Anna Doble was 16 in 1995, obsessed with reading the NME and Melody Maker, and dreaming of getting into gigs in the north of England. She wore Manics eyeliner and nicked her big sister’s fake fur coat. Half the world away in London, James Cook was practising his bass guitar and riding buses to Camden to buy the NME with his band Flamingoes actually in its review pages. The glam-power-pop trio fronted by good-looking twins (they shared the vocals) was, in theory, mid-’90s catnip, with glorious nail varnishy dashes of Roxy Music and Bowie. In other words, right up Anna’s Suedey, Pulpy and bucket-hat rejecting street. But despite devouring Britpop via free tapes and magazines, Anna never found Flamingoes. Why?
Anna: First up, how did Flamingoes come to be? And was it just chance that the band collided with peak Britpop?
James: Flamingoes was dreamt up after drummer Simon Gilbert left the band my brother Jude and I had formed, The Shade, in 1991, for a completely unknown London group – Suede. It took them a year of struggle to get to that famous Melody Maker front page - “The Best New Band In Britain” - and after that Simon was on a newspaper or magazine cover pretty much every week. That’s quite an incentive, added to the fact we’d been writing songs for 10 years and starving on the dole for four of those in London. We were on our last legs, exhausted, and we were only 23!
We were serious young men, perhaps too serious. Our influences were similar to Suede and a dozen other bands we didn’t know about who were all working away trying to establish themselves. A great ferment was under way, creatively, in London. “Everyone’s dreaming of all they’ve got to live for”, as Saint Etienne sang in 1993. The term Britpop was still in the future.
“Echobelly pissed all over Oasis as a live band”
AD: In your book Memory Songs, you describe a moment in 1993 when you say you realised that “something was happening here” (your new drummer Kevin turning up in eyeliner and Blur ditching baggy for The Kinks with Modern Life is Rubbish). Which Britpop bands did you feel kinship with? And which not... ?
JC: I felt a certain kinship with Suede, the Manics (not really Britpop, but contemporaneous I suppose), Shampoo, Pulp, Elastica to a degree, and Echobelly. But none with Oasis, Cast, Ocean Colour Scene, Bluetones, etc, even Blur, which was probably just me personally; I couldn’t understand how anyone could love Damon’s faux-yob voice, although I admired his songwriting and the rest of the musicians in the group, and played Parklife to death . . . The other bands were just lads – it got very laddish very quickly – and Flamingoes weren’t lads, we were trembling aesthetes (or at least I thought I was!)
AD: There’s a moment where you are very much “on the cusp” of a major breakthrough. Tell me about how it felt...
JC: I found a flyer from Sheffield Leadmill (‘Voted third best live venue in UK!’), October ’94, and in one month they put on These Animal Men, Elastica, Ash, Shed 7, Supergrass, Green Day, and Flamingoes. Apart from Green Day, obviously, all these new bands were on the starting blocks, waiting to take off. It was unbelievably exciting. After a 10-year apprenticeship, it finally felt as if we were “going in”; that it was almost pre-ordained. We had daytime Radio One airplay and were “hotly tipped for the top” in both Melody Maker and NME. Of course, we didn’t know that the gatekeepers of the press would finally decide who was chosen or not. We were about to find out...
AD: Which bands did you get support slots with from the established scene, and who was supportive generally?
JC: The only bands we really supported were Mantaray and Echobelly (UK and European tours). Cast supported us once at The Monarch in Camden. Echobelly were incredibly supportive and generous. The first time we met Sonia, in summer 1994, the first date of the tour, Jude and I were so nervous we both went in to shake her hand at the same time. She was on the cover of the Melody Maker that week (‘All Hail Queen Sonia!’). She was sweet about it, very cool. An amazing frontperson and singer. In fact, the group were amazing, they pissed all over Oasis as a live band. There were some other bands we played with that I really liked: Tiny Monroe, Drugstore, a few others. All female-fronted, I realise now. There’s a misconception that Britpop was just blokes, not helped by the fact that the big three – Oasis, Blur, Pulp – were all male, but women were making some of the most interesting records, and were influenced not just by the usual Beatles, Kinks, blah but by Huggy Bear, PJ Harvey, and [the] Riot Grrl [scene].
"The ‘90s was a very bitchy era generally, everyone seemed to be in full-on sarcasm mode all the time"
AD: What about rivalries – we all know about Blur v Oasis – did you have any arch enemies?
JC: In Memory Songs I write: ‘The prevailing tenor of the time was one of rivalry, a dirty civil war among the groups’, and I haven’t reversed that opinion since. The bands quickly realised there was only limited space in the inkies and Radio One playlists, so we were all pitched into daggers-drawn conflict with each other. And remember we were all in our early 20s and hugely ambitious. Some (like us) had screwed up their education to follow a music career so the stakes were sky high. Also, the ‘90s was a very bitchy era generally, everyone seemed to be in full-on irony/sarcasm mode all the time. It wore me out, as Thom Yorke sang. So, to answer your question, our arch enemies were EVERYONE!
