(Note: I wrote this review for the now defunct Leicester-based music and pop-culture zine Rockfood about two years ago. It's also been posted on Your Face Is An Advert before now. Two years on, I stand by it. Now, get your eyes down the page and get the bugger read!)
Phonogram: Rue Britannia
Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Jamie McKelvie
Phonogram is a comic about Brit-pop, the revival of British guitar-pop that dominated British youth culture in the mid-90s. If you’re anything like me, and by that I mean 21 years old (or thereabouts) and grew up in Britain, then Brit-pop probably casts a pretty long shadow over your childhood memories. The bands of Brit-pop were the first bands I knew the names of and liked listening to, (excluding my Dad’s Roxy Music tapes and a Green Jelly single I bought myself when I was six) but I was 11 years old when the movement petered out, and as such it was never really mine. It belonged to the teenagers and students who made the pilgrimage to Glastonbury to see Pulp, who used a mix of lager and Kenickie singles to work up the courage to ask someone out, etc. etc. The beautiful thing about Phonogram is that it makes you feel like you were really a part of it, so vivid are its depictions of the era.
Make no mistake though, Phonogram is not an exercise in misty-eyed nostalgia. As its highly original and not-a-little peculiar plot drives the main character, chain smoking muso Dave Kohl, to analyse his relationship with the music he loved and the people who loved him ten long years ago, it also picks at the Brit-pop phenomenon through wonderfully inventive but never pretentious metaphor and allegory. An angry Goddess finds a temple in an acoustic show put on by aging riot-grrl fans, mod cultists strive to resurrect Britannia as they did twelve years hence, and Graham Coxon sits drunk on the staircase of a castle denying all involvement. These are just some of the wild ideas in store for those who dare to peek within. Chiefly though, despite the window dressing making this appear like High Fidelity meets Alice In Wonderland by way of Modern Life Is Rubbish, this is a story about being a music-lover, and what happens when a musical movement dies, leaving only its fans and memories behind. I’m confident that it will speak to something in you whether you grew up on Blink 182, David Bowie, Prince, Metallica or the Beatles. If you love music, any music, and were once young (you might still be young), and are not averse to sprawling tales of love and sex, drugs and dancing, magic and mythology, and are scared of growing up, or have done already, I heartily recommend this comic. If you sang along to Pulp’s Common People in the summer of ’95, whether you were nine, nineteen, or fifty-nine, you owe it to yourself.
9/10
Go and get it from Amazon, or your bookseller of preference! It's really bloody good!
