The Hater’s Guide to Britpop

Once upon a time, in the United Kingdom, there was a type of music called Britpop. It involved people, most of whom were men (the go-to gender when it comes to any kind of atrocity, cultural or otherwise) in the early-to-mid-90s copying some alright-ish albums that came out in the 60s and then 70s while people up and down the country pretended to be cockneys and/or from Manchester. The Union Jack was everywhere and being drunk and awful to people was seen as A Good Thing. It was like some sort of Orwellian fascist dystopia except instead of Big Brother, we had Chris Evans.

Though there is still some speculation on when the whole farce got started, musical historians widely accept that 1994 was the year in which the genre solidified and began propelling itself into the national consciousness. It was the year that two landmark records came out, Blur’s ‘Parklife’ and Oasis’s ‘Definitely Maybe’. These albums are pretty great, owing to the presence of old-fashioned things like actual songwriting talent and musical ability. Almost everything else that came afterwards was either a dogshit salad or very, very boring.

 

With the first wave having manifested itself in 1994, 1995 brought the second wave. Some of the bands during this period, like Pulp and Supergrass, were decent outfits who had the misfortune to be getting big just as the scene was enveloping them like some sort of musically sterile gelatinous blob. The rest were journeymen hacks who rode the gravy train for all it was worth, like *exasperated sigh* Menswear:

 

As one would expect, the mainstream music press shit their pants with glee over all this nonsense and for a good two to three years, the entire country was in love with its own cultural banality. The jingoism was palpable. Tracksuits, bad haircuts and shitty beer were all the rage, as was being a complete cunt (or ‘lad’, as was the nomenclature at the time) while saying “Mad for it!” a lot.

 

The apex of all this bollocks was during the summer of 1995, when Oasis and Blur both had one really shit song each – which they were cruel enough to actually release – and whoever sold the most copies was the winner. It made the national news and everything:

 

This was the moment of singularity. Britpop had peaked and began to eat its own tail as it started an inevitable, irreversible decline. Oasis’s third album, 1997’s ‘Be Here Now’ was pretty goddamn dreadful no matter how much coke you snorted and Blur distanced themselves from Britpop altogether with their self-titled album released the same year. Gratifyingly, none of it sounded like a bad version of The Kinks. Woo-hoo!

 

The “we’re-all-fucked” moment came later that same year when then newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (at the time a dynamic politician and not the war criminal he is now) used Britpop for his own nefarious ends by getting all pally with Noel Gallagher at a photo opp in Downing Street. HMV began selling t-shirts that said ‘I Hate Oasis (And I Really Hate The Beatles)’. The dream was over.

 

 

Things got slightly better afterwards. Radiohead released OK Computer and by then The Spice Girls were cheering everyone up. Britpop’s only real hangover manifested itself in the form of The Verve, a hitherto decent combo who unleashed devastating amounts of mediocrity in 1998 with their third album ‘Urban Hymns’. It was preposterously dull and predictably enough, it sold bajillions. I remember reading an interview with singer Richard Ashcroft at the same time, where he agreed with a description of his band as ‘the new Led Zeppelin’. How amusing!

 

Fast forward to 2014. Oasis have long since split up and the closest we can get to the spirit of ’94 is Beady Eye. Yikes. Blur are still standing but are now almost unrecognisable from the band they were in the video for ‘Country House’. Once bitter rivals Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher have hugged it out. The nightmare has long since passed but we must all stay on our guard. If any cultural revisionists out there try and convince you that Britpop was somehow great and worthwhile, you have my full permission to throw chairs at them. Until then, John Dower’s great 2003 documentary Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of Britpop provides a perfect post-mortem on the subject;