'Paperweight, baby, that's my name,' howls Holiday, 'I can't relate 'cause you're all the same.' You get the gist, but it's hard not to wonder if anti-establishment sentiment is really best expressed through the metaphor of decorative office furniture. Jet are big on symbolism that doesn't quite work. Aside from the title track, a touching tribute to Cester's late father, the lyrics are agonisingly stupid throughout. With things as they are, is it any wonder the hulking, coke-blasted caution-to-the-wind excess and wrongness of Oasis' grand folly has started to take on a perversely appealing hue? The gaudy splat of the Scissor Sisters and Muse notwithstanding, the biggest sellers on the top 20 album chart are just different shades of drab. The result has been an overwhelming glut of nice singer-songwriters, stadium rockers peddling vanilla angst, indie bands so eager to please you worry they may have missed their true calling as Butlins Redcoats. Ever since, it has reined in its excesses, kept on the rails, done its level best not to offend our sensibilities. Mainstream rock music learned its lesson rather too well from Oasis' 1997 debacle.
More recently, however, it has been difficult not to gaze upon Be Here Now with a wistful eye. For years after its release Oasis' Be Here Now was held up as a sort of musical Millennium Dome, a vainglorious nadir for 90s rock, prima facie evidence of the terrible havoc that cocaine can wreak not merely on a great band, but an entire era.
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