England was never, and never will be, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The ruffled charm, the rounded expletives, the unexplained wealth.

England is not, and never will be, Paddington 2. The bougie hippy dippy, the cutesy life lessons, the unexplained wealth.

England maybe was, and might just be again, the kind of prickly, confused but eventually understanding place presented in About a Boy. Though again some apparently hard-up folk seemed to live in awfully nice North London flats.

What is it about this wealth that shuns explanation? Cough, splutter. One for another blog I reckon.

Only one of those of three films though is a national treasure – and it’s Paddington 2 and I will not brook counter arguments.

All three however have benefitted from the presence of a man who is now a national treasure. 

Hugh Grant.

An actor and a man who can viably claim to reach across the breadth of what constitutes a national treasure  – that is an ‘artefact, institution, or public figure regarded as being emblematic of a nation’s cultural heritage or identity.’

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A single England of course doesn’t exist.

It’s a filing system not a file. 

England is way too fractured and fractious to be effectively and comprehensively portrayed in a single film. Like anywhere really, our layers of history, class, immigration and region prevents this. Parasite is Korean but it’s not Korea, no matter how much foreign audiences may wish to convince actual Koreans that they are challenging capitalism and centuries old class structures through the medium of improvised cellar renovation.

That didn’t stop us trying though.

Richard Curtis’ England of the nineties was one such attempt with Hugh Grant its’ charming totem around which Cluedo eccentrics danced badly and American leading ladies were charmed effortlessly. This was an England that was enjoyed with such enthusiastic, universal and unfamiliar affection we were all rather taken aback. This benign self-deprecating, sweary, bumbling and harmless enough England was Hugh Grant and whose gravitational pull was so strong it is easy to forget that Julia Roberts – JULIA FUCKING ROBERTS –provided a genuinely sweet cinematic moment which actually referenced ‘Horse and Hound.’

More than anything we were flattered. We quite liked this unusual feeling of being liked. And we quite liked the England that the world seemed to like too. An England where Poshos go to funerals on Scottish housing estates (they don’t) or where the PMs asks his tea lady out (no he wouldn’t). And so 1990s England wrapped a flag around Hugh Grant like he was some sort of rose scented rom com Bond rebrand.

Eventually though Bond got hot again and we got more relaxed about reasserting another core national brand attribute: going around the world killing people. 

Grant slipped from centre stage although not entirely from our eyeline, 90s Rom Com Hugh now more national artefact than global icon.

Like all good national treasures, Grant didn’t at first appear to relish the mantle. Indeed he appeared keen, to the point of self-destruction, to shed the type had fame had cast him into. He got caught curb crawling as he broke America. He starred in Two Weeks Notice.

A man who then happily, gleefully threw aside foppish Hugh to embrace lechy boss Hugh in the Bridget Jones films. A man who recast himself in middle age and mid-career, as utterly unlikeable villains. Ever since becoming very well liked, Hugh Grant seemed at very much at ease with being disliked.

He’s failed because here we are in 2022 and he has the widespread, deeply held and almost unshakeable affection of a country.

And the strange thing is, he probably reclaimed his place as a national treasure because he played this other role, neither fop nor scoundrel. He played a version of himself.

A version of himself who decided to step up when the UK tabloid phone hacking scandal broke and its victims’ needed someone who was prepared to stand up to Murdoch, Morgan and Brookes. Someone who felt robust enough, exposed enough already not to care about the blow back that could and did come his way.

That arrest in Los Angeles, his very public relationship and break up with Liz Hurley and the various irrelevant but nonetheless widely exposed ups and downs of his personal life were already out there. Tabloid Hugh was already oven cooked. To his detractors and now his enemies in court here was a dilletante caricature posh cad and love rat. He saw had nothing to lose.

Anti-Tabloid Hugh, @hackedoffHugh smashed out of this caricature. He was Terminator like in his indestructible pursuit of his targets but imagine Arnie as a pithy and urbane public school boy with a liberal, anti-establishment line in take downs. He part-funded the brilliant Daniel Morgan podcast, a brutal, murderous introduction to the corrupt power base from which the phone scandal emerges as one just one gruesome component.

Hacked off, fearless but unmistakably English about it. As someone else once said of Captain Blackadder – another Curtis invention up there with RomCom Hugh – ‘you’ve got to admire his balls.’ Hugh Grant had become a national public figure. And this time rather than stuttering awkwardly under our glare, Grant gave every impression of not giving a single fuck.

