In the spring of 1997, I stood with Damon Albarn outside Los Angeles’ uber-trendy and impossible to get into Skybar at the Mondrian Hotel. It was Albarn’s idea for us to come here after Blur’s successful, and, if memory serves, sold-out gig at The Palace (now Avalon Hollywood) in support of the group’s eponymous fifth album. At the show’s afterparty, Albarn invited me, whom he knew from my interviews with him, and two friends to join him at the Skybar. A ubiquitous face in his native U.K., Albarn expected ease of entry. But as the doorman ignored him, I muttered under my breath, “Noel would have gotten in.”
At that time, one thing is for sure: Albarn and Noel Gallagher of Oasis would have been ushered in anywhere in their native U.K. and been given the royal treatment. The reigning kings of Britpop, they ruled the charts, were catnip for the always-hungry British press, and were household names. The media-created Blur vs. Oasis battle—at that point two years stale, in which neither side was interested in participating— is still, almost three decades later, the focal point of Britpop for casual consumers of ’90s U.K.-generated alternative music. Britpop may have ruled its native country, but in the U.S., if you weren’t a card-carrying Anglophile, its numerous bands barely registered with music fans.
Britpop is so much more than Blur or Oasis, as is attested to with its revived popularity as part of the current interest in all things 1990s. A cultural movement rather than a musical genre, at its most eloquent, Britpop spoke to the authentic British experience of that decade, pre-shaped by teenage years in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. A reactionary movement musically, it was a pushback to the glossy pop of the ’80s. And, more obviously, against the grunge tidal wave that had taken over the U.S., which left no room for British voices.
“Britpop seemed pretty amorphous,” says Supergrass’ bassist Mick Quinn. “It didn’t have a central theme to it. There were people reaching back to ’60s music, and we were also at the end of the baggy thing. It didn’t seem cohesive. It was just a handy label.”
In “Hail Britpop!,” arguably the best episode of Netflix’s docu-series , Blur’s Alex James and Dave Rowntree break down how Blur went on an “enormous”
