FRESH HORIZONS,FRESH SOUNDS

With his PC Music label, A. G. Cook became one of the most influential figures in shaping the pop trends of the past decade. With the label on hiatus, and a new base in LA, he now presents Britpop, a mammoth triple album that interrogates ideas of Britishness and sees him tackle his past, present and future

- WILL RICHARDS

ROMAN ROADS. CHARLI XCX. Mark Twain. Tolkein. The Wild West. These are only a handful of the things that cross A. G. Cook’s mind in a single response to a question about his brilliantly ambitious new album, Britpop. To the enigmatic producer and cofounder of independent record label PC Music, it all fits together though, similarly to how he’s been making hands-in-the-air hits out of seemingly ill-fitting ingredients for a decade.

As a pioneer of the hyper-modern British pop scene of the past decade, Cook has played a vital role in pushing pop forwards and redefining what it can look like. On Britpop, he rewrites his past, present and future.

The idea of the album first came to Cook when he found himself in a rural town in Montana during the pandemic. He was living in the hometown of his partner, singer Alaska Reid, but was the only British person in the entire place. “It was the longest time I’d ever spent away from the UK,” says the now-LA-based Cook over Zoom from his new home, “and I felt like a bit of an alien.”

Both the free time that the pandemic offered and his unusual location led Cook to think of home, and especially ideas of Britishness abroad. “I started to think that there could be something really solid to base new music on, and not just do it in terms of Britpop as a Blur vs. Oasis thing,” he muses. “Even though that does interest me too.”

Cook admits that he has enjoyed evoking a “confusing era” of Britain in his music — referencing his own permanent Beatles-esque haircut — and saw Britpop as a way of “thinking about whatever Britain was in this pseudo fictional way as well as a biographical way”.