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“I think Charles Dickens might well have summed it up best in 1859 when he wrote: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’." Noel Gallagher

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Opinion

Published: 2:40 PM October 1, 2020 Updated: 2:45 PM October 1, 2020
Music photographer KEVIN CUMMINS took many of Britpop's era-defining images and knew all its key players. So, as his new book about the period is published, why does he feel conflicted about the musical movement that sparked Blur v Oasis and Cool Britannia?
In the mid-1990s anything and everything British was cool. Celebrity mockney chefs: cool. Lads' mags: cool. Tony Blair: cool. The Spice Girls: cool. Ladettes: cool. New Labour: cool. Britannia: cool.

Except none of it was cool.

Britpop was a term I was uncomfortable with, and I wasn't alone. In April 1993 Select magazine dropped a photo of Brett Anderson over a backdrop of a Union flag, using the coverline: "Yanks Go Home! Suede, St Etienne, Denim, Pulp, The Auteurs and the Battle for Britain". They were reducing the standard of the once-lofty music press to the level of red-top, flag-waving patriotism.

Suede's Brett Anderson was furious. His songs were documenting the world around him, illustrating its cheapness and failure, not about Britishness in all its perceived glory.

Twenty-seven years on, he joins me and several of his peers in feeling conflicted about how the era's breezy confidence became tainted by nationalistic exceptionalism.

"The use of the flag is interesting," he says in my new book While We Were Getting High: Britpop & the '90s. "It's fascinating how something that loaded can be interpreted completely differently depending on the context.

"Look at how Morrissey's use of it at that Finsbury Park gig in 1992 was seen as nationalistic, whereas Geri Halliwell's and Noel Gallagher's use later in the decade was viewed as patriotic.

"It's an indication of the blithe optimism of Cool Britannia that people managed to get away with waving flags. It's an indication of how different the political climate is today that exactly the same act would now be viewed as deeply troubling."

Despite Brett's reservations, Britpop became a movement and flag-waving became the norm. Most British bands distanced themselves from the term, but they were fighting a losing battle.

For a period of three or four years, UK bands would be asked repeatedly about their Britishness. They weren't asked about the elements of toxic masculinity, misogyny and racism that many commentators - and musicians - were uncomfortable with.

Brett told me he now views Britpop's "core politics as anachronistically patriarchal and, actually, borderline toxic", and another interviewee for my book, Gene's Martin Rossiter, pointed out: "If you look at all the NME front covers for 1995, only 10 featured women and only two included people of colour... I'm slightly ashamed that at the time I didn't see it for what it was - a return to a white, male-dominated Britain.

"The responsibility lies mainly at the doors of the music and media industries, but I certainly didn't hear the artistes at the time speaking out and I have to include myself in that list. Some maybe did, but it wasn't a narrative that was part of the zeitgeist."

Sonya Madan of Echobelly prefers to remember the "exuberance and joy that Britpop championed." She told me: "The seeping-in of shame when it comes to nationalist pride is a modern-day obsession. If it's done with a positive appreciation for one's culture, why shouldn't it be exuberant? To feel obliged to denigrate a musical scene because of the politics of the current climate means you limit your appreciation of all the good things it had to offer."

A quarter of a century on, however, the symbolism of the Union flag is more loaded and exclusivist than ever and I find it hard to separate Britpop from today's political climate.

Was it really a precursor to the Brexit mentality? It's hard to truly know, though I suspect a connection somewhere along the way.

At NME, where I photographed Blur, Oasis, Suede and the key bands of the movement, I like to think we distanced ourselves from the more laddish end of the spectrum. We concentrated on the musicians and their music, and some great music came out of this period.

"Looking back on it now," Noel Gallagher told me, "I think Charles Dickens might well have summed it up best in 1859 when he wrote: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'.

"Has it (Britpop) aged well? Yes and no. The attitude of the main players was correct and even some of the music still stands up, but sadly the cartoonish element of it has been allowed to survive."

While We Were Getting High: Britpop & the '90s by Kevin Cummins is published by Cassell Illustrated.

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How Britpop was tainted by nationalistic exceptionalism

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Music photographer KEVIN CUMMINS took many of Britpop's era-defining images and knew all its key players. So, as his new book about the period is published, why does he feel conflicted about the musical movement that sparked Blur v Oasis and Cool Britannia?

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Labour Party used this song (D:Ream) as part of their campaign for the 1997 general election (the theme of their campaign was that things "cannot get worse" after 18 years of Tory government)

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Labour's 1997 Party Political Broadcast- Things Can Only Get Better

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Oasis won the best album and the best band award and this was their response.

