The rookie Noel Gallagher, with a bunch of songs he wrote whilst being a roadie with Inspiral Carpets together with his brash brother couldn’t have a clue of how successful “Definitely Maybe” was going to be. Oasis and Blur, the two heavyweight contenders of Britpop who the media seemed to mainly concentrate upon, came from two very different places in their career. It’s all a bit vague as to when Britpop actually started and it’s pretty much a certainty that there was no cynical attempt to start a movement from any of the bands involved.
However, after the domination of primarily American music from the grunge movement in the early nineties (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden et al), the fact that there was a mainstream shift in popular taste from the US bands (which arguably ended when Kurt Cobain decided to take his own life in April 1994) to up and coming home-grown talent, such as Blur, Suede and, yes, Oasis, all appeared to offer something fresh, new and unashamedly British, all steeped in the legacy of The Beatles, The Kinks, David Bowie, The Buzzcocks and The Jam. It is not only a bit of a naff term, it seems to have a huge amount of negative connotations these days, only really representing the most popular and plastic aspect of British musical culture at the time. Firstly, I have to say that I loathe the term “Britpop”. I have read quite a few articles with interest and have been surprised by the harsh tone of some of them, especially Taylor Parkes’ enjoyable assassination, “A British Disaster: Blur’s Parklife, Britpop, Princess Di & the 1990s” for The Quietus, and they have inspired me to commit my thoughts to writing, mainly because that era of music is very close to my heart.
The truth, as always, lies somewhere in-between the two absolutes and it’s all a matter of opinion as to which end of the scale it actually rests.
It has been decreed that “Britpop” is twenty years old this year and it, therefore, is time for lots of journalists to look back and either fondly reminisce about the time when some genuinely great music, the sort of thing that exists only on the fringe these days, became mainstream or decide that it was a fake, faux-patriotic pile of claptrap that allowed lots of substandard indie bands to jump on the bandwagon.
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