Unlike the sixties, being able to remember the nineties is not a reliable sign you weren’t there.
It is not that there were no drugs around, but with the noticeable exception of the rave scene, that generation didn’t decide to base their entire culture on them. Which may explain why we produced Take That and not the Doors.
Alcohol was the thing. Rather than the press being full of stories of musicians being arrested for, or dying from, possession, it was generally bad behaviour under the influence of the grape which satisfied the tabloids’ lust for scandal.
This was quite in keeping because, if one wanted to summarise the time, “the sixties with stabilisers” would work quite well. There was a clear debt to what went before, but a refusal to go quite so far. Blur vs. Oasis was a less existential re-run of the Beatles vs. the Stones. Rebellion no longer meant setting up a Maoist commune but voting for Tony Blair. There was a similar feeling that a better world was possible, perhaps less commitment to suffering to bring it about. The revolution was organised so that you would have time to finish your essay – how else would you get a decent job after university? Pastiche was the flavour of the times.
I have a theory that eras of popular culture get another go when those who were there the first time reach positions of sufficient influence in the media to bring them about, and the rest of the cohort have enough disposable income to make them worth pandering to. It is this, rather than any innate quality to the work produced, that explains the current nineties revival. Late early middle age prompts a wave of nostalgia, and if we spent our youth with Wonderwall seeping out of every window in the quad like musical tear gas, then so should our kids.
Revivals have their place, even if Brit-pop is every bit as terrible today as it was thirty years ago. But one can have too much of a good thing.
Not content with lining the Gallagher brothers’ pockets for the privilege of listening to their Fab Four knock-offs, we seem to have decided to be ruled by the incarnation of that time when everything was possible, but nothing was really new.
To those of my generation, Andy Burnham is a mirror of our younger selves or a wormhole to a time in which we were present but not overly involved. There is the well-attested fondness for Britpop. There is the habit of wearing tee-shirts and sports clothes. There is the faintly tedious obsession with football. The faintly ridiculous assertion that one can be nurtured by the elite without being changed by the elite – his fondness for chips and gravy probably wasn’t catered to during many formal dinners at his Cambridge college.
He is, to my way of thinking, a Nick Hornby character who somehow found his way out of the pages of a best-selling novel, and on to the political stage.
Hornby’s characters are generally portrayed as man-children. Their development got arrested somewhere along the line, so they stopped growing up. Without being unkind to the new MP for Makerfield, Burnham gives off that exact same vibe. Shave off a couple of pounds and it is hard to imagine that he has changed much over the last thirty years. The internet went mainstream, 9/11 and Iraq happened, the financial system collapsed, globalisation went into over-drive, Covid struck, China grew. And none of it seems to have changed him. He got elected to Parliament, became a cabinet minister, ran for leader a couple of times, became mayor of Manchester. And none of it seems to have changed him. He’s still Andy, wandering through the quad looking for a pint of mild for his whippet while wondering about Everton’s back four, Champagne Supernova on his Walkman.
To some that may be a sign of authenticity and strength of character. Despite all the opportunities to change, he has remained true to himself. To others, it is faintly uncanny, like meeting a younger self if that self turned out to be Peter Pan, or a university friend who had taken Austin Powers’ place in the cryo-chamber.
Perhaps that explains his popularity. An avatar of the last time (with the possible exception of the London Olympics) that Britain felt good about itself. If we just put him in charge, it will be 1997 all over again and we can forget about Iraq, 2008, Brexit, Covid, Liz Truss. Instead, the Gallaghers will be having drinks in No. 10 again, and things, once more, will only get better.
But they probably won’t. Burnham’s policy platform is not cuddly New Labour, but seems to hew back to an earlier left-wing tradition of state control, trade unions, curly sandwiches on British Rail and the Three Day Week. Even if it were, the words “Iraq” and “Financial Crisis” (during which he was in the Cabinet) are marching inexorably in the direction of this article.
But those are issues for another day. Not to disturb us from the audacity of nostalgia for a time when we were young and some people actually thought Suede was the best band in the country.
All politicians are salesmen. Most sell themselves. Burnham sells us ourselves. As we were before we had to compromise. Before the world had a proper go at us. Before we left Eden. He’s what we could have been.
But we were never that good.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
(Photograph: Jon Clempner, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
