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Underground > Radio & Music >

Britpop, ten years on

  
  

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Janean Patience
10:57 / 23.04.07
There has been a previous Britpop thread here on Barbelith but it's broken. It accepts new posts but it doesn't appear on the front page. So I'm starting this as a replacement.

I've been thinking about Britpop for a number of reasons. Firstly, I tend to think of what I was doing ten years back every now and again, and it's coming up to Blair's anniversary, and it suddenly seems a long time ago. Secondly, I got a lift down to London at the weekend and the car only had a tape player, which means that you're cast back to the years when the driver still bought/made tapes. That made this particular car Britpop on wheels. We settled on a lovingly pause-buttoned compilation of tracks from about ten years ago.

I thought little of it at the time. I was more concerned about the wedding we were going to be seven hours late for. But today, somehow, the chorus of Sleeper's Sale of the Century has affixed itself to my head and is making me want to cry. I'm shot through with nostalgia that isn't even real; I wasn't into Britpop, though I liked a few of the bands. Something about the indie innocence of the song, its intention to capture nothing more than student yearning for student, has me hooked.

My household only recently got a car and we've found that compilations provide a better soundtrack for driving than albums. One of our favourites, The Sound of the Suburbs, has been resurrected. And the music of that particular period, post-punk pop, the juxtaposition of one-hit wonders and bands which are now described as seminal, seems to have much in common with the Britpop era.

So. To get finally to the point. I'm going to have to assemble a Britpop compilation for the car. What should be on it? What are the classics, major and minor, of the period and which bands were merely concurrent? Suggestions please, and further discussion of a popular movement in music that seemed like a high-water mark but wasn't much mourned.
 
 
Mike Modular
11:20 / 23.04.07
Do you know about Phonogram...?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
11:42 / 23.04.07
This seems like almost too large a subject for a thread on Barbelith, or anywhere else; really, you'd have to write a book about it, or failing that, a graphic novel.

In a way though, Britpop does seem more interesting as something to talk about than, say, punk, or acid house, or Sixties psychedlia, because Britpop was basically a cynical exercise from the get-go. Like New Labour, or Nineties Lad-Lit, it was about people who'd felt marginalised throughout the Eighties finally having their day in the sun, and then slowly coming to the realisation, or not, that after a couple of visits you can't be in Stringfellows ironically, that when you look into the abyss, etc, and that if you dance with the devil ... and so on.

I find myself briefly wondering what Rick Witter from Shed Seven is up to these days, though. I sort of hope he's all right, but then again, do I? Do I really?

Nine songs anyway, for the mooted Britpop comp;

So Young - Suede
For Tomorrow - Blur
Connection - Elastica
Supersonic - Oasis
Chinese Rocks - Menswear*
Paranoid Android - Radiohead
Common People (Live at Glastonbury) - Pulp
The Ballad Of Tom Jones (or whatever it was called) - Catatonia.
The Intense Humming Of Evil - The Manic Street Preachers



* This was a somewhat listless, very slowed-down cover of the Johnny Thunders/Ramones classic, tucked away on a b-side somewhere - their finest moment, I think.)
 
 
Feverfew
11:55 / 23.04.07
A good list - I feel duty-bound to add, however, that The Ballad of Tom Jones was by Space ft. Cerys from Catatonia - two groups that had some interesting work of their own, but never really lit up.
 
 
doctorbeck
14:51 / 23.04.07
i must admit to having a very negative view of britpop, it swept away an indie aesthetic that i think was much more interesting (the DIY / fanzine led glory of C86 bands and the slightly later noisey shoegaze scene) and replaced it with a dumber, radio freindly corporate indie beast that has gone on to global domination and compilations in tesco.

i like the above link with the whole ladmag phenonenum and the two certainly shared some common ground, (including a stullifying obsession with a mythological british past)

saying that there were a couple of really great tracks to come out of britpop, that elastic one whose title i can never rememember and a couple of pulp singles, but the dross was so much greater than the good:

truly lumpen pub rock crap from oasis, the politically and musically risible madness rip off that was blur at the time and the weedy bowie karaoke that was suede.

it stood very much at odds with the polysexual multiculturalism of house music at the time or the wild white / black british working class of hardcore and jungle. even the poor attempt at polysexualism that suede presented was, well bogus i suppose. anyone remember brett the 'bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience'?

and don't get me started on kula shaker. possibly the worse band to come out of the UK ever (though this is covered in detail on other threads and in the excellent phonogram comic)

sorry if that sounds unduly negative, but it was really crap from where i was standing.
 
