Weird / unusual / extraordinary Britpop

'peripheral' unWellery Britpop: Manics, M*nsun, Boo Radleys, Space, Placebo, Black Grape, Verve, James, Divine Comedy, Jack, Earl Brutus

I assume spice girls or massive attack or bush aren't britpop?

Spice Girls weren't but they were very much of the same zeitgeist, just the True Pop version of it.

Massive Attack felt positioned against it to me.

Bush were irrelevant.

There's that weird interregnum between Britpop and whatever you want to call the "landfill indie" era c1999/2000 where Britpop as a going concern wasn't really talked about, but that whole wave of Strokes/Libertines/Hives type stuff hadn't quite emerged yet.

And I seem to remember it being the time when a lot of drippy AOR bands like Travis and Coldplay took up that space. The NME were clutching at straws trying to make stars of bands no one remembers any more like Terris, or coming up with new "scenes" like Shroomadelica. God, I have little love for mid-2000s indie, but it was depressing.

Can I bring Stereolab into the conversation? Not a britpop band in any traditional sense but, to me, often part of its fringe by association, e.g. the epic performance of French Disko on the Word at the dawn of Britpop.

― giraffe

Yeah, I think Stereolab are interesting here. Laetita sang on a Blur track, for one thing. I'd argue against them being Britpop but there were definitely attempts to get them into that bracket.

The seven circles of Britpop. I'd put Stereolab in circle 4 next to, I dunno, Prolapse or something

Did Britpop have to be British? I remember bands like Fool's Garden, the Wannadies and Superpunk being occasionally described as Britpop.

Incidentally, this is one of the Britpoppiest things I can think of, and it's German.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7YOafHdC3A

Were the Dandy Warhols secretly a Britpop band?

Ha, I did think about proffering Prolapse, partly just to see if any of them still post here and I could get them to be annoyed at me.

xp

didn't realise they posted here, haha

There's that weird interregnum between Britpop and whatever you want to call the "landfill indie" era c1999/2000 where Britpop as a going concern wasn't really talked about, but that whole wave of Strokes/Libertines/Hives type stuff hadn't quite emerged yet.

― your mom goes to limgrave (dog latin), Friday, 12 April 2024 14:42 (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This period is pretty fertile for bands which were one foot NME-friendly and one foot Kerrang-friendly. In the mid-90s idk if NME were as into Britrock (Terrorvision/Therpy?/Skunk Anansie) as Melody Maker were but in the late 90s/early 00s I feel like they (and Q) shared with Kerrang a big liking of Ash, Feeder, Idlewild, JJ72, My Vitrol and Muse. Happy to be shown a negative NME review of one of those bands and proved wrong ofc. And I know even they stopped short of Stereophonics.

Here's the three-part compilation I made about a decade ago, call can be streamed with the mixcloud links at the top.

https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/09/20/britpop-nuggets-part-one-some-people-are-born-to-dance/

https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/09/28/britpop-nuggets-part-two-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-tolerate-northern-uproar/

https://haonowshaokao.com/2015/10/22/britpop-nuggets-part-three-long-live-the-uk-music-scene/

Part three is maybe the most relevant based on the above.

ooh nice one!

My recollection of the final couple of years of the 90s is that OK Computer kind of changed everything overnight and suddenly there was this slightly superficial critical emphasis on experimentation and a certain pose of seriousness - I say slightly superficial because its parameters were pretty constrained, which was confirmed by the release of Kid A in late 2000 when a lot of critics decided that the band had gone too far.

I'm thinking of e.g. the critical reaction to (in different ways) the Manic Street Preachers' If This Is My Truth..., Blur's 13, Mansun's second album, Super Furry Animals in this period.

In my head Ultrasound were perhaps the archetypal band for this interstitial moment, while Gay Dad were perhaps its silliest manifestation.

The Beta Band feel like they were half-in half-out (and were liked by a lot of people who would not have been fans of the above stuff)

I find it strange that Suede are considered Britpop, let alone one of the "Big 4". No one I knew was especially into them. They didn't really have huge media-attracting hits like Blur, Pulp and Oasis. And I feel like their critical and commercial peaks bookended either side of that era rather than exemplified its centre. Plus their music and overall look felt more like it was riffing off goth and glam tropes than 60s psychedelia or 80s new wave. I dunno. I just don't think they fit

agree re suede not fitting, it was cool that they toured with the manics last year (“this is not britpop, this is a design for your life”)

i just picked up a cheap copy of I Should Coco by Supergrass bc i figured it would appeal to my kid. i was right. he hates the turgid britpop.

