NOW THE PARTY'S OVER....

By the end of 1997, the scene that the music press dubbed Britpop was dead. Some might say Oasis killed it with their self-indulgent and overblown Be Here Now album, recorded in a blizzard of drugs and egotism. "Girl Power" was now the word on everyone's lips, due to the chart conquering Spice Girls, and their more urban counterparts All Saints, both of whom i will admit were quite good at what they did: big pop tunes and soul/r'n'b-infused pop respectively. Add to this the increasing amount of boybands, dance music, and r'n'b/hip-hop/gangsta rap from across the pond, and the charts were starting to look quite lonely for indie music. It wasn't all bad: Blur had shaken off their Kinksian/Mod stylings and returned with an album of alternative lo-fi indie influenced by American bands like Pavement, mainly at the urging of guitarist Graham Coxon, who hadn't been happy with the direction the band were going in, especially after the Benny Hill tomfoolery of the "Country House" video! Pulp would return at the end of the year with a much darker mood, having discovered the long-sought success they'd waited 20 years for wasn't quite what they wanted. The Verve reformed, having split only 2 years before, returning with a more straighforward approach than their previous psychedelic exploits, with two huge hits - the orchestral "Bittersweet Symphony" and the chart-topping dark balladry of "The Drugs Don't Work" - and a No.1 album, Urban Hymns. There were still a few "meat and potatoes" guitar bands having success, mainly influenced by Oasis and the return of the Modfather, Paul Weller. Ocean Colour Scene, Embrace, Cast, Hurricane No. 1, Stereophonics - "Worthy" "crafted" "real music" were the words used to describe such bands. Now, i'm not saying these bands didn't make the odd gem, but they were quite dull compared to some of the other music that was being made, often on the fringes of the Top 40. This was probably the first year that i'd really started taking notice of music that wasn't likely to be on the Sunday night countdown - bands like Belle And Sebastian, Asian Dub Foundation, Idlewild, Lo-Fidelity Allstars, Grandaddy, Six By Seven (a Nottingham band!) and others were all making far more interesting and varied music than the more successful bands. Some of the stuff that got inside the Top 30 was pretty decent too: Super Furry Animals released three cracking singles and a great second album - Radiator - that blew away all the "four blokes playing guitars" stodge, There was a huge swell of creativity that followed Britpop and the resurgence in independent music, especially as all this new music was getting daytime airplay on Radio 1, and had massive support in the music press. 

As the year ended and 1998 began, it seemed that anything was possible, both in music and in my life - i'd done the radio presenting thing, and i'd written to the local paper to see if they'd let me write a music review column, I was still in a boring dead end warehouse job, but i hoped to get out and do something connected with my love of music. As it turned out, things would change - just not in the way i'd hoped. But every experience counts, good or bad....