The year is 2026, and we are stuck inside a Rubik’s cube. Its colours and shapes are redolent of a mid-2000s Big Brother house, which is all the better because Davina McCall is actually there, and in gigantic form. This is not a strange experiment from the final days of television; it is a music video for “Girl Like Me”, the final single from PinkPantheress’ Britain-themed mixtape, Fancy That. The song features two samples from turn-of-the-millennium electronic outfit Basement Jaxx, as well as sound effects from a Yamaha keyboard that went on the market in 1998. One of the video’s CGI-generated sets comes from a 2009 music video by cult J-pop group Perfume. Everything else is from Britain. But it is a very specific Britain – one that announced itself in the mid-60s, shuddered to life during the Blair premiership and died, painfully, with the austerity of the coalition government. The actors are dressed like walk-ons from an early series of E4’s Skins. The bouncy animations look like something from an early E4 ident. The sets are littered with twee, optimistic signifiers of Englishness, like Mini Coopers, Buckingham Palace footsoldiers and lawn tennis.
For PinkPantheress – real name Victoria Beverley Walker – almost none of this is an expression of real-life nostalgia. The singer-producer is 25, which places her soundly out of reach of the Skins era but means she came of age within a major revival for 2000s fashion and music. The rest of the mixtape is a similar exercise in almost-historical pastiche. It features a USB stick’s worth of barrel-aged samples, a Sugababes cameo, an entire Vivienne Westwood wardrobe, and several nods to Lily Allen’s 2008 video for “The Fear”. The first of two music videos for hit song “Stateside” was seemingly shot, compressed and upscaled again, as if to approximate the look of a real turn-of-the-century artefact uploaded to the depths of YouTube.
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