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Oasis - 1996-02-19 - Brit Awards Uncut, Earls Court, London, England

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A DESIGN FOR LIFE - MANIC STREET PREACHERS

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A DESIGN FOR LIFE - MANIC STREET PREACHERS

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- not typically viewed as a Britpop band
- however in 1996 they released A Design for Life which explores themes of class conflict and working class identity
- the band were very vocal about their socialist convictions
- the video features subtle video clips of class privilege (fox hunting, Royal Ascot, polo match, and the Last Night of the Proms)
- at one point it says 'violence for equality' in the background

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Manic Street Preachers - A Design for Life (Official Video)

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CAN YOU BE WORKING CLASS AND AN INTELLECTUAL?

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CAN YOU BE WORKING CLASS AND AN INTELLECTUAL?

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Many of the Britpop bands used their working class background as a way of relating to their audiences. Bands like Oasis used these experiences as a muse for their lyrics, building revolutions and harsh realities. However, bands like Pulp and Manic Street Pearchers wouldn't shy away from the fact that they were still intellectuals.

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Where my dad had mods, and the generation between us had punk, I ended up with Britpop. The period btween my 15th birthday and my 18th was a period of genuine optimism when Britain shrugged off the hair metal of Bon Jovi and Guns 'n' Roses and pulled on a Kappa or Adidas tracksuit.
Looking back, half of what made Cool Britannia cool wasn't Britpop at all, at least not how we would end up defining it. But all of a sudden there was a constant stream of songs about what it meant to be British, and to be working class. Three songs stuck with me in particular: Parklife, Common People and A Design for Life.

In August 1994 Blur released Parklife, the title song of the album of the same year. Of these three songs it is the one that is thoroughbred, dyed in the wool Britpop. Jangly and primary coloured, with Quadrophenia star Phil Daniels providing vocals on the spoken verse, its accompanying video featured Daniels and Blur frontman Damon Albarn drive around an as-yet ungentrified East London in a beat up Ford, pretending to be double glazing salesmen.
Not exactly a celebration of working class culture (Sample lyrics: I get up when I want except on Wednesdays /When I get rudely awakened by the dustmen), the song did however set a standard for the Kinks-esque storytelling, slice of life mode of songwriting that would embody Britpop. However, Blur did themselves no favours. The hilariously posh James Blunt described Albarn as having "an orchard full of plums in his mouth and a silver spoon stuck up his arse." Albarn (an Essex boy like Brand), along with his bandmates, the other musicians in this list and myself, went to what Tony Blair would describe as a "bog standard comp". It is true that in speech Albarn was a lot less cockney (or mockney) than in song. My sister adored Blur which, of course, put me right off them. On hearing the chorus to Parklife (Awwww the peepuwww, so many peepuwww...) I dubbed them the "New Chas n Dave" and even made a Chas n Dave CD inlay which I put in the copy of their following album The Great Escape when I gave it to her for her birthday. She was unamused.

Blur went to art school but so did Pulp (see below). Blur were seen as the middle-class posh boys when they took on the suitably unsullied-by-education working class Oasis in "the battle of britpop" later in 1994, when their Country House was released on the same day as the Manchester band's Roll with It. Some of the criticism was born from the slightly sneering tone of Parklife (not just the song but the album), but they suffered heavily because of the idea that your working class hero should be a noble-ish savage and not, under any circumstances, reference Balzac.

Nine months to the day later, Pulp's breakout hit, Common People was released. There was no hiding the fact that Jarvis Cocker had been to art school (the song opens with "She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge/ She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College") But Pulp were saved from accusations of being middle class by their sheer northernness. This despite the fact that Cocker's mother was a (shock!) Conservative councillor! In Sheffield as well!
At a casual glance, it's a similar premise to Parklife - a kitchen-sink-melodrama narrative with a brightly coloured, pantomime video (even with almost matching shots of terraced housing) but the point was very different. "Laugh along even though they're laughing at you/ and the stupid things that you do/Because you think that poor is cool" could almost have been written as a riposte to Blur's apparent posturing. The song was a smash hit and propelled the band, who had been struggling on in one form or another since the early 80s, to stardom. You could pick up an "I'm Common" T shirt from your local HMV. Of course to spend fifteen quid (a lot of money in those days) on a T shirt that said "I'm Common" was missing the point of the song spectacularly. I still have mine, although it's a little tight now.
I loved and still love Pulp, and Common People is a song I will always hold in great affection. The album it came from ( Different Class, given to me as a birthday present from my sister with no sarcastic inlay card) was worn out on the sixth form common room tape deck and I rather clumsily used the line "You wanna sleep with common people like me?" to try and seduce a fellow student (I was rebuffed with a card that read "I'm no common person"). Two and a bit years later it would be the first song I would dance to with my partner, who I met at an indie disco at the student's union (Liverpool John Moores, not St Martin's). I refrained from doing the amusingly literal dance I used to do along to the song at parties back home, otherwise he might also have escaped my clutches.

