Marc Burrows plays guitar mashups, dances wildly as Jarvis Cocker, and creates chart after chart to bring back a slice of the Britpop craze for an audience clearly raised on a diet of Blur or Oasis.

We go down a journey of Britpop history – while Burrows sometimes veers more into fact-telling rather than comedic territory, his quips and well-timed sarcasm moves the show along. Armed with a slideshow, a Union Flag-painted guitar and a dream, his PowerPoint night-style humour takes us through the story of Britpop through chart, graph and timeline.

For Burrows, Britpop falls somewhere on a timeline marked by the two most influential events of all time (the birth of Christ and the Eras Tour). We go through lists of things Pulp is older than (including McDonalds Chicken Nuggets), and an interactive game session of ‘Is It Britpop?’ The question of the Stone Roses is met with a resounding no from the audience, instead hailed by Burrows as the John the Baptist of Britpop.

The guitar section is by far the standout element; Burrows brandishes a Union Flag-painted guitar (admittedly expressing his mixed fear and bravery in bringing this item to Scotland). He flies through a segment, comparing Britpop gospel to predecessors with conveniently the exact same chord progressions, whether it be Oasis’ ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ and T Rex’s ‘Get It On’, or Whatever and Neil Innes’ How Sweet To Be An Idiot. If we are sceptical about Burrows spending an hour blindly worshipping at the altar of Damon Albarn and Liam Gallagher, we are instead met with gleeful mockery.

A handful of jokes miss the mark, being of poor taste or just being slightly too rehearsed – Burrows spends five minutes relying on Liam Gallagher’s tweet catalogue to move the hour along. The most effortlessly amusing elements come from when he isn’t afraid to embarrass himself, channelling all his energy into a frenzied Jarvis Cocker impression during the finale of a mass karaoke session to ‘Common People’. The singalong is an endearing touch to a nostalgia trip, with a warm celebration of the songs that defined a generation.

‘The Britpop Hour‘ is at Underbelly, Bristo Sqaure – Dairy Room until Mon 25 Aug 2025 at 18:10