Part Two: Thrills (Golden Omelettes)
If anything were to justify Adorno’s claim that the culture industry just serves up endless repetitions of the same product, it might be the steadfast refusal of a certain type of boy band to admit what century they’re living in. Sporting bland good looks and winsome harmonies, every summer turns up another straggling bunch of runts rehashing past pop pleasures, and demanding to be taken seriously: ‘Don’t believe the hype! We mean it, man!’.
But I don’t mean the piss-poor child-men playing submissive to their management’s appetite for destruction in your Boyzone or Westlife’s. These are formulae which continually update and evolve: witness Busted, whose lovelorn public school boy appeal depends on dropping precisely the urban and street clichés which dogged the wave before – Triple 8 anyone?
No, the real regressives are the trad-rock combos reared on a diet of Byrds and Monkees, dreaming of a golden age when men were real men, girls were real girls, and pop was real pop. This year’s model are The Thrills: catchy guitar tunes which sound good on the radio, shaggy lanky youths who look good on cable, and an album which is just gagging to be described as the sound of the summer: and of last summer, the one before that, the one before that, and a whole bunch more receding back into the past.
Or The Coral, whose last single ‘sounds like it could have been made at any time in the last fifty years’ in the words of Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1. And boy, are these bands made for Radio 1, still the pop classicist’s station of choice, despite the creation of 6 music – effectively Radio Uncut, so lame are its material, its presenters and its reach.
We’re talking about something more than just the analogue studio fetishism of the likes of the White Stripes; and more than the charismatic revivalism that characterised Britpop. No, these are bands who seem to have taken on some Herculean challenge to stop time dead in its tracks, to depress the cosmic Pause button and see what happens.
Sure, inner-city kids have been getting high on the crack-cocaine of the west coast mythology for years – sun, surfing and shaggy haircuts. But if there’s a more or less unbroken line running from early Creation records to Teenage Fanclub to the Thrills, that’s not the legacy these self-appointed cultural curators are going to acknowledge. The corpses they’re digging up were laid to rest thirty years ago or more.