Nearly a year would pass and I would try and fail to learn to drive before what I would argue is not just the greatest song of the era, but the greatest song of all time would come out. A Design for Life didn't sneer, nor did it hide its erudition behind jokiness. From the opening line "Lib'ries gave us power" to the video which quotes Lenin and misquotes Orwell ("Hope lies in the proles") these three Welsh valley boys, reeling still from the disappearance of their band-mate and school-friend Richey, skewered class and politics, and the idea that the Gallagher brothers were somehow more authentically working class by never having read a book. I'm reasonably sure it's the only time there's been a Lenin quote on Top of the Pops. And not just Lenin, there's Le Corbusier. And Henry Van de Vald. And the lead singer has a slightly mangled Kierkegaard quote tattooed on him, and had since he worked in a bar in Newport. Where had this band been all my life? The short answer is making music since I was ten, but it took a number two hit to get them on my radar. They are bog standard comp boys, valley boys who don't have to joke around to hide being clever, they read because they want to and are proud to be educated. James Dean Bradfield, he of the tattooed Kierkegaard quote, who talks about class and uses phrases like "iconoclastic eroticism" when talking about why he likes V-necked T-shirts, is considered the uneducated one (he went to sixth form so infrequently he turned up a day late for the last day.) The video, between quotes and shots of the band miming in a chilly-looking warehouse, juxtaposes footage of: drunk Leeds United fans and toffs in top hats at Ascot; fox hunters and poll tax protesters. Twenty years on I had the slightly meta experience of seeing the band play A Design for Life live, with a projected backdrop of the video, at the Royal Albert Hall. The video has footage, juxtaposed with the football fans again, of the flag waving Last Night of the Proms. We cheered when that came up, the proles (at least one of whom is a Leeds fan and was a little tipsy) having stormed the proms. Well, not so much stormed as paid £45 to get in. But still, as Orwell actually said, "If there is hope, it lies in the proles."

Class conscious but not arrogant, the Manics would support Oasis on their American tour, and at the Britpoptacular behemoth that was Knebworth. In 1998 they would score a number one hit with a song about working class Welshmen going to fight for the International Brigades in Spain. They would go on to have the first number one of the new millennium with Masses Against the Classes, a song that opens with a sample of Noam Chomsky. They are still going, like a series of well-timed explosions in a bookshop.

More than twenty years (yes, really) since Parklife, the optimism of my teenage years seems almost comically misplaced. There's no more Top of the Pops, and libraries, rather than giving us power, are being shut down. Culture exists on the internet (no bad thing) and on the X factor. I'm not sure Blur, Pulp, Oasis or the Manics could happen now. Blur and Pulp's long gestations before fame would be written off by record companies and I really don't think tea time television has space for a shirtless man with "You Love Us" written on his chest in lipstick and a Kierkegaard tattoo on his arm, yelling "You love us like a holocaust" any more. There is a lack of working class (or even lower-middle class) representation in the charts. Simon Price said it better than I could (did the research.) Post-Brexit, it is fashionable to draw a division between the white working class and the intellectuals. How did we forget one can be both? We can go to art school (if we can afford it), read books, get Kierkegaard tattoos, and even have Tory mothers.
There are forces on the Right who are trying to define working class culture by an imagined opposition to immigration, "identity politics," and education. Don't let them.

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All the people: Britpop and British working class culture

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Where my dad had mods, and the generation between us had punk, I ended up with Britpop. The period btween my 15th birthday and my 18th was a period of genuine optimism when Britain shrugged off the hair metal of Bon Jovi and Guns 'n' Roses and pulled on a Kappa or Adidas tracksuit.

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Many of the lyrics and the bands were catered towards a male audience and much misogyny and sexism is within the lyrics, the interviews and the "culture of Britpop"

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This article originally appeared on Noisey UK

There have been a good few 90s music retrospectives dancing about in my eyeline of late, featuring the usual stock footage: Oasis at the Brits, Blur's knees-up Parklife routine, Tony Blair at the door of Downing Street. The latest example was the final episode of BBC4's Music for Misfits series, which looked at the story of the British indie scene.

One episode in particular charted indie's journey into the mainstream in the 1990s, beginning with acid house and ending in Britpop. The pundits rolled their eyes about the "Battle of the Bands" and the triumph of bro-ish corporatism in the music industry, pronouncing Britpop the beginning of the end of an exciting era of British indie. It's ironic, given these complaints about bro-ness, that it wasn't until a whole 55 minutes in that we heard the opinions of a woman: the music journalist Sian Pattenden.

As a female music fan, you get used to this stuff. Your experience is often either ignored or viewed as a mysterious phenomenon. Your deep love and appreciation for a band will frequently be written off as manic hysteria, or just dismissed as a desire to shag the lead singer. The responses of male fans occupy centre stage when it comes to how a scene formed or a band was received, and their female counterparts, in the main, are portrayed as a kind of sideshow.