(he's heard Oasis and his reaction was https://greenandblackmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/thumbs-down-300x188.png)

one of my other favorite britpop albums was On by Echobelly, i think they didn't exactly get much love around here in the past but that's a pretty stellar album overall.

it's funny I think "British guitar bands from the 90s that I don't like" is quite close to what I think Britpop is.

my definition of it certainly a lot narrower than most of this thread. Stereolab? absolutely no fucking way. A few of your defences of the blokeyness too tbh. I would never have considered Kenickie or Bis (especially not Bis) to be Britpop bands in the 90s.

I admit I don't really understand what the definition is in this thread though. by some of the responses it's like "a band from Britain in the 90s" which like no? Massive Attack? are you taking the piss?

Suede were the cover stars (in Anderson and headline form) of the YANKS GO HOME issue of Select. They’re the ur-Britpop band.

(The semi-genre may have become dumber and baser as it became more commercial, but close research may reveal this to not be an isolated case.)

Sic is 100% correct

These are the bands that kicked off Britpop. That jingoistic prick Maconie still bangs on about American bands ruining music in the early 90s and how Britpop was needed.
https://i.imgur.com/ze48ffF.jpeg

I missed that and yeah wtf if Suede aren't to be considered Britpop then what even the fuck is any of this about

fuck Stuart Maconie btw. what an absolute cunt

the cretin was even worse when he waded into UK politics during the Corbyn era, he made John Harris seem like a serious person.

he was talking up the kaiser chiefs as a band forged by northern w/c culture and any attacks on them are classist, that is fucking hilarious tbf on him

is britpop just authentocrat rock?

I remember there being a pro-britpop contingent within corbynism who tried to make woke laddism happen for a while but nothing came of it (thankfully or not)

I must admit I am still confused as to what this genre/movement entailed since I only remember the sort of wan melancholic tail end of it and then the forced revival in the landfill era. it's trainspotting soundtrack music basically? but this thread seems to be going for deeper cuts which will inevitably bring up boundary issues.

I've also heard a few older folks lamenting a weirder camper more diverse and inclusive britpop which might have been but I don't know enough to know which if any real artists or subgenres or tendencies that reflected such an ideal more without leaving "britpop" entirely

is massive attack taking the piss because of musical or cultural differences or both? all this stuff gets flattened in retrospect and ime massive attack were the one thing nme readers and techno/dnb heads both generally liked but maybe that wasn't always the case

Liked, yes.
Categorised as Britpop = different thing

the one thing nme readers and techno/dnb heads both generally liked

Outside of the pure lad-rock niche, being eclectic was pretty much mandatory in the '90s, so I'm not sure that "the one thing" can possibly be true here. Sure, there was irony that went with some of the eclecticism, but if you didn't like at least a bit of pop or dance or metal or exotica your tastes were definitely considered shallow. I think this is what the 'historical' viewpoint misses - the music media loved to overstate their positions, but literally nobody I knew was a separatist in their taste.

of course in the mid 90s all the technoheads wanted to do was be a hippy and get stoned on marijuana

You’d hope at least some of those bands would have been embarrassed to be featured on that Britain First select cover, did any of them ever say as much?

I remember a lot more tribalism among 00s teens partly encouraged by older britpop partisans in music culture who were pointedly anti-eclectic by that point (I doubt listening habits ever reflected the lines being drawn in public) but I always assumed britpop was just landfill 1.0 because of these people

SPACE MONKEYS

lol that Select cover, the fact that they site Denim as Brit pop shows they’re “taking the piss”, you all got played, suede not britpop

I wasn’t there btw

You’d hope at least some of those bands would have been embarrassed to be featured on that Britain First select cover, did any of them ever say as much?

― subpost master (wins), Sunday, 14 April 2024 15:41 (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

All of them I think. certainly Suede.

I've also heard a few older folks lamenting a weirder camper more diverse and inclusive britpop which might have been but I don't know enough to know which if any real artists or subgenres or tendencies that reflected such an ideal more without leaving "britpop" entirely

This is a good question and one that's made me think about what the term means to me, which is very different from the way it is now generally understood.

