Britpop Quotes

Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Welsh gangsta rap—every music genre you could name (or couldn’t)—(and a few that probably didn’t really exist) was on a roll that made the Sixties look picayune and provincial. We can argue all day whether Nineties music holds up, but fans devoured—and paid for—more music than ever before or since. The average citizen purchased CDs in numbers that look shocking now, and even shocking then. Every week, thousands of people bought new copies of the Grease soundtrack, from 1978, and nobody knew why. Even critics had trouble finding things to complain about (though we sure tried).

Over the last few decades there have been some fascinating studies that revealed that people who get a physical reaction from music might have structural differences in their brain. Some people have a physical response while others will just hear the songs, enjoy it, but it doesn’t transport them anywhere. Brain scans have shown that the people who get a more palpable response have a higher volume of fibres that connect their auditory cortex to the areas associated with emotional processing, which means the two areas communicate better. They also tend to have a higher prefrontal cortex, which is involved in certain areas of understanding, like interpreting the world more metaphorically, and that obviously helps them develop not just a natural gift interpreting music, but also creating it.

I loved sitting in that Somerset fog of ignorance because all our dreams centred on making that little bit of the world better, rather than us taking on the world.

When you come from small towns in small counties you know deep down that success in any form isn’t going to come easily, which is why we steered clear of thinking too much about it.

I’ve always thought it is important to keep kids focused and fascinated by some kind of music. Listening and learning about it involves, and evolves several really important cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and spatial reasoning. Performing also creates confidence. Because I wasn’t a performer, and I was very much an introvert, I think I gravitated towards absorbing entertainment rather than being it.

(...) in Britpop's fetishisation of chart positions, platinum discs and huge crowds, (Tony Blair) surely saw the same impulses that informed his own rise to power. Principles, it seemed, were secondary to popularity.

It seems that being a woman is very expensive and time-consuming. My innocence about this is incongruous, given my age, but total. I come from grunge, and then Britpop--scenes where you boast about how little you spend on an outfit ("Three quid! From a jumble sale!" "Ooooh, pricey--I found this jacket in a Dumpster. On a dead man. Under a fox carcass"), and taking pride in "getting ready to go out" consists of little more than washing your face, putting on your Doc Martens/snaeakers, and applying black Barry M nail polish, £1, on the bus into town.