The great David Letterman is retiring tonight, and everyone has already chimed in on their favorite Late Show performances. But we can only watch that Future Islands video so many times before we start daydreaming back to a better, simpler time. And that time is the mid-’90s and the height of Britpop.
More than a few Britpop performances still live forever on the internet, and below you can transport back to the era of Cool Britannia, where, for us in America, it meant dropping $30 on import CDs and hoping Tower Records had a kinda recent issue of Select on its magazine shelves.
Those were the fucking days.
We can only imagine what American TV-viewing audiences thought of all this as it unfolded 20 years ago. Below watch Late Night spots featuring Pulp doing “Common People,” Oasis performing “Morning Glory” (great exchange between Dave and, we think, Liam Gallagher, right at the beginning), Elastica doing “Connection,” and clips from Blur, Supergrass, and the Verve.
That Pulp clip is something else, a band at the true height of their powers.
(Really, Pulp on Letterman shoulda been the Future Islands clip of its time. If only YouTube was around then….)
— Annie Zaleski (@anniezaleski) May 20, 2015
Hat tip to Annie Zaleski for finding the Pulp video, and hat tip to the almighty David Letterman.