a semi-retired police officer who is also the head chef and proprietor of a restaurant, rails against those who pursue novelty for its own sake: ‘They’re not gourmets. They’re a bunch of miserable old foodies and faddies.’

Nonetheless, there was unquestionably a positive change in the perception of British cuisine, both domestically and internationally. (‘How do you cook a chicken in England?’ ran a Parisian joke of the 1980s. ‘Boil it until the tyre marks disappear.’) There was, moreover, a new culture of restaurant-going, so that by 2001 it was possible to say that ‘eating out has become a hobby for the young’ without the observation seeming risible. Drinking wine was now perfectly normal, even in pubs, where two decades earlier it had been viewed by many with suspicion: ‘It’s not an Englishman’s drink, is it?’ Wolfie (Robert Lindsay) had argued in the sitcom Citizen Smith in 1977. ‘It’s sort of new on the scene, innit?’ And so ubiquitous had cooking become as a television spectacle that almost everyone could name a kitchenful of chefs: Delia Smith, Antony Worrall Thompson, Gordon Ramsay, Ainsley Harriott, Rick Stein amongst many others.

Most media-friendly of all, perhaps, was Jamie Oliver, who first appeared on television in 1997 in a documentary about the River Café in Hammersmith, where he was then working. A former industrial building, converted by the architect Richard Rogers and owned by his wife, Ruth, the River Café was at the cutting edge of fashionable eating, frequented by celebrities, media powerbrokers and New Labour politicians, and it gave 22-year-old Oliver the credibility to back up his youth, good looks and blokeish banter. ‘When I’m working hard, I use slang,’ he explained. ‘I’ll say, “Know what I mean?” or “Pukka, that’s cool.” It’s my age and it’s who I am.’ By 1999 he was writing a column for GQ and making his own series, The Naked Chef, the realisation at last of the media dream that lads and cuisine would one day be brought together. Oliver’s back-story – growing up in an Essex pub, playing drums in an indie guitar band – was irresistible and his attempts to demystify cooking for his mates and other geezers made him an instant star. He even dressed as if he was out for a few beers after going to a match; asked in a 2000 interview to describe what he was wearing, he replied: ‘Adidas shell-toes, nice Levi’s twists in a sort of a retro style, an old shirt from a second-hand shop and a Duffer Of St George T-shirt.’

He was not, however, to everyone’s taste. The term ‘mockney’ had first been sighted by New Society magazine in 1986, used by ‘upper-class Oxford undergraduates’ to describe their affectation of speaking in a ‘mock Cockney accent’, and had gradually spread to embrace celebrities like the violinist Nigel Kennedy and the actress Emma Thompson. Now it was being applied widely to individuals alleged to be keen on concealing their roots, and Oliver was prominent amongst those singled out, as he adopted a classless persona for the new Britain. ‘About as working class as the Duchess of Devonshire,’ wrote Tony Parsons. ‘It’s true that this pukka mucker comes from Essex, but it is the rural, white, middle-class part of Essex where they still have morris dancing and Young Conservative balls, a place of small minds and smaller manhoods.’

Yet even with the easy-to-emulate preparations demonstrated by Jamie and Delia, the new-found British celebration of cuisine concealed a slightly less impressive reality. Surveys showed that the average outlay on food was falling as a proportion of overall household expenditure, from 17 per cent in 1971 to 11 per cent twenty years later. Partly this was the consequence of improved income and relatively deflated food prices, so that while it had taken five minutes’ work on an average wage to buy a pint of milk in the 1970s, it now took just three minutes. But there was also the suspicion that cooking, like gardening, was becoming something of a spectator sport. Further surveys at the end of the decade revealed that spending on leisure had overtaken that on food for the first time ever, and that a quarter of what was eaten fell into a category euphemistically called convenience food. (There was perhaps a parallel here with the way that the rise in popularity of televised football coincided with reduced participation in sporting activities.)

It was partly in response to concerns over the national diet that official bodies became ever more committed to giving advice on what should and should not be eaten. In 1994 the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy, who advised the government, recommended that each adult should consume six portions of vegetables or fruit each day, two portions of potatoes, pasta or rice and (somewhat intriguingly) four and a half slices of bread. The following year the Independent Television Commission decreed that no one should be seen in a television advert eating more than one chocolate bar, because it would encourage behaviour contrary to the government’s ‘diet strategy’.

Elsewhere, other creative fields were also enjoying revived fortunes. Having struggled for ten years to make an international impact, British Fashion Week really took off in 1994, with sponsorship by Vidal Sassoon and the backing of the government, and couture began to gain a level of respect that hadn’t always been forthcoming in recent times.

In 1988 Vivienne Westwood, the most internationally revered designer of the age, had appeared on the Wogan chat show, hosted that week by Sue Lawley, and faced an audience that simply laughed at her latest collection, treating her with the same derision that greeted modern art. A few years later, her visionary reworking of classic English style was being celebrated even in her own land, while she herself was awarded an OBE. After receiving the award, she posed for the press, twirling the skirt of her frock high enough to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any knickers, and promptly won Fleet Street over to her cause.

By the middle of the decade British designers were being headhunted by international fashion houses. John Galliano became chief designer at Givenchy in 1995, and when he moved on to Christian Dior the following year, he was replaced by Alexander McQueen, while in 1997 Stella McCartney took over from Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé. ‘You could feel there was a change in the air, not just on the street but also within the industry,’ remembered Robin Derrick, the art director of British Vogue, who was instrumental in promoting this new era of design. ‘London seemed exciting again for the first time in years.’

The British film industry too was rediscovering its heritage with a reinvention of what had historically been its strongest and most appealing genre, the social comedy. A string of international hits emerged, including Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997), all of which had received funding from Channel Four Films. Though Four Weddings was to face criticism – much of it retrospective – for being too saccharine in its whimsy, it broke records as the highest-grossing British film ever.

And there was much else to suggest that the future of the industry might be brighter than its recent past, in particular the emergence of an Anglo-Asian strand within the same genre, also heavily supported by Channel Four Films: Wild West (1992), Bhaji on the Beach (1993) and East Is East (1999). These tended to focus on the generational conflicts within immigrant families over the degree of integration that should be pursued, but they also presented a vision of the country which celebrated the common ground that underlay multiculturalism, evoking nostalgic echoes of an older Britain.

