I recently listened to the BBC’s audio documentary The Rise and Fall of Britpop. It told a familiar story – Britpop’s post-grunge rise, Cool Britannia, then the slide into drugs and depression. There were some good interviews, reappraising the events with modern sensibilities, but this felt like a very familiar story.
At the time Britpop started, I obsessively read the music press. I lived in an appalling new town, so NME and Melody Maker were my doorway to culture. Every week I read about new bands and records, and there was something exciting happening. Rightly or wrongly, after grunge, the British music press wanted to write more about British bands. At the time there was a boom in music, with hip-hop and dance music breaking into the indie mainstream. The small scale of the UK as compared with the US meant these scenes overlapped in interesting ways. Britpop was also tied into changes at Radio 1 and in music distribution that allowed indie music to compete against major labels.
These first stages of Britpop drew in some exciting music. Tricky released his first album Maxinquaye, and veered away from ‘trip-hop’ towards indie through his collaborations. Yes, Britpop was entered around guitar bands copying earlier music, often to a legally actionable extent (Elastica paid off Wire, and Oasis settled a number of suits). But there were other bands gaining attention. Black Grape’s fusion of rap with indie was fun and influential. The Prodigy were a huge festival band, headlining the Other Stage at Glastonbury while Oasis played the main one. The excitement in music was about more than a few guitar bands.
If you look at the end-of-year Best Albums lists in the music papers for 1995 – the year of the Battle of Britpop – they tell a very different story to the one the historians pick. In the Maker/NME best albums list for 1995, Tricky gets 1st and 2nd places respectively, with Black Grape 4th and 3rd. Blur might have won their competition with Oasis, but neither of their 1995 albums were well-regarded.
There are interesting stories to be written about 90s music. The nostalgic mass-media version of Britpop is well-recorded, and it’s a shame to see that repeated, rather than making space for some of the other bands and people who were around at the time. In its early phases, Britpop’s triumph was seeing a range of different independent bands hit the mainstream together. It was only later that mass-media simplified the story to just a few very similar bands. There are other stories to be told about Britpop.
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