Britpop – Manufactured or Inspired?

The current rumours about Oasis reforming have inspired me to reflect on Britpop and the influence it had on the British music scene.

Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that at least in part Britpop was a manufactured phenomenon.  The term was first used by music journalist, John Robb and it wasn’t genre specific at the time.  However, as soon as somebody put a label on something it tends to take on a life of its own.

Please note: There were lot of bands on the Britpop scene, far too many to include here and so I’ll just stick to the ones everybody seems to agree played the largest part in it.  If you think there is a band I should include please add it to the comments section below.  By the way, Britpop was really about bands rather than solo artists.

Roots Of Britpop

Musically journalists largely claim that Britpop’s origins lie the Camden Town, London scene in the early 1990s but its roots are far deeper than that.  It is true that some of the major players; Blur, Lush, Elastica and Pulp were in the Camden scene, but this doesn’t into account what inspired them.  Britpop didn’t just happen – it took a long time to manifest.

In reality Britpop began as a consequence of the 1980s independent record scene.  The bands and artists who inhabited the Indie Charts of the time have since been referred to as the C86 generation.  C86 – for those who don’t know – was an influential cassette compiled by the NME in 1986 featuring many of the leading artists from the indie charts of that year.  This compilation was not definitive, however; it is limited to artists who could be contractually included and some of the most influential artists of the time are missing, for example; The Smiths.  Furthermore, one of the most successful independent labels of the time was Stock, Aitken and Waterman but, owing to its perceived crass commerciality, it was also left out.  In any case, it didn’t really fit in with the tastes of the NME’s readership.

Most of the key players in Britpop admitted that they were hugely indebted to The Smiths.  Rough Trade’s success with the band demonstrated to the major labels of the time that ‘Indie’ could artists could bring in good business.  Independent labels in the 1980s had largely been the preserve of ‘underground’ music, some of which didn’t seem commercially, or even musically, all that ambitious but The Smiths didn’t seem to fit into that category at all.  They leaped to the top of the Indie Charts with every release and were even a very successful Top 40 band.  They seemed oddly out of place in the Now That’s What I Call Music compilations and they were now steadily being joined by other Indie bands like The Housemartins and The Primitives.

One of the biggest challenges independent labels had always faced had been distribution, but they had managed to overcome this by clubbing together to form a kind of collective, known as The Cartel.  By doing this they could at least ensure they had some of the same clout as the majors by putting their records in some of the shops were Gallup put together the charts.  Even so, having a successful band could be a mixed blessing for a major label; keeping with demand while still paying the bills could be hard and even potentially lead to bankruptcy.

The biggest game-changer of all was Rave and dance music, particularly when it began cross-poillination with Indie bands.  Since bands on independent labels were still at ‘street level’, they were still in touch with what was happening in the clubs.  Rave – and ecstasy – swept through the whole music scene in the late 80s and caught the imaginations of everybody who came into contact with it.  For a short time, Indie bands and their labels were better placed than those on major labels to take advantage of it, at least with more authentic-sounding results.  Bands like Pop Will Eat Itself, The Shamen, The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, and so on were all signed to independent labels.  It didn’t take the majors all that long to catch on though, and before the end of the 1980s independent labels were being bought out by them, some kept a limited amount of A&R control but others just existed purely as logo.  Many labels just disappeared entirely.

By the 1990s major labels had learnt many lessons from the 1980s.  The biggest of all was that there was now a generation of people who had had their tastes – even their identities – formed by the previous decade’s counter-culture.  What’s more this had happened while they were attending college and university, so these were now people with potential spending power and influence.   Some of them were even writing for the music press, promoting gigs and in charge of booking artists for TV shows.

