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Britpop on Trial (Q, 2014)

Feature 1

If you want to pinpoint the moment at which Britpop began to eat itself, you don’t have to leave it as late as Be Here Now and Noel at Number 10. Just look up Blur’s Country House video on YouTube. A sorry fiasco directed by Britart superstar Damien Hirst with cameos for lad-about-town Keith Allen and topless pin-up Jo Guest, it now looks very much like clever people losing their minds. An uneasy Graham Coxon later described Country House as “insincere and cynical. Like a great big trailer filled with money on the back of a fat man’s car.”

If the battle for Britpop’s soul was summed up by Alex James’s cheerfully boorish hedonism versus Coxon’s old-school indie values, the Coxonians lost the battle but won the war. In recent weeks the 20th anniversary celebrations have been deflated by furious thinkpieces calling it “a cultural abomination” and “the beginning of the end”. Individual bands and records may be excused but the overall entity is despised in a way that grunge, punk or any other scene that produced garbage as well as genius is not.

At the time Britpop sometimes felt like a cartoon Neverland where Britannia was Cool, football was coming home and the sun was always shee-ining. The current backlash is just as unreal a caricature, portraying a pernicious era of jingoism, laddishness, idiocy and complacency. Perhaps the narrative arc was too seductively neat: the classic progression from outsider aspiration to hubris to downfall, played out by larger-than-life characters on a national stage. Its sheer scale means that it could only have been the best thing to happen to British music in years or the very worst.

“There’s a lot of self-recrimination,” says Rhian E Jones, author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender. “How could we have been so stupid to believe in Tony Blair or in Noel Gallagher as the saviour of rock’n’roll? There’s an idea that something went wrong but we’re not sure who to blame and how to fix it. Britpop is quite a convenient scapegoat.”

Even in the warmer commemorations, there’s an undercurrent of ambivalence; a sense that something went awry while we were getting high; a feeling that it marked an irrevocable shift in British culture that wasn’t necessarily for the best.

“It’s inextricably tied up in people’s minds with that shiny, self-confident, slightly shallow and now tarnished Cool Britannia era,” says writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie. “It’s like a party where people wake up and say, What did I do last night? Did I really say those things?”

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When people talk about Britpop they mean different things. It’s as specific as a clique of musicians who hung out in Camden in 1994 and as broad as a national mood that incorporated New Labour, Euro 96, TFI Friday, Loaded magazine, the Prodigy, Shooting Stars, Born Slippy, Tracey Emin, Things Can Only Get Better and Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack dress.

“The whole shebang was willed into existence,” says Luke Haines, former Auteurs frontman and author of the scabrous memoir Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall. “Sort of like religion. We know that God doesn’t exist but if enough people believe in God then he actually does exist.”

The original proposal for Britpop (as yet unnamed) in Select magazine’s April 1993 “Yanks go home!” issue bore little resemblance to what it became. When Stuart Maconie wrote the issue’s central polemic, he was playfully proposing Suede, Pulp, Denim, Saint Etienne and the Auteurs as a sharper, more eccentric counterblast to grizzly grunge bands like Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots.

“I was thinking of Philip Larkin not Phil Daniels,” says Maconie. “There was something darker, odder, more outsider about this British music. It was bedsits and being on the dole: a sort of pasty-faced underdog strangeness.”

But other developments in the early 90s pointed towards Oasis rather than Denim. There was a growing eagerness for indie music to break its glass ceiling, in the spirit of the Stone Roses’ world-beating rhetoric before they botched it, or the insolent audacity of the Manic Street Preachers’ ambition to sell 16 million albums. “Why wouldn’t you want to infiltrate the mainstream?” asks Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. “It definitely felt subversive. I’ve always wanted underdogs to do well in the chart.”

Populism felt idealistic, even radical. Rave, the revival of terrace culture after the hooligan-blighted 80s, and the largely peaceful revolutions that ended the Cold War had revived excitement about communal celebration. In that sense New Order’s 1990 World Cup anthem World in Motion, which united the FA and MDMA, was proto-Britpop. Think of the democratic embrace of Parklife’s “All the people” or Shakermaker’s “Shake along with me”: everybody in the same benign gang.

“Rave had made people optimistic about being in groups of people, and about youth culture in general,” says Jeremy Deller, the Turner Prize-winning artist whose work often involves music subcultures. “It was expansive. There were possibilities. And Margaret Thatcher was out so maybe there was some mild cultural euphoria about that.”

