Miranda Sawyer

You do a really brilliant thing where you list bands and they're like, some of them are real, some of them are not.

Some of them are successful, some of them are not.

And literally, there's like the Beekeepers, Luna, Feline, Proper, Lower, Arnold, the Dub Pistols.

Yes, we remember.

The Highbirds, The Aloof, Spooky Reuben, Sally Burgess.

You list all these ones, but then there's Finley Quay in there.

There's Tiger in there, who I remember, obviously.

Robbie Williams, you know, Knicky.

But there's also people like Foil, Peach, Ether, Charlotte Kelly.

And all these people at the time were considered to kind of be on the same level, weren't they?

But you do.

I mean, you sign Mogwai.

But it's funny because also at the time, obviously, there was Radiohead.

doing actually quite mad stuff Radiohead really and you know like OK Computer for quite a lot of people was like a big shock it just happened that everybody liked it but because of that you're always going to get bands that are a bit like that that come through and some of them are going to be successful we could say Travis Coldplay those kind of bands but for every one of those there have been 50 other bands that sound quite similar

Yeah.

But you know what that thing is about the singer, which you do also mention in the book, is that absolute drive.

So with Damon, I remember meeting him, I suppose, when they were Blur because food records were just around the corner from Smash It.

So we all used to drink in the same pub.

And the main thing that was really obvious with Damon was that he needed to succeed.

And in fact, he became a nicer person once he became Blur.