Musical/cultural movements seem ineffable at the start, logical at their height, laughable in their decline. The key that unlocks any door is the sound. Pop music is novelty, which is not necessarily originality. Pop’s audience for many years has been the young, teenagers and twenty-somethings. Everything is new to them, from their feelings to their bodies to the wider world.
So it makes sense when, for example, a ringing electric guitar can sound awesome after years of sounding jaded.
We may be due for a 90s cultural ‘revival’. It’s an odd thing to contemplate, but no stranger than the idea a few years ago that kids would suddenly love synthesiser sounds or dressing like a cross between Madonna or Axl Rose (add your own 80s signifiers. That said the real hipsters out there seem to be taking up 40s fashion signifiers. Nu Folk is possibly a reflection of this. Despite Mumford and Sons distressing popularity, Nu Folk is neither a folk nor a particularly vast cultural movement. Not yet, anyway.
So, Britpop (we finally used the word) is due to pick up some positive cultural resonances. Three things to be said about it
- It was media generated, but then everything’s media generated. Think back to the 1990s, there were two weekly music papers, one monthly magazine, and one radio station. In other words there was huge concentration. A band that got onto John Peel or the Evening Session had immediate access to so many thousand of pairs of ears. If we leave aside the argument about the virtue of authenticity, we may all like something because we’re told to like it, but that doesn’t mean we like everything we’re told to. There have been plenty of failed musical movements, Nu Rave, Skunk Rock, Nu Metal (lots of things with ‘Nu’ in the title).
- It was a cultural reaction against the 80s. Musically speaking we’re talking synthesiser pads, gated snare, reverb and general studio gloss, although this was to some extent the 80s indie recording ethic brought into the top ten. Lead singers were a lot louder than they were in the 80s. Contrast Liam Gallagher or Skin with Ian Brown or Mark Gardener. Fashion-wise there was some attempt to link Britpop with Mod. Blur, 92-94 vintage, were the most conspicuous example, although they weren’t truly Mod style, more like skins with longer hair. It also has to be said Britpop was very sexless. The emphasis was on melody. Rhythms were generally foursquare. I think it comes from not always right-on notions of Playing It Straight. The most notable exception was, again, Blur. Damon and Graham bonded initially over a love of 2 Tone.
- Politically Britpop amounted to a rejection of the 80s. The nationalism implied, where it was thought through, amounted to a critique of atomised consumer society, which in a lot of minds was embodied by the United States. The Nazis as far as I know did not attempt to use Britpop or infiltrate it in any way. This is partly because of the way the way limited groups of like minded musicians in places like Camden or Manchester rose very quickly to national prominence, before any scene could organically arise. But most credit goes to two successive campaigns by Rock Against Racism, which pulled youth culture very much to the left.
So, an appreciation of Britpop begins with this list, subjective and possibly unfair. We will take the period to be from Black Wednesday 1992 to Election Day 1997, between the Major government’s doom and its final extinction, as our parameter. It does not include Radiohead, whose peak came after this period, or The Stone Roses, who came before, or the Manic Street Preachers, who were dreadful.
Blur: Girls and Boys. It’s an obvious choice but, unless you take Suede as the true originals, I tend to think they were a band half apart, who lost momentum as other bands broke through, this is where Britpop, or New Wave of New Wave as it was called in March 1994, made its first mark.
It’s ridiculously catchy, many, many people’s favourite Blur song. Girls and Boys is five minutes long but feels like it ends too soon. Some worried that it pokes prurient fun at the working class, who are, apparently, the mainstay of Club 18-30 holidays, the subject of the song. Damon Albarn was clearly aware of this problem. He used skilful bait-and-switch in the lyric: “Avoiding all work/Cause there’s none available”. At least in the 1990s people worried about insulting working class dignity.
Less obvious is that Girls and Boys succeeded where Relax failed, in alternative sexuality onto daytime radio. Listen to the chorus again.
Oasis: Columbia. Oasis blew it. Ok, they blew it to the tune of several million albums sold over 15 year period, but they blew it. Britpop’s bad reputation is largely down to them, their overblown sound and underwritten music. Noel Gallagher painted himself into such a corner taking over his brother’s band it took him almost ten years to get competent musicians on board.
Nonetheless, their debut album is a triumph. Noel intended it to be a combination of Nevermind and Never Mind the Bollocks, and he got it spot on. Columbia is an odd choice, but it sums Definitely Maybe up well. Three simple chords, wall of sound and the refrain: “I can’t tell you the way I feel/Because the way I feel is oh so new to me”. What 14 year old could listen to that and not feel like they could take on the world, for the first time?
Pulp: Mis-Shapes. I am convinced Pulp were not as good as you remember them. They part-peaked on His ‘n’ Hers and This is Hardcore (it’s isn’t, btw), and only hit their stride with Different Class. Some may disagree.
It’s hard to think of an album or band who sound like Pulp. The music is a welding of opposites, shabby and glam, rudimentary and epic. Jarvis Cocker’s live in the border between observation and imagination. Quite often they’re ugly. There is no such thing as pure autobiography. There is no way a singer on a stage can be taken for the person offstage. Even so it’s amazing anyone could like the character, the maladjusted weirdo who sings Babies or Disco 2000.
