The 10 Best Britpop Albums...According To An Indifferent Yank!

“OH CHRIST THE BRITPOP 30th ANNIVERSARY” said a wise critic, who will go nameless, on Facebook recently. The replies quickly noted that such things should already be underway, as such signposts for the era as Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish and Suede’s debut were released in 1993. Sure, albums like Blur's Parklife and Oasis’ (What's The Story) Morning Glory? and The Verve’s Urban Hymns could still get triple-decade oral histories and wistful reflections, but it‘s too late for a general overview of Britpop, right? That cultural moment when the rise of proudly British multiplatinum guitar rock after the fall of Grunge led to a rush of patriotism in the UK and Anglophilia elsewhere, eventually leading to the election of Tony Blair? Or so I think I‘ve read?

Well, it’s not too late if you spent the ‘90s as a disaffected American alterna-kid. One who liked plenty of British bands, but held his deepest respect for shaggy, slovenly dressers from semi-suburban US cities like Athens, GA, Stockton, CA and Dayton, OH. Most definitely didn’t know something was up until 1994, probably. In hindsight, the popularity of grunge was a brief retro respite from the rap-rock sound that truly defined American rock in the ‘90s (an arc that goes something like Faith No More, Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine, Korn, Limp Bizkit). Similarly, Britpop as a musical experience in the States was a mid-decade moment where the lanky, pale fellows with snide accents on TV and in magazines were centered the guitar riff rather than the drum loop. Not that Jesus Jones and EMF before, or The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim after, didn’t employ six-strings (or recordings of six-strings). But their mojo came from sounds crossing over from the rave tent to the arena. Britpop, though a reaction to grunge conquering the British music weeklies, ironically shared grunge’s affection for the rock of decades past (someone overseas will have to explain why the root noun was pop instead of rock. Was it out of respect to My Bloody Valentine? Slade?).

If you’re between the ages of thirty and sixty, already tearing at your face in outrage after reading my aloof perspective on all things Glastonbury-adjacent, you sure won’t like what follows: my ten favorite Britpop albums (only one per act), followed by a few categories of bands who didn’t make the list but may or may not be considered Britpop. Oi! The cheek!

How, you may ask, am I defining the genre anyway? As I see it, Britpop involved pop/rock acts from the UK who

1. Had a sound that overtly acknowledged British pop/rock history, without being associated with more futuristic keywords like “electronica,” “hip-hop,” and “post-rock.” 
2. Had a notable album between 1993 - the year it became uncool to emulate “Hush” by Deep Purple in the name of “dance music” - and 1997 - the year Kula Shaker went to number 2 in England with a cover of “Hush.” 1997 was also the year the Spice Girls hit America, just as Brit and way more Pop than any rock band.

For a broader, less offensive (unless you think it’s too broad) overview of Britpop (complete with a Danny Boyle interview!), there’s always Pitchfork. But for the rest of you, here’s that Top Ten!

1. Supergrass, This Is Supergrass 94-04

Three young men from Oxford, their leader a teenage werewolf (or at least wielding an impressive pair of muttonchops for an 18 year old), with the ability to make retro riffage sound like the fountain of youth. I might argue that Supergrass was the definitive Britpop band, resembling everything in Britain’s proud rock past, adding nothing but modern pop confidence. As glib and reductive as that sounds, it’s not meant as an insult! It’s quite hard to play pre-punk sounds with post-punk spirit, giving it a half-cool, half-cute charisma entirely your own. You can’t say they were just aping The Hollies, or the Bay City Rollers, or The Stranglers, or Wings, or whatever British arena-stomp bubblegum consortium you’d use to dismiss them by comparison. Those acts either weren’t as fast, or as loud, or as giddy.

I think this compilation captures Supergrass at their most consistently engaging & delightful. If you’re allergic to compilations, go ahead and grab the 1995 debut I Should Coco, featuring the guys at their punkiest (“Caught By The Fuzz”) and cheekiest (“Alright”). Then get the groovier follow-up In It For The Money, where Coombes & company let old rock dudes know their desire to be old rock dudes. Follow your bliss after that, through another four Supergrass albums and Coombes’ ongoing solo career. As long as you care what Coombes is up to, Britpop lives.