One crucial factor was more prosaic: the timely appointments of Matthew Bannister at Radio 1 and Ric Blaxill at Top of the Pops, both with an agenda to celebrate youth and newness. After years of frustration with the BBC’s gatekeepers, indie pluggers suddenly felt they were knocking on an open door.Suede were a big indie band but Blur were something else entirely. Parklife didn’t go quadruple platinum by selling copies to Select and NME readers alone. Then Definitely Maybe became Britain’s biggest-selling debut album ever and we were off to the races. Like the first drink or (to cite the quintessential 90s intoxicant) line of cocaine of the evening, the first blast of success was exhilarating. “It’s the thing that pop music is sporadically supposed to do: make you lose your head a little bit and get caught up in a party,” says Maconie.

To anyone who has misgivings about Britpop, Oasis are the prime culprits. Who killed indie music as a thorny countercultural force? It was the Gallagher brothers, in the stadium, with the Union Jack guitar.

“There were a moody Beatles covers band without any of the subtlety,” says Deller. “We were hypnotised, brainwashed. The legacy of Oasis is appalling, isn’t it? It’s like a wasteland, like a nuclear bomb went off.”

In his forthcoming book on Definitely Maybe, however, the writer Alex Niven argues that, whatever came later, Oasis’s debut was fresher, more diverse and more emotionally ambiguous than its critics claim.

“It’s Janus-faced: wildly optimistic but with a vein of melancholy and tragedy,” says Niven. “All those lyrics about sliding away and fading away. Oasis songs are poignant because they embody arrogance and triumph simultaneously with the sense that we’re losing what makes us soulful.”

For much of 1994, Britpop offered fans a novel sense of sharing an exciting cultural moment. But the wave that the bands were riding was about to become a tsunami, especially once this inchoate generation of bands was given a catchy name.

“Brit is an ugly word,” says Deller. “It’s quite unusual for a music movement to have a country within its name. It’s not Britpunk. It’s not Britrave. It’s OK to love your country but that slips very quickly into something that’s not OK. Nigel Farage is Britpop in a way, like a racist Oasis. He’s been built up as this rebel and the press are reluctant to knock him down because he’s such good copy. Britpop was something the media created and then couldn’t control.”

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In December 1996, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, famously warned that the wild excitement gripping the US stock market might be unwise and unsustainable: “irrational exuberance”.

Greenspan’s resonant phrase applies perfectly to Britpop in 1995. Previously level-headed critics became gushing cheerleaders, leading to the bonfire of critical judgement that greeted Be Here Now. A&R men spent money like drunken sailors on anyone who looked right, whether Camden scenesters (Menswe@r, Powder) or Noelrock geezers (Heavy Stereo, Northern Uproar). The sudden demand for great young British bands so far outstripped supply that more pedestrian talents made up the numbers.

“There were some really terrible bands that shouldn’t have got anywhere near a record deal,” says Luke Haines. “All judgement had gone. If it had a Union Jack badge and an Adidas top then they were going to sign it. It was astonishing, really.”

In its defence, the music industry became swept up in the convergence of larger forces that militated against the scepticism about success that Kurt Cobain had brought to grunge. The economy was booming. Loaded magazine revived laddism with an ironic wink. Damien Hirst became the Young British Artists’ very own rock star. Euro 96 took place in London amid talk of the spirit of ’66. Danny Boyle brought a brash new energy to British cinema. Dance music entered the era of superclubs and festival headliners. And of course there was Tony Blair, anointed slayer of the knackered Tory dragon. Even the weather seemed to be on Britain’s side, making the summer of 1995 the hottest since 1976.

Like a stock-market bubble, it all created the powerful delusion that Britain could have it all: the country could be wealthier, happier, more creative and more progressive. Echoes of Swinging London were outweighed by a sense that nostalgia was unnecessary because so much was going on now. It really, really, really could happen.

With that, however, came an unhealthy obsession with winning, as if music were a sport rather than an artform: the NME even introduced a fantasy football league for bands. When Blur and Oasis competed for the number one in August 1995 with their most vacuously self-parodic singles yet, it was more about marketing, ego and hysteria than music. “It was ‘our’ music but it was being done wrong,” says Bob Stanley. “There wasn’t anywhere it could go after that without a change in direction.”

“It was really about capitalism,” says Haines. “Your worth was measured in commercial success and nothing else. It knocked out all the eccentricity in British music, with the exception of Pulp. It wasn’t necessarily ruthless ambition, it was ruthless conformity. Britpop was the ultimate conformist away day.”

