Tricky’s comments on two long-standing shibboleths of Britishness were made at a juncture in the national identity that makes his words even more transgressive with hindsight. Summer 1996 began a twelve-month period that saw the zenith of both Britpop and New Labour. The group Oasis’s sold-out imperial-phase performances at Knebworth were followed by Tony Blair’s first election victory, inaugurating a new cultural–political complex in the UK (or at least in London). This mediated alliance, operating under the alibi of ‘Cool Britannia’, embodied a postmodern, post-imperial ideology that sought to reassert Britain as a power within a world grown indifferent to it. To this end, several fields of British life (art, music, politics, fashion, media) staged a replay of an imaginary 1960s, the last time that Britain pretended to world dominance. In particular, the complex found musical expression in Britpop, a style whose assumption of a bleached, backwards-