I was a mere 12 years old during the heyday of Britpop, so I only came to an appreciation of its doyens much later, in my mid-20s, long after their creative powers had irretrievably faded. But what I didn’t fully grasp until relatively recently was the extent to which Britpop had been done before – indeed, that it was to some degree a rather shameless, Frankenstein-like resuscitation of 60s / 70s British rock. This may seem obvious but, as a 23-year-old, I had never gone back and listened to T. Rex or the Rolling Stones with any real sense of purpose or curiosity, and my parents, being pop fans, never exposed me to them.
Needless to say, it would be redundant to harp on here about how “Cigarettes and Alcohol” is basically “Get It On”, how Elastica ended up paying copious royalties to Wire and the Stranglers, or how Damon Albarn almost certainly listened to The Village Green Preservation Society from start to finish before sitting down to write the “keenly observational”, “quintessentially British” character assassinations of Parklife. It’s common knowledge, a tired criticism. But it needs to be reiterated, because, listening back to it from the vantage point of 2024, much of Britpop feels like wide-eyed teenagers paying tribute to their idols, Stars in their Eyes-style.
It was the record-buying and radio-listening public who were forced to pay the price for this unrepentant hero worship – which they did, to the tune of millions of pounds in record sales. But, as derivative as Britpop was, thank god that it caught on, because when the likes of Suede and Blur were starting out, British radio was dominated by the satanic pestilences of dance pop, Eurotrance, and, well, Mick Hucknall. Only in the US did guitar bands sell millions of records, and it seemed that no aspiring British rock’n’roll act could hold a torch to the likes of Nirvana or Pearl Jam, at least in terms of commercial success. To their immense credit, Blur and Oasis cleared away the irredeemable garbage then being served up by the likes of M People and Simply Red to return guitar music to the top of the British charts – perhaps for the last time, as it would prove.
Parklife and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? were perhaps the two defining Britpop albums, and this blog has already reviewed both separately. The following article thus focuses on the scene’s origins, and the five albums which, arguably, did most to launch the burgeoning movement.
Suede by Suede (1993)
Some say that Suede were the first real Britpop band because, in the shadow of grunge, they reinjected a determinedly British aesthetic and British preoccupations into their music. Nonetheless, though Noel Gallagher may have stolen Marc Bolan’s riffs, it was Brett Anderson who robbed his schtick. The slashing, distorted guitars; the desperate, erotic wailing; the suggestive and depraved lyrics – it’s virtually a tribute act. Auteurs frontman Luke Haines once remarked, with typical acidity, that Suede’s “pseudo-bumboy androgyny” was always “more Grange Hill than Bowie”, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Brett’s council estate rent boy trappings spoke to a trashier and potentially more alluring variant of English camp than Bowie’s otherworldly aristocratism. Sadly, around half of the songs on Suede are nothing special, and in my opinion, Brett only really had two tricks up his sleeve: raucous glam anthems (“So Young”, “Animal Nitrate”, “The Drowners”), and pensive, vaguely psychedelic, acoustic-driven ballads (“She’s Not Dead”, “Pantomime Horse”, “Breakdown”). The novelty of the neo-glam guitar sound and the saucy genderbending lyrics starts to wear off at the album’s halfway point, after which it blurs into a forgettable hodgepodge of feedback-riven filler. The singles are great, though.
***
Standout track: “Animal Nitrate”
New Wave by the Auteurs (1993)
Insufferable smart alecks like to flaunt their knowledge of Britpop by claiming that Luke Haines – the poison dwarf frontman of the Auteurs – was the real architect of the movement. And, yes, New Wave, the band’s debut, was released a month prior to Suede, making it technically the opening salvo in a sustained assault on the British charts by the revived corpse of 70s glam. In terms of tone and lyrical content, however, New Wave’s Britpop credentials are questionable. Whereas Brett Anderson invoked the sub-Brookside universe of council homes and sex acts in the backs of battered cars, Haines peppered his songs with decidedly unBritish, Sunset Boulevard-like references to faded Hollywood glamour; washed up child stars, showgirls, and addled actress mothers recently discharged from rehab. The sound consists chiefly in glammy, metallic rockers (“Showgirl”, “How Could I Be Wrong”), twinkly, fragile ballads (“Junk Shop Clothes”, “Starstruck”) and, notably, an early incantation of Britpop’s addiction to strings, here in the form of a ubiquitous cello. Intriguingly, many moments on New Wave hint at Haines’ future as the marginalised, misanthropic “Adolf Hitler of Britpop”, in the form of venomous and unsettling tracks about idiot brothers, homicidal valets, and housebreakers. It’s no surprise that the prettier, more approachable Suede won the Mercury Prize, but it’s clear who had the better songs.
