My life as a Britpop fan: 1994-97

Here's a post I wrote back in 2015 that I thought I'd bring back to coincide with the Oasis reunion and all the 90s nostalgia going about.

“Have you heard The Magic Whip yet?” texts my dad. I have to look this up. This message could mean anything, and is most probably something odd. It’s not. It’s the name of the latest Blur album.

My dad is pretty with it most of the time, but this is ridiculous. For a 67-year-old to be more up-to-date with my once favourite band shows how little I care for music these days. I can romp through books and TV box sets, but can easily go for years without buying an album. The sad fact is I just don’t really like new music anymore.

I hastily tracked down a review so I could get up to speed with him. It was one of many hailing The Magic Whip – their first album in 12 years – as a triumphant comeback. But it was reading these words (by Jonathan Dean in the Sunday Times) that neatly summed up why Blur were once my favourite group: “Looking back, what they, more than Oasis (one note) or Radiohead (abstract), so clearly offered was a lifestyle; something innovative yet accessible, romantic but realistic.”

This was so true. Blur captured my imagination at 18. I’d been waiting to ‘connect’ with a band for some time. As a child I loved my mum’s Kate Bush records, but (strange as it may seem now) no one else I knew had ever heard of her, and there was little about her I could get hold of. She wasn’t really a ‘Kate Bush doll’ sort of artist so I had to make do with staring at her album covers and re-reading the sleeve notes searching for some sort of hidden meaning. (“1978 original sound recordings made by EMI Records Limited” shed no light at all.)

Stock Aitken & Waterman were at the other end of the spectrum, and Kylie and Jason were a dream come true for any 11-year-old. I’ll never forget the day my brother James burst into the living room to tell me that Charlene was releasing a single. My brain just couldn’t take it in. But although I loved her, I remember wondering how many plays of her debut album I was expected to go through before I liked all the songs. (I was particularly perplexed by the low quality of ‘It’s no Secret’, side 1, track 4).

Nirvana’s Nevermind was the soundtrack of my GCSE year in ’92 when I was 16, but it wasn’t ‘mine’. It was being enjoyed far too much at parties by strange boys I didn’t have a clue how to speak to. It was dark and angsty and I was a little out of step with all that. What I was looking for was something a little more… enjoyable, glossier, a bit more 80s perhaps, but still interesting. Madonna was too intimidating, Michael Jackson too weird; without realising it at the time, it was that ‘romantic but realistic’ thing that I wanted to plug into.

Then along came Blur

I remember seeing them for the first time performing Girls and Boys on Channel 4’s The Word. It hit me head on. It was fun but witty – intelligent but poppy. Parklife was full of unusual characters set in a very British sort of Britain (package holidays, boozy bank holidays, cups of tea) that seemed a lot less cliched (and problematic) than it does now. Presenter Terry Christian said they were “once cruelly described as a sort of Chas & Dave meets Duran Duran”, but that to me was what made them romantic and realistic.

I’d started to like Suede before Blur – they definitely had a romantic/realistic thing going on – but with their seedy glamour and strange seriousness they would never be everyone’s cup of tea. Their brand - amusingly summed by Ben Hewitt in the Guardian as being “all council blocks and drug-addled crones having bad sex” - felt a little less communal.

Blur meanwhile offered access to part of a ‘tribe’ which is what every teen wants. Their uniform of 60s-style sports casual wear (Pumas, Dr Martins and Fred Perry t-shirts) were cheap, comfortable and made it easy to recognise people in the same gang – a pair of Adidas Gazelles or Vans trainers meant you were probably listening to Blur, Oasis or Shed Seven and helped to break the ice (so that was how you spoke to boys!). It was lovely to feel ‘part’ of something.

So was it just the sound and the look?

It felt like something much bigger. Music journalist Simon Price says that being a music fan can change your life: “You see the world in an entirely different way. It changes the way you walk, the way you cut your hair, the way you think, talk – everything.”

It certainly felt like that for me. I was about to start university and urgently needed to reinvent myself – to develop a personality, some likes and dislikes that could easily be trotted out at freshers encounters without having to reveal who I actually was (I didn’t really know who I really was of course, but was afraid it was something unspeakably boring). Dressing, eating, even speaking like a Britpop fan hid a multitude of potential character deficiencies and provided a sort of social shorthand.

It even helped to holiday – me and three school friends went to Magaluf in ’95 armed with the Blur back catalogue and a suitcase of super noodles. We treated the Parklife CD more or less as an instruction manual. We ate a full English every morning, sunbathed on Union Jack towels, got painfully sunburnt, and fairly drunk. Meanwhile back at university, I’d somehow managed to bag a Damon-alike boyfriend and was besotted. It was all thoroughly exciting.

Like all intense experiences, after a few years it ended. More or less at the time when Tony Blair started up Cool Britannia and Spice Girls started wearing union jacks. Indie had become fully mainstream – it belonged to everyone now – and my passion petered out.

So I’d thought my time with Blur was well and truly over, but like everything in popular culture, bands can be reunited and resurrected. I was reluctant to download The Magic Whip not wanting to be disappointed, but just two tracks in and I’m hooked. It’s everything they used to be at their height, but with a warmth that’s comfortably melancholy and more up-to-date.

This is as it should be – after all it’s 20 years since Britpop was at its height. Damon pogoing round the stage and la-la-la-ing would be as unwelcome as another trip to Magaluf, but it sounds reminiscent enough for the memories to start wafting in.

I’m just musing about what my old school friends would make of all this when I read about a new musical Damon has co-written based on Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice story. I text dad about it. “Yeah Wonder.land – I’ve already booked it,” he replies. Some things will never change.