East Is East was set in Salford in 1971, a vanished world of Enoch Powell, space hoppers and The Clangers, where smoking is permitted in cinemas, tin baths and chamber pots have yet to be replaced by fitted bathrooms, and discos play everything from Deep Purple through Georgie Fame to Dave and Ansell Collins. Wild West took the clichéd rock and roll story of a band dreaming of stardom, and recast it with a British Asian group playing country music in Southall. The generational culture clash is embodied in the comic stoicism of Zaf (Naveen Andrews), whose obsession with Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam guarantees an incapacity to fit in with anyone except his own gang. ‘You don’t see many Asians wearing cowboy hats,’ a woman remarks, and Zaf shrugs: ‘Yeah, our community’s got no sense of style.’

Meanwhile Bhaji on the Beach featured aunts fierce enough for P.G. Wodehouse, made a comparison between Blackpool’s Golden Mile and the excesses of Bombay, and was accompanied by a Punjabi version of Cliff Richard’s 1963 hit ‘Summer Holiday’. In one of the more touching scenes, an old English actor, Ambrose Waddington (Peter Cellier), is in a theatre with the middle-aged Asha (Lalita Ahmed) and reflects on what has been lost of his world: ‘We used to have eleven live venues here before the war. Opera, royal premieres, classics, that was our popular culture then. Now? It breaks my heart. Look what we’ve become. Not like you, you’ve kept hold of your traditions.’

All these films were located in a more or less recognisable modern Britain far distant from the heritage movies that had dominated much of the country’s cinema in the 1980s. The same was true of a spate of thrillers: The Crying Game (1992), Shallow Grave (1994) and Butterfly Kiss (1995), the latter two marking the directorial debuts of Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom respectively.

The successes of British music, comedy, art, cuisine, fashion and movies in the early and mid-1990s were in large part attributable to the generation that had spent the 1980s in opposition to Margaret Thatcher. The repeated setbacks endured by the liberal left during that decade had alienated many from the political process altogether, producing a sense simply of weariness. ‘There’s been a depoliticisation of the intellectual classes,’ noted David Baddiel in 1991. ‘Lots of right-on people can’t be bothered any more.’

For those who still clung to their faith, there was one last kick to come, as the results were announced of the 1992 election, a moment that finally spelt the end of the 1980s. ‘Without any doubt it was one of the most awful experiences of my life,’ wrote Mark Steel of that night, and he was not alone. ‘I had always known it was impossible for one person to change the world on their own,’ reflected John O’Farrell. ‘But I felt so bitter about the outcome of the 1992 election that I stopped particularly trying.’ Jeremy Hardy, writing in 1993, shared the same sense of defeatism: ‘These days, my political activism is reduced to sitting in front of the television news saying “bastards” periodically.’

Out of this despair, however, seemed to come a determination to shift the battleground from politics to popular culture, to continue the fight for the soul of the nation in another form. If the Tories were unbeatable at the ballot box, that didn’t mean that their values had to be accepted anywhere else. So although this generation was to prove strikingly absent from Westminster politics, it dominated the cultural renaissance of the Major era. After prolonged incubation in the 1980s underground, it broke spectacularly into the mainstream with an energy and a sense of style that hadn’t been felt for many years. It was almost as though the nation had decided by the end of 1992, in the wake of Black Wednesday and the pit-closure programme, that it had made a terrible mistake in the election and had resolved to ignore the government altogether. A new Britain was to be forged, regardless of what was happening in Westminster.

At first, this cultural explosion went largely unremarked in the corridors of power. John Smith, who was born before the Second World War, made no attempt to align himself or his party with a self-consciously youthful phenomenon, and the prime minister was never going to cut a very convincing figure in the new order, even though his own tastes were far from elevated. ‘There is a lot of talk going around in the upper echelons of society about the low level friends John Major has,’ noted Woodrow Wyatt in 1991, recording in his diary that at a recent party thrown by Jeffrey Archer, the prime minister had chosen for his dining companions ‘people like Tim Rice, Sarah Brightman, David Frost and his wife and other people in the entertainment industry or on the fringe of it’. In 1995 Major awarded a knighthood to Cliff Richard.

Such middle-of-the-road inclinations weren’t sufficient to keep on top of new developments. In 1992 Major was heard saying that the pizzas available at the Pizzeria Castello in Elephant and Castle, run by Antonio Proietti, were ‘the worst in the western world’. Evidently the changing tastes of a smarter set had passed him by. ‘Proietti’s restaurant has served the best pizzas in London since the early 1980s,’ wrote the restaurant critic Jonathan Meades, in a state of shocked disbelief. ‘They are far more Italian than the mass-produced English imitations. Perhaps this was lost on Mr Major, with his love of Little Chefs and Happy Eaters.’

Equally out of touch was Stephen Dorrell, the secretary of state for national heritage, who went to the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 in support of the British film industry. There he managed only to cover himself in embarrassment, not least when he failed to recognise the name of the great actress Jeanne Moreau, head of the festival jury, referring to her in a speech as ‘a distinguished Frenchman’. Dorrell’s successor was Virginia Bottomley, who came into office with a positive spirit. ‘There will be no cuts in government spending on the arts,’ she insisted, just three weeks before it was announced that government spending on the arts was to be cut by 3 per cent.

Bottomley went to Cannes in 1996, where she attended a screening of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, one of the defining cultural artefacts of the decade. An adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s acclaimed novel about drug abuse in Edinburgh and the corrosive impact heroin has on friendships, it featured a cast that included Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle and was accompanied by a soundtrack featuring some of the leading exponents of Britpop. Bottomley professed to like the movie, though judging by the interview she gave the Observer, her preference was more naturally inclined towards heritage than heroin. ‘Part of my job is to encourage tourism and our great traditions,’ she explained. ‘This is what films like Sense and Sensibility did, as well as the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. If we have got the country houses and the landscapes, they should be shown off on film, particularly as we approach the millennium.’ It wasn’t the most ringing endorsement of modernity, though she had at least seen Trainspotting, which was more than Labour’s arts spokesperson, Jack Cunningham, could claim.

