The lost decade of the 1990s

Why the dull spectacle of Gaz Combes on Jools Holland is an irresistible metaphor

Blur at Wembley, 8 July 2023

In the last few days, my timelines have been filled with rapturous reviews of Blur at Wembley Stadium and Pulp on tour. I'm sure the shows were great. I am, however, increasingly convinced that Blur and Pulp are among the exceptions to a general rule: That, musically and politically speaking, the 1990s represented a massive missed opportunity.

A week or two ago I was flicking channels and happened upon Jools Holland's Later. I rarely watch it these days (as much because of my aversion to the presenter rather than the guests) but for whatever reason I kept watching this time. One of the artists was Gaz Coombes, ex-frontman of Supergrass. This is the title track to his new album:

There's nothing 'wrong' with this. It's a carefully-constructed song, played beautifully and sung with affect. It’s quite nice. The question that sprung to mind, though, was what on earth is the point?

There are a lot of songs in the world. Musicians add to the pile for many reasons; an instinctual drive to create, a sense of obsession, artistic ambition and financial necessity. I'm sure that Gaz Coombes is passionate about what he does. Yet there is a daunting gap between the human drive to create music and the human desire to hear music. And I don't see how anyone could say that Gaz Combes' recent work needs to be heard.

That wasn't always the case. Supergrass produced some joyfully ragged and uplifting songs back in the day. And yes, I know that to expect a songwriter to churn out youthful bursts of delight like 'Alright' or 'Caught by the fuzz' into middle age and beyond is ludicrous. But is well-crafted 'classic' song-writing really the way to go? Where is the artistic ambition, the thrill of breaking boundaries?

Any Britpop retrospective will feature 'Alright' and rightly so. It's one of a number of songs from the era that still feel luminous with possibility. But what did all that possibility all add up to? You can point to Blur and their continued drive to experiment (as a band and as individual artists) and Pulp with their daring This is Hardcore . But the dreariness of Oasis and the Gallagher brothers seems to smother everything else. What was the point of it all?

Personally, I finally twigged that something was going very very wrong when I read an NME interview with Embrace in the late 1990s, where they claimed to be 'the most important band in the country right now'. Artists often talk themselves up, but in a healthy creative climate, a band playing conventional, mid-tempo would-be anthems would never claim they were important for fear of being laughed at. Yet I guess that in a way Embrace were important as the John the Baptists for Keane, Travis, Coldplay, Snow Patrol and on and on...

Until the mid-1990s I'd been balancing a love of the UK and US indie/alternative scenes with a burgeoning fascination with extreme metal. There was a time when indie and alternative meant a space of musical difficulty and awkwardness. Britpop came out of this milieu and at the beginning you could hear the traces of obstreperous musical marginality- Oasis's cocky insouciance, Pulp's odes to provincial misfits, Suede's camp grubbiness. Success turned most of it to smugness, heralding a future of 'classic' Gaz Combes-style competence.

What's astonishing is that this drive towards the mediocre happened at exactly the same time as both grunge and nu metal were doing the same. Bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney and Tad were a breath of fresh air in the late 80s, but ultimately they begat Nickelback. Rap metal felt daring and fresh in the early 1990s and Korn et al's weaponised fucked-upness was similarly adventurous. Ultimately though, we ended up with Puddle of Mudd and Alien Ant Farm.

You might say that this is all just an old story, of new music scenes being incorporated into the mainstream and losing their edge. I think there's more to it than that though. I think that 1990s music was just one manifestation of a wider phenomenon that defined the decade; the squandering of possibility.

When I look at where we are now, I think of what could have happened during the 1990s. There was time then to make the transition from the carbon-fuel economy; there was time then to make the transition from the debt-fuel economy; there was time to deal with the deeper grievances that would eventually lead to the assaults on democracy in the 2020s. Instead we had the bizarre mix of triumphalism and timidity that came to define both Britpop and neo-liberal centrism.

In 2003, John Harris wrote an excellent book, The Last Party that traced a similar arc of disappointment in Britpop and New Labour. My sense, though, is that this is a much bigger story than the UK. The end of the cold war left a vacuum filled with self-congratulatory complacency. We knew the challenges that awaited us, but there seemed to be endless time available. It was, for much of the 'western' world, a decade without urgency and ambition.

Gaz Combes on Jools Holland is an irresistible metaphor for creation without hope of anything better. There's still the memory of a different time, but no hope of recovering it. To quote the final words in Kenneth Williams' diary, 'oh - what's the bloody point?'