They said a 90s revival could never happen – but it seems
we're on the cusp of one already. Use your nostalgia toolbox
wisely, people
90s revivalists ... Alphabeat
The second album by the Danish pop act Alphabeat has been and
largely gone, to reviews ranging from lukewarm to savage. I enjoyed
it, partly because of its brazen revivalist intentions. It summoned
a throng of 1990s pop ghosts, from Ace of Base to Corona, and
running through it were the huge, sad keyboard sounds of 90s trance
records – great glass spears of melancholy sending me back to a
time I never realised I could miss.
Back in the 1990s, wags like me would occasionally quip that the
decade couldn't be revived; it was already such a hotchpotch of
half-borrowed styles that any music drawing on it would be a Xerox
of a Xerox. I was being silly. With time, the differences between,
say, Britpop and the 60s and 80s music that sometimes inspired it
seem sharper. The fact Cigarettes and Alcohol borrows from T. Rex
is the least relevant thing about it – the way it fitted into its
time and the lives of its listeners is more important.
This is how successful revivals work: like a storytelling
tradition, ideas are passed down a generation with the details
changing in whatever way the new audience needs them to. Why this
happens isn't hard to understand: pop music is identified with
youth by critics, marketers and former youths alike, but there's
mountains of it already, and most is not itself terribly young.
Trying to make sense of the music that shaped you is a noble
endeavour, and nothing new. From one angle much British music of
the 70s – from Roxy Music to Showaddywaddy to the Sex Pistols –
seems like an attempt to work out what to do with 50s rock'n'roll.
It was a music waking up to the fact that it had a history,
reacting with fascination and repulsion, and transforming itself in
the process.
That's the good side of revivalism. The element I'm less keen on –
though it's inseparable – is the aspirational return, where
musicians and fans see pop's history as a rebuke to its inferior
present. Think the reverent attitude of 80s singers (and ad men) to
60s soul, or the sudden descent of Britpop from sharp songs about
brushing your teeth to Deep Purple covers. Or more recently the
way La Roux was marketed as bringing "weirdness" back to
the charts – but a wholesome, Hovis kind of oddness: quirky the way
quirky was in 1982.
There's also a humbler type of revival – a personal trip to the
dressing-up box that doesn't relate to anything
much. Goldfrapp's new album, for instance, mostly sees them
excavating a particular seam of 80s European disco-pop – synthetic
and spacey, the kind of music where a Syndrum is only a bar or two
away. The single Rocket comes with an "eight four" and a "one zero"
remix, just to emphasise the time-jumping. In one way, the
Goldfrapp album is a delightful LP; in another, it's so
well-observed as to be disorienting.
That is the problem for a listener of the right age: having your
memory tweaked so expertly can feel manipulative. The last I'd
heard of Alphabeat were the extraordinary Pete Hammond mixes of
their Boyfriend single. Hammond, a studio engineer for Stock Aitken
and Waterman's PWL Records, turned his mix into a perfect,
indulgent recreation of their sound, every lattice of hi-NRG beats
and crisp synth hits positioned just so. It was a genuine guilty
pleasure for me, not because the music was naff but because it was
so exactly pitched at a pop fan of my age that it felt a little
like a trap.
Alphabeat's new material can feel that way too, though for now the
trap's a novel and tempting one. It puts them just ahead of a 1990s
revival that seems inevitable. My only question is what its
dominant strain will be – creative storytelling, reactionary
finger-wagging or just treating the decade as a costume shop. We
might be spared the worst effects of reverence, as the 90s'
now-disreputable irony should inoculate it against becoming a moral
lesson for modern pop. But as always the real interest will be in
musicians who can take the 90s' nostalgic toolkit and use it to
surprise the people who remember it as much as the ones who
don't.