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Rock Family Trees – The Birth of Cool Britannia

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The normally Civilian Mrs F watched this with me last night. Her verdict: “Music really was better in the olden days, wasn’t it?” I just sat there, repeating “I saw them at {insert name of grotty venue}.

Blurb from the show website:

“The iconic music documentary series returns to examine the real story behind the birth of Britpop and how a handful of like-minded musicians, struggling to find an authentic voice, would pave the way for a revolution in British music. It is an intricately connected story of three of the biggest bands of the 1990s – Suede, Elastica and Blur – and how, for a brief moment in the middle of that decade, they changed British music forever, kickstarting a movement that still reverberates to this day.

With intimate interviews with Brett Anderson, Justine Frischmann, Mat Osman, Justin Welch and numerous other key players, this is the inside story of the friendships, the fall-outs and the changing line-ups that fuelled a new movement in British music. It’s a family tree that extends from the Smiths to M.I.A., but at its heart is Suede: the band who – for better or worse – started it all.

This is not the familiar story of ‘Cool Britannia’, of Blur v Oasis, Champagne Supernovas and Knebworth; it is the untold story of how we got there, all the way from a suburban house in Haywards Heath.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0016dtb/rock-family-trees-the-birth-of-cool-britannia

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Comments

  2. Worth a watch. And I did the same as you, repeating the phrase “seen them”
    Stuart Maconie was almost apologetic for inventing the tag, and I was quite pleased that the producers didn’t add “(Richard’s brother)” to the name plate when interviewing Mat Osman.
    Reminded me that I must listen again to Suede

  3. I think we should have a poll on “what is your favourite band that didn’t change British music forever?” There aren’t many who can claim this of course, but my votes would probably go to The Rose of Avalanche, Northern Uproar and The Tygers of Pan Tang.

    • See also almost every new band that’s ever been hyped. Campag Velocet, Menswe@r, Gay Dad, Ultrasound, etc etc etc. Apparently the actual success rate of new businesses – as in, still in business 3 years after founding – is somewhere under 30%, and I bet the equivalent for signed bands is a lot, lot lower.

    • I remember Terris being splashed on the cover of the NME. I know there was a glut of ‘best new band in Britain/Europe/the universe’ covers, but I can’t recall Terris even releasing a song.

      • I remember The Enemy being all over the NME too, which I’m sure was more to do with the phonetic felicity than anything else. Certainly couldn’t have been the music. (Oh god: just remembered: The Music.) But all of that’s post Britpop and well into landfill indie territory.

      • Bloody hell, just read the Wiki for Terris and it could almost be the type specimen for “the NME breathlessly making knobs of themselves in print about a quite average band”:

        …prominent support from the New Musical Express magazine, which hailed them as a “21st Century Joy Division” and “the best new band in the UK”, and featured them on its front cover in January 2000.[1][2][3][4] … [They] won the “brightest hope” at the 2000 NME Brats.

        [NME] Journalist Ted Kessler wrote of the band, “Only one band want to make records that blow holes through the limits of what we currently meekly accept as sonically reasonable in the field of rock. Only one band can. And that’s Terris.”[5]

        They subsequently signed to the Blanco y Negro label, releasing two further singles, the second of which, “Fabricated Lunacy”, reached number 62 on the UK Singles Chart.[1] Debut album Learning to Let Go was released in March 2001.[1] Critical reaction was mixed, [though] NME’s April Long was more positive, giving it an 8 out of 10 rating and calling it “a vociferous statement of intent from a band dedicated to annihilating clichés”.[3] Disappointing sales led to them being dropped in December of that year.[7] The band split up shortly afterwards.[8]

        Perfect.

  8. Isn’t it a bit daft how the meedja has to invent earth shattering events that really just didn’t happen in order to hype interesting documentaries about short-lived periods in our musical heritage? I mean, really, come off it: “pave the way for a revolution in British music”. I beg your pardon? What revolution? Every time bands do what buses do – turn up three or four at a time after a short period of no show – some berk says we’re having a musical revolution.

    • The main revolution that happened in music in the 1990s was the absorption of hip-hop by r’n’b, not a lot of rumty-tumty retro rock acts that, Oasis aside, didn’t even sell that many records.

      I liked a lot of the Britpop bands at the time but as a label I thought it was nonsense and even a bit desperate.

      • Yes, I was thinking that. Listen to popular music now ( including actual pop music) and it’s mostly derived from Hip Hop, RnB, electronic and related stuff you can track back to the early 90s. The Brit pop stuff has left little legacy beyond those survivors still popping up at the summer festivals.

