A great pice by @ehgillett.bsky.social that captures the bittersweet nature of the moment. It is OK to celebrate the fact Corsica goes out on a high, and I hope Adrian gets to enjoy the pressure being off for a bit. Mission accomplished indeed.

He’s incredible. Maxinquaye gets all the plaudits, and is as good as everyone says, but Pre Millenium Tension is the one for me: deeply sinister but also bleakly beautiful, and completely singular.

Sure, but I think Oasis are about as close as you can get to a properly universal UK-wide cultural event in 2025, which is sort of the whole point of the piece. Like I say, if you disagree with the premise then fair enough.

Also - as the piece points out - a lot of today’s fans weren’t even alive in the 90s! I was 10 years old when Definitely Maybe came out, and completely missed the debate at the time. For as long as Oasis continue to dictate pop culture, I reckon it’s worth having these conversations!

People can enjoy what they like, and the piece is pretty clear that people’s enjoyment of the reunion shows has generally been a good thing. I haven’t seen much (any?) other writing putting the gigs in a wider context though. Fair enough if you disagree!

Of course they’re not exactly the same. But in both cases there’s an assumption of an alternative course being available, which in reality isn’t there to be taken. Starmer, McSweeney et al can’t change because the current approach genuinely reflects their values.

It’s similar to the old canard that Blair would have loved to be more left-wing but knew the electorate wouldn’t wear it, when he said multiple times he’d have adopted exactly the same stance even if it wasn’t popular. What we’re seeing now is that precise sentiment in action.

Right, because it’s ideology rather than strategy. It’s not that they don’t see the alternatives, it’s that they’re making a deliberate choice to pursue this approach, because it’s what they genuinely believe in.

Everyone has their own fantasy land, as you put it, and they’re all basically correct to some degree. There have been particular regressions with austerity, Brexit and Covid, clearly, but each of those were merely building on the declines and compromises of preceding years or decades.

My general suspicion is that the UK as a whole has been steady, gradually collapsing for at least 40 years, even if each of us has a period of our lives where we’re insulated from / ignorant of that wider trend to some degree.

Yep, the superfence was later but I thought 97 had seen some improvements? Maybe I’m misremembering. 95 was definitely the big year for break-ins though. 97 was insanely rainy & muddy, which might have dampened demand.

I think 94 and 95 were the really bad ones for crime weren’t they? Fallow year in 96, then they came back with a much bigger fence.

Yeah for all of Glastonbury’s qualities it’s not exactly tranquil is it. I love the insane scale of it, but I can see how something like Houghton does that smaller, more manageable side of things much better.

There are a few more spots like that now I think: the woods / tree stage, shady bits in silver hayes, redesigned shangri-la, strummerville, green fields obviously. Definitely more needed though, and only going to become more of an issue with climate change.