Even Stuart Maconie, Blur’s friend and biographer, was dismayed. “I suddenly thought, this isn’t quirky or outsider. Once you stop being the underdog and you get the upper hand, it’s become something very different — almost the opposite of what it was originally meant to be. It led to Knebworth, which is either the high watermark or the Nuremburg rally of Britpop.”

Oasis’s Knebworth shows in August 1996 were the zenith of irrational exuberance and the endgame of alternative music’s populist experiment. Knebworth meant a crowd so uninterested in music that it ignored support bands as strong as the Manics and the Chemical Brothers. It meant one reviewer shelving his critical qualms with the very Britpop line, “Who cares when it feels this good?” It meant Noel shouting madly, “This is history! Right here, right now!” Why wouldn’t he then make an album as unhinged as Be Here Now? And who could have stopped him? No wonder the likes of Blur, Pulp, Supergrass, Elastica and the Boo Radleys were already uneasy and keen to move on.

The more hyperbolic anti-Britpop screeds blame it for social and political changes that are beyond pop music’s powers — as Bob Stanley drily notes, “Shed Seven aren’t to blame for the Iraq war” — but some parallels between music and politics are inescapable. Feminism and other left-wing causes once vital to indie music faded from the conversation, replaced by gung-ho escapism.

“All the earnest and thoughtful legacies of the 80s were gleefully thrown out of the window,” says Rhian E Jones. “I can understand why you might find it liberating: Do we all have to care so much? Let’s just enjoy it for a little while. But sexism was now either not acknowledged or even applauded. As a woman I felt uncomfortable. I think Britpop was a symptom and reflection of a particular ailment of the 90s rather than a cause.”

On that gloomy note it’s time to ask: What did Britpop ever do for us? For one thing, the rising tide produced hits for older artists, from the Charlatans and Shaun Ryder to Paul Weller and Edwyn Collins. Julian Cope even presented Top of the Pops one week. Dance music in all its forms continued to amaze and sometimes overlap: even Noel made records with Goldie and the Chemical Brothers.

Women (notably Elastica and Kenickie) were prominent in guitar music like never before and working-class artists like never since: Pulp and the Manics both went to number two with angry, class-conscious anthems. “It was the last time I was able to look at popular culture and see some reflection of my own identity,” says Jones. “We seem to have lost the idea that to be working class is an incredibly subtle, nuanced, heterogenous experience.”

Let’s also remember the veins of darkness and ambivalence in Blur, Pulp and Oasis’s more thoughtful moments. As a frustrated Albarn said at the time, “It annoys me when we’re accused of having this nostalgic romance with a mythical lost Britain. Where are these songs about how great the country is? Nearly every one is tempered with cynicism and aggression.” Of course, that’s easily obscured when you’re larking around with Jo Guest.

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If Britpop was a party then it was bound to end with a hangover, but why are so many people still feeling sore in 2014? Perhaps it’s remorse over believing that the outsiders could change the mainstream without the mainstream changing them. Nothing is more embarrassing in retrospect than false optimism.

“The relief and triumphalism were understandable,” says Jones. “It seemed as if indie was about to escape its ghetto. That tied in with the idea that Labour could escape its ghetto after years of Tory government. But the promised subversion of a Labour victory was quickly dispelled, in the same way that Oasis and Blur at number one didn’t shepherd us into a promised land. It just led to formulaic blandness in both music and politics. Everything that made it worthwhile getting into the mainstream was sacrificed along the way.”

Alex Niven suggests that Britpop’s legacy is so bothersome because it promised so much. “The potential was that we could have a different kind of Britain defined by modernist art, pop music, football, moderate left politics. Contrast those values with the clichés of Britishness that have returned over the last 10 years: the stately homes, Barbour jackets, Mumford & Sons version. That was what was at stake in the 90s. The lasting damage of Britpop is the death of that dream.”

Stuart Maconie believes that Britpop’s friends and foes alike are still hung up on it because, in an internet-fragmented culture, no alternative music since has matched it for drama, clout and ubiquity. “Britpop was the last great scene. We’re probably not going to see anything like it again, for good or ill. If you think pop music’s job is to get in everybody’s face and change the cultural landscape of the country, then it was a huge success.”

Last year, Noel Gallagher looked back on his flirtation with New Labour: “Call me naive but I felt something – I’m not quite sure what it was, but I felt it all the same.” That could serve as Britpop’s epitaph. For all its excesses and disappointments, it felt like a genuine upheaval. There are worse sins than naiveté.

Even Luke Haines thinks it might be time for Britpop’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to stand down. “Jesus Christ, it’s only Britpop,” he says, laughing. “It’s not worth flagellating yourself over.”

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