Even by normal music documentary standards though (which is obviously setting the bar very low) this Music for Misfits episode was extraordinarily sexist. Women artists barely featured at all, and when they did they usually weren't thought to merit the privilege of being named. Moira Lambert, the vocalist on St Etienne's first single, was referred to as "a girl" by one pundit, and when we got to Britpop, men pontificated while footage of Elastica and Sleeper flashed past, but the groups themselves weren't specifically named or discussed at all. Emma Jackson, a sociologist and the former bassist in Kenickie (another band written out of the story), called this indie's "retrospective sexism" problem. It's retrospective because it doesn't matter how important your contribution at the time was or how knowledgeable and involved you were, very little of this will be remembered or records in the annals-or should we say mannals-of time.

I get particularly twitchy about Britpop because this is when, after years of piggy-backing on the music taste of my older siblings, I did indeed find a scene of my own that meant a lot to me. I find it interesting now to think about what it was I, and other teenage girls like me, enjoyed about it, and the ways we used it to find out about the world and ourselves.

I find it particularly interesting to think about Pulp, who, as several experts in the doc pointed out, were something of an anomaly in that scene. They are the only band that has emerged with any real credibility from these recent retrospectives, and are seen as more serious, more interesting, more complex than the rest of the Britpop rabble. Plenty has been said about Pulp over the years, about the searing class commentary, the wit, the irony and the storytelling, the British towns imagery, but somehow, I've never felt my experience, perhaps as a female fan, has quite been reflected. No band of this era were more mine, and the experience of being a teenage girl Pulp fan back then was unique and often contradicted.

It was His 'n' Hers that first hooked me, in the autumn of 1994, with its sexual melancholy and tales of suburban desire. This album, along with the extensive Pulp back catalog, was enough to soundtrack my adolescent angst and longings until the following May, when there was finally some new Pulp material to buy. Here came "Common People" in all its splendour and majesty, that summer's indie disco call-to-arms. Then at last on Monday, October 30, Different Class was released. With it, came that feeling of unparalleled delight in the life of a music fan, when a new album presents itself to you like a little box of treasure: look at all those songs!

I loved the wit and sharpness of "Sorted for Es and Wizz", and the way it cut through the bullshit of a rave culture that I'd been too young to experience. "Disco 2000" struck me as delicious, high energy disco pop. Jarvis-brilliant, clever Jarvis-made everything seem so fun and amusing; this was a world I wanted to enter. Listening to Different Class now, it feels a little baggy and inconsistent, with a few weak tracks alongside some absolute stormers. But at the time this didn't matter, they all seemed like distinct and perfectly contained little stories.

Yeah, sex was a big part of the appeal for me, but not a carnal and reductive desire for Jarvis himself, or any other man in the band. There was a libidinous drive that ran through those songs, a lot of which came from the lyrics, but was also right there in the music and aesthetic, in the shimmer and whirr of Candida Doyle's keyboard, the deep, thrumming basslines, the spiky guitar. The songs didn't need to be about sex to sound sexy, but it just so happens they often were. When, in "Monday Morning," Jarvis sang about a dead-end life of unemployment, hangovers and chucking up on the street, it seemed somehow glamorous. Early morning comedowns in "Bar Italia?" Well I'd never had one of them, but I wanted one. There was something strangely aspirational about Pulp's world of grubby hedonism.

At times though, something darker and more unpleasant ran through a lot of the album. Jarvis was clearly angry with women. He was in full-on class warrior mode, shown off to beautiful effect, of course, in the tale of the rich Greek voyeur in "Common People." But a more violent side reveals itself, in which women are the locus of his fury and his desire for revenge; a weapon to be used in the war of haves against haven'ts. There's a terrifying thrill to all this when he does it in "I Spy"-those swooping strings, the overblown hubris of the storytelling, his menacing monologues. But in "Pencil Skirt," a song about an affair with an engaged woman and musically fairly pedestrian, it's just plain nasty. "I only come here cause I know it makes you sad," he sings.

To be honest, there's plenty there to feel uneasy about in that record, but it's a perspective I never see in these historical documentaries. As Pulp go, I have made a kind of peace with it now-by seeing it as Jarvis's deliberate grotesquery, a character that he's constructed to tell us something of the darkness, violence and power play in sex and relationships. And while at times he's got a kind of beautifully searing righteousness, he's certainly not setting himself up as any kind of moral or ethical figure, and this tension is surely where part of his appeal as a songwriter and performer lies.

Don't get me wrong: I know we don't look to our pop stars for political purity, but it's worth talking about the process we go through as women when we see misogyny in the artists that we love. It's not exactly uncommon, though it might not be something that we see straight away. I've found a way to continue listening to Pulp and love it, but I've had conversations with other women who can't quite enjoy it in the same way anymore.

When you understand that music is still fundamentally seen as the territory of men in mainstream culture, it's obvious why none of this is discussed properly. People like to lazily toss most music and misogyny arguments straight at hip-hop, but the list of big successful artists with questionable gender politics is a far broader than that-John Lennon? Dylan? The Rolling Stones, anyone? It shouldn't just be brushed aside as an incidental detail, it needs to be acknowledged. As women listeners we negotiate this stuff all the time, consciously and unconsciously, and this process is mostly invisible.