2. Echobelly, On

I’m not sure if I actually heard Echobelly in the Britpop era (which, for me, was basically high school). But if I did, I probably wrote them off as “too generic,” thanks to a straight-forward, overdriven guitar-bass-drums attack, their front woman’s voice mixed just low enough that I didn’t make out any “undeniable” hooks. While it wasn’t just sexism that kept me from appreciating a meat-and-potatoes band like this - I also didn’t care for the Jesus Lizard back then! - I would have had little appreciation at the time for what singer Sanya Madan brought to the band beyond “novelty” as an Indian immigrant. 

Doing my due diligence through less familiar discographies for this piece, Echobelly wound up the most striking band I wasn’t particularly familiar with. Unapologetically influenced by the Smiths, but impossible to call a “clone,” Echobelly swung and stompboxed with the best of the era. Sanya Madan was applying Morrissey’s declarative holler to a perspective he’d unapologetically dismissed on racist embarrassments like “Asian Rut” and “Bengali In Platforms.” Where Cornershop explicitly called out the irony of such a progressive figure in terms of masculinity sneering at immigrants for daring to exist in his England, burning his photo in front of journalists, Echobelly showed just how asinine it was to suggest fans like Madan “didn’t belong here.” I don’t know if Morrissey ever acknowledged the irony, but he reportedly enjoyed the band. 

Madan’s pointed commentary about aggressive men on “Kings Of The Kerb” and romantic mundanity in “Pantyhose And Roses” also comes off more earnest and less snide than Damon Albarn’s portraits of British archetypes. This was someone risking vulnerability, expressing personal frustration rather than trying to be Ray Davies. But it wouldn’t matter if the band wasn’t blasting behind her, able to slip a snarling lick from Sugar’s “JC Auto” into the climax of “Roses” (that American trio’s Beaster went to number 3 in the UK, you know!). Though compared to Blondie for their aloof female singer & pop-rock rush, they didn’t share that band’s chameleonic gifts, making evolution difficult (I'm sure the arrival of No Doubt didn't help either). But On captures them at a triumphant peak, unmistakably English rock that subverts any stodginess implied.

3. Elastica, Elastica

Sometimes people forget Elastica was Britpop, what with their art-punk edge (highlighted by multiple references to Wire), outsized impression on America and, y’know…gender. But hey, Wire was British and so was Justine Frischmann, sneering about vacuous women ("Line Up"), vacuous men ("Smile"), her desire to be railed in a car (“Car Song”) and men’s occasional inability to deliver said rail (“Stutter”). Weekly readers got to wonder if songs were about Brett from Suede, and then she dated Damon Albarn! And as Chrissie Hynde was merely an Anglophile transplant from Ohio, they were more British than The Pretenders! 

The band sadly fell apart over fast living even quicker than the Pretenders’ original line-up did, not releasing a second album until 1999, an entertaining mess called The Menace that Frischmann - now a fine artist living in the states - thinks dilutes the brand. While I regret we’ll probably never see them again, I’m glad she gets what an accomplishment this album was: one of the most confident, sleek expressions of young womanhood in rock history, as matter-of-fact and camp-free as The Breeders, but with a stylish poise guaranteed entry into whatever the coolest after-hours club in the city is this week. Elastica made Britpop glamour and rock swagger look effortless, without making a virtue of being allergic to effort. 

4. Teenage Fanclub, Grand Prix

If you were a British (fine, Scottish) band that released an album on Creation Records named after a Formula One racing event, an album that commercially benefited from fans and tastemakers awaiting the second album by label-mates Oasis, I’ll argue you were Britpop. I don’t care if you got American writers all excited via fuzzed-up releases on Matador and DGC a few years earlier. The fuzz was largely replaced by jangle by this point, and the band's declining interest in making the stateside scene nicely coincided with the uptick of attention for UK bands (even if it was genuinely a coincidence). Their next album, featuring their sole UK Top 20 hit, was even named Songs From Northern Britain! They knew what was up, and I do too. Kinda.

