The Story of Britpop (as I saw it)

[davros]

This seemed the best place to put this?
It's my own account and feel free to disagree etc and forgive the spelling mistakes!

Once upon a time...

There was this country called Britain and in the early 1990's not many people gave a flying one about music.
John Lennon would have a tribute concert in Liverpool (with such acts as Lenny Kravitz and Kylie) which was barely attended and computer games seemed to be outselling albums.
The country was transfixed by Nirvana and other Seattle scene bands and they held a stranglehold over everything.
British bands seemed to "rebel" against plaid shirts, fuzzy guitars and smack by er... going back to the 1960's/1970's.
Great music was being made by Blur, Kinky Machine, Lush and Suede etc but they didn't seem as exotic as what was coming from America?
Things changed with Kurt Cobain's suicide and the arrival of Oasis.
I'd say the golden age of Britpop was 1993-1996 there was a complete change around in attitudes from six years ago and things really did seem like British music was on the cusp on a golden age?
...and then New Labour and the non-music mainstream press adopted "Britpop" as their own which more or less killed it slowly over the coming years. A lot of people who used to spend their days jamming with bands suddenly found themselves on the "New Deal" employment programme (myself included) and this soured things like you wouldn't believe!
(There is a special place in hell reserved for the arch-traitor Alan McGee but that's another story...)
Britpop became a label that was stuck to many bands even if they didn't want it? (Such as er... Manic Street Preachers and Super Furry Animals) As well as being used for the dreadful bandwagon jumpers such as Menswe@r (I feel so...so... dirty writing that name...) etc...
One band who really summed up Britpop were Supergrass but because they were in the "second wave of Britpop" (whatever the hell that was?) they weren't held as in high regard as Oasis or Blur. (Who more or less shut and bolted the door behind them once they achieved success...Whoops! "Debbie" got hold of my computer again!)

And now?....

Britian is the most depressing place on Earth!
Since the war on terror started people have become less open to original music, let alone ideas from other genres? The indie kids in their skinny jeans have gone online to "MySpace" in the misguided belief people will notice them or even worse are in the queue to be humiliated or accepted by Simon Cowell on "The X Factor"? If they haven't joined the queue to sign up to fight unwinnable wars or joined the jobcentre?

For a brief peroid Britpop made life worth living. There really isn't anything like it at the moment and I thank the makers of this website for at least trying to keep those days alive.

I have at least saved you money on buying "The Last Party" book by John Harris, but as that had more details of the bands with pictures, it's worth picking up!

The moral of this story is... if a scene breaks near you (which to be honest it won't, the next ten years are going to be hell) then make the most of it but it's gonna go before you can label it and leave dozens of wrecked lives in it's wake.

But you'll always have the music I suppose?...
It's something to play in your head as you stare through the wire fence of your local internment camp...

Thank you for reading this. *hugs*

[marilynroxie]

Being an American fan that found out about the Britpop scene bands after the fact, it is definitely interesting to hear a British perspective - thank you for sharing! And now I've been reminded that I haven't read The Last Party, the politics-and-music angle is curious to consider, and very much there. That is sad to hear about people being less open to original music there now, if that is indeed the case. I know it's been like that in America since at least the mid-00s, perhaps earlier, but I think part of that is because of people with a wide variety of taste being more likely to be the downloaders rather than the purchasers, apart from those who can actually afford to expand their physical album collections (in this trying-economic-times, blahdeblah...), so the Billboard charts and the tiny amount of music videos shown, at least in America, reflect almost exclusively the general music fan with hardly room for originality. Top that off with record labels seeming very confused about how to work the internet to their advantage and get with the times on promotion via music blogs and finding new ways to entice people to buy albums, and it is strange times indeed.

I think the best British band currently, and maybe the best newer band around right now, are the Horrors. There's a lot of music journalists that give them a hard time and seem to think they're pretentious, but I've read / seen enough of their interviews to not think that at all - they have brilliant, eclectic taste (I even made a list of all that stuff: rateyourmusic.com/list/MarilynRoxie/the_horrors___influences_and_favorites) and, despite accusations that they are ripping of Joy Division (oh how clever, the only post-punk band many people are able to cite; when Strange House came out, they were saying The Birthday Party ), there's quite a lot going on in there, neo-psychelia, krautrock, and whatnot...I don't know of another band that sounds just like them, past or present! Being that Primary Colours is only their second album, I'm really interested to hear what they'd have in store for the next time. Anyhow, I think bands like them are a sign of hope, it's just up to the people to 'get' it, labels to do the promoting, the whole tide to change, and being that big rumbles often happen in music at the turn / end of a decade, let's hope there's exciting things in store for British music, and music at large, in the 2010s! ;D

[deansodisco]

To me if anything Britpop was a high example of one genre having many great bands, and the hype machine pushing the right people for the most part, giving it credibility.