 
Spaniel
15:05 / 23.04.07
I'm not sure I ever had much time for that criticism of Brett Anderson. Lots of people quite justifiably id as bisexual who haven't had a homosexual experience.

Fucking tabloid nonsense.

I do think what was going on in the world of dance music was considerably more interesting however. At the time I remember feeing that, although I liked some of the tunes, Britpop was a pretty horrid attempt by the middle class white boys to reclaim the musical centre.

I'm not sure if I'd go quite that far today, but I think it is an avenue worth having a look down.
 
 
Janean Patience
19:18 / 23.04.07
doctorbeck: i must admit to having a very negative view of britpop, it swept away an indie aesthetic that i think was much more interesting (the DIY / fanzine led glory of C86 bands and the slightly later noisey shoegaze scene) and replaced it with a dumber, radio freindly corporate indie beast that has gone on to global domination and compilations in tesco.

I'm not sure it swept away much, from memory. The indie scene previous to that was fragmented and a little random, as it tends to be before a movement comes along that gets into the charts. Everyone loved Nirvana but other than that there was very little unity. A few hangovers from Madchester, the grunge scene, the shoegazers, Carter USM and the crusty rockers. It might be argued that an indie landscape with nothing dominating it is more interesting than one with a hard-rolling bandwagon steaming the weirder shit out of the way. But there was something to cheer, being that age, seeing your bands in the news and dominating the musical discourse of the nation. However crap most of them turned out to be.

it stood very much at odds with the polysexual multiculturalism of house music at the time or the wild white / black british working class of hardcore and jungle.

It wasn't an either/or proposition. Dance music did just fine during the same period, even though all the Brits went to Oasis. Living Joy's Dreamer, from memory, kept The Stone Roses' Love Spreads off number one. It's not like the rise of Britpop stopped people getting into house music. From personal experience, I was buying Renaissance and Cream albums while Oasis ruled every pub in the land. But they did rule every pub.

Alex's Grandma: In a way though, Britpop does seem more interesting as something to talk about than, say, punk, or acid house, or Sixties psychedlia, because Britpop was basically a cynical exercise from the get-go. Like New Labour, or Nineties Lad-Lit, it was about people who'd felt marginalised throughout the Eighties finally having their day in the sun.

There was an element of that, I think. The Smiths couldn't have been lionised any more than they were in the 1980s but they never did well in the charts. For whatever reason, the Britpop bands scored genuine big hits and it felt like a victory of sorts.

I wasn't a massive Britpop fan. Pulp I liked consistently, but the rest were singles bands. Nonetheless after a trawl of mine and others' memories (thanks for the suggestions, btw) I've sat listening to the tracks of the time and there's something exquisitely sad about them. Silly little pop songs by people who've grown up now and gone on to other, probably better, things. This was their youth, their single shining moment when they were unique and where they should be and it didn't last long and it wasn't much regretted when that moment passed. It's only now, given the space of a decade, that it glows with the golden nostalgia of the recent past.
 
 
sorenson
00:48 / 24.04.07
I don't think you could have a britpop compilation without at least one track from the primal scream album screamadelica.

But that's totally coloured by my memories of the era.
 
 
Spaniel
08:48 / 24.04.07
I'm interested to hear if people felt that Britpop was an inclusive force, because, looking back, I have impressions of something very white and predominantly middle class.

I suppose a bit of dilettantish gender bending was allowed.
 
 
Janean Patience
09:10 / 24.04.07
I don't think you could call Oasis, as they were then, middle class. That was the reason for the famous battle for the charts: on one side working-class Northerners with an honest rock song, on the other poncey Southerners with art-school backgrounds who had a regrettable penchant for posing with bulldogs.

I don't know how far you'd get classing Pulp as middle-class, either. Remember I-Spy off the Different Class album? Class war in a short, vicious, self-lacerating epic. "My favorite parks are car parks. Grass is something you smoke. Birds are something you shag. Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your arse."

