Uncommon People by Miranda Sawyer: Britpop – the last musical era?

Uncommon People by Miranda Sawyer (John Murray £25, 336pp)

Britpop, that brief but florid era of banging indie pop tunes, which lasted from the dog days of John Major to the brief honeymoon of Tony Blair, is now a very long time ago. 

Has there been anything musical to write home about since? Not really, I’m sad to say. The charts are irrelevant; live performance is dominated by the elderly, the infirm and Taylor Swift; music magazines have vanished; and even the DJ Johnnie Walker has retired, which feels a bit like the last raven leaving the Tower of London.

Miranda Sawyer’s memoir of Britpop is therefore very timely. Here was the last great musical movement (that was never really a movement) anatomised for a middle-aged readership who can now afford 25 quid for a small hardback. 

Here is your youth repackaged, as everyone’s will be sooner or later. If you’re as obsessed with pop music as I still am, it’s a terrific read.

Sawyer has subtitled her book ‘Britpop And Beyond In 20 Songs’, for she has taken a song each by all the leading protagonists of Britpop (and a few who were very much on the margins) and woven witty, thoughtful and very well-informed essays around each one. 

Some of the songs have lost nothing in the intervening decades: I was in the pub the other day when Pulp’s Common People came on and everyone started singing, as they knew all the words. What happened to the girl in that song? She must be pushing 60 by now, and a scion of Greek society. Jarvis Cocker is himself 61.

Oasis: Noel Gallagher (left) is now 57

The Britpop generation have aged. Noel Gallagher is 57. Damon Albarn of Blur (we all assumed he had changed his name from Allbran) and Thom Yorke of Radiohead are 56. Even chirpy, cheeky Gaz Coombes of Supergrass is 48.

And Miranda Sawyer is 57. She was there, as a journalist, at Britpop’s epicentre. She met all these people, she interviewed them, she drank with them, she saw them play to five men and a dog. 

And now she has turned her gimlet eye to the songs and the ‘exceptional’ people who created them. ‘If we concentrate on the songs of these bands at the time, we can show how important they were, plug into the small – yet suddenly big – lives of the people who made these songs and the mad exhilaration of what it was like to hear them, fresh, for the first time.’

This is a book of thoroughgoing excellence and the basis of one of the best playlists you’ll ever hear.