Weird / unusual / extraordinary Britpop

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

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