Credwashing: The past through rose-tinted earholes

Years ago, talking to my mum about growing up in the ‘60s, it transpired that we’d got it all wrong. My mum dressed like a mod and she’d mentioned going to Manchester’s legendary Twisted Wheel, one of the places that gave birth to what became Northern Soul.

I expected a muso-answer of all these rare soul records and the feeling of being at the forefront of a movement. I was reluctant to ask initially, because I didn’t want to ask her about taking drugs and about promiscuity, as it might embarrass her.

Her response was pretty flat: “It was alright — the music was okay but they didn’t serve beer and it was full of druggies.”

She went on to tell me how she thought a lot of people there were pretentious and not as much fun as other places, where everyone got hammered and danced to the big Motown hits without having to stroke their chins.

From that point, a wariness grew of nostalgia, and who actually listened to what. Everything comes back in 20/25 year cycles, and we all know that people look at the past like it is far more interesting or peachy than it actually was. However, I was too young to properly notice it.

Until now.

2015's kids have beatified the late ‘80s and ‘90s, which I remember first-hand. There’s no problem with young people looking backwards for inspiration, especially now as there’s so much good music and re-imagining fashions in cool ways that no-one saw coming (you’re a liar if you thought Mom Jeans would make a comeback and look decent); but now, it is increasingly obvious that the history books of pop-culture are suffering from a complete credwash.

This Is England ’90 is set to hit the screens and the trailers for it show everyone going crazy to acid house and ‘Fools Gold’ plays faithfully away, letting everyone know exactly what this period was all about. However, that isn’t the case. In 1990, the top-selling singles — and therefore a truer reflection of what the nation was dancing and singing along to — weren’t baggy-shaped at all.

The biggest records of 1990 are a re-release of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’, Cliff Richard’s ‘Saviour’s Day’, Timmy Mallet’s Bombalurina project, Maria McKee’s ‘Show Me Heaven’, Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, and ‘Ice Ice Baby’.

Phil Collins, Michael Bolton, Jive Bunny, NKOTB, Roxette, Wilson Phillips, various members of the Neighbours cast, Londonbeat and Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman’s ‘Kinky Boots’ were all huge sellers. Of course, there were some cred-approved big sellers too, but the sound of the British charts in 1990 is not remembered correctly.

This goes for a lot of periods in time — people think of the ‘70s as a complete Bolan and Bowie-fest, when really, the nation’s record players were blasting out James Last, New Seekers, Don McLean and Lieutenant
Pidgeon.

When ‘Spiders from Mars’ got released, the biggest record of that year was The Pipes and the Drums and the Military Band of the Royal
Scots Dragoon Guards playing ‘Amazing Grace’. While Ziggy Stardust has had countless fawning reappraisals and the like, while the military pipe and drums band bagged 7 million in sales before the ‘70s were out. It sold steadily for nearly a decade, dwarfing the sales of ‘Starman’.

Very rarely do we see period pieces that accurately and fairly reflect the state of the nation’s tastes at the time. Even the hugely accessible ‘The Wedding Singer’, looking back at 1985, credwashed The Cure, The Psychedelic Furs, B-52s and Depeche Mode into their soundtrack, when really, it should’ve been awash with Jennifer Rush, Foreigner and ‘Easy Lover’.

Dance music and hip hop is rife with credwashing too — we all know about the influence of Kraftwerk, James Brown drum breaks, reggae and the rest, but will you hear those chronicling the history mention that the novelty Stars On 45 records showed beat-matching off to the widest audience first? Does anyone fancy mentioning Jimmy Savile’s claim to be the first two-turntable DJ ever?

It makes sense that the counterculture would be the thing that people are most keen to make a record of, as there’s a sense that these things would be forgotten if they were left alone.

However, counterculture has now surpassed pop-music, and with countless music journalists willing to keep the flame alive, the thing that is really being eroded is the taste of the majority of pop music fans. In twenty or thirty years, you can bet that nostalgic films won’t be including the music of Pitbull, Avicii, Maroon 5 or Hozier — there’ll end up being a credwash of MGMT and Future Islands, with montages of boys stalking a manic pixie dream girl’s Instagram to The Raconteurs’ ‘Steady As She Goes’.

‘Gangnam Style’ might get a look in for meme-revivalists.

As advertisers get increasingly hipper and people stay young (at heart) for much longer, there’s a whole business that revolves around keeping certain narratives alive — one of them is that credible rock music is real music. So, while parents now extol the virtue of The Stone Roses, likewise, advertisers seek to reassure the spending public with earnest rock music (or ukulele covers of it) to give everyone the idea that their products are the real deal.

So, with Real Music Fans shouting the loudest about their tastes, and advertisers leaning heavily on rock, the consensus of what it was like in years gone by is completely credwashed.

It is such a shame that so much good and hugely popular music is swept under the rug, and with that, such a small number of people are represented in reappraisals of pop-culture. The record of what people actually listened to is concreted over, and placed on top, is someone who liked vaguely alternative music, who was a nerd about it and can remember it all, painting a different picture of the real sound of the nation’s speakers. Will Calvin Harris get pored over for his relationship with Taylor Swift, his work with Rihanna and his televised stage-invasion of Jedward with a pineapple on his head? You can bet that, if Jack White had done these things, he’d be talked of with reverence.

History is clearly not like we remember it, so you can only hope that this nonsense is a dying thing. Maybe 2015's kids will grow up revering a much broader taste in things and document how weird and varied this period was.

We can only hope.