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Seven Ages Of Rock











The website for the series the Seven Ages Of Rock that starts on BBC2 on May 19th has opened here.

The site also also has a page on Oasis (here) with part of an exclusive interview with Noel Gallagher and lots more.

Episode 7/ What The World Is Waiting For Indie 1980/2007
Saturday 30th June, 9PM BBC 2

The story of British indie, beginning with The Smiths, the archetypal indie group. The film follows The Stone Roses as the heirs to the indie crown, Suede's dark sexuality and the media saturation of Brit-pop's Blur v Oasis.

What The World Is Waiting For explores how indie ultimately lost its once cherished intimacy and integrity in front of 250,000 fans at Oasis's Knebworth spectacle in 1996 and how, by returning to its roots in clubs and bars (and even front rooms) with bands such as Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines and The Arctic Monkeys, indie became respectable again.


Sebastian Barfield Director/Producer Of The Show

"Back in April 2006, I found myself in the plush basement of a Chelsea boutique hotel, with a film crew, waiting to interview Noel Gallagher. He was due to be turn up at 11am, but we were ready half an hour early. While I used the time to redraft my questions for the nineteenth time, I overheard my colleagues chatting about the mid-90s moment when the man we were waiting for 'owned' British rock.

Tony, the film's researcher, had worked next door to Oasis' old record company, Creation, in Primrose Hill and recalled seeing the legendary indie label balloon in size as the millions started rolling in. Desperate for extra staff, the label employed his girlfriend.

Louis Caulfield, our camera-man, had done his first ever day of paid work as runner on the band's first video: a task that apparently involved keeping them constantly supplied with alcohol and their favoured flavour of herbal refreshment.

Less glamorously, I had spent the heady years of Brit-pop working at a Birmingham call centre, and it was there in 1996 that I had spent a frantic day manning the phones, taking credit card details from anxious fans desperate to secure tickets to Oasis' statement shows at Knebworth. It was a short day for me - within hours, tickets for what was already being dubbed the biggest concert in British history had all gone.

It struck me that in the mid-90s Oasis had presided over their own mini-economy. Of the four thirty-somethings waiting for Noel that morning, two of us had indirectly worked for him, another's girlfriend had worked for him. The only person untainted by the Gallagher shilling was our Russian sound-recordist who had been in the former Soviet Union.

I was interviewing Noel about the "over-grounding" of British indie - something for which his band was largely responsible. In approaching the film, I hadn't dared attempt a dutiful chronicle of British indie scene from the late 70s to the present day - we would need an entire series to do justice to that story. Rather, I narrowed my focus to show the trajectory of the music through a few key bands from the mid-80s onward - The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, Oasis, The Libertines - and in the process show that what happened to the "indie" scene in the 90s was similar to how Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd took "underground" music into stadiums in the 1970s.

When Noel turned up, he was on time, funny, and only started swearing when the camera was switched on. He held court for two hours. My main memory is of biting my tongue hard during some of his stories, so that my guffaws wouldn't appear. As he shook my hand to say goodbye, he told me he could have kept talking all day.

When I look back at Noel's interview and the 12 year-old old archive of Blur and Oasis, there's a clear sense that Britpop coincided with the end of the rock industry's glory days.

Top of The Pops was still the important shop window for a band as it had been in the 60s; the internet was yet to happen, and the record industry was awash with cash. Now, with personal play-lists, digital radio, and iTunes, everything has fragmented. In the last ten years something has definitely changed, and we are in a new era of rock that is still taking shape.

Noel is clearly aware of this. In his interview he said: "Back in the 90s there was so much money floating about it was unbelievable. I remember us being invited to bashes in proper stately homes. We were getting f***ing DVDs given to us... These days you're lucky if you get a f***ing Christmas card."

A band becomes a phenomenon when people who couldn't care less about music start talking about them; when their success somehow defines a cultural moment in the life of the nation. What's interesting about Oasis isn't that they were a British rock phenomenon - that can't be disputed - but the fact that they were possibly the last."

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

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