by Bob Stanley
Suede’s breakthrough in 1992 was the first major indicator that, beyond thrill-seeking journalists, there was an appetite for a new patriotism. They hit national consciousness when they appeared on the cover of the April 21st issue of Melody Maker, under the headline ‘Suede: The Best New Band in Britain’: in 1992 the music press – even second-stringer Melody Maker – held such sway that this virtually guaranteed success. Their first three singles – ‘The Drowners’, ‘Metal Mickey’, ‘Animal Nitrate’ – were louche and lithe, clean and classy where post-dance pop had been distinctly unstylish. There were no cyber-dayglo graphics, no handwritten titles, no pirate flags or smiley faces or dreadlocks in sight. Suede’s artwork and aesthetic was simple, and that suddenly seemed very sexy. Brett Anderson’s vocal inspiration appeared to come from one record – Elton John’s version of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Their musical and lyrical influences were equally straight-forward and pure: Bowie and the Smiths. That was it. Anderson came out with a line that could have been a composite of Morrissey and Bowie quotes – that he was ‘a bisexual who has never had a homosexual experience’3 – and by now they were set for stardom.
How could this have happened? How did Suede get everyone, even Mark E. Smith, who had never sung the praises of anyone apart from M. R. James, to talk about them as the ‘best new band in Britain’? One reason is that the competition was so poor. The early nineties had been an embarrassment for British guitar bands, a lull in proceedings after Madchester had allowed a bunch of scrappy indie groups (Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Pop Will Eat Itself, the Senseless Things and the Wonder Stuff) to become Top 40 fixtures. They shared an unwashed look and a sneering mix of contempt for pop culture and ‘disco’.4 The Wonder Stuff’s Miles Hunt told riot-grrrl-inspired sulk queens Shampoo that ‘girls don’t belong in studios’, while Carter’s Fruitbat rugby-tackled children’s TV presenter Phillip Schofield at the 1991 Smash Hits awards. These acts were small-time, mean-spirited and distinctly lacking in glamour.
Secondly, the music press suddenly had a need for a consensus group like Suede to justify their existence. According to sales reports from the high streets, computer games were fast gaining ground on music as the new dominant pop culture. Comics (especially Deadline, featuring Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl) and even piercings and tattoos seemed to be generating more interest and press coverage than pop music. As British indie had begun to congeal, there had been a simultaneous boom in stand-up comedians: Rob Newman and David Baddiel became bigger on the student circuit than almost any pop group; the Wonder Stuff scored a number one covering Tommy Roe’s ‘Dizzy’, but only with assistance from comedian Vic Reeves. ‘Comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll’ quickly became a cliché.
Thirdly, despite winning the 1992 election, John Major’s Conservative government was now in its death throes. The new optimism abroad in Britain related to neither the grunge acts nor the Wonder Stuff’s grubby ilk. Damien Hirst’s shark, the tart Scottish movie Trainspotting and Brett Anderson’s half-unbuttoned acrylic blouse all seemed peculiarly British and irreverent. Once the war was won, once Britpop ruled the charts and Blair was in power, this would curdle and become jingoistic arrogance. But not just yet.
In the summer of 1992, while Morrissey was being derided by the NME for playing in Finsbury Park draped in a Union Jack, Brett Anderson was telling the same paper that ‘all great British pop artists from the Beatles to the Fall have celebrated Britain in some way. I’m not remotely attracted by New York. I mean, all the streets are laid out in a grid. Doesn’t that say everything? In Britain it takes this convoluted arcane knowledge to get from one bus stop to the next.’ Here was an effete group, unashamedly borrowing from past pop heroes, prepared to turn their back on the States. By February ’93, at the height of grunge, their third single, ‘Animal Nitrate’, went Top 10. They were invited to play at the Brits, alongside George Michael, Genesis and Annie Lennox, intruders at the corporate-rock ball.
Anderson’s muses may have been oblivious5 but in the spring of ’93 came the first acknowledgement that this nameless nascent scene was going overground. Select published a ‘Yanks go home’ issue, with Suede on the cover alongside other ur-Britpop acts Denim, Saint Etienne, Pulp and the Auteurs. Suede’s debut became the fastest-selling album in almost ten years.