Apart from Sonya Aurora-Madan of Echobelly (it all comes back to you, I discovered in last night's research) it wasn't a movement particularly inclusive of ethnicity. That's possibly to be expected in something so focused on abstracts of Britishness and the 1960s, before the immigrant experience began to be included in our view of ourselves. A putative UKpop movement, dominating the charts in 2017, would have a different view.

Lots of female-fronted bands, though, which was something you saw in the Sound of the Suburbs scene but not much subsequently in 80s indie. Lush, Catatonia, Sleeper, Elastica were all sold by their frontwomen and they weren't sold in the traditional "These ladies are sexy!" way. It was the boys who tarted around getting their sculpted hips out.
 
 
Feverfew
10:01 / 24.04.07
I agree with your points - except for the last paragraph, and it's a minor niggle, but I'm of the opinion that Sleeper were definitely sold on their frontwoman's sexy image from The It Girl onwards, but only theoretically because of 'Nice Guy Eddie'.

There was also a hint of exoticism in Catatonia, with the Welsh connection and the targeted usage of the Accent for some of their records (or the singles, at least), but that's more clever marketing than exploitation.

I'm interested that Britpop is being intricately tied into the Lads' Mag phenomenom as well, because I can see it, but I can't explain it...
 
 
Janean Patience
10:23 / 24.04.07
I'm of the opinion that Sleeper were definitely sold on their frontwoman's sexy image from The It Girl onwards.

I honestly can't remember. There was something attractively self-possessed about Louise Wener but I remember it as quite a subtle appeal. Happy to bow to your opinion on this one.

There was also a hint of exoticism in Catatonia, with the Welsh connection and the targeted usage of the Accent for some of their records (or the singles, at least), but that's more clever marketing than exploitation.

I remember it being the opposite way around with Cerys; she was an indie frontwoman who, suddenly and unexpectedly, began to be much fancied around the country. By both sexes, which was IIRC remarked upon when she appeared in FHM; men being surprised when their girlfriends remarked how sexy she was. But it was more of a grassroots movement than a marketing campaign.

(Incidentally, that Catatonia song on an advert where she sings "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt..." drifted through my head all week after Vonnegut died. They did do some lovely tunes.)
 
 
Spaniel
10:39 / 24.04.07
JP, That's true about the frontwomen.

I'm not saying that the band members themselves were all middle class*, I'm saying that the majority of the scene's followers in the South East were, at least in my experience, of the white middle class persuasion, and that the people who were championing the music, in the music press, tended also to come from that demographic.

There's a lot of half thought out nebulous stuff here. I don't want to create the impression that I didn't like Britpop (although by the time the term was being used it had lost a lot of its appeal), 'cause I did. I wore the clothes and listened to a lot of Oasis and Blur, but it's just... I dunno... my experience of indie clubs and venues where dance music was getting played were so different. The former were white, middle class, safe and knowable, like the village I was brought up in, the latter were edgey and inclusive and exciting.

I can't shake the feeling that nice, knowable guitar music with all of its white, safe connotations isn't the music that I would want prefixed by the word "Brit"
 
 
Spaniel
10:50 / 24.04.07
There's a lot of half thought out nebulous stuff here.

In my head, I mean!
 
 
haus of fraser
10:54 / 24.04.07
What was interesting about "Britpop" was its evolution from the blur n oasis battles of white boys playing rock n roll- to a broader definition which seemed to be used to refer to the upsurge in British music at the time- the whole Bristol sound of Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky, dance music like Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Underworld even the Spicegirls seemed vaguely aligned to the movement.

I don't remember Britpop being conciously non inclusive Boboss- i certainly remember running between the dance tent and the NME stage for various acts at glastonbury.

There was certainly a buzz about nationalistic pride which for the first time i can remember didn't feel jingoistic - more a culteral identity of inclusion and celebration of ecentricity (Jarvis, John Peel etc. you weren't gonna get your head kicked in at a Pulp gig). It felt good to point out the pomposity of the whiney american grunge stars and have pop stars that liked to dress up again, it felt good to have the news talk about the bands that i liked.

IMHO The ten years since britpop thing seems a little late (more like 12/ 13 years) my memories of the height of britpop were 1994-95 with Oasis and pulp headlining glastonbury in 1995 - by the time Tony was elected Blur were playing Song 2 and the oasis bubble had burst.