Britpop Arrives

What do you think of when you think of Britpop?  I doubt it is Goldie, The Chemical Brothers or Tricky. Yet all of these were artists were key parts of the scene and were hugely influential in it.  However, Britpop has now come to mean union-jack painted guitars, Blur versus Oasis, Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann, Cool Britannia, bands with floppy fringes…

Indie used to mean Independent, which could mean any style of music.  Thanks to Britpop, Indie is now a musical genre that even Coldplay occupy despite having always been signed to a major label and effectively a corporate rock act.  Indie is now a specific sound; guitar-oriented without necessarily being ‘rock’ per se, quite jangly or angular, generally white and either 60s or post-punk.

This blueprint was formed had already been formed by C86 and, indeed, the NME had a large part to play in promoting Britpop, although the most definitive publication was Select magazine.  Music journalists had become bored by the prevailing music scenes; grunge was too American and depressing (particularly following Kurt Cobain’s suicide) and the British shoegazing bands (My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive, for example) were also rather downbeat and insular.  They were looking for something more upbeat, energetic and positive.  The darlings of the British music press had been The Stone Roses but their career seemed to have stalled indefinitely; there had been no new releases form them since 1989 apart from remixes of old songs.  Another band, The La’s, had looked like contenders but after one great album had also become inactive.

When Suede and Blur emerged they fitted the bill.  However, early Blur tracks weren’t too promising being heavily reminiscent of the Madchester-inspired ‘baggy’ sound, by now falling out of favour.  Suede seemed to arrive fully-formed though; there was a distinct Smiths influence; the singer was androgynous, Bowie-esque; the guitarist had a unique, powerful style and the whole package came across as dangerous and transgressive.  Suede had the music press salivating and – not only that – they were a commercial prospect too.  Even Morrissey (who was still the doyen of the music press at this time) attended Suede’s shows.  That sealed the deal.

What music journalists particularly liked about Suede is their archetypal Britishness.  The band was influenced by British music they could identify with and cite; Bowie, The Smiths, glam and furthermore their lyrics reflected upon the experience of British suburban life.  They also signed to a British independent label, Nude.  Tellingly, however, Nude – although independent – were effectively a subsidiary of Sony by this time.  Suede were not only British, they were as English as rain.

Nothing demonstrates how incestuous the Britpop scene was more than the fact that when Justine Frischmann’s relationship ended with Suede singer Brett Anderson, she began dating Blur’s Damon Albarn.  This seemed to have a very positive effect on Damon Albarn’s songwriting though, because when Blur returned with a second album, it virtually defined Britpop.  Modern Life Is Rubbish was the result of Albarn’s latest obsession with The Kinks, the most English 1960s band of all-time and the fact that their label Food (again, independent but effectively a subsidiary of a major, this time EMI) was considering dropping them.  This was despite the commercial success of their first album and because of the media’s dislike of it.  This shows how important the favour of the music press was at this time.  As expected, the music press adored Modern Life Is Rubbish and this ensured its success.  Blur didn’t rest on their laurels though, they followed that album with the even more successful Parklife, which drew on the same formula but expanded on it, including all kinds of uniquely English references, both musical and lyrical, and this made music journalists ecstatic.  Blur became the most popular band of 1994.  Damon Albarn therefore revealed that he was a canny songwriter who could write songs to match public and critical taste and this would lead to him still being active on the music scene today.

From the North, Oasis emerged.  Unlike their southern rivals, Oasis were far more belligerent, arrogant and abrasive, in keeping with their manager and label boss’, Alan MacGee’s style (Creation had allegedly already hatched a deal with Sony by this time although a few years would pass before it was announced publically).  They were just as British as their southern rivals though and had many of the same influences that the London bands had.  Oasis wore their Beatles influence on their sleeves and proudly told every music journalist who listened about it.  Although the Gallagher’s passed themselves off as rowdy, rude and uneducated, it became obvious that this was actually a clever marketing ploy, designed to play into the prejudices of the South-based, music press.  It had worked for other Manchester bands like The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses so why wouldn’t it work again?  It did and this time it paid off dividends.

