As the garrisons of the Blairite army wind up their years of service, it's worth remembering those soldiers who fell in the early period of the new Labour revolution. I speak of those members of the Britpop corps who failed to make it to 2005 (or even 1997) to collect their war pension. The indie bands which warranted only footnotes in that edition of Vanity Fair with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit draped in a Union Jack. "London swings!" announced the cover, but it didn't for very long for Dodgy, Menswear, Echobelly, Kenickie, Sleeper, Dubstar . . . (I could go on.) Many of these bands were scorned at the time, but despite their identikit one-word band names - and some would say identikit guitar-pop - I think reappraisals are in order.
Sleeper, for example, may have consisted of the singer Louise Wener (she is now a successful novelist) and a backing band so nondescript they earned the nickname "Sleeperblokes", but they produced, over the course of three mid-1990s albums, a number of great, now largely forgotten singles. Take "Inbetweener". Its lyrics about suburban ennui are so tacky it could easily have featured on Blur's lamentable Great Escape album - yet it's a quite impeccable pop song (you can download it, along with "What Do I Do Now?", "Sale of the Century" and others, on iTunes).
I would happily recommend lost Britpop classics until the ice caps melted and David Davis became prime minister, but, in brief, try rediscovering Lauren Laverne's old group Kenickie ("I Would Fix You", "Punka", "In Your Car" - all fantastic, all on www.mycokemusic.com), or Dubstar (witty, melancholic electro-pop; try "Not So Manic Now" or "Stars" from iTunes), or Echobelly (if only for Sonya Aurora Madan's incredible voice - get "King of the Kerb" from iTunes). It occurs to me that these bands have few Y chromosomes between them, and this brief bout of gender equality in indie music is another reason to look kindly on an unfairly maligned period in British music. After all, how often do female artists grace the cover of the NME these days?
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