It's for those reasons that when documentaries like BBC4's Music For Misfits write women out of history-from women who challenged the norms, rewrote rules, and changed their era, to women who bought the records, filled the gigs and formed the scenes-they exacerbate the issues and freeze progression in time. It's like it never happened at all, and the history of music reverberates endlessly as a gaggle of girls screaming at a stage beneath the voice of some weary male talking head explaining what the music was really about.

Some amends were made by the BBC this past Friday with the airing of Girl in a Band, which looked at women rock musicians, but women's role in all this-in making music, writing and thinking about it-should be more than just fodder segregated away for a special one-off. To make it more than this, it needs to be established as our territory, and our experience needs to be reflected, back then and right now. These discussions of the past should be flooded with the voices, stories, opinions and thoughts of women. Because there's plenty of us out there, with plenty to say, about the thrills, pleasures and tensions of living and loving music-you just need to ask.
Eli Davies is a London-based writer and teacher.

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Retrospective Sexism: How Women Are Written Out of British Indie Music History

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This article originally appeared on Noisey UK There have been a good few 90s music retrospectives dancing about in my eyeline of late, featuring the usual stock footage: Oasis at the Brits, Blur's knees-up Parklife routine, Tony Blair at the door of Downing Street.

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In 1998, New Labour was desperate to associate itself with Cool Britannia, so much so that Deputy Prime minister John Prescott and his wife attended the Brit awards at London Arena. As he sat down, Danbert Nobacon, of anarchy punk-band Chumbawamba, ran over and threw a bucket of water over him https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2014/sep/24/john-prescott-brit-awards-chumbawamba-1988

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The biggest rivalry in Britpop was between the two bands, Blur and Oasis. They had an ongoing competition on who will get number 1 and Blur one in 1995 when both albums were released on the same day.

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Two decades ago, Blur and Oasis released their highly-anticipated new singles on the same day, setting up the biggest showdown in chart history. The Battle Of Britpop gripped the nation, reinvigorated the UK music scene and defined an era. Here, in the words of the main players from both sides, is the definitive story of pop's biggest bust-up.
THE RISE OF BRITPOP

By early 1995 Britpop was gathering an unstoppable momentum, led by scene-leaders Blur and Manc upstarts Oasis, who'd made a huge splash with their debut album 'Definitely Maybe'.

Stephen Street (Blur producer): "Following [1994's] 'Parklife', optimism was very high. There was a lot of confidence flying through Blur. We knew that when we made a record there was a good chance it would get heard on the radio, which hadn't been the case three or four years previously. At that point Damon was revelling in being one of the hottest things on the planet. He was still going out with Justine (Frischmann, of Elastica) at that time, so they were the hottest couple in town."

Johnny Hopkins (Oasis press officer): "The first Oasis album had been the best-selling debut album ever. There was a lot of confidence, a lot of excitement, a lot of celebration around that time. The intention was to keep them away from Britpop as much as possible. I saw them as an international rock'n'roll band. I found the whole Britpop idea to be pretty parochial and limiting, and in parts pretty sinister. They weren't hanging out at [Camden pub] The Good Mixer like all the other so-called Britpop bands were. The only time they ever went in there was after a Creation Unplugged press conference at NME. There was an idea that they should go in there, just to fire a warning shot across the bows. Mission accomplished."

John Harris (author of Britpop tome The Last Party): "The Brit Awards 1995 were the high point of the idea that these two bands had a common cause. Before that, the Brit Awards were just Annie Lennox and Chris Rea - this was the first time that indie rock groups were winning big awards. Albarn picked up the last award, I think it was Best Group, and he said, 'This should be shared with Oasis' and Graham said, 'Much love and respect for them'. I never knew whether he was joking or not."

A RIVALRY EMERGES

As 1995 progressed, it gradually became clear there was growing resentment between the two Britpop behemoths.

Steve Sutherland (then-NME editor): "Although Liam and Noel liked to fight each other, what they really liked doing was picking a fight with somebody else. These were the days when the NME Awards had only just started. Blur and Oasis had both won a number of awards, and there was a coming together backstage between Liam and, I think, Alex from Blur, where Liam had a go at him and called him all sorts of parts of the female anatomy. And Graham, bless him, who was very drunk, walked up and kissed Liam on the cheek. Alex was the one they really didn't like, because he was Little Lord Fauntleroy, foppish Alex. He really wound them up. Oasis didn't think that Blur were proper rock stars, and Blur didn't really give two figs what Oasis thought of anything."

Damon Albarn, Blur singer (speaking in September 1995):"No-one was having a go at Oasis on our side. I mean, I did that thing on Chris Evans' show when I said, 'It sounds a bit like Status Quo', but that was the only thing. It was all on their side."

