Britpop Cinema

Matt Glasby

Description

The Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation, and the films were just as exciting as the music. Beginning with Shallow Grave, hitting its stride with Trainspotting, and going global with The Full Monty, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Human Traffic, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead and This Is England, Britpop cinema pushed boundaries, paid Hollywood no heed and placed the United Kingdom all too briefly at the centre of the movie universe.

Featuring exclusive interviews with key players such as Simon Pegg, Irvine Welsh, Michael Winterbottom and Edgar Wright, Britpop Cinema combines eyewitness accounts, close analysis and social history to celebrate a golden age for UK film.

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Don't Look Back in Anger

Chapter 1: Things Can Only Get Better

Chapter 2: Do You Remember the First Time?

Chapter 3: The Day We Caught the Train

Chapter 4: A Life Less Ordinary

Chapter 5: Staying Out for the Summer

Chapter 6: The Drugs Don't Work

Chapter 7: Caught by the Fuzz

Chapter 8: Chemical World

Chapter 9: Anyone Can Play Guitar

Chapter 10: The Living Dead

Chapter 11: Three Lions

Chapter 12: Everything Must Go

Epilogue: Don't Look Back into the Sun

References

Index

Sujets

• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Social History
• Media Studies
• Popular Culture
• Años 1990
• Película fotográfica
• Shallow Grave
• Golden Age
• Cultural studies
• Pop music
• Cinema of the United Kingdom
• History of film
• The Full Monty
• Art
• 1990s
• Trainspotting
• Edgar Wright
• Simon Pegg
• Michael Winterbottom
• Irvine Welsh
• Music
• Petits meurtres entre amis
• Pop (musique)
• Film
• Cinéma
• Cinema

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789380354
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Matt Dykzeul
Production manager: Amy Rollason
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-987-3
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-036-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-035-4
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Author’s Note

Britpop Cinema would not have been possible without many hours of interviews with the actors, writers and filmmakers who made 1990s/2000s British cinema so remarkable. The resulting quotes have been edited for clarity, brevity and, in places, legality. I would like to thank everyone involved for sharing their stories, even the unprintable ones.
Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Don’t Look Back in Anger
Chapter 1: Things Can Only Get Better
Chapter 2: Do You Remember the First Time?
Chapter 3: The Day We Caught the Train
Chapter 4: A Life Less Ordinary
Chapter 5: Staying Out for the Summer
Chapter 6: The Drugs Don’t Work
Chapter 7: Caught by the Fuzz
Chapter 8: Chemical World
Chapter 9: Anyone Can Play Guitar
Chapter 10: The Living Dead
Chapter 11: Three Lions
Chapter 12: Everything Must Go
Epilogue: Don’t Look Back into the Sun
References
Index
Foreword

By Hardeep Phull, music journalist
If you came of age in Britain in the mid-1990s, there is something you need to know: Noel Gallagher envies you.
Our first meeting came at the NME Awards in 2003. At the time, I was a writer for the esteemed UK music weekly, and in a room full of celebrities such as Coldplay, Kate Moss and The Clash, Noel was the guest of honour.
Although it is not the done thing for journalists to betray their cool exteriors and unleash their inner fanboys (or girls), I cared too much to pretend I did not care. I had to take him aside and quickly, efficiently, explain to him that the first two Oasis albums were not just the soundtrack to my youth, they made me believe that our little island was the centre of everything, that the doors of opportunity were open to even the most provincial of hopefuls like me, that the world was mine for the taking. Being a wide-eyed teenager, bereft of any cynicism, during the Britpop years was an incredible feeling, and something that I still consider myself fortunate to have experienced.
But back to those awards. As a rookie music journalist, I had learned this much: pop stars enjoy flattery (especially those who deny it). So, I adopted my best faux-Mancunian accent, my best wide-groined walk, and approached Noel with a compliment.
‘Alright Noel, I’m Hardeep and I’m a writer for the NME . Thanks for coming to the awards. I just wanted to say that one of the reasons I do what I do is because of you.’
It worked. He was engaged, and nodded his approval, which I took as a sign to continue.
‘You know, I was 15 years old when (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? came out.’
His eyes grew large, and before I could even cobble together another sentence, he blurted out the following three words: ‘You lucky bastard!’
During Britpop’s imperial phase, Noel was essentially the benevolent, beloved ruler. There was no drug, no drink, no sordid whim that he could not indulge in, and no shortage of acolytes willing to offer them. But even with his first-hand experience of the last truly bacchanalian phase of British rock, he was jealous of me because he never experienced what I did; that sensation of invincibility that comes from simultaneously coming of age, becoming interested in music, alcohol and sex, and having the stirring roar of songs like ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Acquiesce’ in your ears.
The musical history of the 1990s has been pored over ad nauseum. There have been thousands of articles, documentaries and books, and to this day you cannot swing a vintage Select magazine down Camden High Street without hitting a fortysomething musician with a funny story about how they once supported Blur. But Britpop was not just about what you heard, it was also about what you saw, and that is why Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting to This Is England is so long overdue.
It was no accident that the groundswell of British music coincided with the revitalization of British cinema, helping it move away from stuffy heritage films starring Anthony Hopkins and Kenneth Branagh. Britain had a new beat, and it was not just coming from the radio, it was all over the nation’s silver screens.
Movies such as Shallow Grave , Trainspotting and Human Traffic gleefully welded contemporary sounds to modern visions, while the likes of Billy Elliot and 24 Hour Party People used their period settings to highlight the forerunners of Britpop such as The Jam, T-Rex and New Order, returning them to our cultural conversations.
In hindsight, Britpop’s reverence to the past may feel reactionary, but at the time, anyone eager to learn about the history of British pop culture had countless roadmaps at their disposal, to which these films added vivid colour and detail. Following where they went and rediscovering the treasures of the past only added to the thrill.
Taking pride in British pop culture is something that British people are seldom keen to do. It is easier (and more amusing) to make fun of ourselves. But for all its failings, Britpop gave young, curious Brits a feeling that we were in the ascendancy.
Maybe that is why Noel envies us. During the grinding recession and socially oppressive Conservative rule of the 1980s (when he grew up), harbouring pop-cultural aspirations was unlikely, if not downright dangerous.
‘When I was 17 I was a typical northwest scally, going to football matches, smoking dope and collecting my dole,’ he told The Times ’ Michael Odell. ‘People say to me, “Oh, but you must have been writing songs, getting your foot on the first rung of the ladder.” I didn’t even notice the ladder was there. The people I hung out with – if you had any ambitions you were seen as a bit of sissy, so I didn’t even pick up a guitar’ (2011).
Viewed in this light, it is no wonder he thinks those of us who were teenagers in the mid-1990s are ‘lucky’. When he was young, being interested in music and film were things you had to hide. During the Britpop era, they felt like a ticket to somewhere. Anywhere. Everywhere.
Hardeep Phull, New York Post, January 2018
Acknowledgements

