It was the NME's alternate term of shoegazing that eventually caught on, but when My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive and so on formed an advancing army of dreamscape guitar pedal pushers the Melody Maker grouped them under the term The Scene That Celebrates Itself, noting that the bands involved refused to take part in traditional rock and roll rivalry and were instead, gasp, helping each other on and being friendly in public to one another, interpreted by the class-conscious Maker as a sign of self-indulgent over-privilege. Good thinking, but a couple of years too early. No scene has celebrated itself more readily than Britpop, not in the sense of camerarderie - ask Noel - but the way that pretty much ever since it was killed off at the end of the 1990s people have been all too willing to exhume and reanimate the corpse through documentaries, comparisons, retrospectives and compilations. Whether Britpop was necessarily a sociological boon is something to debate at another time; for now we have Common People, a very loosely chronological three disc set picking out 54 notable tracks from British guitar bands spanning 1994 to 1999. The glaring omission of anything by Blur or Oasis - not, as far as can be told, for licensing reasons either as both bands have labelmates represented (no Manics or Ash either) - might suggest a Nuggets-style exercise in digging deeper and resuscitating the lost classics; the fact it's called Common People and CD2 opens with that track followed by Supergrass' 'Alright' dictates otherwise. At least it's well presented, coming with comprehensive Bob Stanley sleevenotes and a booklet designed in the style of the infamous "Yanks Go Home" issue of Select magazine often pinpointed as an important step in defining what the movement became. Still, where's Luke Haines when you really need him?Ah, here he is, CD1 track one, the Auteurs' swaggering, pinpoint ire of 'Lenny Valentino'. That and Elastica's buzzsaw agenda settter 'Stutter' make for a fine opening, and from then we get to find out that fifteen years is a long time in maturing for certain records. It's tricky to imagine that Gene and The Bluetones were once regarded as natural successors to The Smiths and The Stone Roses (whose 'Love Spreads' is also here), Shaun Ryder and Black Grape scrape around at a futile attempt at recreating The Happy Mondays' urchin funk, and 'Wake Up Boo!' has been robbed of whatever charm it had by endless TV use. And who thought the shortlived immediately pre-Britpop scene The The New Wave of New Wave, represented by skinny boys with nasal voices S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men, would provide any kind of quality control context? On the positive Saint Etienne's 'You're In A Bad Way' remains retro-futuristically wondrous and actually in its self-help baiting quite parodic for what was ahead: "Jeans are old and your hair's all wrong/Don't you know that crew-cuts and trainers are out again?" Leicester also-rans Perfume's 'Lover' is an understated swooning lament with a hint of Byrds guitar, and even Menswear don't do too badly, 'Daydreamer' recalled as a lascivious Wire rip. Cast's 'Alright'.... well, you have skip buttons.CD2, as previously stated, begins with 'Common People', which overplaying will never dull, and 'Alright', which it does. This disc is home for a lot of mid-period chaff, chiefly bands that aren't as good as you recall (Echobelly, Babybird), those that never were (Northern Uproar, Powder) and Kula Shaker. Mansun seem to have been left behind in the nostalgia rush but 'Wide Open Space' holds up, and the compilers pull out two plums in perennial underdog Lawrence Hayward's postmodern glam project Denim, albeit represented by the wrong track, and the underrated Salad's storming 'Drink The Elixir'. What the disc proves more than anything else, though, is that while there is no other time that My Life Story could have received so much attention, there's also no other time that someone with the voice of Rick Witter would have been given the go-ahead to record a string-driven rock power ballad like 'Chasing Rainbows'. Heady days.The third disc also opens with a timeless barnstormer, the Super Furry Animals' maniacal 'God! Show Me Magic', following with Suede, whose story is surely better played out in the very early stages, finally turn up with the undistinguished 'Trash'. From then on, as you'd imagine with the dregs of such a scene on an album designed to encapsulate the lot, the hit and miss ratio goes haywire. Catatonia's 'Mulder And Scully' owes more to Cerys Matthews' force of personality than any great melodicism, Geneva remain better in memory than actuality and second chance bands The Seahorses, Monaco and Hurricane #1 (John Squire, Peter Hook and Ride's Andy Bell respectively) were doomed to be bad ideas. On the other hand Kenickie remain the best advert for giving a group of excitable chippy teenage girls instruments, 'A Pessimist Is Never Disapponted' by Theaudience's sophistication seems to play better now than it did then (and Sophie Ellis-Bextor stakes her claim as the country's best offhand swearer) and Gomez's electro-blues road trip 'Whippin' Piccadilly' and Spearmint's Dobie Gray sampling paen to lost chances and coming to terms with it all, 'Sweeping The Nation' owe little to those around it. Earl Brutus' 'The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It'? Never mind another time or location, it seems to have been beamed in from a completely different dimension, especially when followed by the Stereophonics and Gay Dad.Obviously, any widespread scene will have its fair amount of chaff, but remembering that this was really the first 'alternative' scene to aim squarely for the charts you wonder what kind of legacy it's actually left. (Sidenote: the aforementioned Perfume's singer now manages the Pigeon Detectives) This compilation won't help clear matters up much. There's some songs that have held up well, true, but a worryingly large amount that hasn't survived fifteen years of musical turnover unscathed. As a broad cherrypicking it works, but tread very carefully. 66%