Key to a Shrine

I know I missed Britpop. I know I was not only merely sixteen in 1994, but also on the wrong continent. Where I was living in the mid-nineties, Blur was nothing more than the band that had released “Song #2″, tricking all the frat boys into buying what they thought would be a rock album, but which turned out to be cynically twee hangover-pop. Blur was my weird shame, Oasis my embarrassingly cocky proclivity, to be hidden from my friends as so much of my music was. But what was a “club kid” to me in 1994, except ads for odd clothes in the back of expensive music magazines? I was a grunge grrl. Pacifiers were for babies.

By the time I understood Cool Britannia, it was several years back in the blurry collective memory, and England herself was indeed hungover. But no matter. When in London, I threw myself into grimy streets that no longer gave any fuck about AbFab, or Noel Gallagher’s eyebrows, or translucent shark slices. Who knows where that headtrip went? Probably into the same dumpster where they tossed the silver windpants and chewed-up glowsticks after Y2K. Nevertheless, I chased it all over England, that lucid delirium. Finding it in the sparkle of a sunset on the Thames after a few Guinness and some Thornton’s chocolate, in the almost imperceptible movement of the lights on a closed London Eye at midnight, in the jolting, decrepit thrust of an accelerating Tube train—a flashing exuberance, a driving and mad exultation, the gloss on the decadence. Cool Britannia isn’t gone, it’s a mindset. It’s just the form that magic takes in London.

When everything around you is moving, the human tide breaking and swirling around the aggressively grand old architecture; the sense of history pulling like an undertow, just making our modern selves swim faster; til all is racket and motion and smell, and you can feel the web of tracks under your feet, and reach with ecstatic fingers towards the same grey sky the trees in Hyde Park have clawed for centuries…in clammy fog, in needle rain, in giddy sunshine, it’s always been there. Dip your head in that river.