Damon won everything. Actually no, Paul Weller came out of Britpop better than anybody, although that may just be coincidence that he was entering a more productive phase at the same time.

But back to Damon, Blur did well, but I actually prefer Gorillaz and they probably wouldn't have been possible if Blur hadn't been successful.

Pulp? Suede?

they got the number 1.
Mid term Oasis won - they had a huge number 2 in Wonderwall and record-breaking album sales (and this after the weasely music press gave The Great Escape fantastic reviews)
Long term Blur won - better albums and reinventions to come, great career for Damon, decent career and sober respect for Graham, This Week etc for Dave, great reunion etc etc*

*Except for the cheese. Enough with the cheese already. The cheese is a terrible idea, tastes even worse and makes me close to disliking Mr James.

At the risk of trotting out a football cliche. I think it was actually us that were the winners. I think pop/rock music needs a focus every now and then and, with grunge and baggy just before, they seemed to be coming think and fast.
There will always be hangers on with record company execs scrambling over themselves to just sign someone (will that ever happen again?) but there will also be artists that hang on the "movement's" coat tails and get exposure that they otherwise might have trouble in getting. With punk I think Elvis Costello was a major beneficiary (and by extension we were) and with Britpop the atmosphere was ripe for Pulp who had been previously ignored by the masses.
I'd rather have the option to ignore a band that I don't really like than to never hear a band I may love just because they didn't quite fit so you never heard them.
I suppose these arguments are no longer relevant but they were during the Britpop years.

It was the moment when everything in that scene began to go downhill and for the first time where a consensus of 'Britpop' began to form in the wider culture, resulting in cartoon strips about Blur in The Sun and guides printed in the Daily Mail about how to 'talk Britpop'. At the time it was tremendously exciting, it did feel like a storming of the barricades, but it also ushered in an era of conformity when many of the cliches that people associate with Britpop - also ran indie bands in check shirts - began to take hold.

In effect the battle of Britpop marked the moment when an endless glut of brilliant records by extremely diverse and talented acts between April '94 and October '95 began to dry up and the imagination, verve, wit, stylishness and irreverance of the first wave was replaced by the cliched, single genre nonentities of the second wave. Between 94 and summer 95 barely a week went by without me queuing up outside the record shop on a Monday to buy a record by Oasis, Blur, Black Grape, Massive Attack, Tricky, the Prodigy, Pulp, Supergrass, Portishead, Radiohead, the Chemical Brothers, Coldcut, Goldie, Elastica, These Animal Men....There was so much energy, creativity and excitement around at that time - Weller certainly look inspiration from it. And everyone stopped dressing like the Levellers.

When Oasis got their first number one with 'Some Might Say', I walked to the school bus stop the next morning feeling like I'd scored the winning goal in a World Cup Final. It was a victory for me as much as them, or it felt like that. The battle of Britpop was the beginning of the end.

Anyway (ahem) more of this in my forthcoming book......hem hem....sorry.

Ahead of the arc with Wild Wood then commercial Renaissance yet creatively going downhill when he started to believe the Modfather bullshit around the time of Stanley Road.

... post Great Escape (which was pretty much Parklife 2) were all excellent - "Blur" had three cracking singles - Beetlebum, Song 2 and M.O.R. "13" is a real grower of an album but "Think Tank", for me, is the best of the lot - even without Coxon.

1 Oasis album
0 Blur albums

I bought the Oasis one a good three years after release.

To continue the battle/war theme, if Blur are Britain and Oasis Germany, then America, as in WW2, come out the winner.

Who's America? Pulp, maybe. Weller, maybe. Albarn the solo artist?

I look back on that era with a great deal of fondness, compared to today. At least then I bought new music by new artists, and loved it. Can't say that I do as much of that nowadays

what I was listening to at the time as I certainly wasn't digging the Britpop thing at all. Probably lots of Drum and Bass, something called Dream Pop which later morphed into 'Post Rock', lots of abstract, weird electronica like Future Sound of London. How ironic that they've now produced Noel's next waxing.

If I had to pick one of those acts it has to be The Blur, great Pop singles and some great melancholy and moody album tracks.

As for Rock and Pop rivalry, well I recall Take That and East 17 were pitched as rival bands but also had rival groups of fans who would regularly duff each other up over who was best, Little Marky Owen or Criminal Boy from ver 17. I seem to remember E17s fans in particular had a rather fearsome reputation. Much earler I also recall a bit of rivalry between The Spands and the Durans as well, but they never really exploited it for publicity like Oasis and Blur did. They did once go head to head on Mike Read's Pop Quiz though, that's about as serious as it got.

...with Pip Schofield by a rugby tackle knockout at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party ... was that the one where Radiohead played My Iron Lung to a confused crowd of tweens?

Anyhoo ... Schofield arguably won the war by getting to spend so much time with, er, Holly Willoughby, er ... yes I see this is all so subjective isn't it?

Absolutely at the bottom of the barrell following Richey's disappearance, half empty gig descending into riotous carnage, The Holy Bible shifting less than 40,000 copies despite it's (relative)critical success.

The Manics came back with "Everything Must Go" - a comeback gig supporting The Stone Roses at Wembley Arena ('it's only us') and their future shifted entirely on one little couplet...

" We don't talk about love, we only want to get drunk "

That for all the wrong reasons tapped into Loaded psyche of the time, teaming up with Underworld's (lager, lager, lager, lager) lyric from Born Slippy.

