Britpop Buffs
Just as there are war buffs who drone on about the war, I wonder if we will ever see Britpop buffs reminiscing about the exploits of Blur, Suede, Pulp, Oasis et al. I remember going to the Imperial War Museum as a student and being told by the archivist there that they have to reject hundreds of war diaries and memoirs every year because they were already overwhelmed by them. Perhaps the same thing will happen to Britpop — with the publication of biographies by Luke Haines, Alex James, David Barnett, and John Harris the shelves are filling up. So here are some brief, inaccurate and unrepresentative reminiscences of the era.
In the summer of 1993, whilst Luke Haines was being feted by the music press, I was 14 years old and getting into music for the first time. I had taped songs from the top 40 rundown on Sundays, but I had no sense of music as being important; it certainly wasn’t as engaging as Atari, Sega, and Nintendo.
That August I went to a new school where, crucially, you didn’t have to wear uniform. Suddenly, your music preferences were everywhere — on peoples T-shirts, in their hair cuts, even in the way they stood. Without any questioning, we all slotted into our groups: townies had their vapid dance music, ravers had their hardcore basslines, metallers their greasy long hair and headbanging, and the alternative crowd had slightly shorter hair and earnestness. I leaned towards the latter and, that year, listened to things like Nirvana, Cypress Hill, Pearl Jam, The Lemonheads, and The Wonderstuff.
By 1994, I had learnt how to play the guitar and started going to band practices where we played cover versions of any song that had four chords or less. What we discovered was that if you knew the tablature to Lithium by Nirvana then you could also play Married with Children by Oasis. Until I started playing in a band, the bubble the music press meant nothing to me, then I started thinking about the competition that stood between us and fame.
We ignored the success of Blur, Pulp, and Oasis who were all too well-established and focused on the later, more decadent phase of Britpop. Bands like David Devant and his Spirit Wife, Gretschen Hofner, Jack, Nilon Bombers, The Karelia, and Bennett — these represent were the apotheosis of Britpop for me. A time when it seemed that any band could get a record deal. But not, alas, mine.
By the time I left Leicester in September 1997 to go to Sheffield (home of Speedy and Baby Bird), Labour were in power and Oasis had released the dreadful Be Here Now. The new generation of bands celebrated in the weeklies — Bis, Kenickie, Dweeb, Tiger –were even more slight than the last and everyone had realised that it was time to move on. My dreams of Britpop stardom were snuffed out. The End.