as a musical era these days, I feel, as though the cynical bandwagon-chasing of the lesser acts (and the ghastly Loaded/Chris Evans-sanctioned Cool Britannia business) has obscured the glory of the greater ones. Certainly the last time I felt genuinely and consistently thrilled by pop music, living for the regular Monday morning bus ride to HMV and the chance to scoop up a fistfull of the latest CD singles. I remember it very fondly.

Bloated, blasted, coke-fuelled egos staggering out of the Good Mixer in Camden. Plugging in their guitars, checking their Beatles / Kinks/ XTC / Wire / records for suitable riffs they could just about manage to copy and, as a result,dragging the entire British music scene back to an age that only the most retarded ex-public schoolboy could find engaging. It was a middle-class scam perpetrated by spoilt idiots and foisted onto us by their mates in the media, desperate to create a "scene" in which they could be the major players and exclude anyone they damn well liked.
I hated the tunes then, and I hate them now. No invention, no soul, no guts and definitely no glory.

Sorry..had to vent.

The brothers were co-opted into the scene because a genuine working class element was needed by the class tourists who always like "a bit of rough". Go to an Oasis gig, how many public schoolboys are you going to see braying along? Working Class kids were loving their Happy Hardcore!
As for the rest? Hmm..Elastica,Blur, Sleeper, Echobelly, Gene (need I go on?)

Yes the Britpop bandwagon was driven by opportunistic media types and politicians and it all got very boring.
However immediately before Britpop, pop music was mostly soulless, anonymous house and interminable grunge. What Britpop did do was to introduce songs to a new generation. My kids were turning teenagers when Britpop came along - did them no harm!

One of the worse musical "movements" ever! Sorry Wheaty, I know you wrote a topic about anyone over 40 listening to Punk Rock and I know it's all about age, taste and opinion and all that...BUT I can't see anyone listening to any of these bands now, at any age...ever!

Of course there are a couple of decent records - but none of the bands will ever inspire anyone, it was all too contrived and obvious - I mean Elastica were sued by Wire and The Stranglers - they weren't even clever in their use of influences.

It was all just too false - every band had to pretend to be cockneys or into a football team - Blur being the prime culprits.

Pulp were good but were they "Britpop"? They had a bit of humour about them and made some good records but they did jump the bandwagon a bit (they were trawling around playing long raincoat dull indie for years before they hit the big time.

Sorry Wheaty! You can moan at my love for Punk Rock on the other thread...

The charts were shite, but then they always are, but check out this list and tell me the (alternative) music of 1993 was bad!

http://www.scaruffi.com/ratings/1993.html

It's purely personal , but there's a lot of quality there!

It's funny because David H's 'saming' reference in the most recent podcast applies wholeheartedly to Britpop.

For example, take the female-fronted Elastica... there was also Sleeper, Echobelly and Republica.

The other mid-90s bands were no different. Still gives me good memories, though

Britpop: An Appraisal, or Why Guitar Hero wouldn't have sold (in the UK) in 1996

Oh and the sweeping generalisations, lack of research and the reference to Zeppelin's 2007 reunion as "recent"? It's just easier that way!

Origin of Britpop proper (if you go along with, say the bbc 'seven ages of rock' doc, and John Harris's book among others) popularly considered to be Suede's The Drowners. Nothing middle class about them. Quite the opposite. As for Oasis being 'co-opted into the scene...' Eh?!

There aren't many 'scenes' (shoegazing, acid house, punk, post-punk...) that could truly be described as being free from the middle classes and people who were 'spoilt' to some degree so it seems an odd thing to bring up. Let alone use as a reason to justify hating an entire era of music.

Anyroad from the classic Britpop era my top 5:

To The Birds / Suede
Star Shaped / Blur
In The City (Peel Sesh) / Elastica
Daddy's Speeding / Suede
Slide Away / Oasis

That's the thing about me - not afraid to ask the big questions.

but it did produce some fine records.

Blur had many great tunes... 'This Is A Low', 'Girls and Boys', 'Strange News From Another Star' to name but three.

Elastica's 'Connection' was a toe tapper.

I like 'Slide Away' by the Monobrow Brothers...

Pulp...

Umm... there must be more but I'm tired and I can't think of any.