My suggestions for the compilation would have to include Blur "Girls n Boys" which was the first reel Britpop anthem- i can also remember the day it came out and a friend rushed into my 6th form common room to proudly show off the cassette single- designed to look like a condom packet - very cool and very post modern- it was the first real Britpop anthem and still sounds fucking great - rather than the b list beatle busking of oasis.
 
 
Spaniel
11:11 / 24.04.07
I don't think it was consciously non-inclusive either.

As for the comp, Common People, surely? Yeah, yeah an obvious choice, blah, blah and a cake-of-fish.
 
 
Janean Patience
11:21 / 24.04.07
For the compilation I'm trying to make the most obvious choices. Each band's most memorable single. Common People has the unfortunate effect of making everything next to it look like insignificant rubbish, however. And I also, because I love the song so much, am resisting the urge to replace it with Babies.
 
 
johnny enigma
12:05 / 24.04.07
I kind of came of age during the Britpop era - I brought Definitely Maybe the day it came out, saw Blur on the "Song 2" tour, I had all of Suede's albums etc.
However, most of those bands listed in the thread summary were pretty cack, weren't they? Pulp deserve a special mention due to the undisputable genius of Jarvis Cocker, and the Elastica debut still sounds fab. The only band I still listen to that I discovered during that era is the Super Furry Animals.
 
 
Spaniel
12:52 / 24.04.07
Common People has the unfortunate effect of making everything next to it look like insignificant rubbish

This is very extremely true.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
13:02 / 24.04.07
Oh. I wrote all of the following before refreshing to find the entire exchange between Boboss and Janean, and now don't know what to do with it, so, erm, here it is anyway and I hope it adds something:

In my head, it was a lot more dominated by the more gender-fluid side of things than was actually the case, but I think that's because my brane instinctively excludes Oasis, Kula Shaker, Shed Seven and other more reactionary elements.

Gender: I think it was, while not exactly perfect, a lot better than many other comparable movements. Elastica was possibly the biggest player at one point in their existence, and Sleeper, Echobelly, Kenickie etc. held pretty strong positions.

Class: Well, if you don't exclude them as my brane does, Oasis were fairly undeniably the biggest Britpop band overall, and they've got the whole working-class-boys-done-good thing down pat. Of those most prominent in my brane, Suede and Pulp both touted working-class credentials, but were actually if not comfortable-middle-class, certainly not quite as hard up as they'd have you believe. In Elastica, Justine was very middle class, but the rest much less so, with Donna always referred to as a street kid type. So, like gender, I think middling marks as far as class diversity is concerned.

Race: Erm, there was Echobelly? (Incidentally, is Sonja-from-Echobelly's name taboo round here for some reason? I think I caught snarky somments referencing her, but never found out whence they came.) Yeah, Britpop was definitely basically rubbish for racial diversity, although I'd suggest no more so than other genres consumed by similar demographics before and since - grunge, shoegaze, C86, Madchester, current popular indie (e.g. Franz Ferdinand, f***ingKaiserChiefs etc.) and so forth.

... Leading on from which, I think the main source of your impression is, probably, the fans. Perhaps the reason Britpop dominated the radios even though there weren't that many weeks it was at number one is that those who liked it were predominantly white and middle-class, and the radios are run by people who are... well, predominantly white and middle class. Pretty much the same as ever, really.
 
 
ZF!
13:03 / 24.04.07
Well I kinda know "Britpop", even though I was in another country and never fully into the "scene", but the songs that highlight the time for me would be:

Lush - Ladykillers
Supergrass - Caught by the Fuzz
Inspiral Carpets - Saturn 5
Elastica - Connection (actually the whole first album did it for me)
Boo Radleys - It's Lulu/C'mon Kids/Wake Up Boo
Ash - Girl from Mars/Jack Names the Planets/Oh Yeah
Cast - Finetime/Sandstorm
Ocean Colour Scene - Day We Caught the Train
Menswear - Daydreamer
Blur - Girl's & Boys/Charmless Man
Pulp - Do You Remember the First Time/Mis-shapes
Bluetones - Slight Return

Also see: Gene, Shed Seven, Sleeper...