No political foray into popular culture, however, quite matched the 1996 Guardian article about Britpop written by John Redwood, arch Eurosceptic and Fellow of All Souls. He began by confessing that as a teenager in the 1960s he had much preferred the comedy-beat group the Barron Knights to the Rolling Stones (‘I didn’t like them much in the 1960s and like them even less now,’ he said of the latter), before praising the recent achievements of Pulp and Blur. He focused particularly on the Lightning Seeds, a band led by Ian Broudie, and on their album Jollification (1994): ‘The Lightning Seeds reassure us there is still an England under that English sky. There is a time and a place, here, for jollification.’ The single ‘Change’ from that album prompted still more enthusiasm: ‘They are right that there is too much needless change. We can’t make everyone drink warm beer if they prefer cool lager, and we can’t make a policy out of nostalgia. But we can defend Britain against senseless change – against political vandalism which would demolish our constitution, giving away powers to Frankfurt and Brussels.’ Redwood’s contribution attracted much ridicule, along with a warning from former Tory MP Alan Clark that was heeded by few during that era: ‘He is breaking the first rule for politicians – never have anything to do with showbusiness.’

‘It’s embarrassing,’ commented Ian Broudie of Redwood’s attempt to swim with the tide. ‘He preferred the Barron Knights over the Stones. I mean, doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about the Tories? They went through the most exciting decade of this century with their eyes closed.’

But perhaps Broudie’s comment was just as revealing as anything that Redwood had written. For it indicated the shift that had taken place in music and was to change the tone of mass culture in general. The early Britpop groups had drawn primarily on the sounds of that darkest of recent decades, the 1970s, but as it became clear that the economy had managed to climb out of recession, the primary colours of the 1960s began to seem ever more appealing.

The key moment was the arrival of the Manchester band Oasis, whose series of hits began modestly enough with ‘Supersonic’ in April 1994, but whose ambitions seemed to match the boasts of the Manic Street Preachers. By December of that year they had released ‘Whatever’, a slight piece adorned with a string section and blown out of all proportion to well over six minutes in length, that was evidently aimed at the number one spot in the Christmas singles chart. It missed that mark, losing out to East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’, but nothing much else impeded the band’s inexorable rise. Their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) sold upwards of twenty million copies worldwide, even succeeding in America – where Suede had failed to make an impact – and for a couple of years their music was the only serious rival to that of the Spice Girls on the soundtrack to modern Britain.

There was still in Oasis a residual influence from the early 1970s, but it was Gary Glitter and Slade, rather than David Bowie and Roxy Music, who were now the benchmarks, while the band’s first top twenty single, ‘Shakermaker’, bore a striking resemblance to the New Seekers’ ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ (a song promptly revived by tribute band No Way Sis). The principal source of inspiration, however, was a lumpen Beatles obsession that steamrollered through Britpop, flattening out the subtleties, ambiguities and diversity. They were, some mocked, like a reincarnation of the Rutles, the fictitious parody of the Beatles created by Neil Innes and Eric Idle for the television comedy Rutland Weekend Television in 1978; consequently there was some amusement when Innes successfully sued Oasis for borrowing the melody of his song ‘How Sweet to Be an Idiot’ for ‘Whatever’. That was a minor distraction, however, and did nothing to dent their – and the media’s – fiercely held belief that the group were indeed the new Beatles.

The idea caught on that we were living through a moment of popular culture that echoed, and might even rival, the 1960s, and for a while there was no stopping it. Certainly the visual artists seemed to be looking back to that decade, to a time when Andy Warhol had turned money-making into one of the fine arts and Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the readymade, originally developed fifty years earlier, had finally become fashionable. Several key artworks drew explicitly on the period for inspiration: Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie so that it lasted for a full day, while the most controversial work at Sensation, the Royal Academy’s 1997 exhibition of the YBAs, was Marcus Harvey’s Myra, a portrait made from children’s handprints of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, jailed for life in 1966.

Sensation itself was a hugely popular show, attracting 300,000 visitors in Britain before becoming a cause célèbre in New York, and its success was a sign of the other triumph of the age: the power of marketing. The increasing commercialisation of culture had started as a desire to escape irrelevant isolation in the underground: ‘Who wants to be a sad little indie noise-freak who alienates everyone?’ as Blur’s singer, Damon Albarn, put it in 1995. That was the year in which even the television news bulletins reported on the hyped sales battle between Blur’s ‘Country House’ and Oasis’s ‘Roll With It’ as they fought for the number one chart position. ‘The screaming at gigs was deafening,’ remembered Blur’s bassist, Alex James, of that year. ‘From the end of summer to the start of Christmas, the screaming never stopped.’ When the critics on the music magazines compiled their lists of the best albums of 1995, the top ten was comprised entirely of British acts.

The success of Britpop provoked a recovery in singles sales from the doldrums at the start of the decade. But this upturn was due as much as anything to the marketing drive of the major record labels. ‘Part of the reason Britpop took off with such a flourish,’ noted Louise Wener, ‘is that it coincided with record companies slashing the cost of singles and selling them for as little as a pound.’ Singles were now regularly released in four formats – on two separate CDs, on 12in vinyl and on cassette tape – with different combinations of bonus tracks, in an attempt to lure the hardcore fan into buying all four. Although this scheme worked well enough in the short term, it was hardly a sustainable model, and by 1997 concerns were being expressed in the industry that the proliferation of formats was out of control and was damaging profits. In a not unrelated development, this realisation coincided with the decline of Britpop.

For now, however, few doubts were being entertained, and the seemingly unstoppable wave of creativity required only a decent brand name for it to be fully exploited. It duly arrived. ‘Once, cool Britannia ruled all the new waves of youth culture, alongside black Americans,’ wrote journalist Cosmo Landesman in May 1992; ‘alas no more.’ He spoke too soon, and within a couple of years that very phrase – Cool Britannia – had been resuscitated from Gorilla, the 1967 debut album by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band whence it had first come, and attached to the newly vibrant youth culture. In the summer of 1996 the expression turned up as the name of a new flavour of ice cream by the American manufacturers Ben and Jerry (vanilla with strawberries and chocolate-covered shortbread) and by the end of the year it was inescapable. Britain is ‘currently the coolest country in the world’, declared the Sunday Times in September, with an impressive degree of certainty. Cool Britannia was to be the Swinging Sixties reincarnate.

