Weird / unusual / extraordinary Britpop

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

Elastica and Echobelly also got called NWONW

Menswear and Compulsion were called it too

If anyone called Oasis NWONW is just shows what a non-thing it was.

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

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