Can Blur really be cool again? Inside the strange rebirth of Britpop
Britpop was once seen as a flag-waving embarrassment partially responsible for ushering in Brexit. Now, decades on, the genre is fashionable again – or at the very least, redolent of simpler, better days. Ed Power investigates
A few years ago, you’d have struggled to find someone with a kind word to say about Britpop. “Patronising, jingoistic and crass,” reckoned Suede’s Brett Anderson. “Grave-robbing necrophilia,” lamented writer Simon Reynolds. “Just awful,” said Blur’s own Graham Coxon.
You wonder how Coxon feels today as Blur follow a nostalgia-soaked two-hander at Wembley in early July by claiming their seventh No 1 this week with new album The Ballad of Darren. That Wembley triumph – variously heralded as “glorious” and “momentous” – coincided with the acclaimed return of Pulp, led by Britpop’s resident eccentric professor Jarvis Cocker. Their comeback shows have been widely praised, too. The New Statesman credited Jarvis and company with “launching the second summer of Britpop”. The NME described Pulp’s first tour in a decade as “a reunion you never wanted to end”.
Next month, meanwhile, Liam Gallagher releases a live LP culled from the two nights he played at Knebworth last year – an event that consciously referenced the peak Britpop moment of Oasis storming the same venue in 1996. For a chapter of British cultural history long shunned as naff and retrograde and blighted by a streak of “mockney” class tourism, Britpop has recently been showing surprising signs of life. The “oi’s” have it. Its resurgence is a feat of unprecedented musical rehabilitation. Until recently, Britpop was seen by many as having paved the way for Brexit in its celebration of British (ie English) exceptionalism and presentation of cultural frippery – fish’n’chips, a cuppa on a Formica table, pints at the dog track – as sacred expressions of a unique British (ie English) identity. Once you took back control of your pop music, how long before you tried to do likewise with your politics?
Today, though, even Britpop’s also-rans are enjoying a resurgence. Shed Seven (the Battlestar Galactica to Oasis’s Star Wars), have all sold almost the entirety of their October tour. The Boo Radleys have a new LP out, Eight, and in September will release a deluxe, three-disc edition of their 1993 masterpiece Giant Steps. Sleeper’s 2019 comeback record, The Modern Age, was a top 20 hit. To say this is a turn-up for books would be an understatement. Few people can agree on anything nowadays but up until this year – or even just a few months ago – the consensus was that even if Britpop left us with some good tunes, it was, in its totality, a flag-waving embarrassment: the rock’n’roll equivalent of those tiny union jacks waggled about on the final night of the Proms.
It was seen as sexist too. In his 2022 memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster! Coxon recalled “clashing heavily with the Britpop thing” when required to participate in the video for Blur’s 1995 track “Country House”, a cheerily charmless promo featuring models Sara Stockbridge and Vanessa Upton and Page Three model Jo Guest. “It made me angry because here I was, finally in a band, and the experience seemed to be getting cheapened by Page Three-type imagery, a revival of sexism and football hooliganism.” Coxon may have cringed, but he hasn’t disavowed “Country House”. The bawdy chugger retains pride of place in Blur’s new set, as they come together for the first time in seven years. At Wembley, it prompted a mass singalong. A song over which even members of Blur were conflicted has been reborn as a musical national treasure: a literal terrace anthem.
How far we have travelled. As recently as 2018, commentators were tracing a direct line between Blur cracking the charts in the mid-1990s and Boris Johnson gaining the keys to Downing Street. “Would it be uncharitable of me to begin this review by stating Britpop is partly to blame for the s*** show of corruption, incompetence and lies that is Brexit,” wrote music writer Jon Savage in his review of the Merrie Land album by Damon Albarn’s the Good, the Bad & the Queen project. Merrie Land was Albarn’s appalled response to Brexit (“Are we not green and pleasant?/we are not either of those,” he lamented on the title track).
Savage wondered if the musician quite appreciated the part he played in the great national act of economic immolation. He wrote of “all those self-regarding white kids forming bands and trying to reinvent The Kinks” and suggested they had “laid the emotional and cultural ground for all those emotional appeals to an idea of England that never existed, enabling the Conservative party to turn an internal split into an act of national self-harm.” Savage’s opinion was vehemently articulated – but not unusual. “Jingoism, proud idiocy and most of all giggly sexism became entirely acceptable,” is how Britpop was described by author Owen Hatherley in Uncommon, his 2011 mediation on Pulp.
Likewise regarded as a low point was the notorious June 1997 Downing Street get-together between Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher. An “effective castration” went one description of the meeting, in a 1999 lament for Britpop published in the Independent under the headline “It’s Over (Definitely Maybe)”. “If rock stars were now friends of the government,” went the piece, “how could they continue to be truly exciting?”
