“Britpop” is a tricky label – for one thing, it was disowned by many of the musicians it was applied to. But the best Britpop albums share more than enough DNA for them to be plausibly grouped together. They were all released in the early to mid 90s, when UK popular culture was a swaggering sprawl of sportswear, guitars and booze. And they’re mainly created by working-class musicians, this being a period where access to the top of the charts was as open to scrappy strivers as it was in the 60s.
Because of that, the best Britpop albums also have an unmistakable self-confidence to them. Though their sound and their mood varies, from the trad, stripped-back rock of Oasis to the more intellectual approach of Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers, there’s no half-heartedness or indecision on display. These bands knew what they wanted to do, then did it – and were usually rewarded with massive commercial success for their trouble. If the Oasis reunion has got you digging back into the musical movement that surrounded the band, you can’t go wrong with brushing up on the below.
To many people, Oasis simply are Britpop, which is no surprise, given their debut has sold 2.7 copies and gone nine-times platinum in the UK. There must be very few households in the country which don’t have the CD hanging around in a cupboard or on a shelf. That ubiquity is well deserved, given the incredible potency of Definitely Maybe. The sound has zero fluff – it’s just five blokes and their instruments – while Noel Gallagher’s songwriting hits like a heatseeking missile. Even the most hardened Gallagher sceptic will melt at the power of “Live Forever”.
It’s only natural to follow Oasis with Blur, the band with which they had a media-hyped (but also partly real) rivalry with. The contrasts were right there: Oasis were northern and working-class; Blur were southern and (lower-)middle-class. And though Blur has taken various musical forms over the years, 1994’s Parklife is the record that defines their Britpop era. For all the band’s effete stereotype compared to Oasis, this is a gloriously geezerish record: there are two racing greyhounds on the cover, for god's sake, while “Parklife” and “Girls & Boys” have hooks which are tailor-made for singing (or shouting) after a pint or six.
The cover alone is a checklist of 90s style signifiers: a bucket hat, Clarks Wallabees and Adidas trainers all present and correct. But Urban Hymns also stands among the best Britpop albums as the record with some of the most monster tunes. The very first thing you hear when you press play is the orchestral sample for “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, which ended up as one of the decade’s defining singalongs – as did “The Drugs Don’t Work”, which comes a mere three songs later. The rest of the album is excellent too, ticking along with a deliciously smooth psychedelia.
If Britpop sometimes veers a bit too close to meat-and-potatoes pub singalongs for some, Suede’s self-titled debut proves the movement could be risqué and daring too. The band had the glitter of Bowie-esque glam rock about them, as well as the jangling guitars of the Smiths from the previous decade. Frontman Brett Anderson’s androgyny and sexual fluidity was a big contrast to the straightforward heterosexuality of most of Britpop too. Guitarist and songwriter Bernard Butler left the band as they were recording their follow-up, Dog Man Star, and though Suede went on to have considerable success, they were never quite the same.
This is the album that links the more traditional, guitar-heavy side of Britpop with all the other sonic innovations going around at the time – namely, the electronic, sample-heavy worlds of dance and trip-hop. Just like Oasis and others paid homage to the 60s with live instruments, Saint Etienne paid homage by sampling music and snatches of film dialogue from the decade. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, their dubby, dancey take on Neil Young’s wistful classic, ranks among the most brilliantly inventive cover versions ever.
Elastica were formed by Justine Frischmann and Justin Welch, both of whom left Suede in 1991 after Frischmann and Brett Anderson broke up. If success is the sweetest revenge, Frischmann and Welch certainly got it: their new band’s debut album became the fastest selling since Definitely Maybe the year before. Elastica offered simple but brilliant pop-rock songs, performed – in an exception to the Britpop rule – by a mostly female band. But it was too good to last: Elastic couldn’t muster another album until 2000, shortly after which they broke up.
This record’s title can be read in a couple ways. In one sense, it’s about the British class divisions which Jarvis Cocker and the gang were so deft at skewering in music. In another, it’s a cocky but accurate statement of how good the album is. Both meanings came together in the lead single, “Common People”, that immortal song about a rich Greek art student who wants to slum it among London’s hoi-polloi, now tattooed across the heart of pretty much every Brit. It sometimes overshadows how the album’s other tracks – “Disco 2000”; the wry rave chronicle “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” – stand at the top of the Britpop canon too. Different Class is not just one of the best Britpop albums, but one of the best albums ever.
We don’t really think of Radiohead as a Britpop band, because largely, they’re not. But their second album, coming after the grungy Pablo Honey, has the alternative pop spirit that characterised the movement. Trembling ballads like “Fake Plastic Trees” and spiky songs like “My Iron Lung” are beautifully written and arranged, but they don’t have the weirdness of Radiohead’s later work, which saw the band become a genre all of their own. For those unaware of what was to come, The Bends must have seemed unusual but certainly not unrelated to everything else going on at the time.
“I fucking hated Britpop,” the Manic Street Preachers’ bassist Nicky Wire said in a 2017 documentary about the band. That may be true, but Everything Must Go can’t be separated from it. “Libraries gave us power” is the lyric that opens lead single “A Design for Life”, standing for the unapologetic working-class intellectualism that was just as prevalent in Britpop as the swagger of Oasis. This was the Welsh band’s fourth album, and their first since the shattering disappearance of guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards. It managed to cram all manner of artistic and political references into music that was accessible and hugely successful.
The group that Liam Gallagher once christened “the second best band in the world” (no prizes for guessing who he ranked first) hasn’t endured in musical history the way Britpop’s big hitters have, but their popularity at the time attests to their talent. Bandwagonesque, their third album, is a heady balancing act between perfect pop songs and shoegaze-y distortion. Coming before Britpop hit its highest commercial heights, it’s a record that emphasises how the movement was just the latest phase of the UK’s rich rock history.
