I'm tremendously pleased with this. I'm on the cover of a magazine that published - amongst many others - three of my greatest literary heroes: George Orwell, H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestley. I'm very grateful to the editor Jason Cowley for his support, and to dozens of others, including the chief sub-editor Nana Yaa Mensah.
The book should be available at the end of next week, but until then, the New Statesman is clearly the place to be.
2 comments:
A compelling article in the Newstatesman. It is satisfying to be able to read a social/cultural history of my (for the most part) formative years (I was born in 66)and having read your previous studies of the 70s and 80s I look forward to the e book. This stuff resonates!
Even at the time the whole mid 90s Britpop/Cool Brittania mularky seemed like a contrived media-driven rehash of a particular idea of the mid-60s with Blair doing his Harold Wilson and The Beatles bit.There was a theory doing the rounds (post-post modernist) that the 90s did not actually exist and was simply a mish mash of the previous 3 decades.Of course another media contrivance.
Nevertheless for a while it did seem to be an improvement on the horrible 80s. We could even fool ourselves (for a nano second)that Blair was a break with the recent Thatcherite past. Of course it did not last: do you remember the March 1998 edition of the NME with it's front cover picture of Blair and the Lydon strapline 'Ever felt you've been conned?! (or was it "had"?).
been conned?'!
Thank you for the kind words. Much of the e-book deals with the cultural side of the 1990s, particularly Britpop and comedy.
I'm particulaly fond of the early phase of Britpop, when Suede and the Auteurs and Denim were drawing on the legacy of the 1970s, without sounding like they actually wanted to live there: glam rock and new wave was seen as a source of inspiration, not an era to be recreated. I found myself falling in love with modern pop again, for the first time since the advent of the Jesus and Mary Chain.
But things changed with branding: Britpop itself, then Cool Britannia, even the Young British Artists (most of whose best-known work was done before the term was adopted). The celebration of success, after the years of 1980s counterculture, allowed the media contrivance you talk about.
Anyway, I hope you like the e-book. The New Statesman extracts are from the Prologue and Epilogue - the more overtly political bits - but (inevitably) I think it works better as a whole.
Meanwhile, the full-length book on the 1990s is coming on apace. You won't be surprised to hear that Blair isn't coming out of it terribly well.
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