Here we’re going to look at Pulp going political – sort of. Mis-Shapes was the forgotten half of a Double A with Sorted for Es and Whizz. The first verse: a put-upon figure rues their predicament, it is a mixture of class oppression (“raised on a diet of broken biscuits”) and outsider status (you can end up with a smack in the mouth/just for standing out”). But it is a collective predicament (“brothers/sisters/can’t you see/the future’s owned by you and me”). The bridge builds to a truly rousing chorus that is a revolutionary statement (“we want your homes/we want your lives/we want the things you won’t allow us”). It is arch and it might be silly, but only someone who has never dreamed of such sweet revenge.
The ambiguity as to who exactly is “making a move” is a nice poetic touch. Class is a much more indelible marker than fashion.
Echobelly: King of the Kerb. Echobelly were a fine band. They were mixed gender, mixed race, international: as if Pigeon Street had a house band. Lead singer Sonya Madan was like the anti-Gallagher, and no less charismatic for it. There only trouble was the lack of good songs.
But King of the Kerb is great. Deceptively jolly: it's actually about homelessness, a unwelcome 90s phenomenon probably on its way back in.
The Bluetones: Slight Return. I remember some time ago, around the arrival of Anti-Capitalism in public consciousness, The Bluetones being interviewed in the NME. The lead singer, Mark Morriss kept trying to prove to the interviewer they weren’t left wing, and they weren’t. If songs called The Fountainhead weren’t strong enough hints, the lead singer elsewhere regularly dropped dubious comments about ‘Englishness’.
If Indie music was not just a post Post-Punk style, jangly guitars, mumbling etc, then it was an alternative culture; an outlook that wasn’t left-wing as such but open to left-wing ideas. At some point in the 1990s things became All About The Music. Something was lost at the point because it’s plainly music is not all about the music.
There might be better examples, but The Bluetones were an excellent example of that moment when bands became less a gang of mates with something to prove, even if that something wasn’t clear, to musicians who were the sum of their influences and abilities. Slight Return is a fine song. It’s very simple equation: The Smiths + The Stone Roses. The arpeggio riff is the star of Slight Return, as bright and clear as the moment when four people realise they can make music together.
Reef: Place Your Hands. Having said all the above, these guys just as easily be the typical post-Indie apolitical band. For all anybody knew to begin with they were an advert for a brand of mini-discs (now an obsolete format, but the future of everything in the mid-90s). Their song, called Naked, was agreeable enough. It sounded like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against the Machine, and was accordingly chart hit. Gone is the age when bands like REM or The Beastie Boys refuse to license their music on principle. Averts are just another way of getting your music heard.
But Place Your Hands is the one everybody remembers. It’s silly, as silly as a song with an opening line that for all the world sounds like an invitation to digital/rectal massage can be, but it’s great. According to Wikipedia the lyrics are about the lead singer Gary Stringer coming to terms with his grandfather’s death. If I hadn’t have said you wouldn’t have guessed.
Mansun: Wide Open Space. The lyrical equivalent of Britpop’s retro sound was an obsession with the prosaic. Example: well, it can’t get much more everyday than Oasis, Digsy’s Dinner: “What a life it would be/if you would come to mine for tea/I’ll pick you up at half-past three/We’ll have lasagne”. This is not to denigrate such songs. Slice-of-Life lyrics are unlikely to degenerate into cliché or cock rock.
Mansun were late on the scene, their first singles came out in 1996. Their music was highly orchestrated. Their lyrics were fantastical tales. Their first album, Attack of the Grey Lantern, was brilliant. It was a half-realised concept album (aren’t they all?) about a comic book hero The Grey Lantern. He lives in a village, who knows where, peopled by characters called Dark Mavis and the Stripper Vicar. Perhaps was meant to be literal, perhaps it’s about the universal teenage desire to escape small town life and perhaps the concept was cobbled together as an explanation after the fact.
Wouldn’t you know it the best known song on the album is nothing to do with any concept! Wide Open Space is a superb piece of bluff, showing how good bands can make exciting music from almost nothing.
Elastica: Connection. Cocaine was the mid nineties drug of choice. The price of cocaine has fluctuated over the decades, but it has changed from a elite to an everyday drug. You can hear its effects quite clearly in the Britpop sound. Cocaine is a front-brain stimulant. The chemical solution to prolonged stimulation is a back brain depressant. Nobody noticed at the time but heroin took over from cocaine as some musicians drug of choice. It was the undoing of Suede and Elastica. It's amazing to think that nobody noticed the frequent references in Blur's eponymous album and 13 (at one point in the Swamp Song Damon started yelling "STICK IT IN MY VEINS..." whoosh, it went over people's heads).
Elastica were a mildly notorious magpie band, but as with Oasis (or Led Zeppelin) chutzpah and a good ear will win the day. If you must rip off a song rip off a good one.
Colon: Kick In The Sun. Let's not forget though, Britpop was mostly shit.