• A Year in the 'Lab
• A year in corporate culture
• Signs of the times

alt.culure.fashion

• The year of ethical chic

alt.culture.games

• Play with your Croc

alt.culture.cooking

• Xmas oysters

alt.culture.fiction

• Xmas reading

alt.culture.pop

Laetitia Sadier took a break from Stereolab's sell-out world tour to tell Theresa Clifford how they became this year's model pop group

A Year in the 'Lab

'Some people have asked whether Stereolab are like Pulp, in the sense that we have been around for ages and then we suddenly take off. But our experience is much more gradual. The life of Stereolab is a slowly evolving process. Never any massive change, steady and slow in the charts and in the press. But this year has been really good, in that we are finally getting to do what we set out to do.

'At the beginning of the year we wrote the new album in about four weeks - written on a four-track in a very basic fashion. We just threw the songs together in snatches of 20, 30 seconds. Then everyone learnt their parts and we took the thing to Chicago where we began recording with John McEntire from Tortoise and Sean O'Hagan from the High Llamas. Chicago is a very inspiring place, and you try to live up to the musical standard of the city. Making Dots and Loops was really fun, because we didn't practise anything. We went into the studio and put it down, and then embellished it.

'Contrary to some cynical assumptions, Dots and Loops is more complex than our last album, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. This album is very detailed, like lace. It's not an easily accessible record. However, more people have come to understand what we are trying to do with our music. At first listening to our music is weird, but then you get used to it. You treat it as yours. When people say we are more accessible, it's largely to do with the fact that they are more familiar with our music. They have done the work, not so much us.

'But at the same time we have done our work better than before. The music is now less angular, violent or angst-ridden. In the past there was always a sort of angst feel to our music, but that was more because we weren't meeting the sort of standard that we aspired to, so we were a little insecure. Now we are more confident that we can express ourselves better. Therefore the album has got a smoother quality on the surface. But on another level, it is still full of contradictions, or a better word might be juxtapositions. The whole of Stereolab's musical history is based on the juxtaposition of opposites. They have to work together and most of the time they do.

'I totally disagree with the notion that there is nothing new coming out of music. Nineteen ninety-seven saw some great things happening. Within the music produced today, people are mixing around some old kitsch with some new drum'n'bass beats, or even jazz with drum'n'bass. There is a lot of new stuff going on - Tortoise, Mouse on Mars, Pram, the High Llamas, Broadcast, Air and Kid Loco. New tech and their own ideas, juxtaposing things that have not been juxtaposed before.'

A year in corporate culture

Mergers of every sort, worth an unprecedented $100 billion on one October Monday morning alone, were also surrounded by a sense of doubt. The shenanigans around BT, MCI, GTE and WorldCom confirmed this. No firm admitted wanting to marry another to cut costs; that, like our old friend 'synergy', was passé. No, mergers boomed because growth by normal means looked slow compared with staying focused in one's sector, but aquiring in order to go global. Shareholders - pension funds with portfolios organised into nice little sectoral boxes - demanded nothing less. But what was a 'sector' any more, when branded billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson were deeper into everything? With sleepy WH Smith under pressure to dispose of Waterstone's bookshops, demergers were touted as the Next Big Thing. After all, as London Business School guru Gary Hamel argued in Fortune (23 June 1997), the name of the game now is to change the rules of the game (even if, as he has, you've been arguing this same story for years now).

In Waterstone's as elsewhere, shelves groaned from the weight of conflicting theories, and also from an increasing overlap with the burgeoning literature of self-help and personal growth (at work and play). Indeed, merger failures themselves were blamed, more than ever, on conflicts of ego, leadership style and...culture. While many a newly-acquired merger target flouted a suitor chairman's 'value system', his employees were sternly urged to adopt it. So it wasn't 'people are our greatest asset' any more. Rather, the right people were our greatest asset.

Right meant believing that business is the best kind of leisure (the magazine Fast Company, launched in 1997, is dedicated to this proposition). It meant job interviews where you don't ask about the pay, just about when you can start. It meant changing your behaviour through a course on Neuro-linguistic Programming: thinking about positive outcomes, anchoring those thoughts by touching an ear lobe, mobilising the five senses - smell included - to get results.