        • I forget what it was that came on the car radio (6music) the other day, but it was a band with a guitar.

          Offspring The Younger (16) said “this must be at least 20 years old – you don’t get music like this nowadays.”

    • One of my pet theories is that, at any point in time, you could fit all of the creatives in a scene onto a double-decker bus.

      In the 60s, the big hitters were DONONVAN, Dave Clark 5, Fabs, Stones, Kinks, T’ Ooo.

      Britpop even more so: Justine and Justin from Elastica had both been in Suede, and Justine was Blur-adjacent. Add in Pulp and they’d still fit onto a single-decker.

  9. “Britpop” was a funny old thing even at the time. It gets lazily reduced to an easily digestible slew of slightly spiky guitar rock bands now but at the time Saint Etienne, Massive Attack and Portishead were kind of bracketed in as well and this seems to have been a bit forgotten, mostly because people like St Et’s Bob Stanley seemed to distance themselves from it all so quickly, probably seeing which way the critical wind was blowing. It’s become retrospectively sort of de rigueur to mock the era nowadays but some of it was quite fun at the time. Most of these bands had at least a couple of good tunes, even Oasis I suppose, (although admittedly I am really struggling to name more than a couple for them) but obviously like any era some bands have stood the test of time better than others. Can’t say I choose to play many typical “britpop classics” myself nowadays (Mrs L is still a massive fan so they have to get included on car journey playlists) but at the time it was a reasonably refreshing change after the somewhat dreary early nineties NME t-shirt bands such as Wonder Stuff, Neds, Atomic Dustbin, Kingmaker etc. These particular bands get even shorter shrift than the Britpop ones these days, and I was no particular fan, but they got kids going to gigs again and they were sort of precursors to Britpop, and even though they weren’t exactly innovative, fresh or ground breaking, to so consistently mock them is still a bit mean as they were entry level indie to quite a lot of kids who might have ended up getting into possibly more demanding fare…check out Chart Music podcast’s Neil Kulkarni’s review of Neds Atomic Dustbin’s Brainbloodvolume album which although probably accurate at times is a churlish and music snobbish put down. He seems really proud of this review and still retweets it.
    Britpop itself had some good tunes, some interesting characters (not the tedious Gallagher bros though) and was fun while it lasted. Then we mostly grinned with realisation at our somewhat smug parochial taste with late nineties near hindsight and moved on. Those who didn’t stayed fans of Oasis and are probably the reason Liam and Noel are still playing stadiums.

    • I could never really tell who were/weren’t the Britpop bands.

      I’m inclined to say that if you were never photographed with a Union Jack between 93 and 96 you weren’t really Britpop.

    • Not sure how you could be britpop if you were already an established success before it happened as those three you mention were. Even Suede were a bit pre, although they shook things up in a ‘now it’s time to move on from that whole US grunge thing’ which was key. The awful mod type hair-do, a worse version of the Weller look, ushered in the end. When Liam started to look rubbish after looking so right on the early singles.

  11. I will need a cheeky VPN to see that doc, but I wouldn’t mind having a go. Having been a bit down on Britpop at the time( being bit of a snob and all), I don’t quite get the critical derision it often attracts now : it seems no more or less fly-by night and opportunistic than glam or New Wave in the 70s ( or Beat groups in the mid-sixties for that matter), and seems like the last hurrah of the music industry promoting naive guitar bands through conventional sales. Maybe it needs to be repressed for another 10 years when it will seem so in the past that it will not irritate people with memories of the 90s and the Student Union remix of “Daydreamer” by menswe@r will be a period minor-classic.

  12. The sad thing about Britpop is there was a some great bands mixing guitars with other elements like dub, psychedelia, dance music, ambient etc

    Thinking about Ride, AR Kane, MBV, One Dove, Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys, Slowdive

    Britpop wiped almost all of that out.

  14. Thanks for the nod @fentonsteve
    I thought it was ok but didn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of heavy substances that seemed to creep into that scene. I traveled up to Morecambe Bay arena to see Blur the night that ‘Country House’ beat Oasis to No1. It was a great night and it did feel that it was an important moment in Brit’ Pop history. As you might of guessed I preferred Blur over Oasis.

    • I don’t know whether it was because I had money in my pocket for the first time in my life, or because there was a genuine shift in prices due to some great global goings on that we were blissfully unaware of, but I remember drugs being very affordable and very available for the first time ever. There was a huge amount of cheap coke about but pretty much all the Britpop bands that I knew of had at least one or two members who were smackheads. Looking back, it’s a miracle that there weren’t more casualties.

