Twenty years on, Britpop is a bit of a Blur

BRITPOP burst into life with an Oasis song at a London disco in 1994.

From left, Gem Archer, Noel Gallagher, Andy Bell and Liam Gallagher, who made up Oasis, the biggest band to emerge from Britpop.

IT'S midnight on April 9, 1994. The DJ at Smashing, a disco in a former Piccadilly gentlemen's club in London called Eve’s that featured in the Profumo scandal, is playing the debut single by Oasis. Sandwiched between David Bowie’s Queen Bitch and the soundtrack to Bugsy Malone, Liam Gallagher’s snarl on Supersonic sounds malevolent, exciting, carefree. The dance floor erupts. Nobody knows it yet, but we have just witnessed the birth of Britpop.

I was perfectly placed to feel the excitement of British indie music’s last hurrah.

Fresh out of university, living for the weekend while working in shops and post rooms, I had very little going on. Britpop, with its songs about getting nicked for smoking a joint (Caught by the Fuzz, Supergrass), going on Club 18-30 holidays (Girls and Boys, Blur) and wearing ill-fitting clothes (Mis-Shapes, Pulp) was for and about people like me.

And it all began at Smashing.

Starting out in 1991 in a mirrorballed Leicester Square discotheque fallen on hard times, it was set up by four friends disillusioned with London’s club scene. Martin Green, the DJ who first played Supersonic, says: “We had this idea that the club would be like a party in your living room ... you’d play your favourite records, dress up and do party games. In the early days we would only have 30 people coming down, but they would be fabulous people: (Australian performance artist) Leigh Bowery would be there alongside Jarvis Cocker, Brett Anderson and Damon Albarn.”

Hosted by Matthew Glamorre, a flamboyant man-about-town who would dress up as Jesus one night and paint his teeth green the next, Smashing had something of the Weimar-era decadence of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret, but an innocence too. It rejected the serious in favour of extreme silliness.

“I spent countless nights at (Manchester nightclub) the Hacienda at the end of the 80s, when it was the centre of the universe,” says Noel Gallagher of his own roots in the pre-Oasis climate of rave culture. “I'd be walking around Manchester city centre on a Thursday, on ecstasy, waiting for the weekend. What was happening was a revolution without words.”

Gallagher provided the words, writing working-class anthems that articulated the party-for-its-own-sake mentality of the times.

Britpop coincided with the death of grunge, that most self-consciously alienated of youth movements, and more pointedly with the death of Kurt Cobain. The lead singer of Nirvana shot himself in the head on April 5, 1994. Twenty days later Blur went to No 1 with Parklife. All of a sudden, everything that was shameful and unstylish about Britain — booze-fuelled yobbos, spotty students, poor dress sense — was something to celebrate. Suede had the fastest selling debut album in a decade. Definitely Maybe by Oasis sold 15 million copies. Elastica’s album went to No 1. I Should Coco by Supergrass was the biggest selling debut on Parlophone since Please Please Me by the Beatles. After 1½ decades on the margins with Pulp, Cocker hit creative and commercial gold with Common People .

The rot began in August 1995 with Britpop’s moment of high drama: the race for the No 1 single spot between Country House by Blur and Roll With It by Oasis. Blur’s win made the TV news. Oasis got so big that when it played before 70,000 people at Knebworth in 1996, Liam Gallagher didn’t realise the band was booked for a second night. By the time Vanity Fair published its “London Swings Again!” issue in 1997, the whole thing was looking extremely smug.

The Spice Girls came along and bashed the indie mavericks back to their natural habitat: the pongy backrooms of pubs. Heroin crept on to the scene; Smashing closed its doors.

“Whatever I was feeling when I wrote Cigarettes and Alcohol, everybody else was,” Noel Gallagher says of Oasis’s rapid journey from breath of fresh air to a painful trapped wind. “Which was: life is shit, but as long as the sun is shining and we can go out on a Saturday, who cares? By the time of Be Here Now it was all champagne and supermodels, and who wants to hear that … on their way to work at nine?”

Kitsch, irony, kitchen-sink observation and beery hedonism were replaced by the earnest introspection of Radiohead and Coldplay. The last great gold rush of the British music industry was over. Like all good parties, it was fun while it lasted.

THE TIMES