20 Years Of Britpop
„The first time I saw Blur was on September 29, 1994, at the old Academy Theatre on 43rd St. in Manhattan. That place has been shut down now since 1996, but I’d guess it held … 1200 people? 1300? In any case, it was a relatively intimate room, and as I recall, that show wasn’t even sold out. This was the last night of an 8-date North American tour on which Blur had embarked in support of their then-new third LP, Parklife. They were joined on that trek by support act Pulp, who were also promoting a new album, His ‚N‘ Hers. The timing was good: Both albums had been received fairly rapturously by the UK media after being released within a week of one another: His ‚N‘ Hers came out on April 18, 1994, and Parklife dropped the following Monday.
If you were trying to identify a single week in which the thing called „Britpop“ burst into bloom, you’d probably have to point to that stretch of mid-April 1994. (Actually, you could probably start the clock a week earlier, on April 11, 1994: the day Oasis‘ debut single, „Supersonic,“ was released.) This was not, crucially, the birth of Britpop (more on that later), but it was the moment at which these many disparate musical things of British origin became a single one. Suddenly there was no more baggy or Madchester or shoegaze: Countless extant bands with monosyllabic monikers (Verve/Suede/Lush/James/Ride) were swept into this new movement; countless new ones (Cast/Ash/Shack/Space/Gene) seemed to arrive immediately afterward, as if coming off an assembly line.
For a music-obsessed college kid in New York City, this was a joyous moment in which to exist. Every day brought with it new discoveries. Those discoveries weren’t limited to Britpop, naturally – there was a lot of great music being made in 1994 – but something about Britpop inspired a different sort of devotion. It was a community, an identity. I spent the better part of the second half of the ’90s working at the tiny Greenwich Village record store Rebel Rebel, which was New York City’s best source for British music (and it remains so to this day!), and I saw it firsthand. One of my co-workers at Rebel was a kid named Arty Shepherd, who today plays in the band Primitive Weapons and co-owns the Greenpoint bar St. Vitus. Back then, Arty and I used to pull these bootleg Blur photobooks off the shelves at the store and bring them around the corner to Thomas David Salon, where we’d show the stylist pictures of Blur frontman Damon Albarn, requesting the same haircut (or the closest approximation possible) for ourselves. We weren’t the only ones. I remember, at the Blur/Pulp show, my friend Kevin walking up to some random stranger in the crowd and asking if he was „the singer from Oasis.“ Of course he wasn’t; he was just another lookalike, like all of us. Less than six months later, Kevin and I went to see Oasis, touring for Definitely Maybe, at that same Academy Theatre, where the guy working security at the load-in entrance tried to open the door for us because he thought we were in the band. I remember one day at Rebel Rebel, when some seriously skeevy dude asked me, Arty, and another Brit-obsessed co-worker – all of us in our early 20s – if we’d be interested in doing some „modeling,“ in which we’d dress (and presumably undress) in the style of Blur. I also remember our revulsion came only after we discussed which one of us would most likely get to be Damon.
I’m confident in saying no city in the world, outside London itself, boasted a more frantic and fervent Britpop scene than New York. We had record stores that stocked import CDs and magazines, and clothing stores that sold brands like Fred Perry and Merc. Big British bands would come here – here, before any other city in North America – to play small clubs. In the pre-internet world, this degree of access to information, fashion, and art was rare, and it was intoxicating. Blur’s music openly mocked American culture (or lack thereof), but as a young and jaded American, it wasn’t hard to see where they were coming from. On these shores, Britpop was the elitist’s alternative to „Alternative,“ which had grown dull and depressing and diluted. Kurt Cobain had killed himself; Beck was singing, „I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?“ Oasis, meanwhile, were singing, „You and I, we’re gonna live forever.““
[…] Stereogum
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