Recently I've been listening quite a bit to The Gentle People, a retro-electronica act that emerged from the Loungecore-Acid-Jazz-Easy-Listening-Big-Beat Madwoman In The Attic of Britpop that people try to avoid mentioning now (primarily if they're writing career histories of Noel Gallagher), inspired in no small part by that big new Corduroy box set that's just come out, complete with a previously unreleased two-fingers-to-Britpop-as-they-come cover of the Sesame Street theme.
Anyway, while enjoying their gloriously of-its-time combination of futuristic dance music sounds with an overall What Time's Issi Noho On? vibe, it's difficult to avoid reflecting on just how prominent they were for such a wilfully niche-marketed band. Only a couple of years earlier, they'd have been the sort of outfit that John Peel played apologetically in the last twenty minutes of his show, and then got complaints from miserable Grunge-worshipping dullards asking him never to play them again. In the mid-nineties, however, they were everywhere, from daytime TV to daytime radio, and the subject of countless multi-page colour spreads in magazines. And not just in the likes of Select or Vox either, but everything from Stuff to Loaded as well.
Yes, alright, so the latter sort of magazine might well have been drawn towards them by the fact that they had two attractive female members - though it's difficult to convince people these days that Loaded was actually a pretty good magazine for the first couple of years, placing articles on the likes of Peter Cook and Lancelot Link Secret Chimp in amongst all the Nicola Charles In Her Pants Again stuff, and heavily championing the likes of The League Of Gentlemen and Super Furry Animals way before they actually got anywhere, and that it was only finally consumed by the monster it accidentally created after Harry Hill featured on the last regular male-only cover in 1997 (although as I briefly appeared in a feature some two years after that - no, not telling you which, sorry - I can't really fingerwag as much as I'd like to), but that's an argument for another article - yet all the same there's no getting away from the fact that they weren't the sort of band that would have been considered potential mainstream fodder only a couple of years earlier, or indeed only a couple of years later. They were, after all, a gaggle of flourescently-dyed-in-the-wool confirmed retroheads like the similar headcases behind Radio Tip Top - themselves a regular sighting in these sort of unlikely avenues, and similarly pushed towards the mainstream to the extent that they nearly landed a daytime show on Radio 1 (and if you want to know more about that, you'll have to read my book Fun At One) - and hardly of a piece with bacon sandwiches, football tribalism or children's TV presenter 'babes'.
So what happened? Why was there that curious moment in the mid-nineties where the mainstream and the non-mainstream suddenly collided and everything seemed on a level playing field for the briefest of times (well, unless you were poor old Luke Haines)? A large part of it is obviously down to the success of the likes of Blur, Pulp and Supergrass, who waved their more angular influences in people's faces but at the same time had found a way to make them eyecatching, earcatching and marketable, and given that to the average punter it must have seemed like all these amazing bands were suddenly tumbling out of nowhere (whereas the average NME reader would doubtless have seen things a bit differently), it was inevitable that people would feel mildly curious about what else was 'out there'. Clearly that can't have been the entire cause, as it seemingly got through to people who wouldn't know Sofa (Of My Lethargy) if it pitched up in the middle of a Shine compilation and refused to budge until they had heard it so many times that their head exploded, but that's for some crazy futuristic Space Dominic Sandbrook to speculate on.
Anyway, for the briefest of moments - yet still one which in the heat of the moment seemed like it was stretching on into infinity in a sort of weird time distortion event of the sort that they used to use technobabble to describe before all this 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey' business started - it seemed like the 'outsiders' could take on the mainstream and, if not win, then at least co-exist in a more receptive plane of popular cultural existence. But of course, Simon Cowell wasn't having any of that...
If you've enjoyed this, you might also like this feature on 'Loungecore' favourite France Gall.
