00:00Hi, my name is Mark Burrows, I am a comedian and an author and a music journalist and I
00:05am on tour with my stand-up comedy spectacular The Britpop Show. It is a tribute to the 90s
00:13and why it was weird and extraordinary and should never be forgotten but also why it
00:19was such a strange time. And I'm bringing that show to the Foundry in Sheffield on April
00:26the 25th and on Sunday the 26th I'm at the Glee Club in Leeds. I'm actually 45 years old
00:32on the Sunday when I play, on Saturday when I play in Sheffield. So the Leeds show will
00:38be the first day of my 45th year. I was 13 in 1994 and I was 18 in 1999. So
00:44my entire
00:45teenage years is the Britpop era. Like that music is the soundtrack to that period of your
00:52life when you turn into who you are. I remember just discovering these songs on John Peel on
00:58the evening session through reading about them in NME and Melody Maker. Kurt Cobain had died
01:02and everything was very miserable and I was looking for something that felt optimistic
01:05and confident and then Blurr's Part Life comes and goes, oh there it is. Blurr vs Oasis was
01:11a weird thing because it kind of felt inevitable and it was entirely constructed, right? Like
01:17it was entirely constructed. It became a big news story because it happened in August when
01:21there was nothing else happening. It was in the summer silly season and it really, it came
01:28about, people go, oh it's North vs South, it's working class vs middle class, it's arty pop vs rock
01:35and roll and it wasn't any of that really. All that actually happened is that Damon Auburn got
01:41off with Liam Gallagher's girlfriend at a party in early 1995. Liam Gallagher wakes up and decides that
01:47hating Blurr is now 100% of his personality and it all just kind of grew out of that. The
01:52best
01:52Britpop band was Pulp by Country Mile. So like it's not Blurr vs Oasis, it's why Pulp were better
01:58than any of them and Jarvis Cocker is one of the greatest living Englishmen and one of the best
02:04songwriters we've ever produced. I could never just expect people who already know about this subject to
02:09come to the show and so the show works as an introduction to it. You don't, there's no previous
02:13knowledge required. It's worth I think looking back and tracing where that music came from and
02:19why it was so impactful and why it was so important and why it kind of created this this era
02:26in this
02:26kind of last hurrah era uh before um in the before the internet became mainstream uh it's not a tech
02:33talk
02:34it's not a lecture it's a stand-up comedy show um but it's a stand-up comedy show with music
02:38and it
02:39has a lot of nostalgia in it but also has a lot of sort of social commentary in it and
02:42and looking
02:43at why that music became so important and why it's come back uh and I find that really fascinating
02:49because I'm a journalist I can't help but write like that um and uh and the audiences seem to really
02:56click into it and seem to really understand what I'm going for which has been really really good.
Comments