Granted, you could argue the harmonies of their three singer/songwriters were more Byrds than Hollies, and the beat was more Neil Young than T. Rex. But…fuck it! They did considerably better in the UK than the US during the Britpop era, they were on Creation, and they're too strong a band to leave out just because SPIN got excited about them before Melody Maker did. Besides, America had mostly given them back to Britain at this point, SPIN giving Grand Prix an embarrassed 4 out of 10 right before giving Morning Glory a 6. Songs From Northern Britain might have more gorgeous peaks (do check out that UK Top 20), but Grand Prix best melds the churl and swirl of their early period with the shimmering beauty that followed, winking at English majors with the whimsical rhymes of “Versimilitude,” naming the most vulnerable track “Neil Jung,” and calling the zippiest rocker “Discolite.” Grand Prix is Britpop’s best case of a rising tide lifting all boats.

5. The London Suede, Coming Up

I swear I’m a fan of The London Suede. Despite believing their biggest accomplishment was delivering ‘90s kids Bowie-esque androgyny and drug-fueled decadence without red mullets and sequined leggings. Despite thinking The London Suede is a cooler name than just Suede because London. It’s possible with a more thorough listen I might give the edge to their double-disc B-side comp Sci-Fi Lullabies over Coming Up, their third album and first without guitarist Bernard Butler (arguably the biggest guitar hero of this period). One of their singles comps would allow me to acknowledge earlier moments of erotic ecstasy like “The Drowners” and “Animal Nitrate.” But something I adore about Coming Up is that singer Brett Anderson, having done his best to outswan the seventies on the none more grandiose Dog Man Star, realized that - instead of recoiling from the laddish, stadium-sized AOR that had bloomed in their wake - it was time to own it, shake it, and sell. Hits like “Beautiful Ones,” “Trash” and “Lazy” reaffirm that Anderson’s vision of British rock pride had nothing to do with promoting football clubs and everything to with sex and drugs. All kinds of sex, and all kinds of drugs. Coming Up is a victory lap that arguably trumps the win.

6. Pulp, Hits

I know, I know. “How dare you…” I get it. I’ll give you that Pulp was the last great new wave band, too neurotic, earthbound and late in the game to make it as a Roxy Music clone back when that was the move for skinny, horny guys who like to dress up and read. But Pulp stuck at it, singer Jarvis Cocker eventually making his insecurities pass as not just class pride, but a gripping, unique and memorable expression of it. His ’N’ Hers, Different Class and This Is Hardcore have more than their fair share of enthusiasts grateful for a band that makes passing out drunk and high after passing ones’ A-Levels sound as mythic as the E Street Band made elopement and motorcycle purchase. For many people one-degree-or-less from an adjunct lecturer today, Pulp are the biggest heroes Britpop had.

But I just can't with any of their full-lengths. “Acryllic Afternoons,” “Seductive Barry,”   “I Spy”…I like to think of myself as a fairly randy, anxious guy, but I can’t get through a Pulp album without thinking Cocker needs several chill pills and a cold, cold shower. Hits has their best comic narratives of adolescent angst (“Babies,” “Disco 2000”), their finest underclass anthems (“Common People,” “Help The Aged”), and enough elegant pop exercises that it more than satisfies without making me sweat how ridiculously unsatisfied Pulp’s wry frontman could come off. I'm sorry, forty-something faculty of the world! I'll give a little more to your strike fund instead.

7. Blur, Modern Life Is Rubbish

With Blur so transparently derivative, and Damon Albarn so transparently vain, it’s fun to not give them their due. I’m delighted I didn’t finish this post until after Blur failed to get a Coachella crowd singing along to the once-racy/now-gender normative “Girls & Boys,” show producers not realizing Blur is way more Xennial a brand than Albarn’s cartoon Gorillaz, who won the audience over last year. Many of my peers were aghast at the lack of appreciation kids had for this fine, upstanding decades-old rock band. Because Blur was all about treating your elders with respect, right? Parklife!

