Miranda Sawyer: contextualising the music scene of an entire decade (Uncommon People / Talk 90's To Me) #640
Distraction Pieces Podcast with Scroobius Pip
Scroobius Pip
4.7 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Distraction Pieces Podcast with Scroobius Pip!
This week Pip is joined by legendary writer, journalist, critic and cultural treasure MIRANDA SAWYER!
A natural fit in the Distraction Pieces jigsaw, Miranda is someone who was pretty much destined to eventually join Pip for an episode. As a necessary firm fixture in much of the music media of the 90's (and well beyond, of course), Miranda's got decades in the game and is awesomely well versed in basically all of it. The book is 'Uncommon People' which is out now and essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in 90's Britpop, but on top of that you'll hear a good ton of bits and pieces including the recording of podcasts and the importance of them in Miranda's career, an early dabbling in a career in law, working with such publications as Smash Hits / Select / The Face (and more), the broadness of 90's Britpop and how it wasn't sipmply Oasis vs Blur, 'Smashing' club, Tricky being tricky, being a woman into music and the unchecked sexism back then (not that it's gone anywhere), what constitutes a scene, and making a living being a musician or journalist. Super fun but also incredibly relevant, and anything about the past will reveal so much about our present, especially with the hindsight of 25-30 years. Enjoy!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Grand Sumo Tournament comes to the Royal Albert Hall. |
| 0:05.0 | Over 40 elite sumo wrestlers from Japan will battle for the coveted title of Grand Champion over five days. |
| 0:14.0 | Witness the battle of power and endurance between these great athletes. |
| 0:19.0 | From the 15th to the 19th of October. |
| 0:22.7 | For tickets and more information, head to royal alberthall.com. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is the Distraction Pieces podcast, episode 640. And I'm joined today by a living legend, an icon. In my opinion, one of the great music journalists of our times. It's Miranda Sawyer. Me and Miranda have never sat down and had a chat properly, but I've been a fan of Miranda since I was a young man. I think she's great. She's got a fantastic book called Uncommon People, Brit Pop and Beyond in 20 songs, which is really good and the audio book's great. And she's got a podcast called Talk 90s to Me, which I'm frankly addicted |
| 1:13.3 | to. It's an absolute favourite of mine. Each week, she has a different guest on to talk |
| 1:18.4 | something 90s related. And it's an absolute joy. So I hit Amanda up. Amanda? Who's Amanda? |
| 1:26.0 | I hit Miranda up. I don't know anyone called Amanda, really. |
| 1:29.6 | I would know. |
| 1:30.1 | We talk about an Amanda. |
| 1:31.3 | That's why that's in my head. |
| 1:32.3 | We talk about an Amanda in this episode. |
| 1:34.5 | A mutual Amanda of ours. |
| 1:36.6 | We talk about a mutual Amanda of ours, |
| 1:39.2 | which is a weird flow of words and syllables. |
| 1:44.0 | But, yeah, we're brought to as ever by speech of element of records.com. |
| 1:48.6 | We talk a little bit about how hard it is to make it as an artist or a musician in the modern world |
| 1:54.4 | versus in the 90s where a lot of our conversation is rooted. |
| 1:58.0 | So head over to speech development of records.com if you want to fight back against |
| 2:02.0 | that. Patreon.com forward slash scrupious pip is also another place where you can do that kind of |
| 2:07.1 | business and twitch.tv.tv.4. slash scrupious pipyo. You see the amount of different platforms I have to |
... |
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