more willing to accept the awkwardness of the overall sound and delivery. If the rumoured Coldplay cover of 'A Night On The Tiles' happens, then I fully expect the arena dates to follow next year. Do you think DI were always gonna be out-of-the-loop of mainstream UK pop in the 90s just by dint of where you came from? The wrong bit of Essex. Ian C: Essex is the heart of where the white working class who took Thatcher's shilling and began the process of destroying English society settled. White flight the BNP calls it: the whites from inner London decided to get clear of the blacks and Asians and move out. They are really the white working class heartlands of the south east. You will hear the cockney accents that have disappeared from inner London there now. There's definitely something in the demographics but Blur come from what I'd call High Essex, out in Colchester. There's a lot of the posh middle classes out that way, even if they do put on cock-a-knee accents like Jamie Oliver to try to fit in. So Britpop was middle-class? Ian C: The ascendancy of the newly dominant middle class seeped through everything. So the Britpop thing coincided with this, certainly at the start of it. A lot of these bands were most definitely upper middle class and privately educated, from what I saw of them. Albarn is obviously a very clever bloke who like a lot of middle class people sees the