Now you need to look deeper, to other genres which is really cool to me, finding some diamonds in the rough and all that.

There are tons of great British bands about nowadays, it's just that British guitar bands aren't as mainstream in the same way. Sure you get the likes of the decent Arctic Monkeys and AMAZING Franz Ferdinand, but as with everything there's a cycle. You can't have constant same genres as the in-thing.

As for the Horrors I really like their debut, but their latest album...it was dull to me. I know what was in there and the ideas etc but I've seen it done better (in my opinion) by bands of the past, in much better ways (I'd cite Mr Bungle as one of them in their rare peaceful moments!) so I struggle with it. Their third album will be the decider for me, it's almost as if with their follow up album they tried to force their evolution a bit and ended up with a few gems (Sea Within A Sea specifically) and a lot of dirt.

As for my favourite sort of known British artist right now, I'd say I still have a huge appreciation of Pete Doherty despite not listening to him much in the last six months. Amazing lyricis, great songwriter, beautiful peace in his moments of clarity...more peace should be found in chaos I say! ...oh God, I'm turning into one of them!

[notsomanicnow]

Davros - sounds like you were there at the time, and in a band?

I was a music fan before 'Britpop' and lived through the scene as it developed, peaked and wound down. When most of the seminal recordings were made, I don't think the average fan even knew the term 'Britpop'. It was coined by the music media and I first saw it in NME/Melody Maker (can't remember which, they were both interchangeable as Louise Wener said in her recent book) around Christmas 1994.

At the time I would have said that Blur's 'Boys And Girls' was the song that started 'Britpop', marking an unusually quick return for an artist so soon after their last album. The two-year cycle was not evident here. I understand it was for financial reasons that they came back so soon - had they not done so, would 'Britpop' have ever happened?

Looking at it now, 'For Tomorrow' was probably the starting point, the first release from what would be a trilogy of themed albums by Blur. But had 'Boys and Girls' not been released when it was, 'For Tomorrow' and its album 'Modern Life Is Rubbish' might have been un-tied loose ends, last quirky outposts beyond early 90s 'baggy' that signalled a slow ride out into the wilderness. So it must be surmised that if 'For Tomorrow' was the seed, then 'Boys & Girls' was the fertilisation of that seed that made 'Britpop' actually grow.

After nearly a decade of mediocrity people had forgotten what good, creative music was like. Younger fans had never seen it at all. After Live Aid mainstream music had become increasingly global and a lot of it was centred around record companies re-releasing the back catalogues of their middle-aged established artists. The youth audience had repetitive and cheaply-made dance records, by anonymous production teams with anonymous front persons for publicity, who may or may not have performed on the records. Sampling and re-mixes were endemic. Young Britain was dancing to this production line, the slightly older were buying 'best of' CDs of forty-something’s and everyone else was playing computer games. It was hard to believe that there could be any place for a genre that revived the jolly tunes of eras past. Remember that "retro" hadn't yet been invented. Music had never before looked back to go forward. The early 90s indie of The Stone Roses and The Charlatans seemed like a short-lived novelty, at a time when music had nowhere else to go, rather than the preamble to something that changed the landscape.

I don't think the typical fan was aware at the time of the political link between 'Britpop' and Labour. This was not revealed fully until John Harris's book 'The Last Party', a book that is both enlightening but sobering at the same time. I was surprised but excited when 'Britpop' really did take off, and thrilled as it reached its heights. Then a mini-complacency set in as you expected bands like The Bluetones and Mansun to always reach the top ten, and indeed be there with their releases for several years. The mediocrity of before had been cleared away, and Britpop was here to stay.

But then as with any other middle-ranking musical phenomenon, it was decided that the three year cycle was up. Robbie Williams and Texas with indie haircuts could do what Cast and Sleeper were doing, and in a way that the mainstream audience, who worked 9-5, watched soap operas and football, and never went anywhere near a local gig venue, could relate to within the comfort of their car stereo or house gatherings on a Saturday evening after a meal and the lottery results. Throw in a soap star like Natalie Imbruglia, and Spice Girls solo records and you had processed indie. Who needs the uncouthness of 'Britpop'?

But worry not. Nowadays, if the radio has the audacity to play The Longpigs or Echobelly, it is a "stop you in your tracks" moment. And whatever happened to Texas....?

'Britpop' you're gonna 'Live Forever'.