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I'm Charlotte Kan, an inquisitive Xennial, and 
in this episode I'm asking James Brooke-Smith,  

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a previous guest on this show, to come and join 
me to reminisce about the good old days of rave,  

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BritPop and Cool Britannia. Welcome to Xennials.

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James. Welcome back.

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Great to be back.

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Absolutely. And we're delighted to have you 
here with us, James. But I want you to spend  

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a bit more time to talk about the place 
where you grew up and where I live today,  

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it's the UK because a lot happened during the 
1990s here, Brit Pop, called Britannia New Labour,  

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and a thriving art scene with the young British 
artists, the YBAs, and tech developments with  

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the band who is credited with inventing the 
internet. Tim Berners Lee being British,  

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and we've got Dolly the sheep as well, raves 
and the Prodigy of course, but there's also a  

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darker side because there's a public health 
scandal concern with Mad Cow's disease, for  

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instance. But overall, the Nineties here in the 
UK is a time that's fairly uplifting, isn't it?

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Yes. I think parts of the 1990s, thinking in 
terms of a whole decade can be misleading,  

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I think is worth dividing the nineties into 
sections and phases, perhaps certainly Cool  

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Britannia, New Labour, hat kind of cultural energy 
that many of us feel nostalgic for these days is  

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very much a product of the mid to late nineties. 
And Britain at that point became a kind of global  

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icon, if you like. And we've got things like the 
Union Jack on the Spice Girls on Noel Gallagher's  

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guitar, a kind of almost rebranding of Britain 
in these kind of youth, cultural, optimistic,  

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modernizing terms. But if you go back to 
the beginning of the nineties in Britain,  

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it's kind of a different world coming on the 
heels of a recession, very high unemployment  

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still from the 1980s, a conservative 
government and a much different mood  

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and atmosphere. So the boom of the nineties 
happens, I think later on in the decade.

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So I have to ask you, were 
you an Oasis or a Blur fan?

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Oasis or blur? The answer is pulp.

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Okay. I see the nineties in UK as a time where 
there's a general movement towards levelling up,  

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and maybe that stopped afterwards. 
What are your thoughts on that?

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Yeah, so with the election of Tony Blair's new 
labor government, there's a real attempt to at  

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least slow the acceleration of inequality in 
British society and new labor benefit from a  

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booming economy, which you have to acknowledge 
began under John Major and the conservatives  

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and is part of global forces as well as just 
national economic policy. But Tony Blair and  

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Gordon Brown and the new Labor project actively 
seeks to redistribute some of the wealth of that  

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boom outwards. And there's lots of hospitals 
built, lots of schools refurbished and built  

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new labor concise as one of their achievements 
in their first term ending homelessness,  

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ending rough sleeping. So there's a real 
concerted attempt to address some of their  

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inequalities that had arisen over the course 
of the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

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Tony Blair and New Labour generally 
embody, rupture with the past and this  

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new wind of optimism, which contrasts 
with the 1980s in the uk, doesn't it?

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Yeah, in certain respects, they do constitute 
a rupture. There's a different style. There's a  

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much more inclusive language that comes out of 
new labor about multiculturalism, about a new  

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kind of British identity that's not based on the 
kind old symbols of pastoralism and traditional  

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institutions, and it's much more about embracing 
a new, young, multicultural, forward thinking  

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society and culture. The economical side of it 
is slightly different though, I think because new  

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labor have modernized their own party and reject 
the kind of older economic doctrines of the far  

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left. So there's an attempt to redistribute, 
be progressive, be inclusive, but within a  

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framework or within a new kind of consensus that 
was formed in the eighties by Thatcher and Reagan.

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James, what about this thriving 
art scene in the UK in the 1990s?

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Yeah, so the young British artists in particular 
make a huge splash both within British culture and  

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around the world, and it's famously focused on the 
sensation exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery, and then  

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they fill a space that opened up at the Royal 
Academy, and then it travels around the world.  

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The sensation show is transferred to 
Brooklyn, New York, and Rudy Giuliani  

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objects to some of the more controversial 
and challenging pieces, in particular,  

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Chris Ofili's Black Madonna paintings, which he's 
elephant dung in order to depict black religious  

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female iconography. So there is this kind of 
dynamism that provokes a scandal, a controversy,  

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a shock, and it's a time when conceptual art 
is being covered in the tabloid press in fairly  

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confrontational polemical terms. And I think that 
was a great thing about the 1990s, the sense that  

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culture mattered and cut through beyond just 
the gallery and to the wider public discourse.