****
Standout track: “Showgirl”
Modern Life is Rubbish by Blur (1993)
Although Suede and New Wave are generally considered to mark the first stage in the mid-90s revival of British rock music, I would argue that Britpop doesn’t really get started until Modern Life is Rubbish. Suede and the Auteurs were too glammy, too effete; Damon Albarn was the first to channel the brattish, British elan of the emerging scene. He did so quite deliberately, after Blur returned from a harrowing tour of the US where they’d been roundly rejected by legions of grunge-loving American teenagers. Determined to “stick two fucking big fingers up at America”, they drew on classic British rock, the ska sound of Madness and the Specials, and the observational lyricism of the Kinks, before adorning the album cover with a picture of a steam train, perhaps to remind everyone who was really responsible for the advent of modernity. In my opinion, though, the songwriting on Modern Life is Rubbish is a bit flat. It has its moments, especially the thrown together single “For Tomorrow”, the uncharacteristically heartfelt “Blue Jeans”, and the strikingly self-aware “Resigned” but, on the whole, it lacks the tuneful, radio-friendly catchiness of the songs on Parklife or The Great Escape.
***
Standout track: “For Tomorrow”
Definitely Maybe by Oasis (1994)
For the most part, up until this point, Britpop had been about long-haired southern art school rejects peddling their London-based, neo-glam, nancy boy revival to an audience of sixth form English Literature students. This changed in 1994 with the arrival of the Gallagher brothers, who proceeded to inject some anti-intellectual, unreconstructed northern masculinity into this fey and limp-wristed scene. Their second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, is generally taken to signpost the highwater mark of Britpop, but their debut Definitely Maybe was the superior record. Noel Gallagher later described it as a “punk album”, and its sustained vibe of confrontational aggression is indeed reminiscent of punk. It’s basically about being pissed off and on the dole in Manchester, all the while dreaming about escape through rock’n’roll stardom – a snapshot of a specifically post-Thatcher moment in the history of Britain’s northern industrial towns. And yet, for all the swagger, menace, and militant rage of songs like “Rock’n’Roll Star” and “Columbia”, the album is consistently melodious and tuneful, even fragile, at points. This comes most glaringly into focus on “Live Forever” and “Slide Away”, moments of jarring vulnerability amidst the sustained belligerence.
*****
Standout track: “Live Forever”
Elastica by Elastica (1995)
Justine Frischmann was the Lou Salomé of Britpop; an androgynous, upper-class muse, who flitted romantically between the scene’s luminaries in suspicious synchronicity with how successful they were at any given moment in time. In 1991, she bailed on Brett Anderson to form Elastica but, to be fair, she didn’t unreflectively copy her former beau’s sound. If Suede were T. Rex knock offs, then Elastica lifted heavily from the poppier end of the punk spectrum – a little too heavily, in fact, as they repeatedly found themselves in court for plagiarism. The band’s 15-track-debut album is punctuated by short, sharp, pop-punk screeds about all-nighters, messy breakups, impotence, groupies, and dreamy men who drive shitty cars. To a cynical observer, it’s a reprehensible document of the lives of twenty-something, art school graduate class tourists, living it up and slumming it in mid-90s bohemian London. It’s too long, and there’s too much filler, particularly on the second half of the record. And yet, there’s no denying the catchy potency of songs like “Line Up”, “Connection”, and “Waking Up”, or the knowing savviness of Frischmann’s lyrics. Elastica remains a cohesive and evocative record, with more than a few indisputable bangers, although much of it is pretty disposable.
***
Standout track: “Waking Up”