The context: I was born in 1979 and spent most of the 90s living in Worcester, very far away from Camden. My view on music (which was my main interest already) was mainly through Radio 1 and Top of The Pops, until I started reading Select sometime in 1994. So 1992/1993, when I was just starting to get into music, was just the dreariest moment, there was Nirvana but that didn't seem to be for me, the cool kids at school liked Neds Atomic Dustbin and Ugly Kid Joe and The Senseless Things, etc. which also did nothing for me at the time. I was really into Shakespeare's Sister, then Kingmaker, also had tapes of The Spin Doctors, 4 Non Blondes, Automatic For The People, no shade or shame here, just that I seemed to be flailing around trying to find something that fit.

So when suddenly in 1994 there was His 'n' Hers and Parklife, and Elastica at the start of 1995, it was just massively exciting, this weird arty indie music which was also making it into the charts. Something I found out fairly recently is that this scene wasn't really from The Good Mixer or even Camden, it was based around Club Smashing on Regent Street, and one of the organisers of this club was Matthew Glamorre, who played in Minty with Leigh Bowery - just a very different place all round, "weird" and "camp" are certainly reasonable words to use. When the Britpop Boom happened in 1995 it was these bands with a kind of post-punk-arty sound but pop visuals that I counted as Britpop - so Menswear, Powder, etc. - and some older groups seemed to be getting on to this particular train.

Now at school I was definitely not part of the mainstream, I was the weird kid who people didn't want to be seen with, and this all just spoke to me in a way nothing else had. When Pulp released Mis-Shapes it really did feel like it was the first time that anyone had talked about my experience. (Recently I've been thinking about how this intersects with queer culture and have come to the conclusion that the answer is - quite a lot - but that's for elsewhere) But on the other hand by mid-1995 everyone was into Oasis, and I didn't for a second consider THAT to be Britpop. It wasn't pop at all, surely? It was rock music! But this important distinction, it seems, was not shared by the media, not even Select Magazine any more, which was by the start of 1996 edited by John Fucking Harris with a firm "no weirdos welcome" policy in place.

At The Phoenix Festival 1996 I saw Minty, and David Devant & His Spirit Wife and Posh, all from that Club Smashing scene and all arty experimental indie pop bands (of very different varieties) - but they were all outsiders again, the second wave of Britpop was all along the Oasis model, and intertwined with the lad culture / Loaded / three lions / Nick Hornby / Chris Evans stuff, which I found even more alienating than 92/93 had been. I was by this point into various underground scenes (especially Glasgow) so very much checked out of whatever Shed 7 and The Verve and whoever else were doing.

So when I think about Britpop I like to think of that time around 94/95 where it looked like possibilities were being opened up, but the nostalgic view seems to almost anything else, and it's annoying. They should get another name for it. It isn't even pop music. Though to be honest I've no fondness for the "Brit" part, they can keep that.

Should say that I never even saw the embarrassing Select cover until much later - would have found it stupid even at the time.

I wasn’t there btw

― brimstead,

It shows.

Booming post, CaAL.

there are scans of Maconie's Select article and accompanying interviews with Suede, Saint Etienne, Lawrence, Luke Haines and Jarvis Cocker here:

https://selectmagazinescans.monkeon.co.uk/?cat=650

It's kind of funny that in the interviewees seem mostly agnostic-to-negative about Britishness/patriotism, makes a weird contrast with Andrew Harrison's manifesto about why 'we' (somewhat vaguely defined) should 'reclaim' the union jack. Seems notable that Maconie frames the brit bands as being distinguished by style and an interest in aesthetics, in contrast to the drab American grunge acts. Maybe things would have worked out better if 'crimplenism' had caught on.

from Mark Sturdy's Pulp book:

By the spring of 1992, the indie landscape In Britain was for more amenable to Pulp than it had been a year previously. Shoegazing and baggy were being supplanted by a wave of young bands that shared a brighter, poppier aesthetic, often with a slight retro-Seventies edge in one way or another. It wasn't really a movement as such - the similarities between the likes of Cud, St Etienne, Lush, Suede and Pulp were vastly outnumbered by their differences. However, the common threads that the bands shared, along with the fact that some of them tended to rub shoulders in the same Camden boozers and occasionally be spotted at the same gigs and parties, was enough for the music press to lump them together into a 'scene', initially under the banner Lion Pop, and subsequently, Crimplenism.

need to know where Romo fits into all this

The people who put together Smashing closed it down and started another club in 1996. That's where Romo fits in.