Blur were similarly in thrall to Bowie but also referenced Syd Barrettera Pink Floyd, Canterbury hippie loon Kevin Ayers and American eighties slacker indie. Tying this up and underpinning it with a baggy beat, they had scored a Top 10 hit with their second single, ‘There’s No Other Way’, in ’91. Three of them were foppish lookers and they quickly found their way into Smash Hits as indie pin-ups. At the tail end of ’93, though, on returning from an arduous and thankless tour of the US, they were horrified to find Suede – ‘these little pricks from UCL’, as bassist Alex James called them – all over Britain’s magazine covers.
If Suede’s naked influences implicitly suggested they thought things were better in the past, Blur came right out and screamed it. They had faded badly after ‘There’s No Other Way’ and spent 1992 re inventing themselves with a Suede-like sound for their second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish. It was loaded with social observations on a Britain that barely existed any more. Lead single ‘For Tomorrow’ ransacked Bowie’s back catalogue – specifically ‘Starman’ and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ – while the Kinks-like chorus showed that they knew how to write anthemic singa longs. It stalled at number twenty-eight in May ’93 but left a stronger impression, and the music press detected more new heroes. Damon Albarn may have won Brett Anderson’s girlfriend, but he wasn’t about to let him have the cover of the NME all to himself. Blur chucked out the baggy gear and reacquainted themselves with the wardrobe of their early teens: the moptops remained but they now sported suit jackets and Fred Perry polo shirts, and looked every bit the 1980 suburban mod.
If Blur had intentionally avoided mentioning clubbing, raving, glow sticks or the declining quality of MDMA on Modern Life Is Rubbish, they would make up for it with ‘Girls and Boys’ in ’94. Feeling the weight of indie fans straying back from the pulse of house to the scratchy guitars of indie, Blur felt they were on safe ground mocking young clubbers and sun-seekers; it wasn’t too much of a stretch to see it as an attack on the working classes, who by now made up the majority of any rave crowd. The catty lyric was outweighed by a tremendous, club-friendly production that recalled early Duran Duran – it entered the chart at number five and officially announced their re-emergence. The parent album to ‘Girls and Boys’, Parklife, combined du jour French wispiness (‘To the End’, no. 16 ’94) and the breezy thuggishness of the title track (no. 10 ’94), which featured a guest vocal from Phil Daniels, a star of Quadrophenia and a hero to 1979’s mod revivalists. Parklife was as unavoidable in 1994 Britain as Thriller had been ten years earlier; in the States, though, it meant as little as Slade had done in 1973. It was a very localised thrill.6
The intensity of Britpop spiked in 1994 with the arrival of Elastica, formed by Justine Frischmann after she was booted out of Suede. They were smart, and very calculated, to the point where they were rather hard to love. Not content to just have a famous boyfriend, singer Frischmann had now teamed up with the perfect Britpop face, a blonde moppet called Donna Matthews, and their appropriation of post-punk spikiness was several years ahead of the pack. Brevity and archness were their stock in trade; folly and sweetness were not for Elastica. Drummer Justin Welch’s belched percussion throughout ‘Line Up’ on their Top of the Pops debut in February ’94 predicted the art-school sniggering of the late-nineties Hoxton scene, and took Blur’s sneers to a colder level. All of their songs seemed heavily indebted to the late seventies, and debut single ‘Line Up’ was so close to Wire’s ‘I Am the Fly’ that they were forced to settle out of court. ‘Waking Up’ bore a strong resemblance to the Stranglers’ ‘No More Heroes’. No one’s enthusiasm was dampened. ‘This is happening with our permission,’ wrote Paul Lester, reviewing Sued
e in ’94. ‘We wanted it to happen. We virtually willed it to happen. But are Suede really the only thing happening in pop right now? Of course they’re bloody not, but it feels good to pretend we’re all united by a single cause.’ He wasn’t alone in feeling this enthusiastic. Elastica’s album went straight in at number one and became the fastest-selling British debut of all time.
They are quarrelsome, clannishly protective and socially rumbustious … All have fuelled, usually in very direct ways, the articulation and transformation of imagery drawn from daily, urban life – a bed, a room, a hospital door, sport, poverty, rural dreams, television, food and death.