Indie singles were topping the charts - and they weren't novelty hits. Indie albums were selling in undreamt-of quantities. Something a band did would make the front pages of the tabloids. That couldn't have happened since The Beastie Boys about ten years earlier. They got mentioned on the news. They had fans all over Europe. Given that a liking for indie music had been like being a member of some kind of sect, since the early 1980s, it was an entirely new experience. Of course, I immediately sought out new, sect-like genres to listen to.

Not that they haven't been mentioned in this thread, but Suede are definitely being slowly airbrushed out of Britpop, which is a real shame as (along with Pulp) they were my favourites of the whole bunch. Their B-sides were excellent, and I'd put their first 3 albums against anyone else's of the time, all great in different ways - the short sharp shock debut, ambitious & inspired second, and ultrapop all-killer no-filler third. Yes, the follow-ups were let downs, but I think they they deserve more than just being ignored...

In 1996, I was ten years old. As well as the pre-teen pop pap that clogged up the charts (which, admittedly, I was seduced by), my music knowledge was such that I pretty much liked popular bands of the day. So, at that impressionable age, I liked The Prodigy, Blur, Pulp, Sleeper, Dubstar, Suede, Saint Etienne, Dodgy, The Boo Radleys, Supergrass, Mansun, The Bluetones, The Levellers, Black Box Recorder etc. (I may be a couple of years out with some of these bands). Never did like Oasis though...

Now imagine you're ten years old in 2009. Follow chart music and you'll end up with a liking for N-Dubz, Akon and other unlistenable twaddle (Mr D Rascal excepted).

And Britpop was all about fun and having a laugh. As a nipper, the lager influences (except on Born Slippy, obviously) and massive amounts of drugs passed me by. They say people love the music of their teens and it always stays with them. Me? I'm a Britpop Boy; I'm just a couple of years younger than I should be.

Taken as stand alone tracks, it produced some really, really good songs that stand up very well.

It all went pear shaped and perception changed when the NME stuck Menswear on the cover and it opened the doors to every sub standard A&R man who found 4 guitar wielding pretty boys with a nosebag habit.

For what it's worth, there isn't too much wrong with these.....

Animal Nitrate - Suede
Common People - Pulp
Beetlebum - Blur
The Circle - OCS
Road Rage - Catatonia
Line Up - Elastica
A Design for Life - MSP
Bluetonic - The Bluetones
One to Another - The Charlatans
Firestarter - The Prodigy

Plenty more where those came from too.......

Granted, only Blur, the Manics and Oasis (all coming 2 or 3 years before the hype - never sure how Oasis managed it as they've been banging out the same two songs - slow and fast - for all those years) have had longevity but as with the punk and new wave scene, you'd can't deny the quality of some of the songs that came in the slipstream

and throw in casual sex and chemical stimulants aplenty and you have the recipe for the mindless hedonism and Babylonian excesses of London 93 to 98. And that was just the Accounts department on their "Thursday is the New Friday" nights out.

Of course, you could stand aside, tutting disdainfully clutching your Joni albums, sipping camomile tea - or, you could rush headlong into the delirium, the bedlam, the racket of the times.

Of course, "britpop" (a term at least as meaningless as New Romantic) provided the soundtrack. There were some musical gems - don't forget Radiohead and Beck had poked through at this time too - but from the school of British Pop - Mansun were a spunky little unit.

But there is no doubt that Oasis were the Big Dogs. They were as empty and shallow and bombastic as the times themselves.

Listening to them now is not an option. Except a faintly risible one. Back then, it was the only option:

for a movement, rather than an all-embracing "type" of music, as in the parallel strand on country. Apply a label and much can, will and often shouldn't be lumped in together, but it is easier that way for journalists to describe. If JW's list is "Britpop" clearly I like it more than I thought, whereas I thought I didn't like it at all, loathing Blur and having an intolerance to Oasis much beyond the first 2 albums.
Surely the Charlatans are "baggy", the Prodigy "techno" and OCS "boring", rather than Britpop, the """" to define the annoyance I have about the often all too necessary evil of oversimplifying the whole genre lark. I find myself slipping into Heppos all music is pop, actually to my surprise.

Too true...

How was "punk" defined.......in the basic 4/4 meat and potatoes SOUND of the Pistols or the McLaren attitude and clothing? Similarly, The Only Ones thrilling Another Girl, Another Planet punk or not?

