When I was younger, back in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the future didn’t feel so bleak. I don't think this is merely nostalgia for youth. It may have been naïve, but the world that I lived in, in the UK, felt like it was on a good trajectory.
The Berlin Wall had fallen a decade earlier, the South African apartheid regime had been consigned to history, and the new century seemed to carry a promise of progress, brightness, and betterment. The internet was miraculous new technology that could connect you with like-minded people around the globe, not yet today’s endless miserable scroll of bad-faith outrage, hostile state propaganda, and shivering heaps of AI-generated slop. The most ordinary things were cheaper, too: food, rent, energy bills. Pints were cheap, and a night out at a club felt less like an act of financial self-harm than an uncomplicated joy.
That Britain is gone now, changed inexorably. It's been quite a downward spiral. First came 9/11 and the War on Terror, which tore a hole in the easy confidence of the West. The vibrant hope of the new millennium curdled into airport queues, security theater, endless newsreels of wars. The mood of the majority shifted to suspicion, surveillance, and terror. There was now a nervousness, and a tightening of horizons.
But the British spirit and economy remained relatively unbowed. Britain briefly surpassed the USA in per capita GDP terms in 2007:
The financial crash of 2008 was the next rupture, from which the British economy has not really recovered to this day. The world I once just assumed to be buoyant and expanding suddenly folded in on itself. The austerity years that followed seemed to hollow out not just the economy but the entire country. A sense of withering decline settled in, especially in the north and the Midlands, places that were already sore from their loss of industry over preceding decades.
In the austerity years, a sense of withering decline settled in, especially in the north and the Midlands, places that were already sore from their loss of industry over preceding decades.
At the same time, Britain was changing in deeper, more elemental ways. The world was growing globalized. The immigration that had trickled in from the end of the Second World War up until the nineties grew from a trickle to a stream, then a flood. For some, this may have seemed invigorating, bringing new cuisines, new attitudes, and new opportunities. Many businesses certainly capitalized on mass migration as a source of cheap labor. But for many, the changes were disorienting, even alienating. Britain was becoming something else, and Britishness began to splinter into something more contested, more brittle.
Meanwhile, the center of gravity in the world was tilting east. China was rising—relentlessly, industriously, quietly at first, then unmistakably. Factories shifted there, jobs drained from here, and slowly the terms of the global game rewrote themselves. The optimism of my youth was premised on a largely unspoken belief that the West was still the center of the world, and the engine of the future. That belief now seems quaint, even delusional. In hindsight, those years might be described as a complacent time. But complacency is not usually an unpleasant feeling. Often complacency can feel normal. Sometimes it might even feel magical.
The music and other cultural artefacts of the era remain, relics of bygone days and a world that no longer exists. Songs are strange time capsules, carrying melodies and whole atmospheres.
For a few short years in the early 2000s, it felt like Britain had stumbled into a new golden age of guitar music. After the hangover of Britpop, something sharper, rawer, and more bookish came rushing in. The guitars still shimmer with that sense of possibility.
For a few short years in the early 2000s, it felt like Britain had stumbled into a new golden age of guitar music.
The Libertines carried that flame most recklessly. Dressed in a bizarre and anachronistic uniform of red guards’ jackets, they made their mythology out of squats—abandoned houses that were taken over by vagrants, oftentimes artistically-inclined individuals—and unmistakably British daydreams, singing about friendship and betrayal as if the whole country were caught in their inter-band quarrels. Bloc Party’s taut, urgent debut mapped the jittery heartbeat of the era, while Franz Ferdinand brought a spiky, dance post-punk. The Killers offered a fuzzy mixture of synth pop, raw guitar emotion, and spectacular choruses. Arctic Monkeys were latter-day beneficiaries of the wave, teenagers whose MySpace demos shot them straight to Glastonbury’s main stage, their songs equal parts kitchen-sink realism and northern bravado.
I hold a particularly fond memory of the night I saw Pete Doherty of the Libertines' side project Babyshambles at the Underground in Stoke-on-Trent, a dingy rock club on the outskirts of the decaying post-industrial centre of the city I grew up in. Pete stumbled onto the stage like a character from a Dickensian novel, part street poet, part fallen angel. The place was heaving, dripping with condensation; you could taste the lager and cigarette smoke in the air ...