Richard Shone, Sensation catalogue
Pulp, who had been around since the early eighties, became the defining Britpop group and Jarvis Cocker its enduring star. After attending Saint Martins art school at the turn of the nineties, he had begun to write acute working-class observational pieces; unlike Blur, these all seemed to be based on first-hand experience. Sex and class were Cocker’s specialities. ‘Common People’ – a number-two hit in June ’95 – aimed its sights on both and became an anthem for the dispossessed, the outsiders; a poor boy/rich girl yarn, it sounded strikingly reminiscent of the first meeting of Justine Frischmann and Brett Anderson.
Intriguingly, Pulp were the only successful Britpop group to incorporate electronics, channelling early Roxy Music and getting Motiv 8 to remix ‘Common People’. They didn’t give the impression that they thought modern life – the world outside Britpop – was rubbish at all. ‘Common People’ soared and dipped like a rave tune, and ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’ (also no. 2 ’95) addressed an issue familiar to a large section of nineties British youth – that of being in a field, somewhere off the M25, with thousands of other people. Alone among their peers, they wrote about rave culture: ‘At four o’clock the normal world seems very, very, very far away.’
Where had this sudden appetite for new British guitar bands come from? Matthew Bannister’s appointment as head of Radio 1 in late ’93 was the point at which Britpop was allowed to become part of the mainstream. Out went DJs like the self-named ‘Hairy Cornflake’, Dave Lee Travis, who had been there since the sixties; out went Simon Bates’s gloopy mid-morning slot ‘Our Tune’; in came the NME’s most hardline indie fan, Steve Lamacq, and Jo Whiley’s Evening Session. In the late eighties the Smiths had been Britain’s most successful indie act, Top 20 regulars, but found themselves sidelined as ‘specialist’ by Radio 1. In 1993 the likes of Elastica and Oasis – before they had even officially released a single – were suddenly on the playlist.
Suede, Blur and Elastica had pillaged the past, turned forty years of British pop culture into a theme park. In itself, this was no bad thing. This essentially retrogressive stance had other, rather unforeseeable consequences, in that it allowed for some overdue reassessments of pop’s past: Dusty Springfield was hailed as the greatest female British singer, bar none; the Beatles’ Revolver was deemed a better album than Sgt Pepper; the Kinks were elevated to the same level of critical respect as the Beatles, the Stones and the Who; even British folk rock was allowed to creep out from under its mossy stone, as Sandy Denny and Nick Drake were beatified. Blur and Oasis played at a Beatles/Stones rivalry and successfully divided the country. Top of the Pops was reborn under the directorship of Ric Blaxill, who attempted to take it back to its seventies glam peak by including new acts who hadn’t yet charted; in one case – ‘Kandy Pop’ by minor Scottish indie cutesters Bis – a self-released single which wasn’t yet in the shops made it onto the show. This was a peculiarly subjective take on Top of the Pops, but it all seemed for the best. Pop was front-page news; even at the height of Beatlemania it hadn’t reached such levels of media excitement.
The problem with the past as a theme park was that the biggest attraction, clearly, were the Beatles. There had been an unspoken agreement, even in the ungentlemanly world of Britpop, that the Beatles were out of bounds. To use them as a direct influence was tantamount to cheating. Oasis appeared with ‘Columbia’, a promo twelve-inch that made it onto the Radio 1 playlist in late ’93; a few months later came the blisteringly loud ‘Supersonic’ (UK no. 31 ’94); by Christmas ’94 they were number three with ‘Whatever’, a festive rewrite of ‘All You Need Is Love’ with a touch of ‘I Am the Walrus’. With the genie out of the bottle, Britpop’s momentum began to slow.
Damon Albarn had come from an art-school background. His dad had set up a design consultancy and a gallery at 26 Kingly Street in the sixties. He had grown up with African field recordings. Liam and Noel Gallagher were from the working-class Manchester suburb of Burnage; the only cultural reference point for the Gallaghers was Sifters record shop. They had no airs and graces, and no schooling in cool. Noel Gallagher claimed that the three most important albums ever made were the Beatles’ red and blue albums and Pink Floyd’s The Wall – no one from Suede or Blur would have made the gauche mistake of citing two compilations and an album from the least hip end of Floyd’s career.
