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Jun 13
Friday Poll Special – The Great Britpop Sorting Hat!
We are now firmly into the BRITPOP YEARS on Popular, oh yes, so it’s time to consider its musical legacy in the only language we truly understand, viz. a ticky-box poll.
We have selected 32 bands who someone, somewhere, might possibly have once described as Britpop. Tick all the ones you like and by science we will be able to finally, once and for all, define terms like “Britpop D-List” and “second divison Britpop”. Isn’t that a noble endeavour? I thought so.
Which of these Britpop bands were Any Good At All?
- Pulp 70%
- Blur 64%
- Kenickie 53%
- Suede 52%
- Supergrass 48%
- Elastica 47%
- Super Furry Animals 44%
- Ash 43%
- The Divine Comedy 39%
- Oasis 35%
- Boo Radleys 30%
- Lush 30%
- Bluetones 28%
- Catatonia 25%
- Mansun 24%
- Sleeper 24%
- Blur 64%
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I’m going to close this poll today when I put the next entry up, btw.
Unless I don’t put the next entry up. But I will dammit.
Hmm…the fact that Tom has hinted the next entry is going to long indicates it could well be in for a beasting! Interesting…
Will we still be able to post comments? Britpop nuggets is imminent!
Oh totally – the thread remains! I’m just going to stop the voting, since we’ve already reached 3x the voters of any previous Freaky Trigger poll! Do you want to run Britpop Nuggets as a separate post, Weej?
IMHO Britpop Nuggets ought to be a post on its own – I for onwle don’t want it to be subsumed at the bottom of a thread.
Well, certainly I would, yes. How would I go about doing that? ETA is Monday morning.
Drop freakytrigger@gmail.com an email and we can sort something out!
Always thought it was quite funny, but bizarre, that Richard Oakes, 17, was uprooted from school to join Suede.
I’m trying to imagine the media reaction had they used exactly the same recruitment strategy with a female member.
It was a pretty great move, if only because nobody else had ever dreamed of it (Mick Taylor definitely not the same thing). It would’ve been awful if they’d just got some session bloke.
I was working in the Music & Video Exchange Book And Comic Exchange just after Suede recruited Neil Codling (around the same time as Oakes). Codling came in one afternoon shortly after, I recognised him from the Melody Maker, and watched with interest as he blitzed our ‘cult books’ section, arriving at the counter with a foot-high pile of paperbacks by Kerouac, Burroughs, Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson, and others. He had a surprisingly gloomy look on his face. I have assumed to this day that Brett Anderson had presented him with a drug culture reading list.
Hahaha. Brett lived just round the corner too, it all checks out.
I wonder how Richard’s parents reacted to their son’s sixth-form project? He seems like a level-headed sort, but there’s many a seventeen-year-old wouldn’t’ve survived long being dropped into peak Suede.
Hang on, this never-before-dreamt-of strategy (especially using schoolgirls) is EXACTLY how Susanne and Joanne were recruited into the Human League — spotted by Phil Oakey at a Sheffield disco dancing (poss.round handbags), while still schoolgirls doing their A-levels.
And Michael Schenker was I think only 15 when he traded up from support group (the Scorpions, as led by his brother) to lead guitar in UFO — though I suppose that’s more Mick Taylorish, in that he was already touring Germany in a metal band, and hence I guess not in school any more really.
So in short Eater >> Suede
Worth marking here that Kenickie have had mixed fortunes on FT
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/10/not-the-freaky-trigger-top-100-tracks-of-all-time-no-38/
I was delighted to be tweeted by Menswear’s Johnny Dean himself this week.. (though perhaps I was being condescending, so to atone, I bought Nuisance from Amazon for, er, £1.27. Genuinely can’t wait – always thought Daydreamer was a masterpiece of cocky, minimalist punk-pop. Strangely, used to think it was Billy Idol.)
https://twitter.com/Sully_vs_Sully/status/354702303493763072
I’ve closed the poll now, well done the new official “Big Three” of Britpop: Pulp, Blur and Kenickie. Bad luck the Uproar BUT! their moment will come as they feature on Weej’s BRITPOP NUGGETS which will hopefully be up this weekend.
Many would put The Charlatans in the “Madchester” box but One To Another was possibly my favourite Britpop song. A fearless, cathartic response to the tragic death of Rob Collins… so much of a brick shithouse of an anthem even “Be your Spiderwoman, I’ll be your Spiderman” was something you could laugh with, rather than at. Though the intro does sound like the “Such and such a body’s [colours of team] army” chant and a tiny bit uncomfortable with anything hinting at the blanket football, “birds” and boozing obsession – the lack of anyone (apart from Pulp and Welsh Bunnies YET AGAIN!) to comment sagely on how it might be slightly fucking things up ensured Britpop was never much fun again after c. September 1996.