Two relatively recent roles cemented have cemented his status. The first was his gleeful turn as the cad, the bad and the ugly in the magnificently uplifting Paddington 2  – a role which Grant himself thinks was probably his best. Here Grant pits his wits against a Peruvian bear nemesis in a duffle coat voiced by Ben Wishaw. If you haven’t, you really should.

This was soon followed up by playing a crooked and sordid Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal. Here he became embroiled in a very ugly love affair and grubby scandal with urm… Ben Wishaw. Apart from the close proximity of the two releases producing some uncomfortable phonic dissonance, in both performance and reception there seemed to an acknowledgement and open enjoyment of actor and audience. A communion if you like.

‘We’ve come a long, long way together. Through the good times and the bad…‘

There is Hugh Grant the memory, a reminder of happier times, the artefact from 90s Curtisland England.

There is Hugh Grant the public figure of some renown, campaigning against the malice of tabloid journalism.

And there is Hugh Grant, the national institution, the provider of pitch perfect comic timing.

And so there we have it. Hugh Grant IS a national treasure.

He’d shudder and recoil at this conclusion no doubt. Who wouldn’t? However, his assent to this lofty position is a reminder that England is just a filing system and that the perverse beauty of any system is that doesn’t always work.

Not everyone can be filed away neatly – least of all Hugh Grant.

Chris

Perhaps ironically, the year we launched Pop Lifer was not a great pop year. Occasionally, music seems to get stuck like an old scratched vinyl record, and 2012 was a textbook example. For the first time in pop history, the year’s best selling album worldwide (Adele’s world-bestriding colossus “21”) was unchanged from the previous year. This was closely followed by not one but two mediocre records by One Direction, with Mumford & Sons, Justin Bieber and Maroon 5 awkwardly filling up the rest of the top ten.

What rescued the year from total forgettability was the emergence of two of the Millennium’s most arresting and unlikely talents, in the form of Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey. Just like Pop Lifer, each of them had done creative work under their birth names in the past, but really made their mark in 2012 using pseudonyms. Unlike Pop Lifer, however, Ocean and Del Rey brought with them two of the most distinctive and compelling albums heard in years (“Channel Orange” and “Born To Die”), while generating a thousand blogs on sexual politics in the 21^st century (one of them being our own debut).

In fact, “Born To Die” was released ten years ago this very week, which seems a good opportunity to reflect on LDR’s legacy. The first thing that’s surprising about that sentence is that almost everyone would now agree that Del Rey does indeed have a legacy to reflect on. When “Born To Die” first landed, the world seemed to instantly divide into two camps: those who thought her rapid ascent to fame was a chimera built on hype and artifice, and those who thought that her handful of luminous instant-classic songs were the true secret of her success. Pop Lifer was firmly in the latter camp… but even we wouldn’t have expected what an enduring and significant musical figure Del Rey has become.

Speaking honestly, the Del Rey of “Born To Die” didn’t necessarily sound like the kind of artist who would stick around. It wasn’t the “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” nihilism of the lyrics and album title, but the sense that even within the twelve tracks of her debut her formula might already be wearing thin. For every seething melodrama like the title track there was a dreary retread like “Dark Paradise”, while love songs as unerringly graceful as “Video Games” were followed by more lead-footed fare like “Million Dollar Man.”

It also seemed very possible that her lurid lyrics of retro Americana and decadent Hollywood glamour might paint Del Rey into a corner. Like early Suede, she created an idiosyncratic universe of her own, expressed through its own lexicon. Where Brett Anderson summoned a world he would later admit could be mocked as all “nuclear skies” and “pigs by motorways”, Del Rey conjured up a realm of black-hearted sugar daddies, end-of-the-world kisses, doomed intoxicated romances, and sad girls in red dresses. It wasn’t hard to imagine the novelty quickly hardening into self-parody.

Two paths forward seemed likely, to us at least. The first would be that LDR would rush back to capitalise on her unexpected success with more of the same, to diminishing returns (think Scissor Sisters or Franz Ferdinand). The second would be that she would try to reinvent herself, with the very real possibility that she would spend years slaving away in a studio and come back with some embarrassing hip hop or electronica disaster which would disappear without trace, taking her with it.

Not for the first or the last time, LDR did something unexpected. “Cruel World”, the first song on her follow up album, didn’t just return to the same universe but expanded it over a bruising and bewitching 6 and a half minutes. This wasn’t diminishing returns, this was doubling down… and winning. The song found Del Rey still in her red party dress while the Bourbon flowed and men waved Bibles and guns around. Nothing had changed except for LDR’s confidence and the depth of her songwriting. The result – the bruised, bloody, beautiful “Ultraviolence” – was her first masterpiece. While it didn’t quite match “Born To Die”s sales, it silenced her snipers and established her firmly as what Bruce Springsteen would call “simply one of the best songwriters…. She just creates a world of her own and invites you in.”