When a butterfly flaps its wings and all that...

In those days I was in full possession of, not so much a chip on my shoulder, as a full on boulder regarding London and the south. For all of my remembered life (this was the mid nineties) I had been living under a tory government which not one single human being of my acquaintance had ever voted for. Plainly this was entirely the fault of those wankers from London and the south and this therefore meant that Blur were simply evil. Plus they were Essex boys pretending to be from London! Even worse! Posh bastards pretending to be poor: I wanted to wring Damon Albarn's neck and as for that Alex James, appropriate torment for that arsehole I couldn't even conceive, I hated that prick so much.

I now fully accept that Oasis were one album wonders (and it wasn't Morning Glory), that Blur evolved and did interesting and superior things and that also in those days I had a hell of a lot of growing up to do. Living as I now do in London (trust me when I say no one is more shocked about this than me), it all seems rather silly how wrapped up in this thing I was.

But you know, perhaps I wasn't actually as wrong as I thought...

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4068586/Why-fast-food-is-o...

- after much talk on a.n. other thread about the Apollo moon landings and Mr James Blast's recent powerful post WRT emerging from depression - about how much the song "Saturn 5" by Inspiral Carpets means to me. It was Morrissey who sang, with typical understatement, about "the songs that saved your life", and my first time hearing the optimism in that song was a tonic for me and the beginning of a climb out of a solid couple of years of dark fog. (There were other factors, obviously).
It may be hard to believe but a succession of great records of the Britpop period, commencing with Saturn 5 at the start of 94 played a huge part in my return to the world of people.

If this seems like a non sequitur don't forget Noel G was a roadie for the Carpets, possibly his best work IMHO.

For those of a different musical persuation are their any parallels where by bands / artists regularly had spats real or hyped at other points in the history of pop?

I realise that we are all far to young to remember but wasn't there a much hyped spat between The Beatles and The Stones? It was all media talk I believe (since the first Stones hit was written by Lennon/McCartney) but certainly appears to have been a precursor to Blur/Oasis.

I'll leave the Massive to decide who won the battle/war out of those two

was a rather hollow affair due largely to the fact that both of the singles were pretty poor efforts. That said I always preferred Blur simply because they were more diverse and "edgy" musically and lyrically. There was a sense they had a more interesting record collection with plenty of contemporary stuff alongside the classics. Noel could write a belting tune but there was always the feeling that he was working simply from the vaunted Tablets of Rock rather than from any musical self-awareness or a desire to push either himself or the boundaries. The band's "image" didn't really help with this perception, Noel sounding like the one bright spark in a room of dim-bulbs. With Blur I was never quite sure what would come next even when they were in their Brit-pop phase. They'd already reinvented themselves before Brit-pop (The "post-baggy" Leisure giving way to "return to the 60s" Modern Life is Rubbish is where they started that process)so the groundwork had already been laid for them to do it again without fear of compromise or having to plough the same furrow. And unlike Oasis they went on to produce better singles AND albums and did so convincingly without having to look over their shoulder at past glories quite as much as Oasis did with subsequent output. In terms of the front-men Liam increasingly became the empty vessel making the loudest noise by living off his glory days while Damon simply carried on looking for new ones.

It could be argued that Blur v Oasis and Britpop showed there was an audience for a UK pop act who were able to play the common people card. Blur and Oasis didn't go after this audience, and Robbie Williams quickly built a career by doing just that.

In Norwegian Black Metal, at least.

I give you: Count Grishnackh vs Euronymous

Both were members of "Mayhem", who were kind of a big deal if you were Scandinavian, hard of hearing and death-obsessed in the early 90s. Other members included "Hellhammer", who used to wear a necklace made of skull fragments collected after the suicide of the band's first lead singer, and the charmingly-named bassist "Necrobutcher". They both looked and sounded as preposterous as you can probably imagine.

Over a period of months in 1993 intra-band tensions simmered, finally exploding in August of that year when Grishnackh went to visit his guitar player, ostensibly to discuss an unsigned contract.

Whether they ever got down to the nitty gritty of discussing indemnities and boilerplate provisions over tea and biscuits we shall never know, because a dispute broke out early in the meeting, and ended with the good Count stabbing Euronymous stabbing 23 times, 16 of them in the back.

The wounds were, of course, fatal. Grishnackh's defence was that he believed that Euronymous was planning to taser him, take him to a nearby woodland and torture him to death on camera. Unsurprisingly, the defence failed and Grishnackh was sentenced to 21 years for murder, and I believe they also tacked some church arsons onto the back of the charge for good measure (at the time of his arrest he had 150kg of dynamite in his house, stashed for future adventures).

There is a happy ending though - Grishnackh turned his back on satanism while in prison, and was released in 2009. I imagine he's probably a cardigan-wearing acoustic singer-songwriter today.

I'm still trying to work out who is Blur and who is Oasis in this scenario. Apparently Necrobutcher will never shut up about cheese, so that's at least Alex James taken care of.

The difference is that Blur are musicians. Maybe a little harsh but in essence he was proved to be correct

I was always on Blur's side.
Oasis are alright for a laugh, okay to put on in the background at a party & the Liam 'n' Noel show's kept me entertained for years.

However, Blur are in a Different Class, which brings me to the true kings of Britpop: Pulp.

Music made by & for misfits which crossed over to the appreciative masses. And a true star in the shape of Jarvis Cocker.