90 T wo words sum up the musical Nineties: Cool Britannia. British guitar bands rediscovered their suburban roots and swaggered on stage to thrash out three-minute pop songs; the Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell sported a Union Jack dress; and pop stars were invited to Downing Street by Tony Blair. The Nineties also witnessed the UK’s best-selling single of all time, Elton John’s non-profit Candle in the Wind 1997, released to mark the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It sold 1.5 millon copies in its first week in the UK, about 10 times more than other decent number-one singles. But by the decade’s end, the only question was how to party like it was 1999 – staying at home and listening to Radiohead’s millennial OK Computer, considered by some the best album since Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, or by going out and dancing to Fatboy Slim. The choice was yours.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC
Blur and Oasis in the Battle of Britpop
Elastica’s Justine Frischmann As a PR stunt, it was inspired. Take the two British bands of the moment, Blur and Oasis, and let them release singles on the same day. Play up the idea that one lot are pretty boys from the South, the other a pair of pouty brothers from the North. Call it the “Battle of Britpopâ€. Sit back and watch the accusations fly. August 1995, when Blur and Oasis went head to head in the UK singles chart, was the high tide for Britpop — a craze for dreamy, jangly and utterly British guitar pop. Britain fell back in love with its suburban
Blur Suede’s Brett Anderson Madchester’s finest, the Stone Roses. Also jingle-jangling at the dawn of Britpop were Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets, who had a 1990 hit with This is How It Feels; while The Charlatans added a further dose of psychedelia with early songs such as Weirdo. Then down South, a string of bands began to assert their Englishness in rejection of American grunge. Suede, founded by Brett Anderson and Justine Frischmann, were a magnet to fans eager for successors to toyed with whimsical English archetypes: six-packs on a bank holiday, 2pm lie-ins and rolling on the white cliffs of Dover — perhaps, you imagined, all at the same time. Oasis, meanwhile, found inspiration in The Beatles. Their debut album Definitely Maybe featured Noel Gallagher’s lyrical reflections on dreams, aspirations and the distractions of a creative life, delivered with vocal gusto by brother Liam. But if the Gallaghers and Albarn were Britpop’s leading men, the supporting cast was led by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, whose 1995 single Common People was an irresistible hit. In the wings were the Manic Street Preachers, The Bluetones and Supergrass; while the leading lady became Louise Wener of Sleeper, with punkish pop songs such as Delicious and Statuesque. So who won the Battle of Britpop? Blur’s Country House outsold Oasis’s Roll With It by 58,000 units; but the success was shortlived as Oasis’ album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, went to number one with hit singles such as Wonderwall. If the Blur-Oasis head-to-head was the high point of Britpop, it was also the beginning of the end. With its emphasis on commercial success as well as critical, it paved the way for a return to manufactured pop. By Christmas 1997, Britpop had fizzled out and the Teletubbies were saying “Eh-ohâ€. Uh-oh.
musical traditions — from The Beatles to Bowie, The Jam to The Kinks — and reinvented them for a new generation of fans. Crucially, Britpop demonstrated that there was a market for what Eighties DJs thought of as “alternative†music — but only if you gave it airtime and exposure, as the BBC finally did in 1993 with the purge of the muchlampooned Smashie and Nicey brigade at Radio 1. The voices in the wilderness heralding Britpop’s arrival had been
Liam Gallagher of Oasis
Bowie and The Smiths. Yet as early as 1991 Frischmann, not willing to be the “girl playing guitar at the backâ€, had left to front post-punk Elastica — whose energetic first hit Stutter proved that the world would listen to two-minute guitar pop. Then Blur and Oasis crashed onto the scene. Blur — fronted by Damon Albarn, who later went out with Frischmann — had been Madchester outliers, but caught the Cool Britannia mood in 1994 with their third album, Parklife, whose signature single featured Phil Daniels and some catchy, Ray Daviesstyle lyrics. The album
OK Computer – and its legacy To make an era-defining album, they say, all you need is to capture a change in the national mood. And just as Pink Floyd caught Britain’s shift from the swinging Sixties to the meditative Seventies with The Dark Side of the Moon, so in 1997 there came an album that rode the bumpy, downhill slope from cocky Cool Britannia to premillennial angst. That album was OK Computer by Radiohead — a melodic, filmic anomaly that marked the moment when the Britpop generation grew up, got jobs, and didn’t like what they saw. The seeds of change were sown. After 1996, British guitar music increasingly moved from the Gallagher swagger to the languid, elegiac sound of bands such as Richard Ashcroft’s The Verve. So Radiohead, whose main hit to that point had been their 1992 single Creep, made their own bitter-sweet symphony — albeit more bitter than sweet. Partly recorded in an Oxfordshire shed, OK Computer is a rejection of faceless, corporate Britain — Karma Police could have been about David Brent — and also a plea for escape to a better world. But sometimes it all goes too far: if all you’re in the mood for is a pop song, listening to OK Computer can be like watching the closing scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke
Radiohead’s legacy was a new downbeat guitar rock scene. Turn-of-the-millennium British bands like Travis, Muse and Coldplay were all, in their turn, criticised as “Radiohead liteâ€. Whatever the truth, it was Radiohead who set the mood.
