Could Britpop Return?

On Tuesday of this past week, I found myself at Bowery Ballroom, a small concert venue on New York City’s Lower East Side, bobbing my head along to the druggy synths and fist-in-the-air bass lines of Kasabian, a band from Leicester, England. I’ve attended, on average, about three concerts a month since I moved to New York in June of ’04, and I’ve noticed that crowd demeanor can most often be described as aloof, indifferent, or, at best, cautiously enthusiastic. It’s possible that I’m just seeing the wrong bands, but I’d bet you a shiny quarter that it has more to do with the mindset of the New York City concertgoer. So, imagine my surprise when I took my eyes off of the stage and noticed that the reaction being garnered by Kasabian was akin to something you’d find at a Franz Ferdinand show. I enjoyed nearly every minute of the hour-and-a-half set: the fuzzed-out guitar riffs, the aforementioned bass/synth combo, and the rave-tastic lyrical exhortations of songs like “L.S.F.” Vocalist Tom Meighan took the stage five minutes after the rest of the band, and as I watched him lope around the stage like he owned the place, I turned to my buddy Mike and said simply, “Dude’s the next Ian Brown.” I was referencing the lead singer of The Stone Roses, the band whose debut album was the origin of Britpop, a musical era that lasted from 1988 to 1997. I stood there, the only sedentary being in a sea of po-going 24 hour party people, and wondered, “Could it all be happening again?”

Britpop is actually a pretty complicated thing; more of a cultural phenomenon than a musical movement, it could serve as the topic of a book or a documentary, as some have already discovered. What follows is a not-so-brief history of Britpop that looks at the circumstances that lead to its birth and death, coupled with an admittedly cavalier analysis of the current state of British music that attempts to answer the question posed above.

Britpop started in Manchester in the late 1980s as a drugged-out addendum to an era of British music dominated by The Smiths, a band that built a career on the idea that melancholy and the desire to dance weren’t two mutually exclusive concepts. The Happy Mondays were at the center of the early Britpop, but were soon eclipsed by The Stone Roses, who took Britpop in a sunnier direction that depended more on melody than rhythm. NME, the British music tabloid that, in conjunction with Melody Maker, played as integral a role in the Britpop phenomenon as any one band, recently named The Stone Roses’ 1989 self-titled debut album to be the greatest of all time. It’s this kind of hyperbole that became the stock in trade of NME and made Britpop so funny and enjoyable.

Musically, Britpop transformed from ‘80s house rock into a reaction to the rising popularity of the early nineties American music scene that was dominated by grunge rock. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp wore their accents like a badge of honor, worshipped popular British bands of the past, and rejected all things American. The Britpop sound was defined its towering riffs and sing-along choruses, and the accompanying lyrics – exemplified most notably in the songs “Common People” by Pulp and “Live Forever” by Oasis – reveled in the anomie and economic dissatisfaction of the young working class while boldly proclaiming that something better was on the horizon. Britpop even extended to fashion – the style of dress adopted by the members of Oasis became predominant among young males throughout most of the decade.

After The Stone Roses essentially disappeared in the early 1990s, and the Big Three bands of the movement became Oasis, Blur, and Pulp. The secondary bands included the Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, The Charlatans, Elastica, Stereophonics, Kula Shaker, Radiohead (yes, at one time, Radiohead was in fact a smaller band), Supergrass, Sleeper, Hurricane #1, later Ride, and Embrace. Britpop dominated the charts, swept awards ceremonies, and saturated the tabloids. The fairly ridiculous feud between Oasis and Blur received daily media attention, and basically determined “which side you were on.” Were you a middle-class student who lived in London? Or did you grow up in Burnage, father on the dole, with nothing to dream of aside from high-tailing it out of Manchester by way of your distortion pedal? The smash success of “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” effectively ended the debate, and for better or for worse (most likely the latter), the Gallagher brothers became the collective voice of their generation. With great humility, Noel Gallagher accepted this position by saying of Blur frontman Damon Albarn, “I hope he gets AIDS and dies.”

