working class as a bag of mythical others to be encountered and observed. You've got the performing monkey for them to laugh at, like they do with Shaun Ryder, where they can listen to him yet feel superior at the same time through the smirks; you've got the hard man archetype that they're so scared of after closing time on the buses and streets of the big city, which was why the 90s were full of lad's mags and fake football bullshit as they felt they had to hold their own on in a hostile environment. I think the whole Cool Brittania thing in the light of Blair's neo-liberal legacy is a beautifully bitter and apposite soundtrack. Pulp are the obvious exception due to their lyrics. I remember Geoff [Travis] played us an advanced cut of 'Common People' in his office shortly after he got the tape back to see if we were interested in working with the producer, Chris Thomas, but all you thought as you heard it, even that first time, was, "This is gonna be a classic song." It was that obvious. The Britpop thing in hindsight makes a decent soundtrack to the push over the top as neo-liberalism had a last good crack at destroying British society by creating massive class difference within it, whilst pushing pseudo-liberal propaganda to paper it over. That's in retrospect though Ian -- at the time what did you think of your contemporaries and 'peers'? Ian C: Well our generation has