It has been more than 30 years since Suede’s first single, The Drowners — slightly longer than the gap between that and the Beatles’ debut — but Britpop is having yet another moment. Blur have just announced two dates at Wembley Stadium next summer, which will take place a week after Pulp headline Finsbury Park. Most likely Noel Gallagher will be touring a new album next summer, while Suede will be playing songs from their thrillingly vital latest, Autofiction, on the festival circuit.
Liam Gallagher recently headlined Knebworth twice, with more than half his set devoted to Oasis songs. There are new books about the period, too: Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That, an oral history by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, and Verse, Chorus, Monster, a memoir from Blur’s Graham Coxon. It’s slightly insulting to lump these artists together as Britpop when it was just a three or four-year slice of their careers, but it was the slice that made everything else possible.
Why can’t we let Britpop go? It certainly helps that the generation currently running the media grew up with it, and that, unlike the extraordinarily unfortunate grunge scene, all the key players are still with us. Aside from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann (whose influence is audible in this year’s sardonic indie sensations Wet Leg), they are all still making music. The best songs endure. Beyond the music, it is a great yarn, with a tight-knit cast of characters and a full menu of drama: sex, drugs, money, hubris, vengeance and bitter rivalry.
Britpop is usually remembered as the musical component of a time when British culture was exploding with energy and optimism: in art, fashion, cinema, football, comedy, television, magazines, literature and politics. But the scene itself was full of rancour, gleefully stoked by the music weeklies. Oasis famously set themselves against Blur but so did Pulp and Suede. “It felt like whenever a new English guitar-based band arrived on the scene, the press would pit Blur against them, even when it wasn’t really appropriate,” Coxon glumly recalls in his book. And thanks to the warring Gallaghers, Oasis also hated Oasis. Music became a contact sport.
Britpop is still worth fighting about. When Blur tickets went on sale, one friend tweeted a savage (and simplistic) assessment by Suede’s Brett Anderson: a band “who waved flags and dropped their aitches and painted a social tourist’s cartoon of British life: patronising, jingoistic and crass”. This opinion wasn’t expressed in the NME in the heat of 1994; it appeared in Anderson’s 2019 memoir Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn. Old feuds die hard. People still argue about who was the best band. They argue about whether Britpop was guilty of legitimising flag-waving and misogyny. They even argue about Oasis’s grand folly, Be Here Now, which many fans like rather more than Noel Gallagher does. Most of all, they argue about whether it deserves to loom so large, then and now. Was it really so special?
Britpop was an idea and an attitude rather than a genre, and it was born out of confrontation. The milestone April 1993 issue of Select magazine (“Yanks go home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, the Auteurs and the Battle for Britain”) was a tongue-in-cheek riposte to sullen post-Nirvana rock and American cultural imperialism in general, against which it championed homegrown “glamour, wit and irony”. The Young British Artists had a similar sense of outsider ambition, greeting the post-Thatcher, post-Cold War Nineties with a determination to come roaring out of the sidelines and rewrite mainstream culture.
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