Middle Class Holes 19 - Damon Albarn

The story of a charmless man

Today’s Middle Class Hole, Damon Albarn of pop groups Blur and Gorillaz, isn’t particularly irritating for me in himself. But don’t worry. What he represents, and the reaction he sparks in that class, really gets on my tits.

When the first wave of Britpoppers emerged in about 1993 I was fuming. Was I just jealous? Jealous, okay, but not just jealous. I suffered the common shock experienced when people the same age as you become famous. And then it gets worse - people younger than you. The temerity! How dare they!

As a teenager I wanted to be a pop star so badly that it hurt. But I flinched at the physical persistence involved. The mechanics were just too awful to contemplate. An instrument? Forget it. I took violin lessons aged ten and all it gave me was an aching knee where the case kept banging as I lugged the bloody thing to school up a massive Chiltern. Pop music seemed even worse on that score - all that lifting of crates. Then there’d be the lengthy hours spent pressing buttons in airless rooms, or being shoved into a Bedford van with your face in a bassist’s smelly socks. Was the self-validation worth it? Much less effort just to find one person who thinks you’re the bees knees.

And in 1990 I thought bands were over. You only needed one computer to do it, after all. (I could never fathom why there had to be so many people in Depeche Mode.) I was wrong there. It took another thirty years or so to knock them on the head and for ‘rock’ to enter fully its later-jazz, niche genre era. Along with everything else, sadly.

But, I was taken aback when Blur’s ‘Girls And Boys’ appeared. Because it was just David Bowie’s ‘It’s No Game Pt.1’ - not only the same tune but the same arrangement (if slightly weedier) and the same vocal delivery (if slightly squeakier). Oh, I thought. Is that really all you had to do? I might’ve tried a bit harder.

Yes I know it’s actually called ‘It’s No Game (No 1), but the streaming sites all have it titled (Pt. 1), and I wanted to make it easier for those of you who are unfamiliar with the song to check

What is to be said about the music made by Albarn? The songs are absolutely fine, as witty little ditties go. But why does indie always have to be front-loaded with significance? We were never asked to ponder the cosmic import of Mungo Jerry or Herman’s Hermits. 10cc were playful and inventive on a similar scale to Blur, but nobody even really noticed.

But then, pop music is, after all, a genre where Neil Tennant and Thom Yorke are regarded as the intellectual heavyweights.

Indie is the most Middle Class Hole genre of music. Guardian readers are where the money is, after all. I went to a Suede concert in Portsmouth once and I have never seen a larger concentration of the semi-posh in all my days, so much that my companion on the occasion could never sing again the refrain of their hit ‘Beautiful Ones’ without adapting it to ‘here they come, the middle class ones, la la la etc’.

Middle Class Holes adore working class people who play their game, which is fair enough; indie provided the driest, dullest, most crushingly conformist opinions reflected back at them, and occasionally spiced with bluff talk. The current shenanigans around Kneecap, Big Fun dressed up as the IRA, are a perfect example of this (and it’s perfection itself that the lads from Kneecap include a 35-year old schoolteacher, the one who wears the balaclava). See how much you can take of this frothing frottage from Miranda Sawyer (58, from Wilsmlow, educated at Cheadle Hulme School), for example.

Snap (L) and Crackle (R) with their Pop

But take indie - or even worse, the grisly American coining ‘alternative’ - apart, and what exactly is it?