There was, of course, an element of cherry-picking about this evocation of the 1960s, as Gus made clear in an episode of Drop the Dead Donkey, complaining about the contents of a compilation video of old footage: ‘You’ve put in a huge chunk about the Vietnam War and hardly anything about Twiggy. I’m sorry, but we’re trying to tap into the feelgood nostalgia market here. People aren’t going to pay £12.99 to watch a bunch of burning foreigners.’ He went on to sum up the media attitude with deadly accuracy: ‘The past is a commodity. We can do what we like with it. Chop it up, move it around.’

Beyond such cynicism, there was a new myth being created here, a belief that everything good started in the 1960s, when Britain had led the popular culture of the western world, a wish that such happy times might be recaptured. And, for a brief moment, the comparisons were genuine enough. The Beatles had commissioned album covers from the pop artists Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, now Blur had a video directed by Damien Hirst; the heroin chic of waif-model Kate Moss was clearly a continuation of Twiggy by other means; and the international press fell in line – Newsweek magazine announced in October 1996 that LONDON RULES and Vanity Fair gave its front cover in March 1997 to a story headlined LONDON SWINGS AGAIN! illustrated with a photo of the Oasis singer Liam Gallagher and his fiancée, the actress Patsy Kensit, in a bed adorned with Union flag linen. Many of the old names returned in commercial triumph. Blake designed his first album cover since Sgt Pepper for Paul Weller’s Stanley Road (1995), the must-have toy for children was Tracy Island, after the BBC began screening old episodes of Thunderbirds, and the James Bond franchise was successfully relaunched with Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye (1995). A growing, laddish appreciation of the 1960s work of Michael Caine (‘the coolest English actor to step in front of a movie camera’, according to the Sun) allowed him to reprise his role as Harry Palmer in Bullet to Beijing (1995), Barbara Windsor was back on television, this time in EastEnders, and Lulu made a return to Top of the Pops, collaborating with Take That on the number one single ‘Relight My Fire’.

By the end of 1995 the Beatles themselves were at the top of the charts with ‘Free as a Bird’, their first new single in twenty-five years, the three surviving members having fleshed out an unreleased demo by John Lennon. Indeed the Beatles turned out to be the best-selling British act in America in the 1990s, with all three Anthology albums reaching number one in the States, while even the lightweight Live at the BBC compilation sold eight million copies.

For those with different memories of the period, it was somehow appropriate that a single taken from the latter album – a cover of the Shirelles’ ‘Baby It’s You’ – entered the charts in the same week that saw the funeral of the 1960s gangster Ronnie Kray. Jailed for murder in 1968, with his last years spent in Broadmoor after he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Kray – like his surviving twin, Reggie – had not been forgotten in the East End of London, and all the stops were pulled out for the send-off. The body lay in state until the day of the funeral, when thousands lined the route of the cortège to watch the passage of an old-fashioned, glass-sided hearse, drawn by six black-plumed horses, and followed by twenty-six black Daimler limousines. In another car – a less impressive blue Peugeot estate – was Reggie, handcuffed to a prison warder, and received by the huge crowds with a kind of hysteria, accompanied by chants for his release. He paid his tribute in a message printed in the order of service: ‘Ron had great humour, a vicious temper, was kind and generous. He did it all his way, but above all he was a man.’ Making the same point, the coffin entered the church to the vainglorious strains of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’. There were wreaths from Barbara Windsor, Roger Daltrey and Morrissey, as well as some sent by necessarily absent friends, including those from ‘All the boys on Reggie’s wing at Maidstone’ and ‘Linda Calvey, Tina Malloy and all the girls at H Wing’.

The media coverage was no less restrained, with the Daily Mirror giving over its first five pages to the event. ‘They promised a funeral to outshine Winston Churchill’s,’ reported the paper, and if that wasn’t quite achieved, it was yet another backward reference to the good old days when psychopathic killers doted on their mums, and East End thugs were said to look after their own.

To cap it all, in the summer of 1996 England staged its first international football tournament since the World Cup three decades earlier. Euro 96 was the definitive symbol that the sport had been fully rehabilitated into society, and there was even an expectation that the England team, having failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, could do rather well this time. There was a new manager, the Essex-born, media-friendly Terry Venables, and a squad of players, headed by Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham and Paul Gascoigne, who looked as if they might just be the real deal. They didn’t start well, but redeemed themselves with a 2–0 win over Scotland at Wembley, complete with Gascoigne’s finest international goal, flicking the ball over the head of defender Colin Hendry and catching it on the volley to score.

This was followed by a 4–1 victory over Holland that saw England deliver a genuinely inspirational team performance, which – thanks to that one goal conceded – ensured that Scotland failed to progress beyond the group stages. A quarter-final against Spain saw a vanishingly rare win in a penalty shootout, before normal service was restored, and England were knocked out by Germany in another penalty shoot-out at the end of a match that attracted a record television audience for a sports event of 26.2 million. It had been a desperately close-run thing, but even without achieving the ultimate dream of a second trophy in the nation’s history, the tournament inspired much of the country (at least south of Hadrian’s Wall) and was an unqualified marketing victory, achieving record high gates for such a competition.

To accompany the tournament, an official single was released – ‘We’re In This Together’ by Simply Red – while the BBC bizarrely chose the EU’s anthem, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, as the theme music for their coverage. (ITV went for ‘Jerusalem’ instead.) Neither made much impression. The English FA, however, commissioned a song that caught the mood of the crowds better than any previous football record, the Britpop anthem ‘Three Lions’ by the Lightning Seeds with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. With its look back to that solitary international triumph in 1966, it encapsulated the eternal optimism of England fans: ‘Thirty years of hurt, never stopped me dreaming.’ That summer the chorus of ‘Football’s coming home’ was heard everywhere, as the record went to number one at the peak of Cool Britannia.

