The one song Thom Yorke wishes he had written: “Bastards!”
Britpop was an explosion that was hard to avoid. Nevertheless, Radiohead seemed to pride themselves on being independent from the era’s emerging zeitgeist. In fact, as Thom Yorke famously stated in a past interview, “The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry. I hated it. It was backwards-looking, and I didn’t want any part of it.”
As Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood further added: “To us, Britpop was just a 1960s revival. It just leads to pastiche. It’s you wishing it was another era.” He continued to say that this wasn’t only futile but conducive to cheap music, adding: “As soon as you go down that route, you might as well be a Dixieland jazz band, really.” This point was also elucidated in the ‘The Bends’ lyric: “I wish it was the ‘60s, I wish we could be happy.” Sadly, that seems even more pertinent today, although you’d be hard-pushed to claim Britpop is entirely to blame.
However, away from this art school approach to looking at the movement, for many people, the sideburn revolution represented a new and exciting time that reinvigorated guitar music. Something almost tangible was happening, and a long list of forgotten nights for millions of young people is proof of this, pastiche or otherwise. There was an unavoidable and intoxicating excitement in the air of indie clubs.
Thus, it seems fitting that the song Thom Yorke wishes he wrote from this period is one that focuses on the unfurling fun times themselves rather than trying to parody the past. When speaking to fans at a BBC Maida Vale session back in 2003, Yorke was smart enough to separate individual works of art from the movement as a whole and championed the Britpop anthem ‘Girls and Boys’ by Blur as the one song he wishes he had written.
“’Girls and Boys’,” Yorke said to the question without a second’s thought and no hint of irony. “When I heard that, I was like, ‘bastards!’” It is a mark of Yorke’s all-encompassing influences that even amid a genre he wasn’t all that fond of, he could still find something worth celebrating. In truth, this is perhaps because the song was far from backwards-looking and, in fact, crystalised the zeitgeist.
As Damon Albarn said of the track that was spawned after a boozy break in Magaluf, “I just love the whole idea of it, to be honest. I love herds. All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just copulating.”
He continued: “There’s no morality involved, I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen.” But it did, and scenes of bleached hair and baggy Union Jack shirts getting busy behind the bins of a foreign nightclub were amorally commonplace.
Graham Coxon added a similar explanation of the track, telling NME: “We’d never been on Club 18-30 holidays or any of those things. We’re writing about characters that you see and you make up stories about them; there’s not a lot of first-hand experiences.” All the same, ‘Girls and Boys’ serves as proof that the spectator sees more of the game on this front.
Whether or not you are in the camp that finds its chanty ways a little migraine-inducing or you relish in the bouncy rhythm of the disco beat, the song’s undoubted strength comes from the fact that it seems to preserve an era in adrenalised amber. It’s not without irony that it also seemed to defy the tenets of that era at the time, making it an admirable oddity in Yorke’s eyes.
Far from a ‘60s throwback, it has dated in the same generational way that those summer of love songs that helped to spawn Britpop have. And it seems very typical of Yorke to pick up on that timeless motif as a personal favourite even if he loathed Britpop itself. In fact, perhaps that proves, as Jarvis Cocker has always argued, Britpop was merely a label invented by the press more so than a genre after all.