2007, it would appear, has been the year of the musical reformation. Led Zeppelin creaked back onstage in a hail of primal riffage. The Police kickstarted a reunion tour with a performance at the Grammy Awards. Take That and The Spice Girls also returned, the latter insulting our intelligence as well as our eardrums by claiming avarice wasn’t a factor.
However, the resurrection of disbanded groups, often splitting in acrimonious circumstances long ago, wasn’t limited to commercial colossi. Britpop also-rans Shed Seven and Kula Shaker started touring again whereas East 17 and Five attempted comebacks that limped hatefully into 2007 before they lost their tenuous grip on the bandwagon altogether.
From the worthy to the execrable, it seems that there is a big market for nostalgia, particularly for 1990’s bands. Why is this I wonder? Are we late-twentysomethings the first generation unable to cope with adult life, forever looking back to an innocent age before debt and proper jobs loomed like omnipresent spectres above the minutiae of our daily existence? With the prospects of marriage and children pushed ever further into our thirties and the bottom rung of the property ladder whisked upwards beyond the reach of many, an entire generation appears to be suffering from arrested development (this would have given me a nice link if Mr Wendell’s hip-hoppers had reformed this year but they had the prescience to reform in 2000.)
Indeed, at my age my forebears sweated in the factories, mills and shipyards of the North-East by necessity with families to support, yet I live like a student in rented accommodation. Perhaps we’re too soft, spoiled by a nanny state that puts cotton-wool over life’s rough edges or perhaps we should be grateful for this cultural shift towards self-fulfilment and keeping the real world at arm’s length. Whatever, it just pains me that the Spice Girls are back from the dead.
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