Alan McGee (Creation boss): "Damon had come to a party [at the Mars Bar in Covent Garden] for Oasis being Number One [for 'Some Might Say', their first Number One single]. Liam went up to Damon saying 'We're Number One, you're not, you're not' and Damon got on one about it and decided to take Oasis on. Oasis, being Oasis, decided to hate them. And Blur, being Blur, thought it was a game, but Oasis actually fucking hated them at the time! I used to go see Chelsea a lot in the '90s, and I regularly met up for a pie and Bovril with Damon at half time. To be fair, I think he was quite unaware that Oasis were so serious about it."

Albarn: "When Oasis got to Number One with 'Some Might Say', I went to their celebration party, y'know, just to say 'Well done'. And Liam came over and, like he is, he goes, 'Number fookin' One!', right in my face. So I thought, 'OK we'll see...'"

Street: "Liam was really mouthy and arrogant, and was even rude about Justine at one point. Damon thought, 'If you want a battle, we'll give you one'."

Harris: "Albarn had that competitive streak. The common cause had started to fray. I guess Damon decided that Oasis were competition, not allies."

Mike Smith (Blur publisher): "Britpop in general encouraged competitiveness - it didn't take much for Noel and Damon to rise to it. Both wanted to be the biggest band in the country. So much was made in the media of posh southern kids and rough working class northerners. It was ridiculous, as none of the Blur boys came from those places. It was more a clash between art school traditions and Oasis' classic British R&B."

CHOOSE YOUR WEAPONS

In picking the first singles from their forthcoming albums, Blur went with 'Country House' and a Benny Hill-indebted video directed by Damien Hirst, while Oasis chose the solid meat-and-potatoes rock of 'Roll With It'. Neither band's finest hour.

Smith: "I think it was ironic that the two songs that caused such big attention were not good examples of what Blur and Oasis were capable of. 'Country House' pandered to a certain aspect of Blur's music and made it to be the predominant sound."

Ross: "I remember the band were slightly reluctant to have 'Country House' as a single in the first place, and one or two people were reluctant about the video with Keith Allen and Page Three girls. But irrespective of how good the song itself was, it sounded like a Number One single. It's like having a big gun. I'm not saying it's pretty or nice, but it's effective. It's certainly not the best song they ever did, or probably even the best song on that album, but it served a purpose. The person who scores the goals isn't necessarily the best player on the pitch."

Street: "It was one of the obvious tracks to go for. I actually think it's a very well-crafted song, I always thought the " blow me out/I am so sad/I don't know why '" at the end, is a great bit of songwriting. And it seemed to cram into three-and-a-half minutes all the best bits of what Blur are about. From mine and Graham's point of view, we were very unhappy with how the record was portrayed by the video - it cheapened it. I hated it, I absolutely detested it."

Tim Burgess (Charlatans singer): "Neither band was on their best form with the singles they were putting out - 'Country House' almost seems like a novelty song when you look back at some of the heights that Blur have scaled, and 'Roll With It' is a kind of flatpack Oasis song."

ENEMY ENGAGED

With release dates shifting, Team Blur decided to settle the whole thing once and for all.

Ross: "The perceived way of things seems to be that the whole thing was rigged and arranged between the two bands, but we'd spent at least six months trying to prevent this from arising. The plan, if there was a plan, was that Oasis would have a Number One then we would, or vice-versa, and they wouldn't clash. Our lines of communications were pretty rock solid. But, then for some unexpected reason from our point of view, they brought forward their single by something like six weeks, weeks and weeks ahead of schedule. That threw us into complete confusion. All of a sudden, they're going to put their record out before ours. So our thinking - 'us' being myself, Damon and [Parlophone chief] Tony Wadsworth - was that if we were to release our record a week after theirs, not only would we be up against Oasis, we'd be up against the sales of a new Number One single, which could add an extra 50 per cent because of all the exposure a Number One would get anyway. We're on a hiding to nothing. They're guaranteed a Number One, but they've got a strong possibility of continuing to have the Number One the week we put our record out. So there's a very strong chance we'll go in at Number Two, which would be sort of a disaster, because this has been very carefully worked out."

McGee: "We were gonna go the week after them I believe, and they were going the week before us. It might have been the other way around, I can't remember. Damon moved it, so we went head-to-head. Damon made it a big battle."

Ross: "Damon and I were sitting outside The Freemasons Arms, near the old EMI building, having this chat, and I said, 'Look, if we go the week after, we're Number Two. If we go the same week, we have a chance of maybe Number One'. So we looked at each other, Damon seemed up for it, and we thought, 'Well, let's go head-to-head, go for broke'. We perceived that we were picking up the gauntlet that they'd cast down."

McGee: "I don't know if we were ever gonna catch Blur, but they effectively put us on the football pitch. I felt like the guy who's trying to get in the ring with the champion. They were the champions, and we wanted to be the champions and Damon brought us in the ring. I actually thought it was dumb but [Oasis' management company] Ignition decided they were gonna go head to head. You know, 'Fuck them! This is fucking great, let's milk this fucker'."