  15. I loved the Britpop era. Some great bands and some great albums. When I moved from Brighton to London in 95 I had a look at a map of London, as I didn’t really know much outside the touristy bits and how to get to the football grounds, looked at where might be nice to live, nice to go out and where there was a hospital with a busy A&E and it was no contest – Hampstead, Camden Town, the Royal Free. So I got a job there and lived in the hospital accommodation in Hampstead from 95 to 97. It was brill.

    Out in Camden Town, with all the pop stars in the pub, as Mr Duffy sang, loads of clubs that played great music (Borderline on a Wednesday and the Garage on a Friday we’re my favourites – I didn’t realise that there were clubs that played great music until I moved to Brighton/London, as I was used to going to awful clubs in Barnsley and Liverpool) and loads of gigs. And occasionally I’d sit and triage the pop stars at work (ooh, I could tell you some stories, etc). I was sort of single for the first time in 6 years, in my mid-20s and living in a big building full of, ahem, fellow nurses/student nurses and several years away from starting to have neuro issues. Sunday mornings playing footy on the Heath with all the locals from the pub opposite the nurses home. On the guest list at Knebworth. And then we had the Euros, which I still have nightmares over, as I equate Southgate’s penalty with the end of the best 7 or 8 months of my life. Although it could also just be that I got a steady girlfriend around that time.

    But the music was a massive part of it. The Charlatans, Pulp, Suede, Oasis, Supergrass, Gene, The Bluetones, Denim, even Stephen Duffy made some Britpoppy music. Loved it.

    • Well said. I moved back to England in 96, but to Bristol not London, it seemed a great time to be (fairly) young in the UK and I enjoyed much of the output of most of the bands you mention. Euro 96 was part of it, there was optimism in the air, possibly not seen since the 60s, also soon a new wonderful Labour government that would bring good things to everybody …

      • Ah, yes, I forgot about that election. I was on nights and it was pretty quiet. Being on triage I was sat out in the waiting room, where we had the TV on. Once it became clear where things were heading it was hilarious. I can still remember running round into minors to grab my mate cos they were about to read the results in Portillo’s constituency. Ooh, we laughed!

        And Bristol was probably second only to London at that time in respect of the music scene, so if you weren’t in London, Bristol was the place to be

        • election night I was watching My Life Story play at ULU with a big wheel which they span to choose the next song … guest spinners included Martin Fry, Mickey Georgeson from David Devant, Pippa from Posh and Marc Almond , we also had the whole of Kenickie there and various members of Romo bands (a not missed musical genre) but it was a fabulous evening … one of my mates friends ended up at a after show party with Su Pollard!!

  19. While we’re here, can we all agree a timescale for Landfill Indie?

    For me it is bookended by Be Here Now and the first Arctics album. The definitive text is Urban Hymns – humourless rockism, standard key changes, moaning self-pity, plodding elephant tempi….

        • For some odd reason Mrs Path has a rolling youtube miscellany on almost permanent rotation, with numerous clips of a pre and post Verve Richard Ashtwig, bellicosely crooning his hits, aka the three obvious culprits from UH, again and again and again.
          I still don’t know what I’ve done.

          • I had an urge for a ‘bombay bad boy’ a few weeks ago. Mrs Paws wouldn’t go near me for two days after eating it, such was the smell I gave off. I shall be giving them the swerve from now on.

            • Through your pores or through the bigger gaps in continuity? (Or, given dogs have limited sweating capabilities, wait for it, through your, yes, that’s it, you know it, through, oh my sides, your paws!!)
              Boom and bloody well boom, eh?

    • Hard disagree.

      Be Here Now has its moments, as did the Arctic Monkeys debut. You can’t place the second bookend prior to The Pigeon Detectives. Plus, I’ve still got a bit of time for Urban Hymns: Drugs Don’t Work remains a tuuuuune.

      I think the Arctic Monkeys probably kicked off the single biggest wave of landfill indie, and it went on for a few years after. They created demand and the market couldn’t supply it quick enough, basically.

      • I remember buying Be Here Now. Drove to Asda (do they still exist/sell CDs?), put it in the CD Player in the car and …… um this is a a bit crap. Maybe 1 or 2 good songs, but it was all so overwrought and long and boring and they were crap live too (saw them same week or so), first 2 albums are good though.

        The singles were great on Urban Hymns, the rest was very average.

        My daughter (15) likes Artic Monkeys

        • The first Arctic Monkeys album was pretty good. I can’t say any of the rest has caught my attention, but they have gone a long way on a little. Like Moosey says, they opened the floodgates for the next few years of Landfill Indie, which they can’t really be held to blame for.