AD: How did you view the power of the music press at the time?
JC: The journalists were vicious and partisan, one eye on future media careers... It’s difficult to grasp the power the press had at the time, living as we do [now] in a fragmented digital age. The three main titles, Sounds, Melody Maker, and NME were comprised of a committee of unelected tastemakers who could literally decide if a band had a future or not. The only comparison was probably Broadway theatre critics. Most of these guys (and they were mostly guys) were the same age or not much older than the bands, and like us they were arrogant and had big egos. Also, journalists were viewed as parasites by the bigger artists, so maybe they took it out on groups lower down the food chain. Whatever the reasons, at some editorial meeting it was decided there was no room for Flamingoes, despite the fact we had some loyal supporters at the papers.
AD: Any regrets about that era?
JC: Hundreds! No, not really. Jude and I tried our damnedest, we had the usual bad luck that bands have. We looked like two Renaissance princes back then, pin-ups (hard to believe now!), and we could write songs. We had to give it our all.
I don’t envy those bands having to tour their one big album on the circuit now in their 50s. I was constitutionally unsuited to touring anyway. If we’d have been a big band, gone to America, I’d be dead now, no doubt about it.
AD: Did you ever want to be categorised as “Britpop”?
JC: Never. I thought it was a lazy catch-all expression designed to sell papers, just as Girl Power would be later in the decade. It became the scene no-one wanted to belong to, even though the exposure, if you hitched yourself to the bandwagon, was massive. Good bands know that there’s built-in obsolescence to a scene and run in the other direction. And by the time the term Britpop was everywhere, in summer 1995, we were done.
AD: In your view, why didn’t 16-year-old me find you...?
JC: I think there was only so much room in the press. We did have a superb press company working for us, though, Hall or Nothing, and our rep Caffy was the best in the business. She pretty much single-handedly made sure Radiohead had a career, when the press despised them because they were signed to The Man (EMI). This was around the time of Pablo Honey. They could easily have been dropped and got “proper” jobs. No The Bends, no OK Computer. But Caffy wouldn’t give up. It took Caffy a year of banging on doors to get us our tiny Melody Maker and NME features. So if you missed those issues you probably wouldn’t have been aware of us.
AD: Can you see a Britpop-style phenomenon ever happening again – a music scene that infiltrated the nation’s living rooms – or do we consign it to a pre-internet age?
JC: Sadly, no. The pop-cultural fragmentation that occurred post-internet – and the fact that music could be accessed for free – put an end to such all-pervasive scenes. But saying ‘Our party was the Last Party’ denies a 16-year-old today their own special era. Yes, Britpop was significant, important, but important to whom? If there’s one group or artist, however obscure, that they care passionately about, that belongs to them, that’s all that matters. I know there are one or two people still out there who see Flamingoes as that group, which makes all the struggle and sacrifice worthwhile.
Now I’ve got some questions for you...
JC: I would have loved to have been 16 in ‘95, and that’s one of the pleasures of reading your book Connection Is a Song. What did it feel like to experience Britpop as it unfolded in real time, at such a crucial age?
AD: I had no idea at the time how lucky I was – it just seemed right and proper that music and culture should be peaking when I was beginning to find myself as a young person. Becoming a (rather too intense, no doubt) music fan from 1994/5 onwards helped me shake off a crippling shyness. In the book I write about my friendship with fellow tomboy Yorkie. We spent hours sitting in her blue Mini listening to music and imagining our futures. The sudden and glorious choice of bands and genres, from what felt like my private version of Britpop – My Life Story and Geneva, the glittery boys - to intensely moving albums from the likes of trip-hop group Portishead, via Yorkie’s favourite band, Garbage... it just felt like the world was finally becoming ours.
JC: How much of the music can you, do you, still listen to?
AD: If Saint Etienne counts as Britpop, then all the time. I think because they skipped around the edges of “quintessential Englishness” in a more 1960s sense, and with more humour, and because they had actual danceable tunes, they’ve stood the test of time. I’ve had phases of re-exploring Pulp and Blur but it can get a bit too teary-eyed and nostalgic! Further by Geneva is my lost Britpop classic and, like Flamingoes, I think they deserved way more exposure than they were granted by the media.
JC: You write about Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts, hair like Jennifer Aniston’s, Return of the Mack vs Elastica, ‘Jamiroqui-infested Knaresborough ‘(your home town). How important was Britpop to your identity in the ‘90s?