Despite Oasis’ fanfare of all-things Beatles, there was just as much punk, glam and straight-ahead rock on their debut album as any mop-top influence.  Definitely Maybe was nakedly ambitious and laddish – the latter quality was not as present Blur and Suede albums.  After a decade of independent bands being shy about wanting to be rich and famous, Oasis came across as refreshingly honest about wanting to be ‘a rock and roll star’.  It seemed liberating to hear and male music journalists seemed to feel that they could live vicariously through Oasis.  Futhermore, although the Noel Gallagher’s songs seemed to thieve from all and sundry, there was an obvious craftsmanship and wit at work.  In his hands, stealing the odd melody or riff was more akin to sampling than genuine plagiarism.  Oasis may have feigned ignorance but they also very funny and entertaining.

It was obvious that Justine Frischmann’s influence had been key to both Suede and also Blur.   She had even been a founder member of Suede but when she left Brett Anderson for Damon Albarn it caused tensions in the band which caused her to leave.  It took a while for her to finally get a band of her own together and this eventually became Elastica.  The project was musically quite different from Anderson and Albarn’s, possibly to avoid any critical comparisons.  Frischmann seemed to be more interested in exploring punk, post-punk and new wave than the music of the 60s, so Elastica had an angular, aggressive sound.  Their self-titled debut is one of the few albums of the era that still doesn’t sound dated.  It was both a critical and a commercial success.  It threatened to be overshadowed at the time by accusations of plagiarism by punk bands Wire and The Stranglers, both settled out of court.  This had already happened to Oasis, so it was becoming a theme in Britpop.  And if Oasis were ‘lads’, Elastica were (mostly) ‘laddettes’ – open about sex, drugs and drink in interviews.  After the ‘just say no’ 80s, this was also becoming a key component of the scene.

I haven’t mentioned The Spice Girls, who I would argue were part of Britpop in many respects, although musically and lyrically they may not fit the criteria.  Their image was ultimately similar to Britpop and they incorporated many of the same ideas; a relatively clean-up version of ladette phenomenon, the Union Jack dress, the arrogant in-your-face attitude, and so on.  The same argument applies to All Saints and any number of mainstream pop acts of the time.

Cast were quite similar to Oasis in some respects but had more in common with The La’s, hardly surprising since their main man, John Power had been one of the key members of that band.  The La’s were unashamedly very retro and were vocal about wanting to return to musical values of the 1960s and Power carried that sentiment through to Cast.  The La’s had dried up essentially because the main songwriter, Lee Mavers, seemed to hit a permanent dry-spell, which eventually lead Power to form Cast in order to start making music again.  He quickly discovered that he was also capable of writing 60s-style songs, some of them rather anthemic.  This is essentially the formula that Cast’s debut album sticks too and made it become a success.  Cast were signed to a major label, Sony but by this time that was no longer an issue at the NME it seemed.  Perhaps Power’s previous involvement with The La’s granted him the benefit of the doubt?  The La’s were on Go! Discs.

Cast were eventually included in the backlash against Oasis other similar bands who became labelled ‘dad-rock’.  This was in many respects unfair because Cast had always been outspoken about their fondness for all things 60s.  This perhaps led to Power trying to modernise the band’s sound on their second album with less success.

Pulp had been going for years by the time Britpop arrived but they were hitting their creative peak.  Pulp’s first release had been back in 1983 and so they were no strangers to the independent music scene, this had brought them few rewards though and so they were ready to make a change.  In 1992 the band had been frustrated by their label, Fire Records, who were still sitting on their album, Separations, which had been recorded the previous year.  Pulp left Fire and signed to a Warp Records imprint Gift (distributed by Island Records) and this resulted in a sudden burst of superlative singles, the most remarkable being ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’, which was their first Top 40 hit.  This single bore all the hallmarks of what Pulp would become famous for and it was a distinctly Northern, British sound.  If anybody deserves the title of Britpop’s poet it is Jarvis Cocker, nobody defined the lyrical template of the period better than him; his songs were witty, sometimes exhilarating but also deeply sexualised and dark.  He captured its mood at the height of the era and charted its eventual demise just as honestly.

