As Labour swept to a landslide win on 4 July to the sound of D:Ream and chants of “Football’s Coming Home” echoing through the streets, comparisons to Tony Blair’s 1997 Cool Britannia optimism came thick and fast. Now a host of nostalgia-tinged shows at the Edinburgh fringe are set to take audiences back to that era.
“I remember seeing the first visible thong and low-rise jeans,” said Amy Annette, whose new show was prompted by the return of 90s and early 00s fashions, forcing her to consider how the toxic beauty standards of the era shaped the girls who lived through it. “Maybe we should’ve known then that a Labour government was inevitable.”
Like Annette, many of the artists behind these shows are millennials looking back at their childhood. Lou Taylor’s show unpicks her 90s obsession, starting with the best day of her life: appearing on BBC One’s Saturday morning show Live and Kicking: “Is it because every generation looks back on the time before they had any adult responsibility? Or were the 90s just wicked?”
Annette hopes we leave some things in the past. The non-stop judgment of women’s bodies left “so many little brainworms”, she said. “One of the Trinny and Susannah body types was ‘brick’,” she said, referring to the BBC One primetime programme, What Not to Wear. “We didn’t say stop. We said, absolutely, makes sense, I guess I’m a brick. My show speaks to people who lived through that time, but also explaining to younger people that the legacy of that time is still with them.”
Sooz Kempner’s recent shows have been “heavily nostalgia-based”, looking back on different years from her childhood. This year her show focuses on the turn of the millennium – there will be plastic tattoo chokers, Impulse body spray and MSN messenger, but also wider reflections on the class politics of the time.
“There’s huge nostalgia for the Y2K era, not just because we’ve got a Labour government for the first time in over a decade. The fashion is back, Britpop is back and we’re even seeing a return of those slightly dirty romcoms,” Kempner said. She was a child in 1997, so couldn’t vote, but was interested in politics. “I used to love Tony Blair. That was the mood of the nation. I would say to people: ‘He’s a real breath of fresh air.’ You’re 12, stop saying that to adults!”
Though she remembers the political hope of the time, she says: “It was also my first experience of getting disillusioned with a politician. It’s good to have a bit of wariness about nostalgia, then you can learn – from your own mistakes and society’s mistakes.”
Raul Kohli is examining what it means to be British, reflecting on the diverse Newcastle of his 90s upbringing. “The normality of multiculturalism is something we took for granted. I’m the son of a Hindu and a Sikh. My best friends were Pakistani and Nigerian, [some of] my grandparents were white working class,” he said. “It’s quite weird for me, because in a sense I agree with Lee Anderson and Nigel Farage – I do want my country back, but the country I want back is a country where my existence was absolutely normal.”
Everyone recalls a sense of hope. “We still had problems then, but it seemed like we were on an upward trajectory,” Kohli said. “We’ve lost a lot of the hope that made it such an enlightened period.”
Taylor said: “I remember adults saying to us: every generation is earning more than their parents –get excited. But obviously we’re the generation that hasn’t, we’ve been through three recessions.” She wonders whether that disappointment propels 90s nostalgia.
All the acts explore the pitfalls of nostalgia too. “How brilliant that we can enjoy the best of something we were around for – but don’t forget that back then you were young and full of hope,” said Kempner.
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Kohli added: “We should be very proud of this country, but to celebrate it we do have to scrutinise bits where it’s gone wrong.”
Is there one thing they would bring back? “This might be very unpopular,” said Kohli. “But freedom – to make terrible decisions and not be cancelled for them.”
Taylor wishes Gen Z could experience the joy of a trip to Blockbuster, Kempner yearns for the wild west of Napster downloads, and Annette has a soft spot for Papa Roach, a long forgotten American rock band.
“Millennials who were children in 1997 are now among those new MPs,” Annette said. “What does it mean for a generation that was defined as young, to now be a generation of nostalgia? What will that look like for the next 10 years?”