Most vicious of all in his diagnosis of Britpop was Suede’s Brett Anderson. He’d been appalled to find himself plastered all over Select magazine’s notorious April 1993 “Yanks Go Home” splash – an issue widely perceived as the moment Britpop went over the top, bayonets gleaming. In its interview with Suede, the magazine heralded the group as “spearheading a burgeoning British movement that…waggles its arse at Uncle Sam”. Anderson wasn’t having it. “Historically you can see the first Suede album as also the first Britpop album,” he previously told me. “We initiated it. And I was kind of offered this thing – ‘Do you want to wave a union jack and pretend to be this boring Carry On… figure, going on about corduroy trousers and fish and chips and stuff like that?’ That never appealed to me.”
With the passage of time and new generations coming to this music, that spat between Oasis and Blur has become irrelevant – that is if they even know about it
Anderson was speaking in 2011 when Suede were in the process of reforming. He has never wavered in his hostility to Britpop. What’s extraordinary is how the return of Blur and Pulp and their fellow 1990s survivors has seen the broader antipathy melt away. “Oh Blur. For 30 years you’ve been the best,” wrote author Caitlin Moran from Wembley – notwithstanding her previous proclamations that “Britpop was dead”. “First of all, everything looks better through the lens of nostalgia,” says Mark Mulligan, managing director of MIDiA Research, an entertainment industry analytics company. “People always remember the good stuff and forget the bad.” But other factors are at play, too. The Britpop Generation are now at the age their parents were in the 1990s (perhaps even a bit older). Nostalgia for a lost youth has been passed down from Boomers to Gen X.
There is also, says Mulligan, a sense of Britpop and 1990s music, in general, representing a golden era before streaming. “There’s a certain amount of people looking back to the 1990s and thinking, ‘Well, this feels like a freer musical time,’” he explains. “Even though, at the time, a lot of people saw Britpop was a very manufactured, big record label attempt to harness what had previously been the indie music scene. It felt less driven by business, more driven by music. That’s how it’s seen. You’re seeing this a lot with young consumers: Gen Z and the younger end of millennials.”
One reason people soured on Britpop was because of the overkill of the Blur v Oasis rivalry, which descended into name-calling and tribalism, says Daniel Rachel, author of Don’t Look Back in Anger: The Rise and Fall of Cool Britannia (2019) and Oasis: Knebworth (2021). Thirty years later, that aura of nastiness is forgotten. What endures is the music. “The backlash grew out of the Blur and Oasis single battle in the autumn of ’95. That was more to do with the spat between the Gallaghers and members of Blur,” he says. “That was then taken on by oppositional fans of those groups. It became silly: it originated from the silly season of August, when parliament was in recess. There was no substance to that; it was real sniping. With the passage of time and new generations coming to this music that spat has become irrelevant if they even know about it. What you instead get is the joyfulness of the songs and of the front people.”
There is also the fact that, unlike many musical movements, Britpop was optimistic and celebratory. “Punk was a nihilistic movement. Britpop was more like disco – something you can find pleasure in and want to celebrate,” says Rachel. “Particularly coming out of lockdown and a stark political time, people want something that they can celebrate… In many ways that was Britpop.” Compared to modern pop, Britpop had a striking degree of self-assurance, adds Professor Gwen Bouvier, of Shanghai International Studies University, who has written about the genre. It engaged with ideas around identity and class confidently and intelligently. “What set [Britpop artists] apart then, may be the attraction now,” she says. “The music was positive and optimistic, and rooted in authenticity, rooted to a place. They were real people, some with a keen interest and background in the arts – such as Pulp and Blur. So, the songs would be ironic and clever. “Parklife”, “Common People”, “Disco 2000” [took] a fun look at the pathos of the lives of ordinary people. And above all it’s ‘real music’ – they are not empty pop, but rather connect to ideas about identity.”
Post-Brexit, Britpop’s obsession with Britishness may have given it fresh relevance too. Decoupled from Europe and cut adrift by America, Brits are feeling slightly at sea and wondering where they fit in. Blur and the Gallaghers don’t have the answers. But they do seem interested in the question of what happens when tradition intersects with modernity: that is, after all, the essence of their music. “This could be linked to searching for identity following the realities of Brexit setting in,” says Bouvier.
Britpop was itself steeped in nostalgia, of course. Oasis covered The Beatles; Blur channelled The Kinks. As a cultural phenomenon, it had one foot in the 1990s, the other in the 1960s. That may be why Britpop nostalgia is so potent. “Britpop itself was very much a looking back, reflective genre. Blur and Oasis were taking from different ends of the musical spectrum but were looking back at bands like The Kinks, Status Quo, The Beatles,” says Mulligan. “You could argue that what we’re talking about here is a cultural line connecting the 1960s to the modern day.”
Ultimately, he suggests, Britpop harks back not to a specific moment in the 1990s but to a more general yearning for the past. In the turmoil of a post-Covid world, there is perhaps comfort in seeing Damon Albarn jog around the stage at Wembley, belting out “Parklike”. It reminds us of simpler times, better times – all the while, implicitly promising that if we sing loudly and wish hard enough, those times might come again.
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