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Earlier I alluded to the fact that new 
labor was very much about levelling up  

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and empowering people, but culture is 
very much about it as well. In fact,  

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a lot of the artists you've mentioned come from 
a working class background, and I think there  

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was a sense generally in the West, not just in 
the UK during the 1990s, that culture was the  

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way forward to help people develop and grow and 
seize all the opportunities around at the time.

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Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. The kind 
of idea of the culture industries becomes much  

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more prominent at that point. And culture gets 
kind of bound up with attempts to regenerate  

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urban spaces in the wake of deindustrialization. 
And as we move into this new kind of globally  

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connected economy. So lots of Britain's kind 
of depressed urban spaces are regenerated via  

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cultural development projects, art galleries, in 
particular new performance spaces. And the theory  

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is that if you use government funds to build 
or fund the art space, then you get a kind of  

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economic regeneration around it with restaurants, 
with entertainment, with shops. So culture is yes,  

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more inclusive, yes, more welcoming, produced 
by a wider range of people in the 1990s,  

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but it's also part of this kind of social 
economic development at the same time.

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The point of this podcast, Xennials, it's not 
just about dwelling on the past. So I'd like  

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to ask you about the shock tactics of the 
young British artists and the members of  

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the movement. You talked about there was space 
for it at the time. Is there space for it now?

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Yeah, the way in which what constitutes shock I 
think has changed since the 1990s. And who wants  

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to shock? So Damien Hurst, Sarah Lucas, Tracy 
Emin, Chris Ofili, actively sought to shock their  

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art. And that shock was aimed at a supposedly 
conservative opponent. I think they were trying  

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to shock bourgeois, kind of consumerist taste with 
their depictions of their kind of private lives,  

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their sexuality, their identity. And when 
the sensation show transferred to Brooklyn  

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in New York and Rudy Giuliani turned 
it into a giant kind of tabloid affair,  

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little warnings trigger warnings were placed 
on the artworks and outside. But ironic trigger  

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warnings saying that be beware. All you 
who enter here, you might experience shock,  

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destabilization enjoyment. So at this point 
in the late 1990s is the progressive leftist  

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artists who are trying to offend people in art 
galleries. Fast forward 20 years or so, and  

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art is much more respectful, I think much more 
scared of giving offense, much more concerned  

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with making good on repairing the traumas of the 
past and the inequalities of the past, racial  

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inequalities, gender inequalities. So in a certain 
sense, we have this kind of more enlightened  

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progressives art culture, but in another sense, 
a kind of polite art culture. I miss some of  

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that dynamism, some of that shock, some of 
that kind of nastiness of nineties YBA art.

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I'd like to talk about Xennials themselves, our 
generation, since you are a Xennial like me,  

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James, I think that's no secret anymore. 
Many of today's political and business  

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leaders are Xennials. I'm thinking of 
Zuckerberg for instance, in France,  

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Rishi Sunak here in the uk, or 
even Zelensky for instance. How  

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do you view their style of leadership? 
What's different about them as leaders?

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Yeah, this is a great question and a difficult 
question because it's, those people you just  

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mentioned come from all variety of different 
parties, ideological positions in contemporary  

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culture, they're all young. They all have a fairly 
casual style in many ways. Politics in the 1990s,  

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a lot of the discourse around new labor and 
of the new Democrats in the States was about  

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spin and about presentation and about pr, the 
way in which politics have become much more of  

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a media spectacle. Well, again, fast forward 
20 years, and that has only intensified over  

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time with social media, with the constant 
attention to gas and gotchas and missteps.  

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So I think all one thing that unites those 
figures is their great skill and attention  

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to image management as much as anything, and some 
of them do it masterfully. Zelensky on the world  

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stage has been masterful at presenting himself 
and generating support through his performances  

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as much as through his leadership. So I think 
that's a key concern for Xennial leaders today.

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In fact, they've learned those skills during 
the 1990s, haven't they? Because the decades  

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really signals an era where everything is 
performed for the camera. But there's also  

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a more morbid connotation, let's say, to this 
need to perform for an audience. And there I'm  

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thinking about the Columbine shootings, for 
instance, or even the September 11th attacks.