All this was now meeting with official approval. John Major, in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November 1996, leapt unconvincingly onto the bandwagon and listed the triumphs of the age. ‘Britain has won a third of all Oscars in the last thirty years,’ he announced. ‘Our television programmes are in demand worldwide. Our education system attracts half a million foreign students a year. Our theatres give the lead to Broadway. Our pop culture rules the airwaves. Our country has taken over the fashion catwalks of Paris.’

Not all these claims were entirely accurate. In particular, television was the one area where Britain was not a world-beater. In 1997 the BBC made just £90 million from exports, a figure dwarfed by the £257 million made through publishing and product licensing. Domestically it was a golden age for sitcoms, from One Foot in the Grave and Absolutely Fabulous to Father Ted and The Royle Family, and for satire, which had disappeared from television in the 1970s and made only a tentative reappearance in the ’80s, but now flourished in the shape of Have I Got News for You, Drop the Dead Donkey and The Day Today. Little of this travelled well overseas, however. Even when British shows did make their way abroad, it was not always by the most direct route; the rights to Jimmy McGovern’s crime series Cracker were sold to ABC in America, whose remake proved much more successful in the export market than the original had been.

Nor did those whose work was praised by Major necessarily appreciate his words of encouragement. Alexander McQueen, mentioned by name in that speech, was distinctly unimpressed. ‘Fucking plank!’ he retorted. ‘So fucking typical of the fucking government! They do nothing to help you when you’re trying to do something, then take the credit when you’re a success. Fuck off.’

The name of McQueen, one might suspect, was not frequently on the prime minister’s lips and had been fed to him by a speechwriter, a not uncommon practice in politics. The point of such references, however, is to make them sound natural, and that was a trick that Major simply couldn’t pull off with any conviction. His opponent after the death of John Smith, on the other hand, was a master of the game. If there was to be a Swinging Sixties revival, then there was self-evidently a need for a new Harold Wilson, especially after the original obligingly died in 1995. And Tony Blair was very keen to fill his predecessor’s shoes, making as much noise about being young and with-it when compared to those fuddy-duddy old Tories, as had Wilson when he had been leader of the opposition. ‘I am a modern man,’ Blair proclaimed. ‘I am part of the rock and roll generation – the Beatles, colour TV. That’s the generation I come from.’

Not even he, however, managed to strike quite the right note on every occasion. ‘The great bands that I used to listen to – the Stones and the Beatles and the Kinks – their records are going to live forever,’ he said at the Q magazine awards ceremony in 1994. ‘And the records of today’s bands, the records of U2 or the Smiths and Morrissey, will also live on because they’re part of a vibrant culture.’ In fact, the Smiths were hardly one of ‘today’s bands’, having split up seven years earlier, and had anyway been chiefly remarkable for not being part of ‘a vibrant culture’; they stood out precisely because their awkward pop was made in the glossy wastelands of the mid-1980s.

At the Brit Awards in 1996 (he was very keen on attending award ceremonies during this period), Blair took the opportunity to proclaim the good news one more time. ‘British music is back once again on top of the world,’ he enthused, though he gave no indication of understanding why this might be so. Indeed, McQueen’s disparaging comment about ‘taking the credit’ seemed even more apposite when applied to Blair than to Major, for at least the latter was in government at the time, and could make some kind of claim to having created the economic conditions for the successes. It was a point that didn’t escape the attention of the Conservative-supporting lyricist Tim Rice. ‘Bearing in mind that he has never been slow to blame the present government for every economic failure or problem during the past few years,’ he wrote of Blair’s speech, ‘it is strange that he failed to give it any credit for this phenomenal achievement.’

But Blair was on a roll and later the same year he was to be found paying tribute to Creation Records, the home of Oasis and Primal Scream, and to its founder, Alan McGee: ‘Alan’s just been telling me he started twelve years ago with a one thousand pound bank loan and now it’s got a thirty-four million pound turnover. Now that’s New Labour.’ Even leaving aside the intriguing idea that the Labour movement was now expected to be seen in terms simply of capitalist endeavour, this was a somewhat revisionist version of history. That bank loan had been raised back in 1983 in order that Creation could participate in the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, the work of the employment secretary at the time, Norman Tebbit.

And Creation was not alone; much of the alternative culture of the 1980s and 1990s, however anti-Tory it professed to be, had benefited from the same initiative, from Viz comic to Jazzie B’s Soul II Soul collective. Tebbit could, had he so wished, have proclaimed himself the most significant patron of the arts in modern times. But then Norman Tebbit, unlike Tony Blair, never posed for a photo opportunity with a Fender Stratocaster around his neck, and never made any pretence at being cool.

Nor would he have essayed such a terrible soundbite as ‘Labour’s coming home’, as Blair did at his 1996 party conference. ‘It’s a bit cheap,’ remarked Ian Broudie, composer of ‘Three Lions’, about that appropriation. Even the Blair enthusiast Giles Radice, while getting the reference, was annoyed: ‘What on earth does “Labour’s coming home” mean?’ The answer, of course, was that it meant nothing at all. And Blair’s next line – ‘Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming’ – flew in the face of the facts, since the cultural moment that had become known as Cool Britannia was largely created by a generation that had indeed stopped dreaming, that had lost its faith in political change altogether. But the soundbite made for a great tabloid headline, and the Blairite Daily Mirror duly obliged. The left-wing paper Tribune, on the other hand, added its own sardonic twist: LABOUR’S COMING HOME: PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF ADDRESS.

Blair’s much-vaunted love of football had also been expressed in the Observer in the build-up to Euro 96. ‘In sport, as in politics, a well-fought campaign for second place means nothing,’ he wrote, in an article whose subtext was not exactly well-concealed. ‘Venables has, rightly, put his faith in youth.’ His failure to mention the participation in the tournament of Scotland, the land of his birth, was a striking illustration of where his appeal was now being pitched.

In appropriating the imagery of the cultural renaissance, Blair tried to add a party dimension to it; he was to some extent successful in the endeavour, but only at the expense of stripping out any meaningful political content. He was, however, perfectly in tune with his times. His rebranding of the Labour Party as New Labour was of a piece with the marketing process that created Britpop, Cool Britannia and the Young British Artists, and was just as detrimental to creative thought.

