Review: The Britpop Hour with Marc Burrows, EdFringe

A PowerPoint presentation, a clicker and a life sized cut out of Jarvis Cocker on stage… What’s not to love? Except there is no love quite like the love Marc Burrows clearly has for Britpop.

Part music journalist, part frustrated guitarist/performer, and full time Britpop Aficionado, Burrows opens his set with the opening lines from Blur’s famous song: “Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as parklife”, which, as he quite reasonably points out, is NONSENSE. (When you read that, try and imagine that word being delivered to the beat of PARK-LIFE!)  

Burrows, in a lovely Fred Perry t-shirt reminiscent of the relevant era, delivers considerably more than a standup routine, laugh out loud funny though it very much is. Using mostly PowerPoint, with a lovely side line in scatter graphs, he delivers a lecture on Britpop: what it was and what it definitely was not. Who were the top three influencers? (Damon – Blur, Jarvis – Pulp and Liam – Oasis, since you ask), along with the (fully researched) reasons for its success (a desire to reclaim real British life, after the unemployment and youth frustrations of the 1980s and a clear rejection of soft American rock). He also makes a very salient point about the need for the youth of the time to connect with something real and how the current resurgence of those acts comes at a time when younger demographics are similarly struggling. His unbridled enthusiasm is such that the act is nearly derailed when he answers a genuine question raised by a member of the audience as to where certain acts that had been left out of one of his analyses would sit on the graph. Some time later he has to remind himself what he should actually be doing.

Moving back into music history, he plays many of the key melodies of that era on his guitar to demonstrate their influences from older artists, such as Bowie or The Stranglers to name but two. He mixes his presentation with photos of himself from that era, and genuinely produces a thoroughly researched and accurate account of that part of British history, how it happened, and what it led into. (There is a particularly sobering section which lists all the things that hadn’t happened at that point: the chicken pox vaccination for example)…

The enthusiastic and supportive audience is, of course, mainly made up of a particular demographic (well, those who were in their late teens in the mid 90s) but a teenager, presumably sat with an older relative, is gently and humorously pulled in to the act. At regular points Burrows attempts to explain what certain things were: such as a jukebox (like streaming Spotify on your phone on the bus so everyone can hear…) and there is plenty of opportunity for audience participation with ‘knock knock’ jokes finishing well known lyrics.

The whole piece is top and tailed with reference to his personal life and his stepsons. It’s well done: not least because it brings an appreciation to a more recent genre of creative art but also in how it demonstrates the need for connection in an increasingly digitalised world. And it is just the right amount of emotionally compelling.

But lest we get too bogged down in the detail, the hour long show is deftly wrapped up by the incomparable Mr Cocker closing Pulp’s set on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. The audience watches the video, whilst singing Common People, and being coached in Jarvis’s dance moves by Marc himself. That’s how to end a show.

Writer / Comedian: Marc Burrows
Corrie McGuire Management

The Britpop Hour plays at Underbelly until 25 August 2025