Pulp’s biggest success was their fifth album, Different Class in 1995.  Unlike the other leading exponents of Britpop it is less easy to pigeon-hole Pulp, perhaps because the band – being so long established – already had their own individual style.  They were, however, strongly influenced by Bowie, glam, The Smiths, 1960s bands and post-punk, but they were just as influenced by Scott Walker, French pop, techno and disco.  It was Cocker’s vocal style, the subject matter of the lyrics and Pulp’s background in the British independent music scene which put them at the heart of Britpop.

I many respects Pulp were one of Britpop’s most defining bands.  They had their roots in 1980s Indie, had been there for all the ups and downs of the 1980s and eventually achieved mainstream fame and success, even if Jarvis Cocker evenutally became disillusioned by it.

In conclusion, Britpop was the result of the major record labels realising that the music on 1980s independent record labels had commercial potential.  Thus ‘Indie’ became another marketing term and eventually even a generic term.  For a brief period, however, it resulted in some very exciting pop music.

Are You A Belieber Or A Believer?

Few people attract a more ludicrous amount of hatred than teen idols.

This has been particularly noticeable recently during the downfall of Justin Bieber.  Judging by the glee some evidently felt one would have imagined that he had been a Third World dictator rather than a pop singer such were the high-spirited comments of some all over social media.  Indeed, some of the comments I remember hearing at the time were pretty outlandish and pretty hateful.  If people feel confused by the amount of adulation Bieber attracts from his fans, surely the volume of spite he receives is equally puzzling.

In fact it is far more odd, since the Bieber-hatred often comes from those who ought to – in theory – know better.  At least his fans have the excuse of being comparatively young and hormonal whereas his detractors have none.

Moreover, there is one very important factor in fandom that often gets overlooked.  There is exemplified by the fact that Bieber’s fans often describe themselves as ‘Beliebers’ and use the word as a hashtag on Twitter and other social network sites to engage with other fans.  Despite the quasi-religious nature of the word itself, one shouldn’t overlook the fact that by using it individuals are placing themselves within a community that spans throughout the world.  This is the very nature of fandom; those outside of it often mistake the behaviour of fans for being about the object of their idolatry when really it’s about friendship and companionship.  When we see crowds of fans wait outside hotel doors for a glimpse of Bieber they are really there to be with other like-minded people and part of an occasion.  This is one of the primary functions that religion used to play in society.

This becomes more obvious in the case of boy-bands and it was even the case back in the 1960s with The Beatles.  Fans would identify themselves as favouring one of The Beatles over the others and it would become a topic of friendly discussion.  This is really no different from what we now see with One Direction – the perceived value of the music is almost beyond the point, it is about being involved.  Fans will identify themselves as being a fan of Harry, Liam or another member of the band and thus become a part of the larger group.  It’s about being accepted.

Record labels understand the nature of fandom and that’s why they capitalise on it.  They know that One Direction fans of proud identifying themselves as such and that’s why it’s easy to sell them merchandise.  Nevertheless, it’s a mistake to believe that it is only young women become fans though, how else do we explain the rabid support rock fans have for the idols?  Band T-shirt sales?  Have you ever made the mistake of criticising Roger Waters in the presence of a Pink Floyd fan, for example?  Such a thing will be taken as heresy.  Forty-something men can be just as passionate as any teenage girl about their idols and quite as irrational about it.  The same argument applies to football teams and so forth.

As a regular gig-goer, I’ve seen as many adult males become as determined to meet the band, have their merchandise signed as any teenage girl at a One Direction concert but rarely is this commented on.  I don’t recall any documentaries or big news features on it at all.  Who bought all the £1,000 tickets for The Rolling Stones last year?  I doubt that many teenagers could afford it.  Surely that’s as worth as much critical study as One Direction fans buying pencil cases with their idols faces on them.