Britpop reached its apogee in 1996 with Oasis’s landmark gigs at Knebworth, which attracted a quarter of a million drunken lads over two nights. The heights were dizzying, and the fall was inevitable. Tony Blair, in his bid to become Prime Minister of England in 1997, shrewdly aligned himself with the bands of Britpop and developed a seemingly close relationship with Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher. At the 1996 Brit Awards, which according to The Independent were “little more than a coronation for Oasis,” Gallagher actually went so far as to say, “There are seven people in this room who are giving a little bit of hope to young people in this country. That is [sic] me, our kid, Bonehead, Guigs, Alan White, Alan McGee and Tony Blair. And if you've all got anything about you, you'll go up there and you'll shake Tony Blair's hand, man. He's the man! Power to the people!” With that, Blair had found his sounding board.

Britpop, though it had a social and economic consciousness, was never political, but it didn’t matter. Blair successfully convinced the electorate that the Labour Party was nothing less than a political extension of the bands making the records they bought. Blair won the election and held a reception at 10 Downing Street, at which Gallagher famously made an appearance. After ignoring Noel for much of the evening, Blair finally approached the guitarist, who told him, “We stayed up till seven o'clock in the morning to watch you arrive at the [Labour Party] headquarters. How did you stay up all night?” Gallagher didn’t talk about Blair’s answer until years later, when he revealed the following: “And [Blair] leaned over and said, ‘Probably not by the same means as you did.’ And at that point I knew he was a geezer.” In other words, he’d been had.

Less than a month later, Oasis released their third album, Be Here Now – purported by the Gallaghers and the press to be the biggest, greatest rock album ever – which turned out to be nothing more than eighty minutes of coked-out guitar histrionics set over top of lyrics seemingly cribbed from a high school yearbook. In 1997, Blur released a self-titled album that espoused American indie rock. Pulp’s 1998 release of This Is Hardcore served only as a reminder of what once was. Britpop was over and the fervor quickly dissipated.

In 1997, a lot of people became very excited over a record called OK Computer. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Radiohead’s atmospheric approach to techno-phobic themes resonated with critics, who embraced them for becoming everything that Britpop had never been – subtle, nuanced, and restrained. Radiohead quickly replaced Oasis as the most influential band in Britain, a post that it held until it became an esoteric self-parody more interested in being Radiohead than writing tunes. Their output dwindled, and they were eventually supplanted by bands like Coldplay, Travis, and Keane; bands so edgeless that they’re often difficult to dislike. The Libertines appeared in 2002 with their street urchin take on garage rock, providing a gleam of hope that the British rock scene hadn’t disappeared forever. In 2004 they released their self-titled follow-up, a record so bad that upon hearing it, my buddy Mike threw it out of his window. Luckily, by then, a Scottish band called Franz Ferdinand had already arrived on the scene, and we all know how that turned out.

A few months ago, a band from Leeds known as the Kaiser Chiefs began playing shows around New York City. I saw them in a crowded basement room inside the Tribeca Grand Hotel and was fairly impressed with their energy and bluster. Their debut album Employment was released to middling stateside reviews, but received a much warmer welcome across the Atlantic. The strong Cockney accent of vocalist Ricky Wilson has caused many to bill the Kaiser Chiefs as the next Blur, which might be a bit of a stretch, but they’re definitely a band to watch. One track from Employment, “Modern Way,” is a Britpop-by-numbers classic. There’s also the shit-hot Bloc Party to consider, and though they too sing with the strong accents characteristic of Britpop, their musical stylings are more akin to The Police than, say, The Charlatans. Finally, we have Hope of the States, a band with two Britpop anthems – “Enemies/Friends” and “66 Sleepers to Summer” – already in the bag, but they lose points for their obsession with America.

So where is all of this going? Are these bands part of a New Britpop? The answer, of course, is unclear. While it’s unlikely that enough time has passed since the death of Britpop 1 for anything but a pale imitation to occur, the stars seem to be taking the same pattern they formed in the early 1990s. American bands such as The Strokes, Interpol, and The White Stripes dominate British charts and airwaves, and an increased American political influence has many feeling frustrated. Might the stage be set for another “Live Forever?” The answer seems to be more Maybe than Definitely, but in true Britpop fashion, one can hope.