Now We Are 40. Tiffanie Darke
features and lifestyle and fashion sections starting to appear. These sections naturally invited in more staff, many of them young and female. This was where my career took off: I went from being an unpaid work experience on the listings section of the Observer (a job I had blagged through a friend of a friend of a friend), to a paid researcher on their Life magazine supplement. From there I went to the Telegraph as a commissioning editor in charge of food (where my patrician, silver-haired boss called me ‘The Infant Tiffanie’ as I was, as far as he was concerned, outrageously young to be in the job).
Courted by PRs, riding the London cocktail circuit of launch parties and openings, it was the ideal spot to watch the Nineties unfold. Like Thykier, I went to some legendary parties and witnessed some great moments. I remember attending one party in Cannes at the film festival, hosted by MTV in Pierre Cardin’s space-age villa, a collection of pink Teletubby pods built into the edge of a cliff on the Cote d’Azur. Ostensibly the week-long festival in Cannes was a showcase of the film world’s upcoming releases – and they were so exciting, as directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie were bringing a rock ’n’ roll edge to Hollywood.
In 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was released, giving London an international film voice – and making it very attractive to brands looking to cash in. There were probably about a thousand people at the MTV party that year, every named DJ in the land playing, and endless test tubes of Absolut Vodka going round. Everyone was cool, young and fashionable. At three in the morning they closed the party down and emptied out the villa – and at four they started it up again, for those that remained. We danced on the terrace as the sun came up over the Mediterranean and there was nowhere cooler or more at the centre of things on earth than that terrace right then – we were all exactly where we wanted to be.
As such a source of economic prosperity, the thriving creative industries, which had previously been dismissed as a bit ridiculous and inconsequential, were now being embraced by the establishment. They were part of Brand Britain – something we could sell on to the world to drive our economy and elevate our national pride. Taking his cue from America, which was so good at marketing itself, the newly elected Tony Blair held an event in 1997 that was to become the pivotal moment of the Nineties. He celebrated his election with a series of parties at 10 Downing Street, and all these artists who had set themselves up as anti-establishment, disruptive voices, were invited to Number 10, the heart of the government.
Blair was Cool Britannia – he had rebranded politics and reinvented it for our generation. For a generation so expert on and obsessed by cool, Blair’s relative youth and embracing of the creative industries was intoxicating. He must be a good thing. One of the first things he did in government was celebrate British design and creativity with a party – a party! Suddenly the emblems of what had previously been considered fringe culture were invited in to be celebrated by the establishment itself. Thatcher had had little time for culture. After 18 years of Tory rule, there were clear changes afoot.
‘It was an exciting time, to have so many people from all these different industries included,’ says June Sarpong. ‘Architecture, design, he had them all. It wasn’t just the obvious musicians and fashion and art.’ Geri Halliwell had just brought the Union Jack in from the cold, Blur and Oasis were fighting it out for cool points, the cast of The Full Monty were on set, the ‘Sensation’ exhibition was about to open at the Royal Academy, Loaded was in full swing. Tony Robinson, Vivienne Westwood, Ben Elton, Chris Evans and Kevin Spacey all trooped up the street to that famous front door. Blair hit cool paydirt when he got the photograph of the decade – chortling over a glass of champagne with Noel.
‘The fact that a guy who’d been in a band, owned an electric guitar and has probably had a spliff was prime minister really meant something,’ said Gallagher later. ‘He might be one of us.’ And Blair knew how to handle himself. When Gallagher asked him how he had managed to stay up all night on the night of the election, he quipped, ‘Probably not the same way you did.’
‘That government, because they were all so young themselves, understood how important shaping British culture was, not just for Britain but as a message to the rest of the world,’ says June. ‘They understood the importance of selling that image so that the world wanted to be part of the UK. It was quite American thinking.’ Politics, then, began to use marketing too: the age of spin was born. Blair’s PR man was Peter Mandelson, a silver-tongued figure hated by the media for his slippery talking, whose responsibility was to cast the New Labour project as the bright dawn of liberal thinking. The danger was that the shiny sheen Mandelson applied to the policies and personalities left them open to suspicion.
Momentarily, Blair brought that disengaged group in from the outside. Ultimately, though, politics did not benefit from its embrace of marketing – in the end its reliance on spin just earned it distrust. By the time Cameron came along with his lookey-likey ‘Cool Britannia’ party (Eliza Doolittle and Ronnie Corbett: the guest list didn’t have quite the same cachet), the cultural zeitgeist had moved on. He would have done better to invite Millennial vloggers and the Silicon roundabout digipreneurs, but of course that just isn’t as sexy or cool. Cameron was a posh boy who went to Eton (nobody likes privilege) whereas Blair presented himself as classless. He may have come from a relatively affluent background and even gone to public school, but Blair was socially much harder to place – the level playing field we all wanted so much.
It was to be some time before the scales were to fall from our eyes. As Private Eye had it so perfectly, Tony Blair was our saviour. Working on a national newspaper, I was not only party to all the cultural changes happening around me, but was on the inside track of the political ones too. I felt like I was living right in the middle of it – and physically I was. I had moved in with a boyfriend (TV producer for one of the myriad new satellite channels) who lived in Primrose Hill, not far from Islington and the street where Blair lived up till the election. I used to visit one of my writers who lived near the Blairs’ old home, and pass the door Cherie Blair famously answered in her nightie on the morning of the election.
Creation Records opened their HQ in Primrose Hill village, and for a while the genteel street that was then lined with greengrocers, tearooms and bookshops also housed pop stars, paparazzi and music industry types. The ancient bohemian ladies of Primrose Hill, who dined at Odette’s in their hatpins, beehives and endless necklaces, were rather a pleasing backdrop to the northern swagger of the Britpop scene. Everything, it seemed, was being overrun by the noisy clash of modernity.
Round the corner was The Steele’s, a pub where Kate Moss and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream would drink; The Queen’s played host to Chris Evans and Oasis; David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Sadie Frost and David Walliams all lived nearby and would pass in the street. It felt as if I had landed in the heart of everything, that I was part of this new world. By now I had moved on from the Telegraph to the Express features desk, where we could be reactive to the news unfolding around us. Racism in the police, the care of the elderly, the shenanigans at Westminster were all fair cop, although my finest hour was probably ‘Too posh to push’ – the truth behind Victoria Beckham’s caesarean.
I definitely gravitated towards the more fluffy side of news: my boyfriend at the time was producing a TV series with the comedian Leigh Francis (who now portrays the comedian Keith Lemon), and a pilot on video gaming with Dexter Fletcher. I was literally living next door to Liam ’n’ Patsy and I think I was rather blinded by the glitz and the excitement. While tabloid culture is a clever mix of both hard and soft news, it wasn’t clear to me at the time how we were shaping the future. How Saviour Blair was, or was not, paying it forward. How distracting and eventually corrosive celebrity culture would become. How Blair’s ‘New Deal’ – a cornerstone of his welfare reform in his first term, which withdrew benefits from those ‘who refused reasonable employment’ in exchange for training and subsidised employment, and the introduction of tuition fees that withdrew free arts education, stifling social mobility – was to have such far-reaching consequences for talent and creative culture.
The recent death of the actor Alan Rickman brought this into sharp focus: could a comprehensive boy who had grown up in a council house make it to the summit of the acting profession now? Twenty-five years ago, if you had no money you could