Less pure "Britpop" but still part of the scene: Primal Scream, Placebo (1st album only), Sneaker Pimps, Black Grape, Space...

Also greatly influenced/played in the clubs: Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Smiths, Slowdive, Wedding Present, The La's...

(I know I'm missing Oasis, Suede, Charlatans, the Manic's and Radiohead, but that's because I hated them)
 
 
haus of fraser
13:04 / 24.04.07
common people followed by Girls and Boys works like a treat surely- epic ending to CP followed by the thin familiar weedy keyboard of G&B.
 
 
Saveloy
13:05 / 24.04.07
Janean Pictures:

"For the compilation I'm trying to make the most obvious choices"

In that case you must include:

Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo
Menswear - Daydreamer
Sleeper - Inbetweener
Supergrass - Alright
Oasis - Wonderwall
Catatonia - Road Rage

as well as the previously mentioned:

Blur - Girls & Boys (I'd kick off with that one)
Elastica - Connection
Pulp - Common People

Copey's Brick:

"My suggestions for the compilation would have to include Blur "Girls n Boys" which was the first reel Britpop anthem"

I was idealogically opposed to Britpop at the time, or at least felt like I ought to be for some stupid bloody reason - possibly because all the critics who had championed 'my' bands up till then were fiercely opposed to it, or dismissive of it - but I can remember the exact moment I first heard Boys & Girls on the radio, and how GUTTED I was to discover that it was by Blur. I really hated them (for the perfectly reasonable fact that Albarn was the smuggest, most punchable man in pop after Jay Kay) but it was the most fantastic bit of mainstream pop I'd heard in years.

Just glanced at the Wikipedia entry on Britpop and it reminded me of the big objection to Britpop at the time - and the thing that was supposed to link the various groups together, the thing that gave it its name - and that was the use of classic British guitar pop from the 60s and 70s as a source of inspiration.
 
 
Saveloy
13:08 / 24.04.07
Uh, double cross-posts!
 
 
Spaniel
13:19 / 24.04.07
Saveloy, you are normally a chappie that I have quite a lot of time for. A lot of time.

And then I saw this

Boo Radleys - Wake Up Boo

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

You're making me feel physically sick. Saccharine, nasty foulness of the most nastiest variety. I hated it even before I was risen from the desperate half-sleep of the speed casualty by a phone call from the most annoying bloke I've ever met, in which he proceed to treat me to two fucking verses before I got it together to hang up (in tears, trying not to vomit).

That shit will not go on any compilation I put my name to. No truck!
 
 
Spaniel
13:21 / 24.04.07
But yes, kick off with Girl and Boys and end with Common People.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
13:30 / 24.04.07
Oh, and on the compilation, personal favourites from bands not yet mentioned would be The Auteurs and Marion. For the latter, Sleep would definitely be the "obvious choice" if that's what you're looking for, but with the former I'm less sure. Probably something off Now I'm A Cowboy... Lenny Valentino or Chinese Bakery?
 
 
Pingle!Pop
13:35 / 24.04.07
Oh, and Gene! Aww, Gene. Erm, "obvious"... We Could Be Kings? For The Dead?
 
 
rizla mission
13:42 / 24.04.07
I kind of came of age during the Britpop era - I brought Definitely Maybe the day it came out, saw Blur on the "Song 2" tour, I had all of Suede's albums etc.
However, most of those bands listed in the thread summary were pretty cack, weren't they?

Well yes, that's the thing really...

I too kinda grew up in the "brit-pop era" I suppose, and after a few formative years of trading 2nd hand Nirvana and heavy metal tapes, 'Parklife' and 'Definitely Maybe' were amongst my first purchases after getting a CD player for Xmas.

Maybe people who were a little older at the time might want to shout me down, but I'm a bit suspicious of the current definition of brit-pop as some defining cultural moment... beyond a few indie bands having big hits (this being an event of note in the early/mid 90s), any wider significance didn't really register with me AT ALL at the time.

Musically speaking, I think it was simply a matter of the cycle of interest turning back toward British rock music for no particular reason other than, well, whatever, it was there... and the disparate bunch of bands who were around at the time happened to be smart or lucky enough to produce some big, memorable, commercially viable tunes and make a meal out of the ensuing attention.