The attempt to lay claim to the 1960s was also a mixed blessing. Blair did win the endorsement of Terence Conran, who had founded the Habitat chain in 1964 and had been instrumental in the look of that decade, but it was not a connection that met with everyone’s approval, since the MSF trade union was fighting at the time for recognition at Conran’s Design Museum in London. ‘The Conran image is of a soft sofa in a shop window,’ claimed Roger Lyon, general secretary of the MSF, ‘but the harsh reality is of a medieval despot. There is a climate of fear and a sense of bullying at the Design Museum which is ill at ease with the culture of a museum and the arts.’

Amongst Blair’s contemporaries, the claims of New Labour were greeted with even less enthusiasm. In 1997 Jonathon Green wrote a new introduction to Days in the Life, his classic oral history of the 1960s underground, and was dismissive of Blair’s perspective: ‘If the Tories represented those who disdained the great Sixties party, then New Labour are those who were never asked along.’ Marcia Williams, who had been Harold Wilson’s private and political secretary, was also unconvinced. ‘He’s anaesthetising the whole scene, isn’t he?’ she remarked in 1996. ‘So it ends up bland. It’s totally bland.’ Most devastating of all, Vivienne Westwood wasn’t even taken with Blair’s dress sense. ‘I prefer John Major’s style,’ she announced.

Nor was the most famous Barron Knights fan much impressed. ‘The Blair image is of a 1960s modernism,’ wrote John Redwood. ‘He is looking back to gain the future. He sees Britain as a land of Carnaby Street and the Beatles, of rock bands and fashion icons, of out-of-doors nouvelle cuisine restaurants by the Tower of London and singles by Elton John.’

Blair’s less than fastidious grasp of history meant that when he came to write his memoirs, he omitted any mention of his Cool Britannia phase, but it had played a more significant role than he was prepared to acknowledge. In the move to the mainstream, the overt politics had largely disappeared from popular culture, but a residual, implicit dislike of the Tories had helped shape the mood of the nation.

Part of the awfulness of Steve Coogan’s chat-show character Alan Partridge, for example, was his parody of the way that the light entertainment establishment had traditionally endorsed the Conservative Party. ‘Suffice to say,’ he noted of the 1992 election result, ‘I think we all, that is the whole country, breathed a very heavy sigh of relief.’ As if to prove his point, the much-mocked magician Paul Daniels threatened to leave the country in 1997 if Labour won the election. Tony Blair was sufficiently in on the joke that he allowed himself to be interviewed on stage by Partridge at a Labour Party youth rally in the autumn of 1996.

‘I want us to be a young country again,’ Blair declared, at a time when the average age of a Labour MP was forty-eight, and that of a Tory MP sixty-two. It added enormously to Blair’s appeal that the Conservative Party looked old and tired, out of step with the country’s culture, of interest only to light entertainment has-beens; in a word, unfashionable.

But Cool Britannia was not the sum total of British youth culture in the early and mid-1990s. Some of the dance music that coexisted with Blur and Oasis – the big beat of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers – was easily subsumed, but a less celebratory side could be heard in the claustrophobic paranoia of records by Massive Attack, Tricky and Goldie. That darker tendency was evident too in the Perrier Award-winning comedy of the League of Gentlemen, encountered in the cult that belatedly gathered around the fiction of Derek Raymond, and found in the dark fantasies of comics written by the likes of Grant Morrison, Bryan Talbot and Alan Moore.

It was also noticeable that the politicians who fawned over pop stars and designers were less keen to trumpet the achievements of computer games. Yet ever since the massive successes of Populous (1989) and Lemmings (1991), British games-writers had demonstrated a remarkable ability to sell their products in an international market. Earthworm Jim (1994) even reversed the trend for licensing existing film, comic-book and television creations into games, by creating a character that could spin off into his own television series and comics.

By the mid-1990s, gaming had become one of the most lucrative branches of the entertainment industry, with Britain amongst the leaders in such software, but it was an area that provoked nervousness in politicians. It was all a long way removed from their own cultural experience, and it seemed rather too keen on the depiction of violence, a tendency that became more marked as the technology improved. ‘Until video discs came along, the characters in computer games were cartoon figures; the resolution was very poor,’ noted James Ferman, director of the British Board of Film Classification, in 1993. ‘I suspect that, even a year from now, they will be very different from what they are now.’ Controversies about the corruption of youth were bound to come, and in due course they arrived.

December 1997 saw the release of the game Grand Theft Auto which, despite its setting (players took the role of a criminal rewarded for causing death and destruction in fictionalised versions of New York, Miami and San Francisco), was actually a British creation. Gleefully satirising the violence in American culture, it fed into concerns about joyriding in Britain, which had been a major media story since the last decade, often centred on estates such as Blackbird Leys in Oxford and Meadow Well in North Tyneside. In both locations riots associated with joyriding took place in 1991, at a time when over half a million cars were being stolen every year, two-thirds of them by teenage boys. Six months before it was even released, the game was the subject of questions in the House of Lords, where Gordon Campbell, formerly secretary of state for Scotland in Edward Heath’s government, expressed his concern at the moral tone of the game and its apparent encouragement to break the law. As the launch approached, Campbell renewed his complaints, and was joined by others including the charity Family and Youth Concern (‘This game is sick’) and Fred Broughton, chairman of the Police Federation: ‘So-called games like these which glorify crime and sneer at police officers upholding the law are beneath contempt.’ All the denunciations ensured that Grand Theft Auto was an instant bestseller, to the great satisfaction of the company behind it, which had taken the trouble of employing a publicist for this very purpose. ‘Max Clifford was the real genius here,’ admitted the game’s deviser, Mike Dailly. ‘He designed all the outcry, which pretty much guaranteed MPs would get involved.’

This was treacherous ground for the cheerleaders of Cool Britannia, despite the impressive export sales, but even within music there were no-go areas. Beyond the state-sanctioned Swinging Sixties revival, there was an echo of the free festival movement that had grown out of that era. Originally manifest in the New Age travellers of the 1980s, this movement was bolstered at the start of the 1990s by a host of sound systems – Spiral Tribe, Bedlam and others – that were run by loose collectives of pseudonymous and sometimes anonymous figures, part of the fallout from rave culture.

