What was Britpop exactly?
The development of music history, with one era moving into the next, is a slow and steady thing. There is never a clear changing of the guards where suddenly all the punks salute and walk off, leaving the New Romantics or the pop stars to the job. Instead, it’s an ongoing and ever-evolving process as music, style, and subcultures are inseparably linked to society and politics. So by 1994, when the opening chords of Oasis’ ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Star’ started up and Britpop took hold, it was just as hard to define back then as it is today.
To some people, the movement started right there and then. Some 30 years ago, when Oasis released their debut album, Definitely Maybe, it seemed to be the birth of a new scene. After the punk of the late 1970s, the droning post-punk of the ‘80s or the scattering of high-glamour, theatrical pop or electronica artists, it had been a stretch of time since the UK was gripped by good old-fashioned, plain and simple rock and roll. So when the Gallagher brothers emerged, quite literally declaring, “I’m a rock ‘n’ roll star”, it felt like the grand return music fans had been clamouring for. Despite being titled Britpop by Stuart Maconie, really, it was Britrock that soundtracked the 1990s.
Of course, to many, it also feels significant that they were declaring the change in northern accents. After years of Thatcherism shredding the country, specifically northern, working-class communities apart, the sharp rise of Oasis felt like a group of lads scabbing a flag into the earth and saying, ‘England is mine’. Not too long after, groups like Pulp were there too, singing “You’ll never live like common people”, or presenting distinctly working-class British stories on tracks like ‘I Spy’ or ‘Disco 2000’.
So, with this view, Britpop becomes the sound of reclamation. It’s a post-ironic flag brandishing that’s not in a far-right, ‘this is our country’ kind of way. Instead, it’s salt-of-the-earth British groups returning to the basics of starting bands in their garage, writing songs about local scenes, playing gigs in small pubs and clubs before climbing up to the top. If The Beatles or The Rolling Stones had caused the British invasion in the 1960s by doing exactly that, the bands of the 1990s launched Britpop by trying to bring those glory days back. In fact, Maconie claimed that he’d first come across the term he’s credited for popularising in 1960s coverage of what could be seen as the first Britpop wave’.
However, Britpop is not a simple class thing. Just as quickly as Oasis emerged onto the scene as the new working class heroes of rock, they were pitted against a worthy adversary for the ultimate ‘us vs them’ battle. Blur were doing the same thing musically as they delivered outright rock tunes with a catchy pop edge to make them broadly loved and on radio repeats. But they were doing it as ‘posh kids’ from the south of England. While Oasis were singing “Where were you while we were getting high” on ‘Champagne Supernova’, they were always more ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’. Meanwhile, Blur were champagne and cocaine, all hailing from more well-to-do, middle-class London backgrounds. Their fans took sides fiercely, proving just how much music is tied into social commentary as their rivalry also became a vendetta of geography and class.
August 1995: Blur vs Oasis
It could be argued that Britpop wouldn’t be such a well-known moment if it wasn’t for the so-called ‘Battle Of Britpop’ in 1995, which seems to encapsulate the whole thing. It’s true that the era was always more than just Blur vs Oasis; other acts like Suede, The Verve, Elastica, Stereophonics, and more were just as important when it came to crafting the sound of the moment. But it’s the rivalry between the two acts, especially the one that broke out during their battle for number one between ‘Country House’ and ‘Roll With It’, that provides a perfect image of what Britpop was in terms of look and feel.
There are countless video clips of the two bands throwing verbal punches at one another, and each and every one has the energy of two football teams winding each other up before a game. Or, for a more relatable British example, they have the energy of a boozed-up pub spat, where each insult is delivered with signature British humour and wit, from a man dressed in the Fred Perry polo, scruffy hair and Harrington combo that these bands made famous. It’s hype masculine behaviour with a cool, edge facade that seems to take some of the sting out of it. Instead, it seems to be looking at the stereotype of rough, lager drinking, sports-hooligan British men and then simultaneously leaning into it while making fun of it.
As the Battle of Britpop grew more fierce, it proved just how much the British public loves a fight. By dividing into two teams and witnessing the spatting banter and competitive jeering that anyone who’s spent a match night in a pub knows well, the musical genre became a phenomenon as it leaned into shared UK culture and soundtracked it with a unique mix of glorifying arms-in-the-air anthemic pride, and just enough critical commentary to stay cool.
So, what is Britpop?
To answer the question of what Britpop was exactly, the answer is simple: a phenomenon. Musically, the Britpop bands involved were merely delivering pure and simple rock and roll but with a distinct British twang, either sharing stories of the local celebrities or just letting their accents cut through clearly. But it was more than just music. As bands like Suede appeared on magazine covers wrapped in Union Jacks, the scene seemed to bring back a sense of pride in the country, but through its music and social scenes.
While the punk scene headed up by the Sex Pistols was of British invention, tracks like ‘Anarchy In The UK’ made rejecting the country part of the make-up of the subculture. In stark contrast, Britpop embodied a kind of love for Britain, but for its humour, cultural exports, local town dramas, dingy pubs and all the bands keeping the grand tradition of rock and roll going in the 1990s.