Nice to see Sturdy on ILM! Wonder if he's ever been on here.

When I began getting into music around 2000, britpop seemed like the thing that was for me. But since I had no money, and not a lot of access to the internet, I was sorta grasping and buying the cheapest britpop albums I'd heard at least something good about. So I do have the Dodgy/Kula Shaker/Space albums, and stuff like that. And those albums are kinda weird too. Dodgy - Free Peace Sweet is not good, but it's filled with small instrumental interludes and switches genre all the time. Kula Shaker did songs in 5/8 and obviously used a lot of Indian instruments. And after OK Computer even Oasis thought they should incorporate some 'electronica' into Standing On the Shoulder Of Giants.

Compared to landfill indie in the 00's, and all the other retro rock movements, britpop was weird! But compared to what else was going on in Britain in the first half of the nineties, not so much. And yeah, since Oasis won the 'battle of britpop', the whole thing ended up seeming a lot less diverse than it was. Except that it really was exceptionally white, right?

Andrew Collins talking about 'Lion Pop' in an NME review of Pulp's Separations album in 1992:

The inexorable rise of Lion Pop continues apace with this, some product by Pulp, albeit one that pongs a bit of risky business and confidence trickery. "

Which is not to say don't buy it forthwith. If the generic term Lion Pop has you lost as yet, listen in. Lion Pop is all about flamboyance, unself-conscious foppery, grand gestures and absurd colour co-ordination. It is Sheffield's Pulp, falling about like an amateur dramatics society putting on Jacques Brel's existential musical adaptation of Run For Your Wife! 'Separations' is a nine-ring synthesiser circus. Bring on the frowns.

So then, enter the Lion, kids. Gesticulate a little. Wear something other than 100 per cent cotton. Be legendary. But snaffle up this record merely as an hors d'oeuvre served on a dishonest plate.

i used to think 'britpop' as a term came from 'lionpop' cus i assume the 'lion' part means (specifically) english. then it became 'brit' to broaden it out. i have no idea if this is bullshit but i suspect it is.

go far with this and we can celebrate the coincidentally named Lionrock (who started at about the same time) as something great and colourful against hoary old Britrock

Andrew Collins is such a talentless pseud that it's nearly (but not quite) charming.

re:Romo surely someone will have painted it at length as the 'actual' successor to lion pop? if not i'm surprised (maybe)

the few years between lion pop and romo felt like centuries, pretty sure it had been forgotten by then.

Never heard of Lion Pop before, what a stupid name.

I definitely do not recall them getting called it but its not impossible that any guitar band gigging in 93/94 just got called it and look how many of the others ended up being called britpop

I've never listened to Cud but assumed (possibly because of the name) they were more in the grebo, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat itself space rather than being retro aesthetes along the lines of Pulp/Suede/St Etienne etc? Have I misjudged them?

idk how much of a jump it is from cud's wardrobe to jellyfish's but i do think it demands more interesting music, better or worse, than it has

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZrG4jmiwNA

I've never listened to Cud but assumed (possibly because of the name) they were more in the grebo, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat itself space rather than being retro aesthetes along the lines of Pulp/Suede/St Etienne etc? Have I misjudged them?

― soref, Sunday, 14 April 2024 22:29 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Somewhere in between i feel? definite '60s' (via baggy) hangover lightness but sounding sorta similar enough to the fraggle rock/T-shirt bands (senseless things, mega city four) to court a student following with what i imagine would have been a big overlap

where do Jack fit into this thing?

50p bin

never really listened to them tbh but something like '...of lights' seems to straddle the gap between suede/pulp and stereolab

Experimental Britpop.

the crowd for blur at coachella was so embarassing damon im so sorry i wasn't there pic.twitter.com/k60LxJj8a7

— nicole (@cupidschok3hold) April 14, 2024

nothing is reproduced
only wasted

What’s embarrassing is having a strop because the crowd don’t want to join in with the lame “ah ah ah aha ow” squeaky bit

I've never listened to Cud but assumed (possibly because of the name) they were more in the grebo, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Pop Will Eat itself space rather than being retro aesthetes along the lines of Pulp/Suede/St Etienne etc? Have I misjudged them?