In this kind of climate, technology takes a back seat. Indeed, the Harvard Business Review proclaimed that the trick was not the development of new technologies, but the 'choice' of existing ones. Clearly management thinking is now in deep doo-doo. As Hamel says, speaking of the whole genre, 'the dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn't have any theory of strategy creation'.

Nineteen ninety-seven was the year in which that secret came out.

Gemma Forest is a management consultant who doesn't believe in it. She has no shares in any of the companies mentioned above; she has no shares, period.

Signs of the times

'No drink or drugs'

Message on the printed invitation to the seventeenth birthday party of William Shaw, son of fun-loving Home Secretary Jack.

The Royal British Legion is to launch its own record label, which will release both classical and heavy metal music. William Straw, take note.

'Pubs should not have anything to do with Nazis. Pubs have been smashed up and these people do nothing for the standing of the pub in the local community'

Anti-Nazi league spokesman telling it like it is, in the Publican magazine

'There are cases where we lose in court, yet have still uncovered a wealth of evidence of people living above their means. It seems silly that this evidence should then be wasted and never acted on. The people we are after are the Mr Bigs who drive flash cars, wear nice suits and jewellery and don't appear to have a job or be claiming benefits'

Supt Bob Pattison of Northumbria Police - and he's not talking about former cabinet ministers. The Home Office Working Group is considering a recommendation that courts should be allowed to confiscate the assets of people police simply suspect of criminal activity.

'He was quite excited. Two asked him to leave - there was a kerfuffle. He stayed and did moves from Flashdance'

A bouncer recalls Peter Mandelson's off-message antics at Labour's celebrity bash in Brighton, where he rushed the stage and grabbed the mic

'As we approach the Millennium, it is uplifting music such as this that aids us in our doubts, speeds us to our hopes and dreams. The family remains the cornerstone of our nation, and Tipper and I feel that music can be a binding force that keeps our families together'

US vice-president Al Gore's moving tribute to those pillars of moral rectitude, Fleetwood Mac

'The cult of the body is narcissistic and self-defeating. I have lead a shallow and egotistical life. My eyes have been opened and I'm turning over a new leaf'

Sylvestor Stallone, turning over a new leaf while opening a new Planet Hollywood burger restaurant in Rome

'We come from a democratic country and believe people should have the right to defend themselves first'

Spokesman from the South African High Commission commenting on their recent football match against the Irish Embassy. The match was abandoned when a South African spat at an opponent after being sent off - all 22 players then joined in the punch-up. Police were called to break up the brawl in which one man was rendered unconscious and another suffered a broken nose and jaw. The peace process continues.

'Years ago, you wouldn't get a model talking politics; now they'll hang, have a Marlboro Light and seem quite proud to have little discussions. When Gordon Brown made his decision over Bank of England interest rate
formulation, there was a lot of interest from the girls -
everyone was talking about it.'

Paula Karaiscos of top model agency Storm

'This book provides a philosophical examination of the phenomenon of Aids. Influenced by Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger and contemporary thought concerning gay activism and Aids research, the author attempts to find a philosophical language capable of doing justice to the experience of living with Aids'

Promotional blurb for At Odds With Aids by Alexander Garcia Duttmann (Stanford University Press)

alt.culure.fashion

The year of ethical chic

Versace's work was admired for its upbeat use of colour and pattern, but Armani's safe and sombre approach was more in keeping with the contemporary mood. The Tories may have lost the election, but the colour of the year was blue.

Fashion lacked confidence, either shyly sheering away into flimsiness and floatiness, or hiding its embarrassment behind fake splendours: feathers, florals, frills and flounces, sequins, beading, embroidery, sparkle and bright colours; preferably all jumbled up together. This was glamour as a caricature of itself, in the manner of Barbara Cartland (she probably wore the big knickers).

We also saw the return of the come-back. Fashion news these days is about what is back: the miniskirt, the trouser suit, the shoulder pad, stiletto heels, black. Even fur came back. None of these could be described as exciting, though we all know a black trouser suit is always practical.

After British designers were invited to head French couture houses, London was hailed as the capital city of fashion. A few sceptics noted that couture houses now make their money out of selling perfume and tights; and what they really want from a chief designer is someone who can create controversy and get the name of the house in the papers. Column inches rather than design quality are what is expected from Brits like Alexander McQueen.

Appropriately enough, the year ended with that most British and boring of fashion staples: grey tweed.

Paola Martos

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