An Oasis reunion and the signs are everywhere it’s a return to 1997 all over again

The day I heard Vanity Fair was coming to do a special report on London’s 1990s pop culture, I was at Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit’s home in St John’s Wood, trying to interview them for a cover story in The Face magazine. open image in gallery Lee McQueen was one of many examples of working-class creatives who set the cultural agenda in the 1990s All these seem so familiar and respected now that it’s hard to imagine how rule-breaking it all felt back then and how much the arts and media establishment of the early 1990s hated it. Noel Gallagher and Stella McCartney were invited to Tony’s No 10 “opening” party and it did feel like a new clean brush was sweeping out the “old” ways. open image in gallery Croydon model Kate Moss was the epitome of Cool Britannia when dating Johnny Depp in 1997 This idea was heard in Albarn’s railing against the hegemony of American rock at the 1992 Brits and would reach its fullest expression 15 years later in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics. We wanted the people who still worked in those old industries to be respected, but we knew they would never reattain their former glories, and so in the early 1990s a lot of us headed down south looking for work with a sort of let’s-see-what-happens, fortune-hunting kind of approach; one thing now that is really different is how the trendy culture of the day was dictated by working-class kids who had just come to London to have a laugh and have a go.