― soref, Sunday, 14 April 2024 22:29 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Somewhere in between i feel? definite '60s' (via baggy) hangover lightness but sounding sorta similar enough to the fraggle rock/T-shirt bands (senseless things, mega city four) to court a student following with what i imagine would have been a big overlap

― you can see me from westbury white horse, Sunday, April 14, 2024 9:33 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

89ish, as a Peel band, they had a scratchy clatteriness that was a bit like a Postcard records or C86 hand-me-down maybe? I don't think they fitted with grebo or Neds or fraggle at all at that point. But they evolve into that Lamacq hinterland that isn't really in my mental map - Kingmaker world.

i do kinda want to hear that 89 Cud album, mostly on the strength (or caution) of its strange sleeve. isn't it a concept album too?

I see them more as Mark Goodier than Lammo

NWONW was an inkie name for Sleeper, SMASH, Shed Seven, These Animal Men, Elastica etc. basically any two Kings Reach Tower writers that drank together would have a crack at reverse-creating a genre and some of them stuck for a few months. when you have tens of thousands of readers eating up a couple hundred pages a week this was a fun way to recommend “if you like this, try this.”

xpost sorry, was in the train tunnel hours ago and that didn’t go through

Jack felt to me like an extension of the vibes established by (especially) The Auteurs and (pre-Coming Up) Suede. I suppose that by the time their first album came out in 1996 that sort of lineage no longer felt like part of capital-B "Britpop", but it's not like the album isn't pretty pop at times (thinking of e.g. the "la la la" chorus in "Wintercomessummer").

It's also interesting how stretches of the album feel like they anticipate Pulp's We Love Life.

a friend pointed out a few years ago that luke haines looks like grandad off only fools and horses, esp with that hat, and i wish to pass it on

xp no doubt because Anthony Reynolds was as much a Scott Walkerphile as Jarvis Cocker.

So much so that he wrote a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Dream-story-Walker-Brothers/dp/1906002258

Yeah I'm not at all surprised that Reynolds is a Walker fan - I was really commenting on the similarity between Jack and (late era) Pulp underscoring the arbitrariness/rubbery nature of what counts or does not count as "britpop"

Genuinely wish Loz Hardy would do a memoir, seems very unlikely though

Vaguely germane to this thread: William Potter from Cud wrote the BritPop comic GEEZER, drawn by the mighty Philip Bond, and it is quite good!
https://www.offregister.press/geezer

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/apr/15/babybird-youre-gorgeous-bikinis-thong

Guy from Babybird is a nasty right winger but here he is with his experimental feminist song

worst big song of the britpop era along with good enough by Dodgy.

Just reading this interview:

https://thequietus.com/interviews/dave-pearce-flying-saucer-attack-interview/

"In retrospect, of course that was the first attempted Britpop manoeuvre by the system."

The notion of Britpop as music made up by the state.

shed seven? mi5 morelike

Makes sense tbh

Someone I don't know on Facebook tried to convince me Babybird was "as far away from Britpop as it gets", then posted a song that was kind of an indie ballad with slightly creepy lyrics to prove his point

Also if you look up Babybird on Facebook, as I just did because I was trying to find the aforementioned conversation, it's just post after post of Babybirdbloke bitterly complaining about how no one cares about his music anymore despite his prolific, unfailing genius

he put razor blades in the ice cream
sha la la la
sha la la la la la la

didn't he eagerly defend roisin last year? i get they've probably been chums since her sheffield days but i haven't really wanted to listen to him since

i suppose this isn't the place is it

He was also posting/retweeting a lot of Islamophobic stuff recently but in the past few days he seems to have deactivated his twitter account.

He was an interesting-ish artist making weird lo-fi records that sometimes got played on mark & lard in 95/96, then he had The Hit and put out a few more to try to chase it (I think Good Night is probably his best pop single but these things do not work logically) then for the next quarter of a century he's been unsuccessfully trying to chase this idea of being a pop star which he is obviously not cut out for and has driven him into this hole. not feeling that sorry for him but ultimately this is a variety of brainworms.

I went to see Babybird in 1995 because a friend wanted to check them out, I had no idea who they were. didn't like it much tbh. weird support bands, there was a metal band then a kind of jokey Half Man Half Biscuit/Sultans of Ping type band, think I liked them best

As an American they seemed… really really British, like real hardcore Britpop for British people

I remember Mark Radcliffe being disappointed in him for working with The Lightning Seeds, which from the perspective of 2024 is simply a bizarre opinion to have.

he put razor blades in the ice cream
sha la la la
sha la la la la la la

― Deflatormouse, Tuesday, May 21, 2024 5:34 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

that was literally the song