But if Albarn hadn’t been annoyed at how generic the band’s “baggy” debut Leisure had been received by the music weeklies, or that American audiences (as well as the label shared with Slowdive and Jesus Jones) were now enraptured with grunge, he might not have gone headlong into British visual and lyrical iconography on 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish, exploiting the gifts of guitarist Graham Coxon and producer Stephen Street to prove Blur was a band worthy of standing alongside The Kinks, XTC and The Jam in the Britain Rules, Americans Are Fools Rock Hall Of Fame. This quickly became a goal for other bands in the UK with no hope of out-groaning Weiland.

The following year’s Parklife is where the UK truly got on board, and my favorite Blur album is their self-titled release from 1997, where - once again eager to stand out - the band decided American indie rock was cooler than Britpop. But that last LP is distinctly not Britpop, and Parklife and 1995’s The Great Escape get a little too corny in their eagerness to establish Albarn as Ray Davies and Cliff Richard and early Scott Walker rolled up into one ballad-prone ball of ersatz Anglophile-bait. Modern Life Is Rubbish is the most brash and guitar-centric of their Britpop trilogy, the band giddily exploring this new sense of identity while still wanting to bring down the house. 

8. Oasis, Definitely Maybe

Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll!!! Well, not too much sex & drugs, Suede! And more rock & roll than that, Blur! Oasis was the Britpop band that Goldilocks chose, if Goldilocks represented the great silent majority of rock radio listeners. That got on my nerves somewhere between my stunned first and stuporous seventy-somethingth listen to “Champagne Supernova,” its extended coda rarely cut short on MTV or Central Pennsylvania’s The Revolution 101.1, out of respect to the band’s unparalleled majesty or something.

Oasis was an important segue between the early and late ‘90s for rock radio, saying “Kurt Cobain was a genius, man” without acknowledging anything remotely subversive about the band other than occasionally wrecking an amplifier. Where everyone from Eddie V to Ed K to Dolores O to Billie Joe spent the decade wrestling with how to be more subversive and more challenging with every album, Oasis just wanted to be fucking big. Big as the Beatles! With sonics way more indebted to the glam stomps of the '70s, Oasis didn’t sound like the Fab Four so much as make it ok to like your parents’ Beatles albums and still think of yourself as an edgy drunken lout living in the moment. They were British enough to charm American alt-rockers while setting the philosophical stage for alt-butt-rock, where thundering masculine energy was again the primary goal.

While the mega-seller (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is damn solid considering the speed with which it was recorded and the hype under which it was made, it’s a touch too saggy to get a thumbs up. The 2CD compilation Stop The Clocks leans too heavily on the early albums, and the 2CD compilation Time Flies doesn’t lean on them enough. So while Definitely Maybe lacks such key moments as “Wonderwall” (their most moving display of Beatles reference as nervous tic) and “D’Ya Know What I Mean?” (their most entertaining display of Beatles reference as cocksure irreverence), I have to stick to that 1994 debut anyway. Other than via the hilarious, affecting documentary Supersonic, Maybe is the best way to hear the band as ambitious rather than entitled, an Inspiral Carpets roadie and his Shaun Ryder-inspired brother sure they can whip up a crowd better than anybody else on the show line-up, maybe even the country. Confident they can avoid what’s shite and stick to what’s accepted as brilliant. And for a year or three, you can’t say they didn’t.

9. Radiohead, The Bends

As with Elastica, you could argue Radiohead were too OK with America (playing radio gigs, opening for REM, Alanis, Soul Asylum…) and not Anglo-centric enough in their audible identity to quality as Britpop. It’s true, their 1993 debut Pablo Honey was promoted by Thom Yorke leaping into the pool at MTV’s Spring Break house. And 1997’s OK Computer established them as aloof, Pink Floyd-level art-rock icons living on dorm walls, floating above such matters as national pride and Spring Break houses. But one big leap between Pablo Honey and its follow-up The Bends was that Radiohead had definitely heard Suede. Honey actually arrived a month before Suede’s debut LP, but on The Bends, Johnny Greenwood’s riffs frequently yank the songs to and fro inna Bernard Butler stylee while Yorke shows a less punk, more elegant vocal dynamism than he did circa “Creep.” Touches like that went a long way to keep them from being mistaken for Bush as they crossed back and forth across this continent.