Much of that dance scene was quickly institutionalised in the superclubs that sprang up in the new decade, most notably the New Labour-supporting Ministry of Sound, but there were those determined to keep alive the original spirit of free events, organising a string of increasingly high-profile parties in warehouses and rural locations. As such gatherings were technically private, the police had few immediate powers of regulation, and since they attracted tens of thousands of participants, physical intervention by the authorities was seldom a realistic option. For those who lived in the vicinity of these raves, they tended to be disruptive, noisy and unwelcome, while the failure of the law to prevent young people enjoying themselves infuriated some newspapers.

There was an unresolved conflict here between different views of society that had been summed up back in 1986 by the chief constable of Hampshire, talking about New Age travellers: ‘If only they would return to a more conventional way of living, there would be no problem.’ The dispute came to a head in May 1992 with a free festival on Castlemorton Common in the Malvern Hills that seemed to echo the glory days of such events in the hippy aftermath of the early 1970s. An estimated 30,000 people descended on the 600-acre common for a week-long party and, reported The Times, ‘established a mini-city with full catering facilities, a large-scale drug distribution system, their own internal police force and a full programme of music and drama productions’. Local residents were quick to spot the different tribes that had descended upon them. ‘The travellers bring their own shovels and when they go to the toilet they dig it in,’ explained one. ‘But the ravers were the ones causing all the trouble – they do it anywhere. They’re a lot of yuppies from London.’ A broad social mix was indeed apparent. One festival-goer declared: ‘This is anarchy working as it should. The site is self-policing. It’s an eco-system.’ The press were pleased to discover that he’d been to Ampleforth College and had studied geology at university.

The massive media coverage of the event, however, apart from making great play of public order and drug issues, focused on the fact that many of those who attended were claiming benefits. A sketch in the comedy series Armstrong and Miller mocked the tabloid perceptions, with New Age travellers enthusing about the lifestyle: ‘You can make nearly a grand a week on benefits easily, and leave litter all over the countryside, and steal babies.’ Others were less amused, particularly the social security secretary Peter Lilley. ‘Most people were as sickened as I was by the sight of these spongers descending like locusts, demanding benefits with menaces,’ he quivered at the Conservative Party conference a few months later, and he vowed to reform the rules: ‘We are not in the business of subsidising scroungers.’ The following year he broadened his attack to bring in immigration, a perennial conference favourite: ‘We have all too many home-grown scroungers, but it’s beyond the pale when foreigners come here expecting our handouts.’

Apart from the sound and fury, the government’s more substantial response was the deeply controversial Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which gave the police enhanced powers to suppress raves, and famously defined the music it was targeting as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. The battle against the Act led to a series of demonstrations and to some violent conflicts with police.

This was a side of youth culture that definitely didn’t come with government approval. Rather it was seen as an alien world that needed curbing. The same was true of the gangsta rap that was making its way across the Atlantic. In 1991 copies of the album Efil4zaggin by American rap band NWA (the album title was intended to be read backwards) were seized by police, and Island Records were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for releasing the record. That prosecution was unsuccessful, but it did help create a climate of uncertainty, so that when the album Death Certificate by Ice Cube, a former member of NWA, was released in Britain, it came shorn of two tracks – ‘Black Korea’ and ‘No Vaseline’ – that were deemed to be potentially racist. Even so, an album that opened with the song ‘The Wrong Nigga to Fuck Wit’ was never going to make the records-of-the-year list of any British politician.

The fear about gangsta rap, like so many controversies over youth culture, was of the contamination of the middle class. The same was true of travellers. So a 1995 episode of Pie in the Sky centred on a senior police officer’s daughter, Jane (‘a weekend hippy, a traveller who doesn’t travel too far,’ says her sister), who joins a New Age convoy. Happily she sees the error of her ways, after getting drunk and injuring herself. ‘I hit rock bottom with those people,’ she admits ruefully to the avuncular figure of Richard Griffiths. ‘I woke up in hospital and realised I can’t live like that.’

The eponymous hero of Inspector Morse was less fortunate. In a celebrated 1992 episode, ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’, directed by Danny Boyle, he discovers that his niece, Marilyn, has been drawn into the rave scene. The day after going to a party in a disused brickworks, she is found dead, having committed suicide. Despite Morse’s insistence that she would never have touched drugs, it transpires that she has indeed been under the influence of a new, experimental pill, which is being developed for treatment of the elderly, but which has also acquired a countercultural use; by expanding the blood vessels feeding the brain, it induces a sense of euphoria so intense that the comedown can inadvertently result in suicidal tendencies.

In truth, ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’ didn’t add a great deal to the debates about raves or drugs, and its opening scene, with girls in perfect make-up and boys in leather jackets as they stumble out from an all-night party into the dawn, lacked the smack of authenticity. Its significance, perhaps, lay in the fact that it existed at all. Inspector Morse was far and away the most popular detective show on television, with a domestic audience that touched twenty million. It was also one of Britain’s few really big television exports of the time; by 2007 ITV were to claim that a billion people worldwide (around a sixth of the global population) had seen at least one episode. The idea that such a mainstream show felt the need to address raves was an indication of how far up the public agenda they had moved, and how close the country was to one of its periodic moral panics.

That scare duly arrived in 1995 with the death of an eighteen-year-old named Leah Betts from a combination of taking an ecstasy tablet and drinking vast quantities of water. The story became big largely because she was clearly not part of an underclass that could be easily dismissed: her stepmother was a nurse and her father a former police officer, who became a key campaigner for stronger action against drug use.

