Latest news with #ThingsCanOnlyGetBetter
The Irish Sun
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
My drug use was so bad I saw Robbie Williams on TV & thought it was me – after that I had to get clean, says Irish star
D:REAM star Peter Cunnah has told how he was forced to clean up his act after watching Robbie Williams perform Let Me Entertain You on TV - and thinking he was watching himself. The Things Can Only Get Better hitmaker was at the height of his 1990s drug use when he confused his old touring pal for someone much closer to home. 6 D:REAM star Peter Cunnah admits his drug use got out of hand at the height of his fame Credit: Alamy 6 Peter's drug use was so bad that he saw Robbie Williams perform on TV and thought he was watching himself Credit: AFP 6 D:REAM shot to fame in the 90s with dance hits like Things Can Only Get Better Credit: Alamy Recalling how he had moved from ecstasy to cocaine, the 'So from the second half of '96, I was a full-blown addict. And I came out of that by just getting clean and going into rehab. 'But I was watching things going on around me. I was turning on the TV and I'm seeing 'And for a moment there, I thought it was me. Read more on Fields of Dreams Listen to Fields Of Dreams on 'So, um, yeah, that's also quite trippy, because you're kind of already out of body, and you're thinking, 'Oh, did I do that? No, that's not me. That's someone else'. So it's very odd.' Episode seven of the Fields of Dreams podcast examines the astonishing rise of dance music in Ireland became a party Mecca for tourists and celebrities. In a scene where ecstasy was a common currency, 100,000 pills were sold here every week by the end of the decade. Most read in The Irish Sun But DJs and other experts insist there was much more to the phenomenon than drugs. Clubland historian Steve Wynne-Jones said: 'Ecstasy's arrival was a social lubricant to a certain degree. The direction of travel was already there. Dance music as a phenomenon was going to happen whether ecstasy arrived in Ireland or not. In the UK, it kind of synchronized with the birth of acid house. Róisín O says Vogue Williams 'fan-girled' over her mam Mary Black 'You know, ecstasy played a role. But it's more the fact that this was new, the fact that this was an experience that people hadn't had before, the fact that people could congregate and immerse themselves in a scene they really believed in. 'That was powerful. It would have happened anyway.' DJ Aoife Nic Canna was an early dance pioneer and promoter who worked in all the major clubs. She said of ecstasy: 'It was a new drug, and it was a social drug, to go out dancing. But it was as much of a hindrance as anything. 'ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING' 'It was absolutely terrifying — even being a DJ — because people might say, 'She's a DJ, she knows where the ecstasy is', you know? 'I would not appreciate being asked that question because it was still very, very strict — and especially as a DJ that was trying to promote dance. 'I didn't want it to be related to drugs, because we were getting so much bad press at the time.' When U2 opened The Kitchen nightclub in 1994, it was part of an enormous shift toward dance music. Dance music began underground, but quickly became mainstream in popular clubs such as The POD, opened by Electric Picnic founder John Reynolds. GO-TO PLACE It became the go-to place for the likes of supermodels Nic Canna was there on the opening night. She said: 'I remember when the doors opened, a lot of tourists came in, and it was like, 'These aren't ravers', and they came straight up to the DJ box, and they were saying, 'Where's Bono?' 'The manager, who was a 'Ecstasy's arrival was a social lubricant to a certain degree. The direction of travel was already there. Dance music as a phenomenon was going to happen whether ecstasy arrived in Ireland or not. In the UK, it kind of synchronized with the birth of acid house." Steve Wynne-Jones 'I was going, 'Yeah, yeah' and then I went, 'Oh, look, there IS Bono'. I could see him walking past.' Wynne Jones said: 'U2, after [their album] Zooropa and into [single] Discotheque, and into [album] Pop, were certainly working with a broader array of producers. 'They were working with Howie B, who was one of the residents in the Kitchen nightclub. So they were broadening. But in Dublin there was an urgency, a vibrancy. There was a mixture of styles. 'For 'It would have to become part of their sound if they were embedded in the city that founded them.' The first seven episodes of Fields Of Dreams are available on 6 When U2 opened The Kitchen nightclub in 1994, it was part of an enormous shift toward dance music 6 Some 100,000 ecstasy pills a week were being sold in Ireland by the end of the 90s Credit: Alamy 6 The Fields of Dreams podcast chronicles the rise of live entertainment in Ireland Credit: The Irish Sun
Belfast Telegraph
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
D:Ream's Peter Cunnah on fame, war and finding his birth parents
He's talking to the Belfast Telegraph via Zoom from London about the group's newest album, Do It Anyway, which he made with long-time bandmate Al Makenzie. It's his biggest regret, he explains, that D:Ream's famous hit — Things Can Only Get Better — an anthem of hope and optimism, was used in New Labour's landmark 1997 election campaign which saw Tony Blair enter Number 10.
Daily Mail
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
KATIE HIND: Tony Blair grasped that working class families like mine want to work hard and get on. After Starmer's attacks on aspiration, I'll NEVER vote Labour again
The day after my 16th birthday in May 1997, I woke up to the news that Tony Blair had won the general election, ousting the who had been in power since before I was born. My head somewhat hazy from the cheeky teenage drinks I'd had with friends the night before, I remember hearing New Labour's anthem, Things Can Only Get Better by band D:Ream, playing on the TV news as footage was broadcast of victory celebrations across the country. (It was a song I was familiar with, having seen the group as a support act to Take That in a concert a few years before.)
