An invented scene? A derivative blind alley? A catch-all for any mid-90s UK band with guitars? Britpop was something, yet no two people agree exactly what. Michael Stephens revisits “the last big movement in alternative music” to find some songs that will live forever and other tunes not good enough…
Scuttle back to April 1992, and Blur are blue. Despite the UK No.2 success of their ‘baggy-lite’ debut LP, Leisure, the foursome find out their first (now departed) manager Michael Collins had racked up tax debts of £60,000. Blur are also in hock to US label SBK, who had spent close to $1m trying (unsuccessfully) to break them in the United States. They need to tour, and hopefully sell a lot of T-shirts, too. Traversing the huge nation over 44 dates, the quartet seem constantly drunk and are enjoying nothing of magic America. By his own admission, frontman Damon Albarn becomes so homesick, he shuts himself in his hotel room and listens obsessively to The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset every night. Soon, he’s writing songs that avow his love for home.
Go forward a year to April 1993, and the now-defunct Select magazine are pinning hopes on fast-rising glammy London-based quartet Suede. Under a headline of ‘Yanks Go Home’ and with singer Brett Anderson superimposed (without his knowledge) over a Union flag, the mag devotes 12 pages to Suede, Pulp, St Etienne, Denim and The Auteurs. Blur aren’t mentioned. Hey, no rock hack can claim they always get it all right.
Go forward another year, April 1994, and Oasis release debut single Supersonic. Definitely Maybe follows in August.
On paper, and even in reality, these bands had little in common. Yes, they were retro, markedly English guitar groups. But they were not a ‘mutual appreciation society’. There was antagonism between Anderson and Albarn over Justine Frischmann (the future Elastica frontwoman had left the former to date the latter, also exiting the band she co-founded, Suede). Pulp, from Sheffield, had formed a decade earlier and weren’t initially part of any London ‘hip’ set. Ditto Manchester’s Oasis – they were just five swaggering lads who happened to boast a songwriter touched with magpie genius. But every creative bubble can become a cauldron, if only it was a ‘movement’ you could hang a hat on. And so it was, some time between 1993 and 1994, that the word Britpop started to fly…
That USA tour changed Damon Albarn and, by the end of 1992, he was writing ver