While the late ‘90s would birth scores of bands making hay with sounds Radiohead found mundane, The Bends posits Radiohead as Suede fans whose grand anomie was more cosmic and less erotic, and therefore less likely to scare straight college students. It’s not a carbon copy of Dog Man Star, as the radio promotion department clearly appreciated, but I think Suede helped Radiohead figure out how to be a big, romantic, British alternative rock band that was transparently not stupid, a position from whence they could rapidly expand and evolve until settling into the post-Eno anguished soundscape (with occasional riffola) mode they’ve been in for the last two decades or so. And so…for that brief moment…we’ll call them Britpop!

10. Lush, Lovelife

I reserve the right to change my mind after a random enlightening re-stream someday, but Lush’s earlier albums, generally associated with terms like “shoegaze” and “dream-pop,” have never clicked with me as more than merely cool & interesting. Part of the problem is I'm hearing them after 1996's Lovelife, a straightforward swing for the bleachers I strongly prefer. The proud clarity of their final album suggests the band was just shy at first, rather than committed to surreal, sonic experimentation.

Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson were straight-forward lyricists from the beginning compared to their 4AD peers, something that’s easier to appreciate with their voices up front and unabashed on singles like “Single Girl” and “Ladykillers.” Not that they weren’t still moony and ethereal compared to Damon Albarn or Jarvis Cocker, the latter dueting on “Ciao!” But the commercial context of Britpop didn’t dilute Lush’s gifts, so much as allow them to flower. Sadly, the death of drummer Chris Acland and the remaining members' reticence to press on meant this coming out was also their farewell.

And, as true heads know, that was just the tip of the iceberg! Below are the lads and lasses who failed to make the above list for reasons of style or quality, opinions hopefully expressed with just enough humility on my part to keep from getting weird e-mails from folks who don’t think Romo refers to American football. And again, please remember the dismissiveness below refers specifically to albums released between 1993-1997. Center your bile accordingly and make no assumptions beyond that. Case in point, I like “The Only One I Know.” And Ride was a top 10 shoegaze band.

If You Need More Than Ten Britpop Bands In Your Life:
(They didn’t make the cut, but my inner A&R man might have signed them in the ’90s.)
Dodgy, Gene, Longpigs, Marion, Northern Uproar, Ride, Shed Seven, Silver Sun, Sleeper, Spacehog, The Verve.

Too Alternapop to be Britpop:
(Too punk, too electronic, too shoegaze, too hip-hop, too likely to be mistaken for American…)
Ash, Black Grape, Cornershop, Kenickie, Lightning Seeds, PJ Harvey, Placebo, Primal Scream, Reef, St. Etienne, Shampoo, Slowdive, Spiritualized, Swervedriver.

Too Old To Be Britpop:
(Even though plenty of US alterna-types had them in their CD binder.)
Edwyn Collins, Everything But The Girl, James, Jesus & Mary Chain, Morrissey, Paul Weller.

Too Welsh to be Britpop:
(Wales is its own thing.)
60ft Dolls, Catatonia, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynki, Stereophonics, Super Furry Animals.

Too British For Me:
(Bands where I’ll admit I might be missing something.)
The Auteurs, Denim, The Divine Comedy, Manic Street Preachers

I Don’t Get It:
(Bands where I don’t think I’m missing something. The category was originally named “Sucked,” but that’s not fair. Many of these musicians would be an accomplished addition to any ‘60s/‘70s cover band.)
The Bluetones, The Boo Radleys, Cast, The Charlatans UK, Heavy Stereo, Kula Shaker, Mansun, McAlmont & Butler, Menswear, Ocean Colour Scene, Salad, The Seahorses, Space, The Stone Roses, Strangelove, The Supernaturals, These Animal Men, Travis.

If you'd like to share any concerns or comments about the above...you should cut down on your dorklife, mate! Get some excerise! Or reach out to anthonyisright at gmail dot com.