Cool Britannia! Backing Britain! Noel at No.10 with Tony! (There's a reason why we're posting this on 1st May 2017, obviously) Yeah, 1997 was the year that all kind of evaporated and Be Here Now was key in making it that way, alongside the old canard of just being too much of the workaday being hailed as next big things - note in this playlist even the bands thrown into the Britpop malaise are audibly making great distance from that form. The year's big winners as far as hindsight goes ended up being Radiohead, making the most of the first great uber-muddy Glastonbury and of the technologies made available to them to progress - which is telling given at the time almost as much critical hosannah-ing was being given to the Prodigy's hooligan breakbeat culmination Fat Of The Land, which from this distance has been thoroughly subsumed by the albums before it even before you factor in the very much timelocked context of a Crispian Mills cameo. Of course what actually sold in 1997 was the reworked Candle In The Wind, brought into a world that was all for the lachrymose having just made Puff Daddy's I'll Be Missing You an enormous starmaking vehicle, and, in long form, the Spice Girls, so great a cultural force that their Saturday Night Live appearance got on the actual news back over here. Chumbawumba of all bands had a massive international hit. Dimly remembered roots rockers Texas reinvented themselves to world-carrying effect. Someone tried to get New Grave going as a genre, while urban London took up speed garage, the opening strains of a very fascinating, very much evolving form (even if the recorded version largely existed in white label 12"s and remixes) that pretty much has a through-line via the following year's UK Garage boom to this day. Jeff Buckley and Michael Hutchence both left us, the latter a polarising force to rock stardom of the 1990s, the former an unwitting key text in the softening of the form in the early 00s. 1997 - a transitional year, but not in the usual way. Someone please sort out digital distribution for most of the Prolapse albums, would they?
Spearmint - Sweeping The Nation
Comet Gain - These Are The Dreams Of The Working Girl
Velocette - Get Yourself Together
Kenickie - People We Want
Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out
Prolapse - Killing The Bland
AC Acoustics - Stunt Girl
Dawn Of The Replicants - Lisa Box
Cornelius - Freefall
Yo La Tengo - Sugarcube
Supergrass - Richard III
Clinic - IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth
The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get
Belle & Sebastian - Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie
Grandaddy - A.M. 180
Radiohead - Airbag
Primal Scream - Burning Wheel
Cable - Freeze The Atlantic
Super Furry Animals - Demons
The Beta Band - Dry The Rain
Massive Attack - Risingson
Portishead - All Mine
Eels - Your Lucky Day In Hell
Flowchart - Flutter By Butterfly
Björk - Bachelorette
Spiritualized - Come Together
Blur - Death Of A Party
David Holmes - Don't Die Just Yet (The Holiday Girl) (Arab Strap Remix)
Six By Seven - 88-92-96
Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan
The Chemical Brothers - The Private Psychedelic Reel
Missy Elliott - Beep Me 911
Scott Garcia feat. MC Styles - A London Thing
Cornershop - Sleep On The Left Side
Tindersticks - Bathtime
Elliott Smith - Between The Bars
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Into My Arms
Teenage Fanclub - Ain't That Enough
Sodastream - Turnstyle
Pavement - Shady Lane
Previously among the 40: 1970, 1972, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1983, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment