Be Sneered Now

Coming from family home that was more D.I. Burnside than Leonard Bernstein, I read with interest Simon Price's recent article for The Guardian (here) on the reformation of Oasis. He could have saved a lot of time and effort by simply posting a GIF of Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke's 'Mad for it' Kevin and Perry sketch. All the clichés are there, the music a 'funkless, sexless plod' and the 'dismal' lyrics. So far boo-hoo I don't like Oasis and being paid to say so. People worrying why he hadn't mentioned the Manic Street Preachers are mollified by paragraph seven, after calling Oasis 'Townies' he berates the public for not conceding that the Manics were in fact 'the true voice of the working class', whilst conveniently forgetting the only thing Noel Gallagher and Nicky Wire have in common is the both voted Blair to oust the Tories and they both publicly wished someone would die of AIDS.

But the article really goes bizarrely off-piste is when Price, apropos of nothing, starts to lay down his working class credentials. Why? In a bid to prove that he's allowed to slag of working class men because he had the telly repossessed? So he didn't come across as a sniffy, sneering Guardian columnist by being '4 real'? The first bone of contention is when Price starts bemoaning how big the Gallagher's childhood home was. The fact is their house was big because it was council house that had to fit three kids. I grew up in a council house containing three kids too, but I don't feel the need to wave that round like a wand of righteousness. I've been to Burnage and it's quite nice, not nice enough the gloss the fact that Noel and Liam (and Paul's) dad was an alcoholic who beat seven bells of shit out of their mum. But you know, it's leafy.

Confusing too is the narrative that all of Oasis's following are some kind of musical EDL. Looking on Facebook, there's a wide interest from people looking to get tickets to next years concerts, ranging from my area manager to my mate's 17 year old niece. Are they all knuckle draggers too? Or are the simply people who quite fancy going to a pop concert? Disturbing too is the narrative that if you like Pulp you're sound but if you like Oasis it makes you a moron. My brother is one of the best people I know and likes to have few beers and watch the football and Ocean Colour Scene and Richard Ashcroft. Am I supposed to disown him because his record collection is different to mine, even though his background, book shelf and attitude to politics and socialism mirror mine? Do me a favour.

Brian Epstein didn't discover the Beatles. It was secretaries and shop girls trying to cop a quick gig at the Cavern on their lunch break before returning to Littlewood's trying not to smell of ciggy smoke and rotting fruit. We can be thankful for a wealth of incredible Northern Soul records not from record labels but factory lads desperately scraping and saving their wages to fly to America to dig out and unearth undiscovered and unwanted black sounds. If it wasn't for them they would still be there, unheard and unloved. (I will conveniently leave out ultra rich crate digger Ian Levine, but you get the picture). It was the artists who gave music it's culture but it was the fans, the working class kids, that gave culture it's pop.

I started buying records at 14. I quickly worked out with the money I made scraping out deep fat fryers and cleaning down greasy kitchen walls of Sunday morning, I could buy two, or if I was very careful, three records a week. It made me hone a sense of taste, an ability to seek out the good records from the shite. It was crushing to spend a week at school, a mornings graft and a trip to the records shop only to discover the LP you had spent good money on was crap. I like Shrag, I like the Sea Urchins and I like Saint Etienne. I also like The Stone Roses which will obviously cause howls of derision from the gallery, particularly after Ian Brown went all tin foil hat, but I learned about Sylvia Plath, Jackson Pollock, James Brown, the Clash, Derrick May and the Paris'68 protests not through my comprehensive school education but through Stone Roses interviews in the NME. We didn't all get into Sarah records during university, some of us had to scrape together money for records doing jobs we fucking hated. And obviously that doesn't make us any better than someone who did a degree in Coventry, but it makes us different. And different is OK.

The real, awful, tragedy of Simon Price's article is it that despite it's confused view of the working class it actually raises some very fair points. It opens with hard evidence of Liam Gallagher's problematic homophobic language. It would be daft to state all Oasis fans as queer bashing twats, at would be silly to state all Pulp fans as left leaning intellectuals, but the uncomfortable truth is language like this normalises homophobia in the work place, at the football, in the pub and at indie gigs. A few weeks ago, a day before a planned anti-immigration demo in Shrewsbury (a demo I'm proud to say was comfortably snuffed out by a few hundred counter protesters made up of anti racist groups, Extinct Rebellion and a smorgasbord of decent and concerned citizens) I was walking to the shops when I passed a group of three lads aged about seventeen dressed in full EDL regalia including what I can only describe as balaclava helmets and scarfs covering their faces. I passed them without incident (one even stepped on the pavement for me to pass) but I was very, very much aware of my privilege of being a 6ft6 white man. Just as I am aware of my privilege of never having the words 'batty boy' screamed in my face. Surely Price's piece would have been better served researching casual homophobic hate, the damage it causes and what we can do about it.

But perhaps I have totally missed the point and the genius of Price's article, that in fact he had highlighted Oasis going back thirty years and being a Beatles pastiche by going back twenty years and writing a Neil Kulkarni pastiche. Who knows?