New Statesman
04-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
A year of crisis and political fragmentation
Photo byOne year ago today, people across the UK went to the polls and overwhelmingly voted for change. When the exit poll landed at 10pm it showed Keir Starmer's Labour party on track for a three-figure majority – and right on cue the New Labour anthem 'Things Can Only Get Better' began playing at the New Statesman election night party. The following morning, Keir Starmer stood outside the door of No 10 Downing Street (despite the common misconception, there aren't actually any steps), and promised a new type of politics to 'end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives, and unite our country'. Well, here we are. The media is awash today with reflections on how the last year has gone for the Prime Minister. You can read one of them, in which David Edgerton argues that Keir Starmer's government does not represent the true Labour Party, on the New Statesman website today. You can also listen to our special anniversary episode of the New Statesman podcast with Anoosh Chakelian, Tom McTague, Andrew Marr and me, where we try to unpack quite what has happened – and where it could go next. So instead of rehashing all of that, I thought we could zoom out and look at some of the other things the election and subsequent 12 months have taught us. British politics is fracturing in all directions. First-past-the-post and Labour's huge (though not unsurpassable, as we saw with the welfare cuts rebellion) majority masked an electoral landscape that more closely resembles multi-party European politics. The Electoral Reform Society (whose chief executive I interviewed in May) has calculated the parliament we ended up with was the least representative ever in terms of how people actually voted. The 2024 result was the first time four parties had received over 10 per cent of the vote: Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Reform. In the May local elections, that went up to five with the addition of the Greens. The latest YouGov poll, conducted just ahead of the election anniversary, has both Reform and the combination of the Lib Dems and Greens on 26 per cent each. That's a Brexit-referendum majority opting for someone other than the two main parties. Those two parties, meanwhile, are languishing around the 40 per cent combined mark: Labour on 24 per cent and the Conservatives on 17 per cent. It would take too long to list all the things they've both done to deserve that (please see previous Morning Call emails over the past, say, five years) but the point is they're down together – following an election that gave them the lowest joint vote share in history at 57.4 per cent. That's new: for 50 years the combined Tory and Labour vote would be a number in the high 70s. This seems to have caught both parties off-guard. Last week I chaired an event at the Mile End Institute entitled 'Does the Conservative Party have a future?' (a question to which no one felt too confident about). Politics lecturer Dr Nigel Fletcher, an expert in the history of oppositions, borrowed an analogy from Game of Thrones: a wheel that sees the great families cycle up and down, some rising while others fall. Dragon-wielding Daenerys Targaryen is determined not to stop the wheel, but to break it. This is, Fletcher argued, essentially what Nigel Farage and Reform are trying to do, breaking the cycle whereby the fall of Labour automatically leads to the rise of the Tories, and vice versa. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The Conservatives' recovery from what they thought was their electoral nadir last July (until it transpired their poll ratings could actually drop further) has, in a strange way, been hampered by a misconception that Labour's sharp fall in popularity would help them by default. It hasn't. All it has done is fuel the narrative that both establishment parties are falling short and thrown Kemi Badenoch's failure to begin repairing her party's fortunes into starker relief. Similarly, many Labour figures assumed one year ago that however difficult the political and economic situation they were inheriting, they could be reassured by the toxicity of their main opponents. Labour could afford to make some early mistakes, because the Tories would be in no position to take advantage of them. What they didn't count on was fringe parties muscling in to suck up disaffected supporters. In a shock move last night, left-wing MP Zarah Sultana, who has had the Labour whip suspended since last July, announced she was quitting Labour and setting up her own party with Jeremy Corbyn to challenge Starmer from the left. Corbyn himself has been suspiciously quiet about Sultana's announcement so far – although he did spend this week hinting about some kind of new movement to bring together left-wing independents. Even before all of that, though, data suggests nearly three times as many 2024 Labour voters are moving to the Lib Dems or the Greens than are eyeing up Reform. But the geographical distribution of the election win (think of the sandcastle analogy) means both left and right defectors pose a serious challenge. They squeeze Starmer in two directions, leaving him trapped. Rishi Sunak would sympathise. What does this mean going into year two of this parliament? In short, things are going to get bumpy. For the first time ever, Nigel Farage is being seriously talked about as a future prime minister (including, in this week's New Statesman magazine, by Andrew Marr). The Greens are holding a leadership over the summer and could select an eco-populist to galvanise the left, or an insurgent Corbyn-led movement could yet emerge. The Lib Dems have set their sights on eating further into what the Tories used to consider their heartlands – if it doesn't get eaten by Reform first. Elections in Scotland and Wales in 2026 look set to become contests of who the electorate hates and fears the least. Wednesday's bond market wobble and subsequent Rachel Reeves love-in means it looks less likely we'll have a new Chancellor than it did last week, but it's pretty inevitable we'll get a new front bench – and quite possibly a new opposition leader too, if the Tories' 'extinction-level territory' polling situation doesn't improve. Who knows, we may even have a serious debate about electoral reform and whether first-past-the-post still works in a landscape like this. In other words, politics isn't going to get quieter. Sorry to disappoint. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here [See also: The bond market has rescued Rachel Reeves from Keir Starmer] Related
Scotsman
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
14 memorable photos telling story of the 90s, from Britpop to cyber pets craze
4 . New Labour's landslide victory Tony Blair's New Labour stormed to a huge victory in May 1997, to the soundtrack of D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better, ending 18 years of Tory rule. Blair presided over the flag-waving era of Cool Britannia, modelling himself as a man of the people and courting celebrities including Noel Gallagher. He was hugely popular at first and remained in the hot seat for 10 years, but his legacy was tarnished in many people's eyes by the Iraq war. | JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP via Getty Images Photo: JACQUES DEMARTHON/AFP via Getty Images