          The Pigeon Detectives are featured in the current series of BBC Radio Scotland’s (otherwise excellent) Classic Scottish Albums. I don’t know if it is an attempt to appeal to a younger audience, or just misjudged – the debut Hue & Cry album is also featured, which is stretching “classic” to breaking point.

      • People got VERY excited about the Arctic Monkeys, didn’t they? They had some belting moments, but were extremely samey after a few songs.

        I’m going to say that the first landfill lineage starts properly with Embrace, taking a line through Starsailor and other dogshit three-chords-and-a-string-quartet sentimental plod for a few years.

        Then the Strokes came along (who weren’t landfill at all) but changed the game and suddenly landfill had to be “spiky” and “angular” and feature skinny boys in skinny suits. Arctic Monkeys parodied all that very well just as they kicked it off, in “Fake Tales Of San Francisco”, so it seems fairly clear that it was dead (or at least dead shit) before it even really got going. That’s your Pigeon Detectives era – roughly contemporaneous with electroclash, DFA, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and all of those American lot, who cross-pollinated with the UK strings lads to form a sort of Militant Embrace Tendency. Disco grooves with indie guitars and whining was basically the template. God, it was almost all awful. (Honourable mention to the Long Blondes, though, who were pretty good.)

        I suppose Kasabian were the last of them. I can’t think of a landfill indie band after them who actually filled big venues.

        • Oh god, yes. Kasabian are my shorthand for “I can’t see how or why they became so popular”. They take a lot of ribbing on my FB, where I blame them for any and all injustice in the world. I’m hilarious, me.

          Them and Stereophonics – I can’t get past Kelly Jones’ voice, let alone their plodding three-chord indie-rock.

            • The tall one in Kasabian pitched up on Soccer AM about 15 years ago (about the last time I saw it) and they had a bit at the end where slebs/old footballers would try to hit a ball through a small hole in a wall. It sorta passed the time before going off to a game.

              Wearing winkle-pickers or some such, with legs like pipe-cleaners housed in skinny jeans, and looking as likely to fulfil this task as Tottenham are to winning a trophy, he flicked the ball four foot into the air and smashed it straight through the middle. It was genuinely outstanding and more spectacular than anyone who had tried it before.

              Mind, never heard any of their records.

            • I never “got” Kings of Leon either. I’m not sure there was much to get. They had cheekbones and a gimmick, but their first album sounded like absolute meat and potatoes 70s rock to me, which is not my idea of – as the kids wouldn’t say – it.

              I do understand why Sex On Fire was a hit, though. Stupid lyrics but a pretty driving anthemic sound, a very “now” (then) vaguely discoish groove, a big YEAH in the chorus, the word “sex”. It didn’t sound much like their previous stuff and catapulted them into a sales echelon I suspect they weren’t really equipped for.

            • I have just read — on the way, in the interest of trimming the library, to deleting both of their never-listened-to LP’s minus that single — that Sex On Fire is the 2nd most downloaded single in UK history.

              Down with this sort of statistic.

        • Not sure what you mean there. Personally, I liked the DFA/ Electroclash/ mash-up moment around 2001 while it lasted; the American influence (and the electro aspects) diverted it from the British Bake Off tweeness of Landfill Indie, encapsulated for me by Brighton-venue staple support band, The Ordinary Boys. Artic Monkeys promised more than they delivered, sadly, but then so did the initially wonderful Franz Ferdinand.

          • I liked the DFA stuff, genuinely loved Yeah Yeah Yeahs (still do: I think at least two of their albums are slightly forgotten classics), thought electroclash was probably an inky label in search of a movement. But I just meant that the American and European tendency toward dancing and away from introspection made indie bands over here realise mawkish strings were a busted flush, and try to do something spikier and more uptempo. And largely bad.

            Only Coldplay continued down the strings route, but also went unashamedly Pop For The School Run in the process. Nothing wrong with that: I don’t like their music, but it has a market and they’ve obviously been very good at what they’ve done (though Higher Power is authentically one of the worst songs I’ve heard in a decade or so). I don’t think Coldplay were even indie-adjacent once they’d got A Rush Of Blood To The Head out the way, so I don’t count them as landfill. They’re playing the U2 game, not the Verve game.

          • I’ve often said how this period was my boys defining musical era. Reading Festival and regular gigs were part of my Dad duties and I have a soft spot for a lot if these bands. Kasabian blew Oasis away at Wembley Stadium gig I saw them support at. To be fair so did The Enemy who were first on. Muse, Biffy Clyro were favourites as were The Vaccines and Feeder. To have lads just becoming teenagers when Arctic Monkeys exploded was very exciting. It was all so new the way the used the internet not radio initially to build the fan base was genuinely ground breaking.

