Britpop : Time For Reevaluation?

Who cares? How snobby and elitist can you get? I know nothing of the bands you mention - but big fucking deal. I bet you know very little of cinema history does that mean that I have a write to castigate you for enjoying the latest Hollywood blockbuster when you may be unfamilair with the work of Kurosawa, Welles, Hitchcock, Lang, Griffiths et al?

And for England please dig your head out of sand and read Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland into that. Hence BRITPOP. Christ, there are four countries in the UK you know.

"Britpop failed because it was a misguided and futile attempt to ignore the fact the the Rolling Stones were the only thing of any worth to come from Britain in the last 50 years"

Hmmmmmmmmm. I can't be arsed answering that actually.

You spelled 'writ' wrong.

It began in weird places. All the bands from London (and waving a Union Jack around is seen abroad as a signifier of London) were people who'd spent the mid-late 80s in art/architecture/humanities courses; some of them had been going to gigs in the capital since they were in high school and were fanzine people, lots of them packed boxes in Rough Trade, and answered phones in recording studios and record companies (yo Damon, yo Emma Anderson). They were friends with the shoegazers and 80s indie people and had lots of post-punk records, Smiths, Cure, Bunnymen, 4AD, Creation, Rough Trade. American stuff mattered too - Pavement, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Happy Flowers, Bikini Kill. They also knew their Bowie and Roxy and could find a backstory of influence going back 30 years without hitting geezer-record territory (that came later when it was trendy). They were not averse to acid house, no siree. Everyone clubbed at Syndrome and Kinky Disco and went to see St Etienne, Pulp and the World of Twist. Blur were no longer Seymour and had a GIGANTIC live following.

In about '92 Blur were having Cornershop and Huggy Bear open for them - after plasticity of debut, they wanted to be more indie-arty - and Graham went out with Jo Huggy for ages. Justine was watching carefully (I met her for the first time at the Astoria for the Blur/Cornershop and the second time at a Bratmobile show). Suede were Britpop from the second they broke; intelligent application of influences and a mouthy interview. Everyone went to Blow-Up and Smashing and that's where Pulp started meeting fashionables and Menswear were recruited by Smashing's promoter Adrian.

Monobrow came from the North in 1993 and the Oasis element is really the second wave with yer evil Wellah thing going on and OCS and beer lads. Blame Johnny Marr's little brother Ian for getting them to his brother's manager before AMcG ever got hold of them. Understand why Damon made fun (he's wanky) and everyone else just yawned and passed the tinfoil (when it started going wrong for wave one, in 95/96).

There's a lot of truth in that, I think. It's true of me actually, except I'm older not younger! I came from a dance and black music background, having detested most of the indie music of the 1980s (although I find I like some of it now). The (better) Britpop I found refreshing because it reminded me of '70s stuff (incl. punk) - in terms of the energy not the retro-ness - and because a lot of the music I'd been into just before (house, r&b etc.) seemed a bit tired and stagnated at the time.

No, Terry: it wasn't about the Northern thing as the Boos and the Verve were in the loop I'm talking about, more when marketing people who read Loaded started smelling money in selling a concept of Northern masculinity filtered through a) slightly patronising Southern take and b) James Brown types discovering their inner pie and chips man as nostalgia for Northern childhood.

Your musician/artist circle somewhat different to the rank and file, I think. This is always the way; eg punk (Lydon keen on Can, Peter Hammill etc. whereas his 15 year old fans would probably not have heard of them).

David, the youngest of us were teenagers, the Creationists from groups were about to be 30, and the vast majority were undergraduates at the time. Tons of these people also worked at MVE and through underhanded means got loads of vinyl at 18. My editor had been working for NME since she was 15.

Can't EVEN begin to guess who this might berenyi.

And thankfully it isn't dead yet. Coldplay, Travis, Doves and Electric Soft Parade are brilliant examples of recent Britpop. Only they aren't called Britpop, but they are. And they are just as brilliant as Blur were at their best.

oh i definitely became aware of all these things, but again i got it through someone else's media filter because i discovered electronic music through the Prodigy/Chems 'Electronica' push, which mostly left out jungle (though i discovered it very shortly afterwards).

my point was that it's kind of ironic that a big part of what appealed to a North American teenager (me) about Britpop was the idea that even the 'laddish' and populist side of British culture seemed more intelligent and alive than my own (eg. lots of grunge leftovers; no rap or electronic music on suburban radar screen quite yet). now i see my affinity for Britpop as the kind of low-Other fetishizing of foreign culture that Edward 'Orientalism' Said had a field day with. meanwhile, the people who lived through Britpop detested much of it, and perhaps rightly so. all i want is to go back to my fantasy London!

GH: Those ravers came from council estates (Carl Cox, Deja Vu/Dub Pistols one estate specifically, Rounshaw in Carshalton) and worked the door on the Cafe de Paris (my first flatmate, who also worked at Tony Coulston-Hayter hangar raves screamed about in The Sun) before going out to Spain and making balearic; they were soul boys on their strain of American urban imports. Soul II Soul, hello? Massive Attack and the whole Bristol colonial legacy? E came into London cheers to a torch singer initials MA and granny's fave BG who had a friend called Marilyn. Also the free party/beginnings of anti-cap protest scene did teknivals all over, and people were only too happy to march against the CJB. All of this is as British as the Hippy Trail, Chris Isherwood and Morris dancing.

Heroes and gods both. :-)

so britpop is now carl cox and billy childish and lush and mbv and jungle and shoegaze? isnt the workability of it as a genre completely destroyed by by this? i'm relly not a fan of the idea that world of twist, st etienne etc were britpop or that the 92 era indiepop stuff was britpop. so some of the prime movers in the london axis of britpop were into doc scott, this doesnt make doc scott britpop though. there may well have been a great london scene of early 90s where people were equally into suburban base and nancy sinatra equally, but i dont see that time as britpop.

also, when were these jungle nights and where? i cannot accept any definition of jungle pre94 (or very late 93)

Good Mixer drinking started in 1990; their extra half-hour made it popular with people who'd gone to see/been in gigs in other pubs in Camden. We listened to pirates when we weren't going to see PJ Harvey and Pulp but that was ages before we went to clubs; I went to one called Paradise in the Angel in late '93 *actually with Simon R* and wrote the first article abt. jungle for US mag; friend who later got together with record company boss worked in a shop with Kemi from Kemistry and Storm and both flipped out when Kurtney popped in the night after Syndrome with FAT? on their mind for my pal.

Whoa, I'm beginning to Zelig out EEEEK.

yea, i know about paradise, you are right that that is the very beginnings of jungle as its own genre rather than hardcore or darkness. any earlier and it wasnt jungle (ok ok, i'll go as far back as possibly accepting summer 93 as jungle as separate from hardcore but even then it was not separated from hardcore properly at that point)

i just think your definition of britpop is too broad. broad enough to lose its defining characteristics, i mean if you're going to throw in st etienne and boys own why not terry farley, acid house, right back to danny rampling and shoom?

i see britpop as a rejection of 88-93, or at the very least, a whittling down. you mention creation records, and how they fit through the preceding period and into britpop, but look how the creation roster changed from 93 to 94. that was quite a shift, how can it all be britpop, across the big change? a lot of people by the wayside, a lot of new people, the aesthetic so oppositional to what went before?

i just think you are describing a london scene that had intersection with britpop, partly because of an industry perspective where people would continue to be involved, but in the music and in the social context britpop ripped up what had gone before

"But he's a 28-year-old man with a beard." "Just look at my fixed smile."

Reminds me of Gareth.