Was Britpop any more than an untucked, button down Ben Sherman or the musical and lyrical "British" inventiveness of Blur and the Manics?

Britpop was an exciting time, not a pejorative time for a type of shit indie music...

I loved the Britpop years, and it annoys me that it's usually characterised as cockney wannabe Small Faces copy-ists. For me at the time, being 16 or 17, it was a time when every week an exciting new record was released. I was at HMV in Exeter every Monday lunchtime buying a great new album or single released that day.

I've been accused on this site of cherry picking acts at my convenience and then lumping them all together and calling them Britpop, but it's my view that it's lazier to pigeonhole an entire time with a huge breadth of musical genres and cross pollination, pretend that it ws only white, middle class guitar bands singing about prostitutes in London or something. It's reductive and unfair to the incredible diversity and excitement of music in the mid 90s.

Don't believe me? Look at the Knebworth bill - Chemical Brothers, Dreadzone, the Prodigy, Manic Street Preachers

Those of us who read (or indeed wrote) Select Magazine will be more familiar with the following portrayal of the leading names of Britpop...

Blur
Oasis
Chemical Brothers
Black Grape
Tricky
Goldie
Pulp
Elastica
Monkey Mafia
And loads of bands who were aorund for a while but released great records during the time - e.g. Massive Attack,Orbital, Charlatans, The Prodigy etc etc

If you weren't there, you wouldn't get it - for those of us who were young it was the greatest time of our lives. So, some of it was derivative - who cares? It was fun. Big time.

I am around 10 years older than you - and I loved it for the reasons outlined in your thread and alluded to in mine - it was a time, a place, a moment -

a wide open space

that I got into folk music. I still listen to The Auteurs - an excellent band in any decade. (I was in my 20s.)

It was always a term that got on my nerves as much as the laddish culture that surrounded it all

as previewed in this month's Word, is an excellent read. It puts the times in real perspective. There is brilliant stuff and dross in all decades / movements / made-up movements. (Stuart Maconie takes the credit for coining the phrase 'Britpop' - this is the man who made the world believe that Bob Holness played sax on 'Baker Street' - draw your own conclusion!)

Pulp had their great moments, and I still love Jarvis. Probably my fave band of that time is Belle & Sebastian, who managed to rise above it all, really... As for folk music, I think I was looking for an escape route as my Radio 1 days came to an end. You could do worse than to start with Sandy Denny era Fairport Convention and go from there (or just stay there!)

who thought they were cool simply because they weren't playing synthesizers. Unfortunately most of them weren't doing anything interesting with the guitars. It would've helped if they knew how to play them properly. Most of the bands suffered from the same problems - a horrible flat chordy sound, rubbish bass lines and a total lack of emotion in the songs. The only reason Oasis have lasted this long is a few of their songs were quite moving. Even if they are basically crap!

all by UNCLEWHEATY.....
Spooky.

I say G'BY

Around this time I was very taken with Pulp, Supergrass, Teenage Fanclub, Super Furry Animals, Oasis, Blur (though more the "post-Britpop" Blur and 13 albums), Echobelly (I still like "On" very much), Paul Weller, The Divine Comedy, Belle & Sebastian, Manics... all of which I still care for and most of which are still going.

There was some poor stuff around too, but there always is. The same thing has been happening with guitar bands in recent years, though I'm not sure if there is a catch-all term for it at present.

and a friend remarks "I had no idea that all these songs I hate are by one band."

I personally quite liked them but got awfully suspicious about Britpop awfully quickly. Coked up southern style slags was what my Scottish associates tended to think.

Giant Steps though. What a fine album. I loved Lazarus, still do

I think they just call it Indie, don't they? Very much agree with the points made earlier that Punk and Britpop (and grunge for my money) had similarities in that they are difficult to define musically but united as a movement, aesthetically and ideologically. Where as modern British guitar bands tend to be a bit, well, mehhh. Maybe we should call it that, though 'landfill' tends to work on here as well.

to John Harris' excellent book "The Last Party", the journalistic view of the time - works well as a companion to Luke Haines book and covers the politics, social etc as well as the music. Also includes a fair discography, although the standard clichés like "after that diminishing returns set in" are all over the place.