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What would British culture be like if Oasis had never existed? | Dorian Lynskey

1 juillet 2025 à 12:24

Would Britpop have happened? Would bands still dream as big? As Oasis prepare for their return gig on Friday, it’s worth asking what their cultural impact has been

In the peculiar counterfactual 2019 romcom Yesterday, the Beatles suddenly and mysteriously vanish from history, remembered by just one man. In the interests of a cheap joke, writer Richard Curtis improbably suggests that every band in the world would still exist in the Beatles’ absence, bar one: Oasis.

But what about a world without Oasis? As the Gallaghers themselves would admit, they weren’t innovators like the Beatles, whose every move changed the course of popular music. If Noel had never joined Liam’s band at the end of 1991, Creation Records might well have gone bust, Manchester City would have had less pop cachet, and The Royle Family would have needed a different theme tune, but music wouldn’t have sounded significantly different. Today, new bands are more likely to cite the spiky intelligence of Radiohead or the Smiths than Oasis’s broad strokes, and very few younger than Arctic Monkeys expects to fill stadiums.

Murderland by Caroline Fraser review – what was behind the 1970s serial killer epidemic?

The Guardian

Par :Dorian Lynskey

1 juillet 2025 à 08:00

A compulsive new history suggests the crimes of Ted Bundy et al were – at least partly – down to the air they breathed

In 1974, the year Caroline Fraser turned 13, Ted Bundy committed his first confirmed murders. Bundy was handsome, charming, extremely intelligent and sociopathic – “a sexual virus masquerading as a person”. There is persuasive evidence that he began killing much earlier but never this gluttonously. Almost all of his victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Sometimes he broke into the women’s houses while they slept, or snatched them off the street. Sometimes he would put on a sling or plaster cast and lure them into his car to help with some fabricated task. If one refused, he tried another, convinced that he would never be caught because they would never be missed. “I mean, there are so many people,” he reasoned. “It shouldn’t be a problem.” Fraser lived on Mercer Island, Washington, near Bundy’s first hunting grounds. Recalling the moment he was first charged with murder in October 1976, she writes: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”

Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfield, known as the I-5 Killer, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Its murder rate rose by more than 30% in 1974 – almost six times the national average. In Tacoma, the city where Bundy grew up, Ridgway lived and Charles Manson was incarcerated for five years before starting his Family, murder was up 62%. It was as if a malevolent cloud had enveloped the region.