And what a world Del Rey has forged, guided by her ever-growing confidence and built on the foundations of an extraordinary songbook. Another unexpected Del Rey quality has been her work ethic. She might sing as if she spent her entire life hanging around bars, picking up tattooed men, and being driven around on Harley Davidsons, but it soon became obvious that the place Del Rey really liked spending time was the studio. Her only rival when it comes to work rate is Taylor Swift, who has also released five records in seven years, and who recently called Lana “the most influential artist in pop”.

Del Rey detractors like to say that her music often sounds the same, and it’s true that – sonically speaking – a breathily melancholic piano ballad like 2022’s “Wildflower Wildfire” could easily slip onto “Born To Die” with a few hip hop bells and whistles dropped on top. But it’s not true that Del Rey hasn’t changed. Del Rey once bizarrely denied that she had ever adopted personas, which was a bit difficult to accept given that a) she issued this denial under her flamboyant nom de plume and b) it was utterly contradicted by all of her early videos and songs, which often seemed to be a restless attempt to channel not an all-American girl but all American girls, from Hollywood starlets to biker chicks to Jackie O. Yet over time these personas have indeed dropped away and revealed a much more honest, thoughtful and naked songwriter, closer to Joni Mitchell confessionals than Madonna self mythologising.

There have been costs to her evolution as a songwriter. Some of the cheaper thrills of her earlier records are gone, and we say this as people who greatly respect cheap thrills. LDR fans don’t get giddy, narcotic romps like “Off To The Races” any more, nor songs as unsettling and visceral as “Ultraviolence”. Perhaps as a result, the bright explosion of Del Rey’s early fame has faded a little over the last decade, leaving her closer to the cult singer you suspect she herself always expected to be.

But the fruits of this evolution have been considerable. To the relief of many fans, Del Rey has in recent years recognised and resisted her previous weakness for glamourising dysfunctional and violent relationships. More importantly, as she has delved deeper inside herself, she has also become increasingly playful. The first sign of this was when, to the shock of the entire world, she revealed that she could smile 1 minute and 12 seconds into the video for 2017’s “Love”. But it was cemented on 2019’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell!”, which was full of mischief and daring, both lyrically (the opening lines to the title track becoming instantly famous) and musically (who would ever have thought Del Rey would one day helm a ten minute dreampop reverie with long passages where her voice would all but disappear in guitar fuzz and scuzz?).

“Norman Fucking Rockwell!” went on to become – by some distance -the most celebrated record of Del Rey’s career so far. Grammy nominations were swiftly followed by it being named album of the year by publications as diverse as Slant and The Guardian. Many of the same music critics who had sniffed about Del Rey’s talent 7 years earlier were forced to eat their words.

Del Rey is a complicated and contradictory figure and so it shouldn’t surprise us that she didn’t take a well-deserved break to bask in the success of “Norman Fucking Rockwell!” Just as she was being rewarded for all her hard work with the first unanimously glowing reviews of her career, she embarked on a self-sabotaging series of retaliations and antagonisms against various journalists on social media. She may also have let her prolific instincts get the best of her. Despite several moments of piercing beauty, her two albums of 2021 did sound – for the first time since her debut album – like she might be stretching her talent a little bit thin.

But before you count her out, remember what happened right after “Born To Die”. If there’s one thing we should have learnt from Del Rey’s glorious ten-year career, it’s that you should never, ever underestimate her.

NEIL

PS: coming soon, we’re going to tracklist Lana Del Rey’s “Best Of” before she does.

30 years on, we finally agree with The Cranberries. 10 years after our first blog, Pop Lifer is jumping on the comeback bandwagon. The two writers are going to share a few thoughts on why – first up Neil.

2021 ended with ecstatic Beatles fans devouring Peter Jackson’s time travelling “Get Back” documentary, which finally resolved the question of whether John or Paul was to blame for the Beatles split with the possibility it was George all along. Then Carrie Bradshaw returned to TV screens for the first time in 18 years, to a warm welcome that rapidly turned frosty. Now, 2022 is barely underway and we’ve already had the thrilling news that one of Britain’s greatest ever pop stars – Betty fucking Boo! – is back with her first single in 30 years* while Morrissey is trying to heap the blame for his own enormous inadequacies onto Johnny Marr via the ancient art of the “open letter”, like its 1987 all over again.

