Introduction

At the height of the Britpop phenomenon, during the mid-1990s, ‘Britpop’ was branded by music journalists and critics alike as a critical resurgence of British popular music. Musically and lyrically, Britpop was regarded as a return to form – a brand of characteristically British, or more specifically ‘English’, popular music that rekindled the spirit of the mid-1960s ‘British’ invasion of the US by groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who and the Small Faces. Indeed, a number of these groups, notably the Beatles, the Kinks and the Small Faces, were frequently cited as key musical influences by leading Britpop artists such as Blur and Oasis. The purportedly English qualities of Britpop acquired a currency at a number of levels. From the perspective of the British music industry, Britpop was considered an antidote to the dominance of US-originated musical styles such as rap and grunge (see also Chapters 4 and 8 in this book) whose rapid commercial success and incisive impact on youth audiences around the world had seen Britain lose momentum as a key player in the global popular music industry. Riding on the wave of the indie-guitar scene of the early 1990s, Britpop’s merging of indie’s guitar-based melodic pop style with a 1960s retro-aesthetic quickly found a niche, both nationally and overseas. The fact that Britpop was considered by the music industry and associated taste-makers as something ‘authentically’ English was further demonstrated through the speed at which groups such as Blur and Oasis found a place in the English rock/pop canon. In September 1995, one year after the release of Blur’s breakthrough album Parklife, UK retro music magazine Mojo ran an extended feature on the band,1 referring to their new album The Great Escape as ‘the most eagerly-awaited long-player of 1995’. The same Mojo issue ran a feature in which Blur vocalist Damon Albarn met and interviewed a personal icon, singer-songwriter Ray Davies of the Kinks, further cementing in the popular imagination Britpop links with the Kinks and other 1960s English popular music icons.