My Britpop Boomerang (or how a Radiohead interview I did in 1996 came back to me as a Facebook recommendation 26 years later)

During a brief bout of sleeplessness last night I opened my phone and went into Facebook. Not the best antidote to temporary insomnia, I know I know. Nevertheless...swipe, swipe, swipe I did. 

Hmmm, nothing much of interest here. 

Then *this* story pops up, from a source I don't even follow. Meaning it came to me through the recommendation algorithm. Okay, it's from Far Out Magazine and it's about Britpop, a genre I was very partial to in the 1990s. I get why it was pushed. 

Then I look at the pull quote - "It's always good to make fun of Oasis" - and I thought to myself "that sounds awfully familiar." So I click and dig into the article. It's all about a Gallagher brother, Noel in this case, slamming Radiohead. If you weren't particularly interested in music in the mid 1990s or maybe you weren't even born yet, you need to know that the Gallagher brothers of Oasis were endless sources of caustic quips about other musicians. Always salty, always amusing. 

See exhibit A below, from the Far Out article, for an example of the kind of thing I'm referring to.

The back and forth battled behind Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and the Oasis guys seems to have spanned decades. Who knew that in 2015 Noel Gallagher was still dumping on Radiohead in the press, but apparently he was. Anyway, then we get to the part of the article that talks about an event that occurred in early 1996. 

And this is where things start to get very self-referential, and why the "It's always good to make fun of Oasis" line jumped out at me. 

It's because the event referenced below, in what we'll call Exhibit B, happened during a recording for a radio show I hosted at CBC in the mid 1990s. And now it's coming back to me as a recommendation in my Facebook feed in September 2022? Now we know how long it takes for the cycle to complete itself. Though why this appeared on the radar of the UK's Far Out at this point in time remains a mystery to me.

And here's the Oasis-piss-taking-by-the-Radiohead-guy, assisted acoustically by 2 members of The Posies. (Note: That's 1996 me saying "Yeah" at 1:10). 

So how did this strange little bit of messing around in a CBC studio in Vancouver in the mid 1990s end up as a story in an online UK publication in 2022, and then pushed to me on Facebook?

It would have all started with somebody, back in 1996, recording the radio show, onto cassette, and then dubbing copies for friends. I remember doing so much of that kind of thing myself I even had a dedicated dubbing cassette deck. This era coincided with the rise of the commercial consumer internet, where people organized themselves into interest groups, using BBSs (online bulletin boards), Usenet, and sites like Geocities. The cassette distribution would have gone from known person to known person to a not personally known individual as recipient. And then from that person to people s/he knew and also potentially other online pals. Yes, kids, this was the world before the viral videos of YouTube and TikTok.

Once we hit the end of the 1990s, we got into the file-sharing world of Napster and later the likes of Kazaa, Limewire, and several other peer-to-peer music sites where MP3s were uploaded and downloaded, and copyright enforcement became too big to take on.

From the same session in which the Oasis Wonderwall bit appeared, the following full song was also recorded. And in between the mid 1990s and the early 2000s Radiohead became one of the biggest bands in the world and the internet as a mainstream technology for global connection had taken hold.

Thus we get the full song featuring Thom Yorke of Radiohead with Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of The Posies making the rounds first through cassette sharing and trading, then on file-sharing sites, and finally onto YouTube, as confirmed in the comments section.

And because there are few mysteries unsolved on the internet, 11 years ago someone who came across the YouTube video had the provenance information for the recording, even though at that time about 20 years had elapsed between the recording and its posting on YouTube.

And there's little old me, chiming in on the comment stream. If you make it to the end of the YouTube video above you'll hear 1996 me in some kind of Nostradamus mode, predicting the likelihood of a bootleg of the recording showing up one day.

It sure is nice to be right once in a while.