A slightly embargoed MSBWT record, but on 8/9/96 the #2 to One to Another’s #3 was just as great – Kula Shaker’s Hey Dude. No flaming swastikas (Hindu or Hitler), no dubious politics, not much “just butthurt as I was 30 years too late for the Beatles meeting Ravi Shankar!” Just great, infectious Madchester. With images of tombstones, IMAGES OF TOMBSTONES. Unfortunately, they were held off number 1 by a certain girl group hell-bent on ruining the fine art of stream-of-consciousness lyrics.. that debut hit also brought the curtain down on Britpop’s imperial phase. But more – maybe excessively – on them later.
Has anyone noticed this review of Northern Uproar’s latest album on The Quietus yet? http://thequietus.com/articles/12942-northern-uproar-all-that-was-has-gone-review
Somebody still loves them, obviously. I’m speechless.
@200 – Now that is impressive. Hard to imagine a sharper hipster move in 2013 than being a massive Northern Uproar fan.
I just listened to Monday Morning by the Candyskins on Spotify. It’s quite possibly the worst song ever recorded.
@202, Patrick. MM’s not *that* bad! A little dull, yes, but worse than even the worst thing in just the current charts? I don’t think so. That said, I’ve always slightly resented The Candyskins their ordinariness, since I’ve always assumed they took their name from this classic from The Fire Engines (who were essential listening if you were of a certain age).
Goodbye to Jon Brookes – drummer for The Charlatans. Long term battle with a brain tumour apparently.
Not Britpop according to this thread (and probably were Madchester/baggy holdovers), but mentioned in this thread, so I’ll file it here.
Re 203: Well, do not underestimate the power of postwhoring! (And girls with plaits and very strange heads.)
Hardly the most original thing I’ll ever post, but the Best Song Ever is a strong contender for the worst song ever.
Re 204 – on a serious note: yes, terrible news. And to think only a few days back, on this very page, I was celebrating the fact he was talismanic in one of my favourite pieces of music. RIP.
[…] pop culture website, Freaky Trigger, published a poll about Britpop bands yesterday, which got me thinking about the genre and its cover […]
For more of your Britpop polling requirements there’s 6music http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01tmt65
Do you think we should adopt a polling “code of conduct” or T&C? (No, we should not – or we’ll end up with members of Kenickie NOT tweeting links)
I am a member of the Market Research Society so our polls are naturally guaranteed to operate to the highest professional standards.
A couple of years later, here’s the now legendary Britpop Nuggets; 3 CDs, 10,000 words and an October of creative procrastination when I really should have been looking for a new job (anyone have any Director of Studies or EAP Tutor vacancies in Europe?)
Britpop Nuggets Part One: Some People are Born to Dance
Britpop Nuggets Part Two or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate Northern Uproar
Britpop Nuggets Part Three: Long Live The UK Music Scene
Good collection. I was expecting vol 3 to be chuck-yourself-off-a-bridge material accompanied by dour, er, ‘sleevenotes’ but the positive turn you took with Earl Brutus, Helen Love and David Devant was a pleasant surprise. Arguably a splash of Romo and maybe even something from Bis or Urusei Yatsura could’ve been included as part of this forward-looking aspect but that’d feck up the ‘cursed Scots’ line ;-)
Which I’d largely agree with. The Gyres might as well have come from Bolton, Whiteout were Bandwagonesque-jumpers a couple of years too late while Octopus’ (subconscious?) attempt at the ultimate mockney Loaded gesture in recruiting the son of a Great Train Robber looks seriously desperate in this context. Still have some fondness for the latter two, mind.
Yes, I diverted from the main thrust at the end to move into commentary (which also gave it a nice symmetry with Denim & Auteurs) but basically wanted to avoid the Glasgow scene entirely as it was conspicuously *a different thing* and also possibly my favourite scene of all time and deserving of its own separate, probably superior compilation, which I might get around to in another couple of years.
Cracking piece of writing, Weej. Made me quite nostalgic. Will throw a few thoughts up about specific bands here shortly. I also read the linked interview with Jamie Harding. Christ, drugs are not good for you.
So, the question on all of our minds, do we think Skinny White Thing by Shampoo is about Brett Anderson?
https://youtu.be/Ylk9yQ-vTdo
@210, weej. Thanks so much for your Britpop Nuggets cds. I’m really enjoying them. At least 70% of the tracks are new to me, underlining that if you were in the US at the time (and say following a mixture of MTV and college radio) you only heard the top-tier of Britpop (whereas, e.g., you ended up completely familiar with 4th or 5th tier grunge and industrial acts).