The Declaration
In April 1993, Select magazine put Suede’s Brett Anderson on its cover, Union Flag behind him, under the headline “Yanks Go Home!” Inside, journalist Stuart Maconie published a polemic titled “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Cobain?” arguing that British guitar music needed to stop genuflecting to American grunge. He grouped Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Denim, and the Auteurs under a single word: Britpop. The term had floated around the music press before, but Maconie gave it a manifesto. Within two years it would dominate British culture so completely that the Prime Minister wanted in.
The ground had been prepared. Suede’s debut single The Drowners was named song of the year by both the NME and Melody Maker in 1992. Their self-titled album followed in March 1993, produced by Ed Buller at Master Rock Studios in London for £105,000. It became the fastest-selling debut in UK chart history. Anderson sang about council estates, chemical generations, and bisexual glamour in a falsetto indebted to David Bowie. Guitarist Bernard Butler played with a romantic intensity that recalled Johnny Marr. The Smiths and Bowie: those were the two poles around which the entire genre would orbit.
North and South
Blur came from Colchester, Essex, via Goldsmiths art college in London. Damon Albarn had spent 1992 touring America behind their baggy debut Leisure and hated every minute. He came home and wrote Modern Life Is Rubbish, a concept album about suburban England that referenced the Kinks, the Small Faces, and XTC. It stalled at number fifteen. But producer Stephen Street and the band regrouped at Maison Rouge Studios in Fulham between November 1993 and January 1994, and Parklife changed everything. They recruited Phil Daniels, the actor who played Jimmy Cooper in Quadrophenia, to deliver the title track’s spoken-word verses after Albarn couldn’t get into the character himself. Graham Coxon suggested Daniels. The song won British Single of the Year at the 1995 Brits.
Oasis came from Burnage, a council estate in south Manchester. Noel Gallagher had spent two years as a guitar tech for the Inspiral Carpets before returning from an American tour in 1991 to find his brother Liam singing in a local band called the Rain. Noel joined on one condition: total creative control and sole songwriting credit. They renamed the band Oasis. Their first attempt at recording Definitely Maybe at Monnow Valley Studio in Wales collapsed. The producer, Dave Batchelor, recorded parts separately with click tracks and isolation screens. The band sounded clinical, dead. They fired Batchelor, moved to Sawmills Studios in Cornwall, and re-recorded the album playing together in one room with no soundproofing between instruments. The results still weren’t right until engineer Owen Morris mixed the tapes at Johnny Marr’s studio in Manchester, stripping away Noel’s guitar overdubs and adding eighth-note tape delays to the drums, a technique he borrowed from Phil Spector’s work on John Lennon’s Instant Karma! and Tony Visconti’s use of the Eventide Harmonizer on Bowie’s Low. Released in August 1994, Definitely Maybe broke Suede’s record for fastest-selling debut.
The Battle and the Peak
On 14 August 1995, Blur released Country House and Oasis released Roll With It on the same day. The press treated it like a boxing match, north versus south, working class versus art school. Blur won: 274,000 copies to 216,000 in the first week. But the victory was partly tactical. Blur issued two CD singles; Oasis put theirs out on one CD plus vinyl formats that teenagers in 1995 didn’t buy. Noel Gallagher told the press he hoped Damon Albarn and Alex James would “catch AIDS and die.” The tabloids loved it.
That same summer, Pulp replaced the Stone Roses as Saturday headliners at Glastonbury after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone. Jarvis Cocker’s band had been kicking around Sheffield since 1978, cycling through lineups and labels for over a decade before His ‘n’ Hers broke through in 1994. Common People had reached number two in May. At Glastonbury, the crowd sang every word back to him, and Cocker realized the band had crossed into a different world. Different Class, released that October, entered the UK Albums Chart at number one and won the Mercury Prize.
The supporting cast was deep. Elastica’s self-titled debut (1995), fronted by Justine Frischmann, drew so heavily on Wire and the Stranglers that both bands received out-of-court settlements. Supergrass released I Should Coco in May 1995; it hit number one, powered by Alright, which also landed on the Clueless soundtrack. The Verve, operating at the periphery of the scene, released Urban Hymns in 1997. Its opening track, Bitter Sweet Symphony, sampled an orchestral cover of the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time recorded by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra in 1965. Former Stones manager Allen Klein sued, and Richard Ashcroft lost all songwriting royalties. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were added to the credits. It took until 2019 for them to return the rights.
The Collapse
Be Here Now killed it. Oasis’s third album, released on 21 August 1997, sold 424,000 copies on its first day and 696,000 in its first week, making it the fastest-selling album in British history. The reviews were initially ecstatic. Then everyone actually listened. The songs were bloated, the running times absurd, the cocaine audible in every decision. Noel Gallagher later admitted the sessions at Abbey Road and Ridge Farm Studios were fuelled by industrial quantities of drugs. Music critic Jon Savage called the album the moment Britpop ended.
The deeper truth is that the smartest people had already left the room. Radiohead released OK Computer three months before Be Here Now and pointed toward a future that had nothing to do with Englishness or chart battles. Blur abandoned Britpop entirely on their 1997 self-titled album, absorbing American lo-fi and Pavement’s influence. Suede had already fractured: Bernard Butler quit in July 1994 during the recording of Dog Man Star, sending his final overdubs from a separate studio with threats whispered through his guitar pickups. The album was a commercial disappointment and an artistic triumph that nobody noticed at the time.
Tony Blair invited Noel Gallagher to 10 Downing Street in July 1997. The photograph, Gallagher grinning with a glass of champagne next to the new Prime Minister, became the tombstone for Cool Britannia. The music had become a brand, and the brand had become a photo opportunity.
Essential Listening
- Oasis – Definitely Maybe (1994)
- Blur – Parklife (1994)
- Pulp – Different Class (1995)
- Suede – Suede (1993)
- Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)
- Elastica – Elastica (1995)
- The Verve – Urban Hymns (1997)
- Blur – Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)
- Suede – Dog Man Star (1994)
- Supergrass – I Should Coco (1995)
- Pulp – His ‘n’ Hers (1994)
- Blur – The Great Escape (1995)