FOR every act that conveyed their modest backgrounds with aplomb, some bands fetishised them to the point of embarrassment. Like these:
Hard-Fi
Presumably now back in the nine-to-five jobs they slagged off on their only successful album, Hard-Fi made it their crusade to produce music only suitable for soundtracking Soccer AM. Glamorising wasting every hard-earned penny to get blind drunk, rejected by girls and possibly arrested worked for a while, but writing endless songs about being poor in dead-end towns was always going to pall eventually. Especially when you’re actually from Surrey.
The Beatles
All four of the Beatles came from working class homes in Liverpool, an industrial city that had seen better days when the band formed. John Lennon even went on to write a song called ‘Working Class Hero’. However, he did that when he was a multimillionaire, and the Beatles only got interesting after they had stopped wearing matching suits that their mums would have approved of and started growing their hair, buying mansions, hoovering up LSD and basically doing everything they could to escape their hardscrabble Northern backgrounds.
Sleaford Mods
Having a wank instead of trying to get off the dole is believable, but it’s hardly flattering to portray jobseekers that way while dancing around like a tit on Jools Holland. The Midlands group have shoved Broken Britain down our throats for over a decade when nobody needs the reminder, even if it is all in aid of bringing down the Tories. Which is a commendable ambition, but ultimately tedious coming from two 50-somethings who are basically doing slam poetry to a beat, and living like squatters for the aesthetic.
Goldie Lookin Chain
This novelty band are still performing, yet few people remember Newport’s lazy purveyors of working class culture. Fake Burberry, offensive jokes and a grown man called Maggot may have gotten laughs from a few pubescent boys, but the naff pantomime joke couldn’t really compete with gritty grime realism, especially after Vicky Pollard was retired and society decided to stop demonising chavs. Although their latest songs is taking the piss out of Dryrobes, which are a worthy target.
Idles
If you’re not poor you can just pretend to be, like these middle class Bristolians appropriating working class struggles for their own ends. Britain makes it easy to cosplay as a punk group where generic rants against Brexit make you look like Che Guevara for NME readers, and Idles go even further with dodgy put-on accents and a visual aesthetic based on Onslow from Keeping up Appearances. It would all be easier to ignore if the music was any good.
Oasis
Mancunians still adore Oasis as sons of their city, despite the fact that neither Noel or Liam have lived further north than Maida Vale since 1996. However, that hasn’t stopped Noel endlessly recycling boring songs about escaping the area he grew up in, because he apparently isn’t as inspired by the leafy suburbs of London. Give it up Noel, these days you’re about as working class as Tom Hiddleston.