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH The Daily Telegraph Saturday, October 18, 2008 telegraph.co.uk /gordonsgin In association with
The soundtrack to our lives F rom the Kinks to Kaiser Chiefs, the Rolling Stones to the Stone Roses, Piper at the Gates of Dawn to the Darkness, nothing has exerted more influence on modern British culture than our music. Whether it’s psychedelic rock or acid house, hip hop or bubblegum pop, Bri
60 N o decade lends itself to parody quite like the Sixties. So many of its characteristics, musical or otherwise, have hardened into cliché: Swinging London; psychedelic guitar jams; mini skirts; tie-dye; frilled shirts; twanging sitars. The Austin Powers caricature of the decade distracts attenti
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC The psychedelic experience “This is it! The next Projected Sound of ’67!†screamed the writing on the sleeve of Pink Floyd’s debut single, Arnold Layne. It was a bold claim but not an inaccurate one: 1967 was to be the year when psychedelic rock
70 T he Sixties were a hard act to follow, and it’s unsurprising that the Seventies saw rock and pop transformed into a spaghetti of different genres and sub-genres. Some acts took a step back, paring off their psychedelic excesses and returning to the origin of rock music, the blues. Others layer
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC Progressive rock With very few exceptions — but also released straight cover namely the multi-zillion-selling versions of classical pieces. Dark Side of the Moon and There was a live album version anything else with the words of Mussorgsky’s Pictures
ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Drinking in the sounds Wherever musical magic happens, Gordon’s has been the definitive accompaniment – from the 1960s The scene: from the rising mini skirt to giving peace a chance, Gordon’s was a part of the social scene as much as anything on the record player. What
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80 I f the Seventies ended with a whimper, the Eighties arrived with a bang: an explosion of gaudy fashions, innovative sounds and boundless energy. Yet our response to the music of the time remains equivocal: a mixture of fondness and faint embarrassment. There’s no doubting it was a time that de
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC Indie explodes in Manchester It wasn’t just would-be musicians who took to heart the punk ethos of “get up there and do it yourselfâ€. In the late Seventies, small record labels had started to spring up in the UK — among them Chiswick, Stiff, Roug
90 T wo words sum up the musical Nineties: Cool Britannia. British guitar bands rediscovered their suburban roots and swaggered on stage to thrash out three-minute pop songs; the Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell sported a Union Jack dress; and pop stars were invited to Downing Street by Tony Blair. The
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC Girl Power and boy bands “Yo... I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. I want a record deal with a sevenfigure advance, the fastestselling album since The Beatles, six number ones in two years, success in countless countries, a film,
00 R eality TV, multichannel TV, MP3 players, MySpace, YouTube, the mobile web – technology changed our lives in first decade of the 21st century, and the music industry was powerless to resist. It was the decade when the internet made its first serious impact on the charts – when everyone had a
THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MODERN BRITISH MUSIC Urban is universal The Noughties was the decade when British urban acts — in particular, soul, R&B and hip-hop artists — broke through into the mainstream in numbers. At the start of the decade, young R&B singersongwriters dominated the scene. While