AD: Very. Somehow bands like Elastica helped me at least feign a sense of confidence. I probably also took on a bit of the fashion for ‘90s ladette behaviour (smoking and drinking and Adidas tracky top wearing) but the main thing was that I truly found a tribe in a pre-internet world. I sent off for fanzines in the post, made eyes with other teenagers who had the right kind of fringe, and felt a genuine delight when – having made a pilgrimage to the nearest cities, York and Leeds - I found people as well as music there. In my first week at university, I spied my friend Rose’s pile of seven-inch records (lots of Suede, Longpigs and Gene) and felt exhilarated. My poor home town was not really so bad, but escaping the fug of Celine Dion and Jamiroquai felt like a serious win.
JC: You say that Jarvis Cocker led you to Scott Walker and that ‘this didn’t happen with Peter Andre’. Can you tell us about the ‘portal artists’ of the 90s...
AD: I guess the funny thing is that lots of ‘90s artists actually harked back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. So vintage sportswear returned to fashion magazines, Mod culture swung around again and there was a Carnaby Street whiff in the air. As such, I got into the likes of John Barry (also through Jarvis) and Ennio Morricone – understanding that film soundtracks were part of the same jigsaw puzzle as the likes of Pulp and Saint Etienne who mixed art, architecture, ketchup bottles and dead-end towns into their musical cocktails. I remember trying to get my head around Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht (‘Mack the Knife’) because Damon Albarn kept mentioning them and the Threepenny Opera. He also led me to The Kinks and Ray Davies with fresh ears and eyes. We were magpies for the things our parents might actually own – I remember nicking my dad’s Francoise Hardy greatest hits CD and fear I still have it....
JC: What was the relationship between sport (particularly football) and music in the 90s? I know you were a keen football fan.
AD: I think Euro ‘96 was a big deal when everything seemed to come together – acceptable pride in being English, a hot summer and that feeling again that this was our time. The Germans knocked us out on penalties, of course, but it was fun while it lasted. I remember being dangerously drunk while watching the tournament with my group of sixth form friends. At half time we would get our guitars out and play the chords of Cast, Manics and Radiohead songs or (me) ‘This is a Low’ by Blur. We even had the odd Oasis singalong....
JC: You write about the smell and feel of CDs and records. The cardboard and plastic . . . Music as physical objects. Have we lost something with streaming?
AD: Yes, I think for a time in the ‘90s you could have put me in a blindfold and have me identify my record collection via sniffing alone. I remember a very inky Catatonia single (‘Lost Cat’) where the CD came in a little white cloth. It smelled mysterious and arty. The Menswear album (‘Nuisance’) was uber glossy to touch and did actually smell like a luxury clothes catalogue. I think it’s very hard to have such a close relationship, certainly with albums, now. Streaming is great for discovery, but poor for building a relationship. I guess this echoes the entire age of social media...
JC: ‘Boys in cagoules . . .’. As ‘the only girl in the record shop’ how did you feel when Britpop suddenly became the realm of the lad? You naturally gravitated to the more ‘nail varnishy’ bands.
AD: I was a bit gutted when “Britpop” and “Oasis” became almost interchangeable terms. For me, the very point was choice and diversity – a glorious exploding cloud of bands and genres and cool characters who challenged normal British life while at the same time describing it. I wanted Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy) in his cravate and I wanted Jake from My Life Story with his teardrops and I quite liked seeing Nicky Wire in a dress and Brett Anderson pretending to be bisexual. I definitely wanted to be Justine Frishchmann in a cool black Fred Perry. The fact that Oasis seemed to legitimise the school bullies again – a boy in nail varnish risked a beating in my home town – was depressing. I spent my first year in Leeds (1998) armed with an eyeliner in my pocket so that I could “convert” Mods into glammer boys at whim.
JC: Lastly, you describe experiencing music in an intensely visual way - songs being ‘emotional and geographic’. This is a fascinating idea. What was it like having these vivid private experiences at a time when music was meant to be ‘communal’, when Oasis had resurrected the stadium gig and we were all expected to bellow away with a pint of warm lager in our hands?
AD: Wow, yes, I guess I do have some sort of synaesthesia going on. In the book, I talk about Candy Flip’s cover of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (from 1990) making me dream in pink and yellow – and the sounds being received as textures. I loved my private experiences and it’s what made the Britpop era very valuable to me as I found myself and found that I liked myself after all. I used to sit alone with tracks such as ‘Yes’ by McAlmont and Butler blasting on repeat and up through my skylight. It didn’t matter that out there in my provincial town people didn’t always “get me” because I had this. Rinse and repeat for albums by Black Box Recorder (England Made Me, 1998) and Dubstar (Disgraceful, 1995). This was my Britpop. I was lucky I never had to turn the music down up there in the loft!
James Cook is author of Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the ‘90s (Unbound)
Anna Doble is the author of Connection is a Song: Coming Up and Coming Out Through the Music of the ’90s (Nine Eight/Bonnier)