The term Britpop can trigger very different responses among UK music fans. For some, it conjures up a golden period in the mid-1990s when the Conservative government finally appeared to be on their way out after nearly two decades in power, England had a half-decent football team, and the radio and pop charts were filled with bands from normal backgrounds singing songs about going out, having fun and falling in love. For others, it’s synonymous with all that was regressive about ’90s culture in Britain, forever lumped in with lads’ mags, lager-swilling footie louts, jingoism, and a populist dumbing down of alternative culture.
In some respects, both are true.
The term itself was introduced to the record-buying public by music journalist Stuart Maconie, writing in the April 1993 edition of Select Magazine. The cover of which depicted Suede frontman Brett Anderson baring his midriff in front of the Union Jack under the coverline Yanks Go Home! (in a reference to wartime-set sitcom Dad’s Army, the piece itself was even headlined ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Cobain?’).
“We don’t want plaid,” read the piece’s opening mission statement, in reference to the uniform of checked shirts and tatty jeans favoured by American grunge acts. “We want crimplene, glamour, wit, and irony.” Maconie, and much of the music press, felt the UK music scene had for far too long been dominated by earnest US guitar bands (and plenty of UK bands aping earnest US guitar bands), and instead presented a selection of groups who represented a certain type of Britishness in defiance of grunge’s scruffy navel-gazing: Suede, Pulp, The Auteurs, Saint Etienne, and Denim. Glamorous outsiders and oddball aesthetes who owed more to the likes of Alan Bennett and Philip Larkin than they did Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder.
Reading the piece today, the two notable absences in Britpop’s foundational text are Oasis and Blur. To be fair, the former hadn’t released a note of music at that stage, while the latter were considered something of a busted flush who, after a couple of baggy-ish hit singles, had delivered a fairly lukewarm debut album, Leisure, in 1991.
It was touring Leisure in America in 1992, however, that Blur frontman Damon Albarn began formulating ideas that would define the Britpop surge about to both wash away the dominance of US groups and crash into the mainstream on a scale that hadn’t been seen since the 1960s.
Frustrated by the band’s lack of success stateside, missing home, and tired of what he perceived as America’s hold over UK culture, Albarn revived a vision of Albion that had been lost in recent years. Heavily influenced by the observational writing of The Kinks’ Ray Davies, he began penning songs about suburban commuter-belt despair, Bank Holiday weekends, and 18–30 package holidays. Blur ditched their baggy grooves and bowl cuts for Dr. Martens boots, three-button suit jackets and Fila tracksuit tops, and by 1994’s Parklife, they’d become the biggest band in the country.
It was a celebration of Britishness that chimed with a renewed sense of national identity emerging across fashion, film and television, but Albarn also unwittingly opened the door for the group who would become his bitterest rivals.
Noel Gallagher, his younger brother Liam, and Liam’s schoolmates from Burnage, Manchester, didn’t embrace terrace culture and fashions, or profess a love of British bands like The Jam and The Stone Roses, as part of a cleverly thought-out riposte to the US alt-rock scene — it was who they were. And it was partly that authenticity that helped them connect to a wider audience on a level that even Blur couldn’t dream of.
Whatever their impetuses, the groups’ two leaders were pushing against similar forces. Noel Gallagher had written “Live Forever” in direct response to the nihilism of grunge (specifically Nirvana’s “I Hate Myself And Want To Die”), and the former Inspiral Carpets roadie’s masterstroke was injecting songs indebted to the classic bands he loved — The Beatles, Sex Pistols, The Smiths — with the communal euphoria he’d experienced on the floor of the Hacienda listening to acid house in the late ’80s.
At odds with the perennial underachievement that characterised the indie music scene in the previous decade, he also had serious ambition and a competitive streak to match Albarn’s.
“My ambitions were way bigger than just selling out [medium-sized London venue] Brixton Academy,” Noel told this writer in 2023. “Every band I met that was always their ambition, maybe even do two nights. I’m not arsed about Brixton Academy or [revered alternative DJ] John Peel. We’re going to take U2 on. That’s where my band are heading. I don’t give a fuck about Felt or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.”
Such was the countrywide-mania surrounding Britpop and its two figureheads that the singles chart battle between Blur’s “Country House” and Oasis’ “Roll With It” in 1995 was a headline item on the 6 o’clock news. However, Britpop’s defining moment also marked the beginning of the end. Both the independents and major labels were now awash with cash like never before, and in the rush to capitalise on the new cultural phenomenon of ‘Cool Britannia,’ quality control inevitably plummeted. Camden scenesters Menswe@r are often pilloried as the movement’s nadir, but there were plenty of worse culprits who came barrelling through the door in the wake of Blur and Oasis’ success.
By 1997, last orders had been called. Oasis imploded under the weight of their own hubris, releasing overblown and undercooked third album Be Here Now, while Albarn was telling the press that Blur’s self-titled fifth album had been influenced by — oh, the ignominy! — US alt-rock.
Whatever you might think of its artistic merits, Britpop was a unique moment in British culture when the alternative music scene genuinely took over the mainstream. When guitar bands with working-class and regional accents (or at least affecting working-class and regional accents) were on primetime TV. When artists who would have otherwise been found on the inside pages of the NME and Melody Maker were on the cover of teen pop magazines, and in the case of the Gallaghers, on the front page of the tabloid newspapers.
For a more in-depth insider’s perspective, read The Last Party: Britpop, Blair And The Demise Of English Rock by NME writer turned The Guardian’s political commentator John Harris. Otherwise, here are ten albums that define what Britpop was all about and, three decades on from its heady peak, have stood the test of time.