This unfettered everyday blokeishness helped Oasis become the biggest-selling Britpop act of all. ‘Never mind the bollocks, here’s the Sex Beatles,’ said The Face in 1993. Will Self described their sound as the ‘wall of lager’. There was no Bowie, Smiths or Syd Barrett in the sound of Oasis; the group they were most reminiscent of was Slade – loud, raucous, goodtime music. Liam Gallagher had far and away the strongest voice in Britpop, as rough and raging as John Lennon on ‘Twist and Shout’, with rounded yowling Mancunian vowels that turned ‘sunshine’ into ‘soon-shee-yine’. Noel Gallagher, like Marc Bolan before him, had the knack of rewriting his favourite riffs and creating something new and irresistible: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’. And, like Bolan, his ego quickly got the better of him.
In 1996 they played to two hundred and fifty thousand people at Knebworth – over ten times that number had applied for tickets. Backstage, Noel said, ‘Yeah, we are bigger than the Beatles. We are the biggest band in Britain of all time.’ With this mind state he wrote the songs for third album Be Here Now, an unlistenable collection – too long, too loud, too few decent tunes – that came out in 1997. Its failings were left unchallenged by the press, who hugely overcompensated for backing Blur in the 1995 chart war and giving Oasis’s second album, the fine (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, mediocre reviews.
Oasis had stratospheric fame, eight number-one singles (two more than Slade, six more than Blur) – and they blew it. It was a classic working-class tale, rags to riches and back again, previously told by pools winner Viv Nicholson in Spend, Spend, Spend and by the Bay City Rollers in the seventies. The Gallaghers were luckier than the Bay City Rollers – they didn’t end up broke and bitter – but their legacy was discoloured after Morning Glory (which included ‘Some Might Say’, ‘Wonderwall’, ‘Champagne Supernova’ and ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’) by a series of records that trod the same ground to ever-dwindling effect. By the time of their final album, Dig Out Your Soul, there was no phrase – lyrically or musically – that wasn’t directly taken from the Beatles; it was as if they had become an obsessive, miniaturist art project.
Oasis represented Britpop’s limitations and its folly. Noel revealed in a Mojo interview how a fan had given him a CD of sixties baroque pop group the Left Banke, and that – to his surprise – he loved it. Would it be an influence on the next Oasis album, asked the journalist? ‘Nah. The idea of [rhythm guitarist] Bonehead dressed in a cravat and a frilly shirt playing a harpsichord doesn’t do it for me.’ He talked about his love of the Bee Gees: ‘In my book they’re right up there with the Beatles in terms of how I learned to like music. But only the first few albums. Once they get into disco and all that fucking nonsense, it’s music for women.’ In 1995 Noel had moved into a house in Belsize Park and renamed it Supernova Heights. He had a Union Jack hot tub fitted; it was so large that by the time the tub was full, the water had gone tepid.
At the start of the decade the Man
ic Street Preachers had been the only credible post-grunge UK rock group, peaking first with the anti-capitalist AOR of ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ (UK no. 17 ’92), based on the chords to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’, and again with their third album, The Holy Bible in ’94. Released in the same month as Portishead’s Dummy, it was equally claustrophobic – Richey Edwards’s lyrics mixed references to the Balkan wars (‘I am an architect, they call me a butcher’), self-harming and anorexia. He disappeared soon after it was released and was never seen again.
Understandably there was a lot of goodwill behind their next single, the orchestrated rock ballad ‘A Design for Life’ (UK no. 2 ’96). It turned out to be an early sign that things had gone awry. The most influential singles of 1997 weren’t by Blur (‘Beetlebum’, ‘Song 2’) or Oasis (‘D’You Know What I Mean’, ‘Stand by Me’) but by Wigan band the Verve: ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ (UK no. 2 ’97) and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ (UK no. 1 ’97) were grandiose and sluggish, as if the plug had been pulled on the scene’s vim and vigour. For the rest of the nineties, ‘A Design for Life’ and the Verve’s anguished rock ballads provided British rock’s rough template, and drear quickly took hold. ‘Dad rock’ was coined as a new genre name – youthful playfulness was jettisoned. The arrival of the surly Welsh act Stereophonics in ’97 and the blues-based Gomez in ’98 only confirmed this fear. The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ (UK no. 1 ’98) was their commercial high and creative low, so slow and big and dull, seemingly drained of any enthusiasm for the actual making of music. The legacy of dad rock was a new bedsit music, the doyens of which were Radiohead, whose singer, Thom Yorke, sang as if he was in the foetal position. In turn they led to Travis (key song title: ‘Why Does It Always Rain on Me’) and the world-swallowing success of Coldplay.
