Sunday November 20 2022
Blur, Pulp, Oasis or Suede: who is the best Britpop band?
We all have our No 1, but for an objective answer, we looked at the data
Jonathan Deanand Athena Chrysanthou
Britpop is back, if it ever went away. Thirty years after Blur, Oasis, Suede and Pulp soundtracked a nation about to be swept up by Euro 96, Tony Blair and Cool Britannia, the songs that playlisted the half decade from 1992 to 1997 are, once again, dominating headlines and you and your best mate’s Spotify streams.
Did you get your tickets for next summer’s Blur and Pulp gigs? Suede are touring, and Noel and Liam Gallagher are headlining festivals to, essentially, play Oasis. The nation’s last great unifying musical era is impossible to resist. Even one of the bit players is back, as the Lightning Seeds redo Three Lions for the World Cup.
So forgive people of a certain middle age for spending more than £200 to see Blur and Pulp in the space of a week in July, where they will probably awkwardly bump into several exes.
It was a question then and remains one now. Who is best? Who has aged the best, and who can claim to have won the battle of Britpop? Because it always was a war. A hyper-competitive slag-off of petulance and arrogance that reached its peak in 1995 when Roll with It by Oasis came second to Blur’s Country House in the singles charts, and Noel said that he wished Damon Albarn would “catch Aids”. Neither track was near the bands’ best, but the story was on the evening news. It was a weird time. If Oasis lost that chart battle, they have won the war, commercially speaking at least. Our data has them topping nearly all categories, from album sales and number ones to Brit awards and monthly Spotify listeners. With 125,000 fans a night attending two shows at Knebworth in 1996, they dwarf their old rivals live too.
Blur come second in most categories, but Pulp deserve a special nod. Jarvis Cocker’s band never won a Brit (though he deserved one for thrusting his bum at Michael Jackson) and boast far fewer streams and sales, but can still play to 50,000 people standing in a field. They won the Mercury music prize though, for Different Class, in 1996 — beating Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? that year. Suede won for their debut album Suede in 1993.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/30d3 ... m8gULILH3Q