BRIT POP

Dear Alex,

You've only gone and blown the bloody doors off. Damon must be seething. Oh, and word to the wise, don't go on Twitter. They're having a field day with their banter and Blur-related puns related to your new sparkling wine 'Brit Pop'.

Tell you what. I'll curate some of the best ones for you.

Andrew Docherty tweeted: "He lives in a house, a very big house in the country where he has lost all touch with reality."

Lee Ashford further added: "What type of rock n roll star is this? Imagine Keith Moon making his own cheese or John Bonham stood in a field flogging wine. Pffft."

Tom: "This is a low"

MTFS: "£25 a bottle??? Modern life is indeed rubbish."

I think they're all being unfair for I believe what you've done with your new range is reduce and distill a fairly inconsequential and disposable genre of music to its purest essence inside a bottle of pop. It's actually genius when I think about it in an accidental Alan Partridge kind of way. AHA!

Though I will say that "floral peach notes with a nutty, biscuity complexity" might be stretching things a bit. Couldn't you have got your mate Albarn to knock something together a little more despairing and sardonic in keeping with the band's political legacy? Perhaps something along the lines of: "Unlike the affluence that passes through the sump dumps into post-Brexit Britain's polluted waters, try this cheap European-appropriated bubbly that has all the pathos of a final drink on the Shitanic (what I call England these days) as it sinks to its watery grave. Cheers!"

Anyway, perhaps you've already had a bellyful (geddit) of Damon's incessant whining (he does go on, right?) and decided to just go for it and embrace the cheese (again, geddit?) factor. And besides, don't you know Ringo Starr once promoted 'Sun Country Wine Cooler' in several promotional campaigns so you're actually in good company.

Anyway, I'm going to leave you to your lovely farm life (better than park life, eh?) and let you get on with navigating your way through the tricky optics of being a Cotswold Tory in a Champagne Socialist pop group, though that involves bubbles too I suppose. Haha! What a time to be alive, eh? I could do with a drink.

Maybe I'll try some of your Brit Pop. Though at £25 a pop, it's a little pricey for a Luddite hobbit like me with a zero carbon footprint. Come to think of it, I bet Damon's got a great big fuck off carbon footprint, probably the size of a West African country, the type he likes to musically colonise with his Peter Gabriel-lite collabs. You should compare carbon footprint sizes next time you see him. It'll be the modern equivalent of a dick-measuring competition, except sort of in reverse. The smaller it is, the more power you have over the other. Rock N Roll baby!

Anyway, cheers!

Digital Renegade

18th August 2023