My project to listen to (almost) all of the biggest UK rock bands from the 60s to now continues, and in recent weeks I've hit a big milestone that I was looking forward to, namely I've reached the Britpop era.
Because I listen to all of a given band's discography, I've gone through several bands and artists that were releasing material in the 90s, some of which swirled around what the Britpop bands were doing. For example, David Bowie was getting recognition again at that time, even as he experimented with other genres and styles, like electronica. Then there were the bands who came just before Britpop, like the Madchester/baggy scene (notably the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays), or the likes of the Beautiful South, Saint Etienne and the Lightning Seeds.
BTW, speaking of electronica, I've already explored the strand that was most closely associated with Britpop, the genre called big beat, which for my purposes consisted of Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy. And what's most fascinating about big beat is that my way in was through Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, who was previously a member of the Hull indie band the Housemartins. While Cook went on to become one of the biggest names in electronic dance music, his former bandmate Paul Heaton spearheaded the Beautiful South, bringing things back to 90s guitar rock.
These bands, like the Beautiful South, were all in rotation on MTV Europe during the summers when I'd go to Italy, and they played between the videos that I was really looking forward to, those from Blur and Pulp. That's why it's kind of poignant to reach Blur and Pulp's discographies, because I'm reminded of how new and fresh they felt when I was just discovering them, and it also reminds me of how hard it used to be to find certain music.
It wouldn't be fair to say that it was impossible to hear these bands here in the US. Before the mythical summer of 1995, when I first saw the videos for Blur's Country House and Pulp's Common People, I'd already heard Girls and Boys and Underwear on my local alternative rock station, Live 105, but the visual component turned out to be so important for imprinting on my brain. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Country House (despite being reviled by a number of reviewers at the time) was bright and breezy and irreverent, in contrast to the dour fare I saw on American MTV at the same time. Common People was also a blast of fresh air, with its 70s sartorial stylings and bright colors.
When I got obsessed with Blur (moreso than with Pulp), I was fascinated by the diversity of musical styles on their albums as well as the aesthetics of their singles. To the End, from the Parklife album, features on its cover a rose lying on top of a gun with a silencer, evoking James Bond. End of a Century, also from Parklife, features a painting of a starship resembling the USS Enterprise from Star Trek.
I wasn't picking up these singles at the time, though I'd likely have seen posters for some of them when I started visiting London. But the real impact is seeing them now and imagining how it would have felt to see them back then. It's the same with Pulp's songs from 1995 or so - in addition to remembering how I felt about certain songs at the time, I also find myself thinking about they must have sounded to other people.
The aims of the British rock listening project were initially to get acquainted with the discographies of the Kinks and then of The Rolling Stones, and subsequently to work my way up to music from beyond 2006 or so, which is about when I stopped being current with new music. But one of the other benefits has been to contextualize a bunch of bands I was listening to when I was in high school, such as Peter Gabriel or the Pet Shop Boys.
Now that I'm at the Britpop years, I'm getting to do the same with an even bigger, more important chunk of my musical background, and I'll be at it for a while: after Blur there's Oasis and Elastica and Sleeper and all the other lesser-known bands that made up the scene, or at least orbited around it. Without getting too caught up in nostalgia, it'll be fun to revisit those times, and fill in any gaps in my musical knowledge of the era.
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