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yYeah, yeah, absolutely. The nineties are 
a kind of hinge point in so many ways. But  

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one of the things that they usher in is this 
world of total digital media surveillance,  

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where not only is, I mean the world of pre 1989, 
and the central state is kind of passing in terms  

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of state surveillance. It's still there, but we 
get this new world of total self surveillance  

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in the digital era. And in the nineties, some of 
the key shifts to that, you mentioned them there,  

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but the rise of reality television is a key moment 
in the 1990s. Big Brother takes its name from  

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a dystopian novel, and there is a sense in which 
in the social media age, we're all living in that  

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kind of dystopian surveillance system where we're 
all checking our updates, seeing what the feedback  

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is, and this kind of hyper self-awareness about 
self-presentation and management. And so you talk  

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about the darker side of that. Absolutely. The 
Columbine massacre was a desperate attempt on  

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the part of two resentful little men to be seen on 
the world media stage. And we're now in the era of  

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livestream terrorist events and mass killings live 
streamed on Facebook in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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And I think many of the kind of new cultural 
movements that we see in the 2010s and 2020s  

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to do with identity and politics and 
the kind of, I hate to use the term,  

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but the kind of woke politics is to do 
with a kind of offense against this mass  

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surveillance mass comment that we have in this 
completely plugged in social media landscape.

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James, further to this need to present 
ourselves to different media platforms  

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constantly in our jobs or personal 
lives. What are the other attributes,  

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qualities, or even weaknesses 
of Xennials according to you?

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I don't think we have any. No, 
no. I'm not going to say that.

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We have plenty, of course.

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yeah um that's a very good question I 
think partly we've grown up in a world post

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Yeah, that's a very good question. I think partly 
we've grown up in a world post 1989 without any  

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real alternatives to neoliberal economics. I think 
maybe that world is going to come into being soon,  

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but what Tony Blair and Bill Clinton managed to 
shift the dial to a certain extent. We've lived  

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in a world of increasing inequality for much 
of our lifetimes and increasing precariousness  

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for especially young people coming through 
today. So I think we've kind of bought into,  

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in many respects that kind of aspirational 
professional kind of world in spite of our  

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subcultural identifications as young people. 
And I think young people today are much more  

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disaffected with that economic system 
that we've done pretty well out of.

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But there was a fair dose of cynicism and 
angst amongst us growing up in the nineties.  

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I remember anti-W-T-O demonstrations, 
for instance, in the previous podcast,  

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we talked about the different musical 
genres at the time, grunge for instance,  

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or heavy metal. I mean, they were not 
exactly very upbeat manifestations of how  

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we felt about the decades. So there was some 
dissatisfaction brewing during the nineties.

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Absolutely. There's a kind of misconception 
about the 1990s as being apolitical in some way,  

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perhaps in comparison to earlier decades, 
early generations. We certainly didn't have  

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our May 68 moment, nevertheless, certainly in 
terms of anti-globalization movements on the  

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streets in Seattle and Genoa and elsewhere. 
When I was a kid, I remember as a teenager,  

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the big kind of protest movement was 
against road development and bypasses,  

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which is part of a burgeoning environmental 
consciousness at the same time. So whilst many of  

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those movements didn't have traction at that point 
within political parties and within governments, I  

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think they feed into a longer line of protest and 
discontent that gets manifested in Occupy and in  

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many of the movements today. So yeah, I think the 
nineties were disaffected and politicized as well.

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To conclude with James, I mean, it's fascinating 
to talk to you, and I'm going to resist the  

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temptation to invite you for a third podcast. 
So I have to ask you the following question.  

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Why did you want to write a history of 
the nineties? What prompted you to do it?

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Yeah, getting old, being nostalgic.

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Midlife crisis?

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Midlife crisis. Wanting to relive my youth in the 
form of a large history book. That's slightly a  

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strange way to go about it. But also my growing 
sense that the nineties were becoming history.  

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What was current affairs lived experience was 
being churned under by a new wave of events,  

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new trends, new styles, new people. So I wanted 
to go back with a different perspective on it.  

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I also had a very strange experience teaching 
British cinema in a Canadian university, teaching  

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a class on train spotting and discussing it with 
my students. And then I had a student come to my  

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office afterwards, tell me how much he enjoyed 
the class and how much he loved train spotting,  

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and how much he loved the music of that era 
and how he loved Oasis and Pulp and Blur. And  

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I told him that I'd been to watch Oasis when 
I was a kid in Wolverhampton in the 1990s,  

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and he was kind of struck, and he said, it's 
amazing that you got to see all those classic  

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rock bands. And so it had this kind of crushing 
sense of awareness that what I saw as kind of  

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fun, but quite retro at the time has now 
become old man's rock music. So that sense  

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of generational change made me want to go 
back and reconsider and rethink about it.

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I can relate to that. I went to watch Guns N' 
Roses twice in the past three years. James,  

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it was so good to have you back on Xennials. 
Thank you so much. I'd like to remind the audience  

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that James is the author of this absolutely 
brilliant book on the 1990s called Accelerate  

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A History of the nineties. Very informative. I 
absolutely loved it. James, thank you so much.

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Thank you.