This being about '94-'95 I guess, and from what I recall it wasn't until a few years later, when the indie/mainstream crossover rock that 'brit-pop' had encouraged was reaching the absolute arse-end of horribleness, that people started to neatly tie things in with Blair's victory, late '90s football/festival culture, economic optimism etc. and ka-pow! Brit-pop (probably birthed as a contrived music-paper buzz word) is retrospectively reborn as Big Cultural Deal!

But yes, back to that aforementioned arse-end of horribleness... ok, the first wave of commercial successes weren't bad - I'll give you Pulp and Elastica*, Supergrass were great fun and Blur have done their fair share of worthwhile stuff (altho I'm not a big fan), but MY GOD, did they ever open the floodgates to to some unutterably dreadful music in '97-'99, once it became established that any bunch of chancers with sufficient label backing could knock out a big, yobbo-friendly catchy tune and get themselves a profitable career for at least a few years.

I was just starting to develop a more serious interest in music around then, and I tell you, I would condemn the reasonably good bands mentioned above to obscurity and death in a SECOND if it meant that I could have avoided those ghastly, soul-sapping couple of years of not being able to turn on the radio or TV without being subjected to, to... well to Kula Shaker, Cast, Catatonia, The Verve, Dodgy, Space, Reef, Stereophonics, Shed Seven, post-Richie Manics, Lightning Seeds, god-awful, 3rd album vintage Suede and Oasis, The Levellers, Placebo, fuckin' Gomez, and many more, probably with bad one word names, which I have wiped from my conscious memory.

Speaking of bad one word names, the only mainstream successful band to emerge from those years who were any good were probably Ash.

Oh, and maybe Cornershop, although unfortunately they never really got anywhere chart-wise except for with that one-off Fatboy Slim song (HE GOES ON MY LIST TOO, even if he is supposed to be "dance").

There was a good article in a recent Plan B, where David "king of the dancefloor" McNamee** engaged in a bit of a nostalgia trip of a different kind, defining 1997 as the year zero for the short-lived movement of teenage, female-focused DIY pop/punk bands formed at least partly in opposition to the ubiquitous dreary guff listed above, headed by Bis, Kenickie and a hundred others who were too shambolic to really get anywhere, but whose assorted 7"s I would surely want to save in the event of a house-fire or natural disaster. You know, fanzines, glitter, bitching about tiny reviews in the back of Melody Maker... that whole kind of thing.

So if the time has come to do a rose-tinted autopsy on '90s British music culture and put all the pieces back together again, THAT IS THE ONE I WOULD LIKE TO ASSOCIATE MYSELF WITH PLEASE.

So... that's "Ben's guide to the Brit-Pop era" I guess. Take it or leave it!

---------

*Pity Elastica fell apart so quickly, and that they'll be forever associated with brit-pop despite having little in common with the rest of it musically or aesthetically... would prob'ly have fitted in much better with the recent post-punky revival I suppose...

** Don't ask.
 
 
Saveloy
14:30 / 24.04.07
Boboss, pull yourself together man! As scientists and men of truth we must face facts, however unpalatable they are. The request was for "the most obvious" and, well, I don't like it any more than you do but 'Wake Up Boo' was bloody everywhere, wasn't it? Your objection has been noted but, I'm sorry, it must be included.


Rizla:

"Maybe people who were a little older at the time might want to shout me down, but I'm a bit suspicious of the current definition of brit-pop as some defining cultural moment... beyond a few indie bands having big hits (this being an event of note in the early/mid 90s), any wider significance didn't really register with me AT ALL at the time"

Hmm, it was probably limited to the pages of the Melody Maker and Select (Britpop's flagship mag), but I do remember it being "a thing" at the time that it was actually happening, in the sense that people were calling it Britpop and it was being claimed as a significant shift in direction and all that. I mean, these things are usually created and kept alive by just one or two hacks at the start, aren't they, and with Britpop it was chiefly Paul Lester, Andrew Mueller and possibly John Harris. It was certainly being written about, had its champions and detractors etc. (As I recall, at least - I'm probably way off). So it wasn't an entirely retrospective labelling / categorisation, but yeah, it probably took a while for the term Britpop to become a household word.
 
 
Saveloy
14:43 / 24.04.07
Boboss:

"But yes, kick off with Girl and Boys and end with Common People."

