Weird / unusual / extraordinary Britpop

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.

If World of Twist hadn't split up in 1992 they'd surely have been a shoo-in for that Select feature/Crimplenism/Lion Pop/Proto-Britpop/whatever

xps but someone could come along and go 'then britpop really began in earnest, oasis happened etc etc, and pulp aside the old english art-pop this and that element got stripped but then look, all these other new bands in camden and the west end, price and parkes to the rescue, glammore stuck to his guns' etc. not saying such an argument in prose would be all that enlightening, just that it's maybe a bit surprising someone hasn't linked both (arty and not very successful, singles wise) ends of the britpop years like so in the decades since.

i watched an oasis interview from the 00s a few weeks ago where noel was pressed on the term britpop and he dismissively went 'but at first we were called new wave of new wave'. would much like to see some examples of that.

Nope, Lion Pop is new to me, and yeah very stupid

As for crimplenism...

I’m seeing at lot of bands mentioned upthread I’ve never though of as Britt pop - only thing I’m common (aside from nationalities) is the time period.
Am wondering if Britt pop has to be from like 1990-2005 ish era or if something newer like Temples could be considered Britt pop.

Read the infamous Melody Maker Romo feature for the first time when it was posted on the Nothingelseon Twitter a few weeks ago. The entire thing reads like a very elaborate April Fool's joke

Yeah it felt bizarre and like it had appeared from nowhere at the time, you do wonder whether it would have been better received if they hadn't launched it like that, or if it had a better name. But ultimately it had no chance against the behemoth of Britpop.

and there were also loads of other things going on in 1996 of course

Romo seems to be notably well documented for a movement that was so brief and didn't leave much of a legacy, but all of those things made it fascinating to me as a teenager in the early 2000s (I was just too young to have followed it at the time). I spent a lot of time reading this website circa 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20070314085457/http://www.thisisromo.com/romo/html/about_this_site.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20070320022458/http://www.thisisromo.com/index.html

the very lengthy romo wikipedia article is written and guarded by one user whose username would be a conflict of interests violation if romo was an actual brand (although you'd think it was from the article, what with the discographies of its bands being present)

whichever arsehole coined "lion pop" in a jaunty jingoistic usage of this horrible language - words cannot express how much I wish them to be already dead.

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

― My God's got no nose... (Tom D.),

I haven't either.

If World of Twist hadn't split up in 1992 they'd surely have been a shoo-in for that Select feature/Crimplenism/Lion Pop/Proto-Britpop/whatever

― soref, Sunday, 14 April 2024 20:46 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Pulp were furious with World of Twist as they thought they'd ripped off their sound and stage show, so yes.

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

Only mention of lion pop i can find is here on a kids wikipedia site

https://kids.kiddle.co/Britpop

Lion-pop was only one band. Hardly counts as a genre.

Hm I seem to remember NME trying to shoehorn at least Cud, Pulp and My Life Story in there?

― The Vintner's Lipogram (OleM), Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Why? What was it supposed to be? I always thought it was Cud's name for their own music.
― everything (everything), Wednesday, August 16, 2006

I think it was something about being more extrovert than the shoegazers etc, or something.
― The Vintner's Lipogram (OleM), Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Seems to be used on the wikipedia pages for Britpop and Cud - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?go=Go&search=%22lion+pop%22&title=Special%3ASearch&ns0=1

i think Cud would be quite high up in my personal list of bands that i would never listen to because they're called Cud

How many bands called Cud are there?

they don't have a lot of competition it's true

i watched an oasis interview from the 00s a few weeks ago where noel was pressed on the term britpop and he dismissively went 'but at first we were called new wave of new wave'. would much like to see some examples of that.

― you can see me from westbury white horse

Huh, interesting to hear that Oasis were called that. The only bands I can remember that were NWONW are SMASH and These Animal Men.

Cud were also shite and not worth listening to

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