War is generally seen as a scourge; a blight on humanity. Conversely, there are many who lived their best lives in World War II – a lifetime of thrills in a minute, bearing witness to horrors, death, destruction, but also heady exhilaration. For many, these thrills could never be replicated in a greyscale post-war landscape, whether it be a world war, or the much-romanticised Britpop wars of the 1990s.
And the problem with the focus of The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect, Janine Warren’s oral history of the 2000s-era British guitar pop explosion, is that this cock-heavy post-Britpop demob guitar crew were, to such a great extent, makers of relentlessly dull landfill tunes underpinned by a distinct lack of personalities. When the Libertines and the Strokes are the two groups most prominently lauded as vanguards of a cultural epoch, the foundations are shaky.
Some of the tangents are fascinating on their own terms, including reflections on how MySpace – and, more broadly, switching trends away from print media towards digital – helped doom any semblance of a profitable indie scene. Also, the rampant and depressing sexism from some of these absolute wronguns towards women in bands (Sheffield’s Long Blondes are especially candid here) during this period of cultural twilight is certainly worthy of excavation.
Inbetweener histories can make for a winning formula, and niche cultural archeology is great. But when The Cribs, Alan from The Rakes and a bunch of glorified recruitment consultants masquerading as NME hacks are your generational spokespeople, maybe it was for the best that this grubby final wheeze of the music industry crashed and burned. Much in The World Was A Mess is best left buried amid The Subways – perhaps to be unearthed and defused in the year 2100, like the remains of a long-forgotten Luftwaffe Mystery Jet.