But why is Pop Lifer back? Simple. Because in the 9 years we’ve been gone Kanye West’s “Yeezus”, The Good Place, Parasite, Twin Peaks: The Return, Lana Del Rey’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell”, Get Out, Station Eleven, Burning, Squid Game, Janelle Monae’s “Dirty Computer”, I May Destroy You, Inside Out, Frank Ocean’s “Blond”, The OA, Under The Skin and exactly 237 other works of genius have come into the world and we only talked about them with each other, never wrote about them. Chris’ football team even pulled off the most miraculous sporting triumph ever in 2016. Now we want to change that and put our love on record. Think of our posts like Morrissey’s open letters, but with hate swapped for love, and hopefully not as atrociously written.

Things have changed for the two founders and writers at Pop Lifer in the last ten years. One of us has changed careers and one of us has changed continents. But the founding principles of Pop Lifer are exactly the same as they were ten years ago. We love pop culture and we want to write about it. Just as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had two rules for their show – “no hugging, no learning” – so do we: “no sneering, no cheap cynicism.” If you catch us failing this test, call us out on it.

In addition, we have a few other house rules we’ll let you in on.

• We can only write about something we love three times per year, to prevent us ever becoming, say, a Kate Bush fansite (please note that this rule will be broken if Kate Bush comes back with a new album and tour).
• We aren’t going to be trying to write as frequently or promote ourselves as much as we did in that first year, we want this to be fun for us above all.
• And we’re never ever doing another two-blogs-a-day advent calendar again, that stupid idea nearly killed us all. (No, we’re most certainly not – Chris)

We hope you love some of the things we write about as much as we do. We hope that just once in a while we might introduce you to a TV show, film or album you haven’t heard of or have been avoiding, and make you love it. If so, let us know please. That would be nice.

Yours, Neil.

Over to Chris…

You are always somewhere, right?

No matter how hard you try to escape into a quiet, peaceful nowhere.

You could lose yourself in the notoriously impassable and dense rain forests of the Darian Gap, be alone in the barren depths of the Australian Outback with only Paul Hogan’s dead eyed casual bigotry as an ear worm for company. You could be in Slough.

But no matter what shade of dust nestles under your fingernails, your location is a co-ordinate. You represent a point of latitude and longitude which can identify your exact location on this fragile beautiful globe. A location from where a Google satellite might zoom in at any moment and provide you with your browser history and an algorithm of your most recent internal monologues.

And so it is now with culture.

No matter how hard you might want to write, compose, film, direct or even review a piece of art, somewhere, somebody or more likely something is giving you a left, right, liberal, conservative co-ordinate – a precise pinpoint on the map across which territory is being fiercely fought in the defining battle of our times: the Great Culture War.

We’re sure we were promised we’d be in Berlin by Christmas but somehow (the Facebook like maybe) and somewhere (Hogwarts most definitely) we’ve become entrenched and it’s all gone on far longer than anyone expected with no end in sight.

Sadly anyone hoping that ‘Don’t Look Up’ might deliver that fatal shot will be disappointed to note that well set battelines haven’t budged an inch.

We know what side we’re on.

Of course we do. I’m sure you can guess.

Ariana’s, naturally.

Do Look Up. But…

…but sometimes, someone may just want to disappear onto another map, another universe that isn’t mapped, break new ground that isn’t yet on any radar but is just gloriously its own thing, resplendent and provocative in a hazy inbetween of don’t give a fuck.

We can’t entirely divorce ourselves from our context and not should we –  but we can and should be able to detach ourselves to give ourselves room to stretch and flex.

So, we just want to go on a bit of leave from the culture war is all. To be gently deprogrammed, so that when we watch a film there isn’t a part of your brain that wonders what Piers Morgan or Joe Rogan might tweet about this.

And so Pop Lifer is back from our leave of absence to provide you with a leave of absence from the inescapable culture war.

A spa day where you just bask in the fluffy dressing gown amazingness of an ‘Sex Education’ or ‘It’s a Sin’ or Dave’s Pyschodrama. So that soon the hum and the drum of the noisy aggy clatter of the outside will be drowned out by the sheer force of just how good ‘It’s Always Sunny’ is or the subversive anti-capitalist anarchy of ‘La Casa de Papel’.

This might prove impossible. But we’ll give it a go. Like Jack and the immovable drinking fountain in One Flew Over ‘we’ll try goddam it.’ At least we’ll do that. Wish us luck but if we fail don’t feel in anyway obliged to lob the water cooler out of the window.

We’ll try to provide you with A Great Escape into some really good songs, albums, films, TV shows and other aspects from a well lived pop life.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook if you want to know when new stuff comes out. Let’s go!

Chris

*It’s her, again. Yes! How did you guess? Because last time you were really impressed?