Fourteen years is a long time in pop, although not as long as it used to be. The last period of Conservative rule, from 1979 to 1997, took the UK from post-punk and disco to drum’n’bass and Britpop. Today, you can look back at the first year of David Cameron’s coalition government and see Britain’s current megastars in one form or another – Adele, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles – as well as its dominant genres: rap, dance-pop, earnest men with acoustic guitars. It does not feel like a different world.
This Tory reign has also been less narratively comprehensible than its predecessor. During the 1980s, music mirrored the times with a mix of full-colour pop stars who shared Thatcherism’s aspirational thrust, if not its politics, and spiky refuseniks in black and grey. The last 14 years broke down into distinct phases, and not just because there were five very different prime ministers: first the austerity years, then the Brexit wars, then Covid, corruption and chaos. Like Taylor Swift, it has eras. An incoherent government makes for a hard story to tell.