That (and the discussion of class further up the page) reminds me of a Simon Reynolds bit in Melody Maker - 1995 or thereabouts - about how the war wasn't *really* between Blur and Oasis, but between Blur and Pulp. How Blur were the Martin Amis / Ian McEwan of pop and Pulp were... f---ed if I can remember now, but some suitably 'authentic' working class voice in Lit (or at least actively for the working classes/downtroden masses). Why Oasis weren't allowed that role I can't remember, and it's bugging me now. Probably because of their "f--- you I'm a rock'n'roll star, me" stance.

Is it possible to find old copies of MM on the web?
 
 
ZF!
15:04 / 24.04.07
Y'know I really don't think "Britpop" ever died, nor was it ever a *movement*, It just was.

I mean what the hell are we listening to on the radio these days then?

I mean I could just call it the 5th or 6th or nth wave or whatever of British guitar based pop music.
 
 
This Sunday
15:47 / 24.04.07
I think the term's a bit suspect, yes. Not really a movement or classification that holds up very well. I've seen people slip later Primal Scream in there, and some exclude Kula Shaker, while I can't bring myself to tie Oasis to anyone, because it's more than likely mildly insulting to them. Which, is not to imply Oasis didn't sound good some of the time.

Pulp and Elastica hold up better for me than most of the so-called Britpop, though. Damon Albarn's not exactly stopped, and I mean, on some levels, the Gorillaz is just a new section of the Blur cat. isn't it? In the sense that pulling in Danger Mouse or the gal from Cibo Matto are less about forming a band and more him being a very good frontman but perhaps not soloing.

That is, Blur stopped for awhile, but Albarn continued, and then Blur started again. Seude shifted about, and somehow grew out Elastica and some other sounds. Pulp had a life of how long, exactly? It's not like they were here and then gone, scale of success or reach aside.

And I still kinda like Kula Shaker. Do I like the bandmembers personally or for their politics or religous convictions? No. But they had a nice layered sound that passes five minutes without hurting.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:37 / 24.04.07
Riz: *Pity Elastica fell apart so quickly, and that they'll be forever associated with brit-pop despite having little in common with the rest of it musically or aesthetically... would prob'ly have fitted in much better with the recent post-punky revival I suppose...

Elastica were more linked into the whole NWONW thing, weren't they? Not that I can remember which other bands got lumped in there, mind.

A lot of the chronology in this thread is out - Screamadelica was released a good few years before Britpop was even proposed as a genre name. Not to mention that it doesn't come anywhere close to anything Britpop in terms of sound. Similarly, Suede didn't step anywhere near to the generic Britpop sound until after Butler left.

I'm not having the Super Furries put in there, either. No fucking way.

It's not really until the whole Blur/Oasis chart battle bollocks that anybody registered it, but the 'shitty guitar groups' thing had been around for a short while before that - possibly as a result of people riding in on the popularity of stuff like early Suede/Manics, but not having the ability or desire to do anything as interesting with it.

What's kind of odd is how otherwise decent enough bands turned to shit as soon as the press decided to shove them all in together. Verve were appealingly odd during the period up to and including their first album, the Boo Radleys' Giant Steps (the one before Wake Up) was great, Cornershop were fantastically ramshackle and tuneless, Suede put out an amazing second album... basically, it all turned to shit for them as soon as somebody at either the Melody maker or NME decided that they really fit in well with pathetic wankstains like My Life Story, Gene, Sleeper, whatever that useless bunch of tossers with Sophie Ellis Bexter were called, etc.
 
 
rizla mission
17:03 / 24.04.07
Elastica were more linked into the whole NWONW thing, weren't they? Not that I can remember which other bands got lumped in there, mind.

Was "New Wave of New Wave" ever actually a convincing enough bit of journo scene-inventing to become a legitimate 'thing'?

I think Elastica are doomed to live with the brit-pop curse whatever their music sounded like, due to the combination of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (the charts, 1994) and their personal connections with Suede and Blur.

Similarly, Suede didn't step anywhere near to the generic Britpop sound until after Butler left.

Was there a generic Britpop sound? - it's notable that most of the bands name-checked in this thread actually sound quite different from each other (within the limitations of mainstream-acceptable guitar pop).
 
  

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