The Beatles came back, the Stones kept going — and Blur and Oasis echoed an old rivalry, writes Shaun de Waal
TWENTY-FIVE years after they broke up, The Beatles are back — well, sort of. The band broke up in 1970, and John Lennon was killed in 1980, but in 1995 the remaining Beatles put years of acrimony and litigation behind them and released the first pair of a six-CD set of alternate versions of old songs, outtakes from recording sessions and some tracks that the band had declined to release at the time.
Its leading curiosity is Free As a Bird, a “new” Beatles song on which the three living ones finished a song roughly recorded by Lennon (voice and piano only) in 1977. The song and the CD set, Anthology I (EMI), were instant hits, but many found the song unremarkable and the collection unnecessary.
Martin Carr of The Boo Radleys expressed his opinion in no uncertain terms: “They were one of the only bands that ever quit while they were still brilliant,” he told GQ magazine. “And it was kind of perfect — they didn’t go crap for a bit and then split up. This is just gonna ruin the whole thing.”
The Rolling Stones, of course, never went away. They were the Beatles’ greatest “rivals” in the Sixties — and it’s weird to think that had the Stones, too, dissolved at the end of that decade, we would have been denied some of their best work.
Their new album, Stripped (Virgin/EMI), kills two birds with one stone. First, it is their version of the de rigueur “unplugged” record, and it’s a commemoration of their Voodoo Lounge world tour, which came to South Africa in February. Stripped was recorded before smallish audiences in Europe, sans the usual massive spectacle of the Stones’ live juggernaut. It is a superb document of a band still going strong three decades after they began, and in its relative simplicity captures something of what they must have sounded like near the start — though the relaxed confidence of their performance here bespeaks a maturity rare in rock’n’roll.
They do a smattering of hits, but also dig deep into their back catalogue for songs such as The Spider and the Fly. They cover Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which Mick Jagger flippantly claims was written for them. The Stones don’t reinvent this classic; they reproduce it pretty much as it was first recorded. That is, however, more than Dylan can manage these days. His own Unplugged live album demonstrated only that he has an excellent memory for his own lyrics and none at all for his tunes.
The old Stones/Beatles rivalry of the Sixties was echoed in 1995 by the leaders of the Britpop pack, Oasis (in the swaggering-rockers Stones role) and Blur (in the Beatles-style pretty-boy popsters role). Britpop is, of course, the generic name given to the resurgence of British pop in the wake of American grunge and alterna-rock, which has pretty much dominated the field since 1991. And Britpop has, naturally, already been declared dead, irrelevant or nonsensical by the hipster critics — usually a sign there’s something in it.
At any rate, as it was for the Beatles and Stones, the Blur/Oasis enmity was partly manufactured, a marketing manoeuvre that drove one after the other up the charts and generated kilometres of critical commentary on who was best. Oasis released their second album, What’s the Story, Morning Glory? (Sony), and Blur their fourth, The Great Escape (EMI). Both are creditable works: Oasis wins on energy, Blur on subtlety.
But perhaps more impressive than either were albums from Pulp, who’ve been around for some 16 years, and Supergrass, who bounced to the top of the UK charts with I Should Coco (EMI), a debut album bursting with youthful charm, punkish vigour and songs of a Kinksy tunefulness.
Pulp had a huge hit with the song Common People — it even kept Michael Jackson’s Scream from topping the UK charts. The wry wit and keen observation of leader Jarvis Cocker distinguish the album, Different Class (Polygram), which draws on a rich seam of Britpop history from The Beatles to David Bowie, The Smiths and The Pet Shop Boys. Cocker’s irresistible songs are vignettes of modern life, virtually short stories, which make most of his rivals’ songwriting look cliched and banal.
The British album of the year, however, has to be Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight … Yeah! (BMG), the resurrection project of erstwhile Happy Mondays leader Shaun Ryder. And what a second coming it is – — a rollicking melange of everything today’s popular music has to offer, from ragga to rap to rock and back, it never fails to put a smile on one’s face and the itch to boogie in one’s nether regions.