For a while ecstasy became the subject of righteous moralising. Ignorant indignation was whipped up to the extent that, for example, rent-a-quote Conservative MPs like Terry Dicks and Harry Greenaway could be prevailed upon to call for the banning of the single ‘Everything Starts with an E’ by the E-Zee Posse, clearly unaware that the record had been released some six years earlier. Furthermore, the prominence of the Leah Betts story, at a time when it was estimated that a million people took ecstasy every weekend, suggested that it was hardly the most destructive drug in widespread use. More damaging was the prescription medicine Temazepam, used for treatment of anxiety and insomnia, which had become a street drug in the late 1980s and was still popular enough to inspire Black Grape’s song ‘Tramazi Parti’ in 1995. Meanwhile, although media interest in glue-sniffing had peaked a decade earlier, there was, virtually unnoticed, a steady rise in the number of deaths by solvent abuse amongst those too young or too poor to acquire other drugs; lighter fuel was now the favoured source of kicks, until its sale to those aged under sixteen was banned in 1998. Legislation proved less effective in dealing with a new Scottish craze, when it was discovered that setting fire to wheelie-bins produced fumes that could be inhaled for a quick high. ‘Wheelie-bins being set on fire is quite common,’ marvelled a spokesperson for the Strathclyde Fire Brigade, on being told, ‘but I had no idea this was the reason.’

In more elevated circles, cocaine use was reaching near-ubiquity in fashionable London society. Tabloid exposés claimed the occasional high-profile scalp, as when Richard Bacon was sacked from presenting Blue Peter, or Jefferson King (aka Shadow) from Gladiators, but mostly cocaine went by with a nod and a wink, perhaps because it was also so common within media circles. When the former New Labour spin doctor Charlie Whelan was employed by the Daily Mirror to write a column during the 1999 Labour conference, it was given the nudging title of A FEW LINES OF CHARLIE.

‘Cocaine is the binding agent of what many are now calling Swinging London,’ wrote Dylan Jones in 1996, by which stage the ecstasy-friendly sounds of rave had partially given way on dancefloors to jungle, and then to its offshoot drum and bass, whose faster beats suited cocaine rather well. By then too darker drugs were making their presence felt in the form of crack cocaine and heroin, the latter doing considerable damage to the Britpop scene in particular. As the comedian Harry Hill used to observe: ‘The worst thing about heroin is it’s very more-ish.’

Drugs played their part in the rapid decline of Cool Britannia, but mostly the era collapsed under the weight of its own self-regarding sense of importance. The third Oasis album, Be Here Now, was released in 1997 and was accompanied by such media hype and such absurdly inflated reviews that huge sales were guaranteed. In Britain alone, 350,000 copies were sold on the first day of release, a million in the first fortnight. As people actually heard the record, however, it became clear that it had nothing to add to its predecessors, save excess; there were more string overdubs, more guitar solos and more repeats of the same choruses, leaving just two of the eleven songs coming in at under five minutes. Most importantly, the grandiose treatments couldn’t conceal the weariness and lack of inspiration in the writing; there were no songs capable of capturing the public imagination in the way that the singles ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ had done eighteen months earlier. It was ‘the same old pub rock bollocks’, admitted guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher.

The immediate future of rock appeared instead to lie in the hands of Radiohead, whose album OK Computer had been released a month earlier. As with Oasis, there were strong Beatles influences to be heard here, but they came from the darker, less fab end of the legacy, with ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ and ‘Sexy Sadie’ influencing ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘Karma Police’ respectively. It sold phenomenally well and made the group international stars, despite being almost wilfully anti-commercial.

Pop music had launched Cool Britannia and now it prefigured the demise, with the experience of that third Oasis album replayed in other fields. Guy Ritchie, for example, had made his debut film as a director with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), a critical and popular success, acclaimed for its reinvention of the British gangster genre. His second feature, Snatch (2000), on the other hand, was described by film critic Roger Ebert as a piece that ‘follows the Lock, Stock formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song’. Tomb Raider II was published in time for Christmas 1997 and won rave reviews and increased sales as it extended the Lara Croft franchise, but soon faced criticism that it had lost some of the strength and charm of the original creation. In the words of gaming historians Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene, ‘Lara was becoming less pop culture, and more pin up.’

Similarly, as the novelty of the YBAs began to wear off, many lined up to denounce their new work as lazy and repetitive. Certainly there was nothing in the YBA catalogue from the latter years of the decade to rival in public attention the Angel of the North sculpture by Antony Gormley, an artist whose first exhibition had been staged at a time when Damien Hirst was considering his A-level options. Hirst did attempt to fuse the parallel worlds of art, cuisine and celebrity with the Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill, but it was not a notable success.

Once its moment had passed, Cool Britannia was increasingly portrayed as something of an embarrassment. Seen in retrospect, it appeared little more than a scam concocted by publicists and their media accomplices, probably in the confines of the Groucho Club, a private-members establishment in Soho, London that had opened in 1985. Craig Brown had pointed out early on that the club was written about in the media as though it were ‘a cross between the Algonquin Round Table and the Bloomsbury Group, when it actually resembles nothing so much as the Radio 1 staff canteen’, but such dissent was never going to stop the self-celebration. ‘Jumped-up one-book novelists, poxy little film company liars, grown men who write for Loaded, comedians who’ve had lunch with someone from Channel 4,’ exulted a former football journalist turned restaurant critic in Tony Marchant’s drama series Holding On; ‘we all gather together and enjoy our good fortune, the unique talent we possess.’

From the inside, it was all terribly exciting. ‘Soho was fizzing,’ wrote Alex James from Blur. ‘There was a big mad family of extraordinary people.’ James had been introduced to the club by Vic Reeves and Jonathan Ross, and found soul-mates there in the form of Damien Hirst and actor Keith Allen. Under the collective name of Fat Les, the trio had a hit single with the World Cup song ‘Vindaloo’, while Allen summed up one aspect of the spirit of the age with his description of a Vanity Fair photo-shoot that was staged in the Groucho Club: ‘not only were we drunk, we were obnoxious.’

There was more, however, to Cool Britannia than a Soho coterie high on booze, cocaine and mutual backslapping. In its early incarnation, before the branding and the marketing took over entirely, there was a moment when popular culture enjoyed one of its periodic peaks of creativity. And before politicians rushed to join in, there was too a political dimension to underpin the post-1980s partying. In 1994, while John Smith was still alive, the journalist Allison Pearson wrote that ‘the whole country was conspiring to look like a piece of anti-government propaganda’. Tony Blair was shrewd enough to position himself on the right side of a cultural fault line that separated the Conservatives from much of the rest of the country, and in the white heat of that anti-Tory alliance, there was lost – temporarily, as it turned out, though perhaps at a time when it was most needed – a scepticism about politics itself.