Hopkins: "There was talk of should we move it away from the Blur date. But that was the date we had already fixed and publicised, and we had all our bits in place. If they want to move their date, that's their prerogative. But we'll stick to ours."

Street: "Blur weren't very comfortable with it, I know Graham certainly wasn't. But Damon, being as driven and competitive as he is, he didn't take well to being provoked by Noel and Liam, so he reacted in the very public way of taking on this battle."

Ross: "From a journalistic point of view, it was a godsend: it was a clash of the titans, like The Beatles and The Stones all over again. Although I don't think The Beatles and Stones ever competed for a Number One single."

Sutherland: "Terry Staunton, who was working on the NME newsdesk at the time, came into my office and said: 'These two records are going to come out on the same day.' I was always a big fan of the rock and pop soap opera, so we made it into an event. We created the cover out of a Muhammad Ali fight poster that I had on a deck of cards, we just took the framework and changed the words and made it like a boxing match."

LET BATTLE COMMENCE!

The national media leapt on the story, catapulting the clash onto newspaper front pages and TV bulletins as Britpop mania exploded in the public eye.

Ross: "You couldn't turn on a news programme without it being featured. My missus' dad lives in Norway, and the Oslo Times had it on the front cover that week... If it was front page news in Norway, it was probably front page all around the world. Even America took notice. It was a focal point for a generation."

Harris: "The whole media decided to make it a class war and Oasis rose to that. That made Blur uncomfortable, especially Graham. He didn't like being seen as a middle class group - he was an army child. The broadcast and print media was in silly season. There was a story about a married couple in The Sun, he was Blur and she was Oasis and she smashed his records up. The record shop had become an exciting place because of all the Britpop records coming out at the same time. I went to HMV on Oxford Street and bought Oasis. To me it was a bit like voting."

McGee: "I think, delusionally, we probably thought we were gonna win at some point during that week. Even Steve Sutherland thought we had won, cos he had two different covers."

Sutherland: "We produced two front covers, because we didn't know who was going to win, and our press deadlines were difficult. So we had a Blur one and an Oasis one and we just waited to see which one would go. It did feel like people were going into record stores and buying a record to try and beat another record, which is amazing."

Smith: "Everybody thought Oasis would win. We felt that we could win, but that wasn't the perception out there. It was still tense up until Sunday evening."

Albarn: "We weren't 100% confident that we would win. You can't be. It's naïve to think any different."

AND THE WINNER IS...

In the best week for UK singles sales in a decade, and amid claims that Oasis sales were hit by faulty barcodes, Blur pipped Oasis by 270,000 sales to 220,000.

Ross: "I was quietly confident come Sunday - we had access to privileged information. Around that time we'd play football in Regent's Park: me, Stephen Street, Damon. We'd go for a kickabout, and I was pacing around outside a pub, waiting to meet up with them. I called the relevant number and a matter-of-fact voice - one of the two sales guys - said 'Blur, Number One'. And I thought, well, that's nice. So I got a bottle of champagne or something, and we went and had a game of football."

Albarn: "I was on holiday with my parents. It was fine until Thursday night but by Friday I was getting really agitated and then on Saturday I flew back. There was no feedback at Heathrow... I went down to the café at the corner of my street and the lady filled me in on all the press we'd been getting... Andy Ross rang up and said he was fairly confident. The next day I went to play football and Andy turned up completely pissed so I knew we'd won, which was brilliant, because we needed to upstage 'Parklife' in some way."

McGee: "I used to get the charts results before anyone else, about 12 o'clock. I got told that we were Number Two, phoned up the boys, and then I just got on with the day. Knowing the band, they probably got fucking wasted. Having said that, they would have got wasted, whether they won or lost."

Smith: "The numbers were incredible. The band were in Soho House celebrating, listening to the countdown. It was an odd event. Dave wasn't there, Alex turned up late, Graham wasn't the happiest soul at the time. Blur were becoming four separate individuals. Alex was all supermodels and champagne, and Graham was hanging out with Huggy Bear."

Street: "That was the infamous gathering on the Sunday where Graham threatened to jump out the window. It was a kind of joke, like 'Get me out of this place'. I think he was thoroughly sick of it all by then. Although we'd won, he didn't like all the bragging and the bravado. Graham saw it for the circus that it was, and wasn't very happy about it."

Graham Coxon (speaking in September 1995): "'I would have liked to have had a Number One quietly, but there's probably no such thing as that. I wanted our band to be Number One just because Number One is a special thing, but it's become not special... I wish the releases has been staggered because then Oasis would have got to Number One as well. We don't need this fake war, this preposterous chart war."

McGee: "Blur had the might of EMI, they won the battle because they were giving away an extra CD format, I think both CDs were 99p. So you get extra tracks for 99p. And that's why they beat us, they had three formats, we had two. They had the EMI marketing machine behind them whereas we had about 20 guys giving out cards saying 'We'll give you some Oasis tracks'. There was a barcode issue, but that was a week before, so I don't think the barcodes got in the way."

