Side B of the 90s (the second half of the decade, that is) is not very different to side A . Much like an album. More of the same, only not quite as good.
I blame Britpop. As much as it was probably the last great movement in British pop music culture, it spawned a glut of bands who struggled to extend their cheeky lad and ladette guitar-based indie sing-alongs across a whole album. Blur are the epitome of this flattering to deceive summation. Had downloads and then streaming usurped CDs before "Parklife" was released, then far fewer people would have bought the whole album. As it was, everyone who "loved a bit" of it, had to put up with all of it, fairground jingles and irritating moments of musical dicking about included.
Blur, then, were not one of the Britpop lot to trouble my geeky top ten lists of albums from each year of the mid to late 90s. Nor were Sleeper, despite my efforts to love them more - efforts prompted partly by their propensity for a catchy single and mostly by my infatuation with lead singer, Louise Wener.
The best albums by bands who could be said to at least loosely fall under this same umbrella would include the following:
"The Sound of McAlmont and Butler" (8/10 1995), which was purchased not just out of loyalty, but because it turned out to be a great album assembled from a series of original EPs; and because it might just kick off with the most explosively celebratory expression of joy ever unleashed in a pop song - "Yes".
Pulp's "Different Class" (8/10 1995) pre-dated the TV series 'Shameless' by a few years, but it managed to put the essence of that show to (extraordinarily catchy) music in its endearing portrayal of council estate romance, dry wit and perversion.
Demonstrating a far more middle-class, culturally intellectual obsession for sex - a classical music and literary tinged Beatlesesque pop version of the 'Carry On...' films - was Neil Hammond, aka The Divine Comedy. "Casanova" (7/10 1996) introduced us to 'Something for the Weekend' with its references to Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (something in the woodshed); "A Short Album about Love" (8/10 1997) contained the ultimate declaration of love with 'If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable'; and "Fin de Siecle" (7/10 1998) painted images of journeys on National Express coaches with huge bottomed women.
Not quite fitting the sunny side of the Britpop template was Radiohead. Before sinking into an abyss of experimental, morose dirge, they weren't quite too pretentious enough to forego a memorable guitar hook or ten within the bars of "The Bends" (8/10 1995) and "OK Computer" (8/10 1997). And Oasis and Supergrass squeeze themselves onto the lists as well, to complete what on reflection is actually a fairly healthy representation for Britpop.
Not Britpop, but sitting comfortably alongside them are these CDs from indie/alternative artists: "Bring it On" (9/10 1998) by Gomez, "Beautiful Freak" (9/10 1996) by eels, "White Ladder" (8/10 1998) by David Gray, "I'm with Stupid" (6/10 1995) by Aimee Mann and "Big Calm" (6/10 1998) by Morcheeba. James also continued to plough a furrow through the 90s of half decent albums sprinkled with some great songs, the best being "Millionaires" (7/10) in 1999.
Less likely to find themselves featured in between topless photo-shoots on the pages of 90s lads' magazine, "Loaded" or invited to be interviewed on "The Word" by one of the decade's most iconic arseholes, Terry Christian, would be the inevitable folk and country rock performers sitting on my CD and record racks. This includes Natalie Merchant, who moved on from 10,000 Maniacs, to produce several beautiful solo albums. Beautiful AND interesting that is. I stress that, because people often use that ubiquitous adjective to describe soft, gentle and VERY dull and bland ballads, which is not what Natalie Merchant did, not at first anyway. She did, later on, spend a few years on a self-indulgent project to put a double album's worth of Edwardian poetry for children to music, which I also witnessed in performance in probably the most tediously fucking boring concert I have ever attended. At her best she can be heard on "Tigerlily" (8/10 1995), "Ophelia" (7/10 1998) and "Motherland" (8/10 2001).
Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Robyn Hitchcock, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch get on the scoreboards, but standing out is another folky favourite of mine, bearded this time, as you'd expect, Richard Thompson. "You? Me? Us?" (7/10 1996) pulls off the experiment of one disc of acoustic tracks and one disc of electric versions without it seeming like a gimmick. In 1999, he unleashed a classic in my mind, one of only two perfect scores in this half of the decade, "Mock Tudor" (10/10). The other ten is "Time Out of Mind" (1997), Dylan's resurrection #3, that proved to be a turning point rather than a blip, a return to form that he continued to build on for the next 14 years.
An even more unexpected comeback at this time (1999), given that their last studio album was 14 years previously, was Madness. The LP title "Wonderful" (6/10) described some of the tracks on that album, not all, but its the odd song that stacks up against their classics that showed they could still write great pop tunes; and they went on to do this again, irregularly, over the time since.
Finally, also proving that they weren't washed up either, were David Bowie ("Earthling" 6/10 1997 and "Hours" 5/10 1999) and Paul McCartney ("Flaming Pie" 7/10 1997).
So, lots of great albums, but a downward trajectory. You'd expect this would continue in the 2000s, as clearly I was getting older, more set in my ways, more narrow minded and rose tinted in my view of the good old days. But you'd be wrong. Strangely.
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