18 August 1995
Neutrality or a notional Irish Sea border couldn’t keep the Battle of Britpop from reaching our shores. Even at the time, the most notable feature of this skirmish was the combatants’ choice of weapons: each with a remarkably poor single, as if there were some gentleman’s agreement not to draw blood. If you were around back then, you’ll know that Blur’s ‘Country House’ vanquished Oasis’s ‘Roll With It’ and claimed the UK number one spot, but that eventually Oasis won the war. If you’re English or an England-watcher, you’ll also recognise it as a tamer pop-cultural manifestation of England’s disastrous addiction to constant seething social division: north versus south, mill worker versus mill owner, miner versus Thatcher, working class versus privileged class, progressive versus conservative, Remain versus Leave, fair play versus “anti-woke”. For any young people hearing of this Blur-Oasis business for the first time: don’t worry, you missed nothing.
I was about to say that ‘Country House’ has aged horribly, but really we should have spotted its blatant awfulness at the time. (For the sake of balance, I confirm that ‘Roll With It’ was equally awful, though in a different way.) Damon Albarn’s main takeaway from the success of Parklife seems to have been to gloss over the swooning melancholy of ‘This Is A Low’ and ‘To The End’, and instead double down on the Carry On Britpop of its title track and the sneery depiction of the English working class in ‘Girls And Boys’. The philosophy of ‘Country House’, famously about Blur’s manager actually buying a rural stately pile, is: new money, know your place. Ironically, trashy and tasteless is how you’d describe the awful Damien Hirst video, with Alex James riding a pig (though not in his friend David Cameron’s sense) and Matt Lucas chasing mini-skirted girls in the Benny Hill style. The rash of comedy brass at the end sums up this retrograde and conservative track: it’s a novelty record.
Although Britpop was bookended by Select magazine’s Union Jack cover and Noel Gallagher’s Union Jack guitar, it wasn’t fated to descend into narrow-gauge landfill indie retro-nationalism. Its roots were the subversive ’70s glam of Suede and the Euro-facing ’90s Italo-disco soundscapes of Saint Etienne. The trip hop of Massive Attack gave the new movement an opportunity for inventive eclecticism similar to how the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays drew on the Hacienda scene to mix rock guitars with dance beats. Instead, because Britpop was the creation of London’s pop-culture media establishment rather than an organic scene in Manchester or Bristol, it regressed into cosy cosplay of England’s mythical 1966: blues rock, art school, World Cup, Carnaby Street, mod haircuts, three-button suits, laddish sexism, a straight white male cultural empire on which the sun never set but the stars never shone. Blur versus Oasis in 1995 embodied the worst of Britpop and hinted at the worst of England. Narrow-mindedness is not conducive to good pop music, or good anything.