Britpop Cinema would not have been possible without the help of friends, family and colleagues too numerous to name here, but a few need singling out.
Thanks to Matthew Floyd, Amy Rollason and the team at Intellect.
To Jon Glasby, Sara Hewitt, Susi Holliday, Hannah Knowles, Alison Shaw, Veronique de Sutter, Howard Trent and Andy Tuohy for their support and advice.
To Jeremy Baxter, Claire Bennie, Holly Bruce, Ali Catterall, Rosie Fletcher, Jane Giles, Andrew Harrison, Roz Kidd, Matthew Leyland, Joff Oddie, Cathy Smith and Josh Winning for their expertise.
To Matt Dykzeul and John Hitchcox for their wonderful designs; to Mel Hoyes and the staff at the BFI for their invaluable research; and to Hardeep Phull for his smashing foreword.
Most of all, I’d like to thank Mina Spatha and Flo for looking after me; Imogen Harris for her insight; John Glasby for believing in me; and my wife Vari Innes, whose name should be inked on every page.
Introduction: Don’t Look Back in Anger
Introduction: Don’t Look Back in Anger

Britpop cinema, definitions and antecedents…
Colin (Eddie O’Connell): After so many dreary years of bombs and blitz and slow rebuilding; no sugar, no jam, nothing sweet anywhere; with the whole English world dressed in grey, it seemed, forever… Suddenly life broke out in warm colours again, so young and beautiful that a lot of people couldn’t stand to look at it.
Absolute Beginners (Temple, 1986)
T he Britpop movement of the mid-1990s defined a generation. Mine, as it happens. Retro-styled but spiked with the bright, brittle irony of the era, it was cheery but cynical, proudly, sometimes cringingly, parochial and – crucially – popular. It freed the charts from the chokehold of US rock and, in the process, changed the UK’s cultural landscape for a brief, sunny spell.
Beginning with uncharacteristic modesty, Britpop’s first salvos were the 1992 indie guitar anthems ‘Popscene’ by Blur, which charted at No.32, and Suede’s ‘The Drowners’, which reached No.49. The movement soon gathered momentum, creeping towards the mainstream the following April with a Select magazine cover featuring Suede frontman Brett Anderson, posing in front of a (superimposed) Union Jack with the legend, ‘Yanks go home!’ Over the next few years, Britpop would reach critical mass, resulting in albums as wonderfully of-the-moment as Suede (March 1993), Blur’s Parklife (April 1994), Oasis’s Definitely Maybe (August 1994) and Pulp’s Different Class (October 1995), all of which reached No.1. By the time Oasis released their stratospherically self-satisfied third album Be Here Now (August 1997), they had blown the nation’s patience on endless string sections and cocaine and the party was as good as over, although it was Pulp’s This Is Hardcore (March 1998), rattling with comedown panic, that finally pulled the shutters.
But before it became a parody of itself, Britpop was a byword for a period of cultural cross-pollination, the like of which the UK had not experienced since the 1960s. It was New Labour optimism meets New Lad irony. Blur vs. Oasis on the News at Ten and Noe