Having already made one respectable reunion album, on January’s Night Thoughts and its companion film, Brett Anderson applied Suede’s gutter-romantic lens to real adult life and particularly fatherhood, to exquisitely devastating effect. For The Magic Whip, Blur departed England for a neon-lit Hong Kong travelogue. What’s surprising about these works, though, is how many of them have managed to escape from nostalgia. In the last month alone, America has seen a new Britpop Invasion across various forms of media: Lush put out their first new music since 1996 in the midst of a North American tour, last year’s Cool Britannia-era British music-biz thriller Kill Your Friends got a low-key stateside release, and the '90s-set Channel 4 teen drama "My Mad Fat Diary" finally appeared on Hulu. Sure enough, the past year has brought new albums from two bands whose reunions once seemed impossible: Blur and Suede. In retrospect, that period looks more like a Britpop hangover than a Britpop revival-but in 2016, Britannia’s moment in the 20-year nostalgia cycle truly has arrived. By the early aughts, the movement had been reduced to a few bands making the worst albums of their careers and a smattering of “ Britpop dance nights” where American twenty-somethings could ritually cosplay an era they missed by half a decade and a few thousand miles.
Now a decade since Rue Britannia’s 2006 debut, it seems impossible that Britpop nostalgia could have been prevalent and destructive enough by that time to demand such an elegant critique. If they succeed, Britannia will wander the earth zombie-like, distorting cultural memories of Britpop and poisoning younger generations with nostalgia. The embodiment of '90s Britpop, this deceased deity in a Union Jack baby tee has become the fixation of a cadre of “Retromancers”-fans plotting to recapture their lost youth by bringing her back. The goddess Britannia has been dead for the better part of a decade by the time we glimpse her reanimated corpse in Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s cult-classic comic book Phonogram: Rue Britannia.
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