Ross: "The EMI sales force was two blokes from Leicester called Roger and John - they were really, really good at getting stuff racked in stores. We can't be disingenuous about 'tiny Creation versus major label'. Oasis were signed to Sony, not Creation. So it wasn't a lopsided fight - they had the same level of resources, or firepower, as we did. It was fairly even. It was like a nuclear arms race. You could have up to four formats at that particular time. It was all neck-and-neck, but our fourth format outsold theirs by 20 to one."

Bonehead, Oasis guitarist (speaking in September 1995): "They could've gone to Number One and we could've gone to number 102... give a shit. We get on with our music, you get on with your music, and let's just fucking do it. Who cares who's at Number One?"

Liam Gallagher, Oasis singer (speaking in September 1995): "I cared, 'cause I want Number Ones. I think 'Roll With It' is a great song. I met that Alex in the pub, so I bombed over and said, 'Congratulations on Number One - it's about fucking time, mate' and he goes, 'Oh yeah. But both our songs were shit anyway'. And I went, 'No, this is where you're wrong. And this is why I fuckin' hate your band, and you. I thought our song was top.' And then I went, 'Do you want a line?' and I gave him one and it was cool. But I still think they're shit."

Alex James, Blur bassist (speaking in September 1995): "I think they're [Oasis] are a great band and that this is the defining Britpop moment. It's not Blur versus Oasis, its Blur and Oasis against the world... The thing that most people don't understand when they read the papers is that this rivalry is all made up. I know that when I want to hear a good song I can write one and when I want to go for a drink, I can call up Liam. There's few people I'd rather drink with than Oasis."

THE AFTERMATH

Over the following months, Britpop became a major cultural phenomenon. Meanwhile, as '(What's The Story) Morning Glory?' emerged to colossal sales, it became clear that while Blur had won the battle, Oasis were winning the war.

McGee: "'Morning Glory' definitely sold because we got the coverage, we were on the fucking national news. We went on and sold 21 million worldwide with 'Morning Glory'. Oasis were building in their own way, but whether we would have got the national exposure, without that Blur/Oasis moment... I've got my doubts. Did I think it was stupid? Yes. Do I think that it worked? Unbelievably. Am I glad that it happened? Completely."

Sutherland: "Britpop was very all-inclusive, so it was easy for everyone to embrace it. There was a band a week, and they would go 'bang'. I'm not saying all of them were great, but it felt like at any moment, anyone could achieve anything. We are encumbered with our own history, there's always somebody turning around and telling you 'It's not as good as it used to be'. And you know what? It fucking well was. It really was as good as anything that had ever happened, because we were having such a good time."

Burgess: "It was great to see bands that we knew fighting it out at the top of the charts. I remember there were lots of anonymous pop songs around with faceless DJs featuring someone or other, so it was good to see that the lunatics had taken over the asylum for a bit."

Smith: "Because 'Parklife' had been a big success everybody believed that 'The Great Escape' was going to be a bigger record. 'The Universal' was launched with the band on top of HMV Oxford Street and Channel 4 were there to make a film they were going to broadcast over Christmas like Magical Mystery Tour. But the footage they shot turned out to be quite dark. The film was cancelled in the end because Blur weren't the fun-loving moptops they were hoping for."

Harris: "Through the first phase of Britpop, art for art still existed. It was reflected in Blur, Elastica and Pulp. Then there became this race that it was all about sales, who would get Number One. In the end, it led to people dumbing it down to get album sales. By '96, the interesting aspects of Britpop had gone."

McGee: "Three things defined the Britpop age. It was that moment, Knebworth, and then Princess Diana dying killed the moment. We'd put out 'Be Here Now', Diana died and the country went off Britpop. Those were the three stages of Britpop."

Smith: "When I got into the business in the '80s, people claimed you would never have a band like The Beatles again because everything was so fractured and you couldn't capture popular culture. In the '90s you had two bands that did capture it. I don't think we will have that again, but I hope to God that we can still have glamorous, rebellious bands that do it themselves."

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Blur and Oasis' big Britpop chart battle - the definitive story of what really happened | NME

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Two decades ago, Blur and Oasis released their highly-anticipated new singles on the same day, setting up the biggest showdown in chart history. The Battle Of Britpop gripped the nation, reinvigorated the UK music scene and defined an era. Here, in the words of the main players from both sides, is the definitive story of [...]

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- Tony Blair invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street in the run up to the 1997 election
- this image was viewed as a defining image of the Cool Britannia era

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'Chris Smith, New Labour's new culture secretary in that 1997 spring, tells me that actually no, that wasn't what happened: "I would point out that the words Cool Britannia were used by Virginia Bottomley [his Tory predecessor] in five different press releases in 1996 and 1997. I defy you to find a reference to Cool Britannia in a press release I released. I hated it!"' https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/may/02/politicsandthearts.artsfunding1