            The cds I used to nick for my car though were the first Franz Ferdinand and of course Maximo Park who were far and away my favourite of the lot. God they were / are good.

        • The blog’s most easily pleased correspondent writes…

          I have a tiny bit of time for Embrace. Come Back To What You Know is pretty good, and I like the way the singer combined all the best attributes of the Gallagher brothers; the quotability of Noel and Liam, the voice of Noel, the songwriting of Liam and the good looks of Paul. Plus! They went on to write this fantastically inappropriate record (hang in there for the chorus):

          I remember that, at the time, the 5 years between the Strokes and the Arctics felt long, hence the excitement when the latter arrived. Something always held me back from loving them, and on reflection I think it was the observational lyrics. I can only think of a handful of songs with observational lyrics that I’ve ever liked, and most of those were written by Bob Dylan, who tended to do his observing through a funhouse mirror. The Arctics did have a great rhythm section tho, and were very good when they were allowed to let rip; Brianstorm will always be my fave.

          As for the rest, I will go one better and say that the first three Yeah Yeah Yeahs albums are excellent, and that they have an all time great band name. Kings of Leon were never really “my” band, but had one or two pretty good songs, while Kasabian are objectively terrible but I have quite a few mates who loved them in that lads lads lads/Footie casual way; watching a pub full of people howl along to Fire convinced me that there was something there.

          Of course, the truly ace indie pop band of the whole period were The Killers, an act who have really gone the distance and whose first album probably inspired an awful lot of the landfill indie that followed, albeit which never got close to those heights. They weren’t met with quite the rapture that greeted any of the Strokes, the Libs, the Arctics or even Kings of Leon, but they ended up outstripping all but maybe the first of that list.

              • Mention of Embrace reminds me of a curious time in the RTE sports department during one of the World Cups when they began to shamelessly nick ideas from the BBC (On Monday after an England game they show unprecedented behind-the-scenes footage of Lineker & chums leaping up to celebrate an England goal; Thursday we see Gilesy and the boys doing to same over here). When England went out or maybe when they went through the Beeb chose to accompany the emotional footage with some anthemic Embrace tune with maybe one apt line in the lyric. Coupla days later over on RTE it’s.. oh yes! .. Embrace with My Weakness Is None Of Your Business. But, of course! Granted, not as off topic as the time the goals on Football Focus were accompanied by Morrissey singing “I Like You Cos You’re Not Right In The Head And Nor Am I”, but certainly betraying a producer who probably spent his school exams looking over the shoulder of the kid next to him..

          • When it comes to punk/new wave type acts, the yanks are usually better at it, as was the case in the original era. They are more interesting, they don’t care what the manifesto says you must do.

  20. The Belfast live music scene of 1994-96 had two or three Britpop-ish acts. Babyshakur were total Britpop in image and music (only one audio track on YouTube, alas), while the New Brontes were hugely musical, capable of embracing many styles.

    Here are the Brontes in 1994 with a mid-60s-esque number. (Fun fact: the great Cormac O’Kane, seen here on bass, is the studio wizard responsible for (re)mastering the 33CD/2DVD Horslips box set due out on July 29.)

    Babyshakur – the Belfast Blur/Oasis!

  21. I’m trying to think of britpop era bands I actually liked. I should have been a fan – I am exactly the right again and was in my early 20s in the mid 90s. But I struggled with Suede, Verve, Oasis, all that gang. Spiritualized were good – do they fit under the britpop umbrella? And let me put in a brief shout out to Kula Shaker, who were better than they are given credit for!

    • Spritualized – yes, where the definition of Britpop is extended to include “any guitar / indie based band around at the time”
      (see also the Manics, Radiohead, Teenage Fanclub and Paul Weller – not Britpop by intent/origin, but that’s the catch-all label).
      New Spiritualized album due this month – eagerly awaiting delivery

  23. Having come late to this wonderful thread I am going to have a listen to a lot of this stuff – well try a song of each anyway. I have heard of some , many I havent and the vast majority I have never heard, it being in the time of my heavy Afro/ Gospel /Funk phase.
    After the inspirational NME reviews cited by @hedgepig I will start with Serris.

    So thanks everyone – Afterword at its best..
    Just could have had a bit more on Boris Johnson.

    • Your post reminds me of our much missed mate Curtis From Ohio who came on here one day saying “I’m from Ohio – what is this Britpop sh*t of which you speak?”*, launching a thread of bickering about who was in and who was not, which did, as you say, have much entertainment value..
      (*except, being a thorough gent, he didn’t say it quite like that..)

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