Steve Lamacq on ‘The Rise And Fall Of Britpop’: “Everyone was a character”
Steve Lamacq has spoken to NME about the new BBC podcast The Rise And Fall Of Britpop – and the chances of a similar cultural phenomenon taking place again today.
Launched this week, the new eight-part series sees 6 Music DJ and former NME journalist Lamacq – along with fellow BBC DJ and former Evening Sessions co-host Jo Whiley – delve deep into the rise of UK indie in the ’90s with new interviews, archive interviews and more, featuring prominent artists from the scene.
To get a feel for the new series, NME spoke to Lamacq about life before Britpop, how it wouldn’t have been possible without the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, the characters it gave us, and what caused the scene’s demise…
NME: Hello Steve. People might take for granted how bleak music was in those pre-Britpop years. What can you tell us about culture in the UK during that time?
Lamacq: “The start of the ‘90s was a little grim, grey and downtrodden. The rise of dance music through the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s was a reaction to that – and an escape from that. In musical terms, we had the shoegaze movement in the early ‘90s, which brought some quite good stuff. My first interview with Ride ran in the first NME issue of 1990. That kind of set the tone. The NME broke a lot of bands during that period; particularly in those first six months of 1990. Ride arrived, we had The Charlatans, there was a lot going on, but we were still at a point where these bands weren’t entering the mainstream. Although they were popular, they weren’t popular outside of our world.
“Obviously Stone Roses were recording somewhere, we had the [Happy] Mondays, and Inspiral Carpets. A few things made the chart, but nothing which had a broader cultural impact. That’s not to say we didn’t have a good time. I loved being in a van with Mega City Four for weeks on end or headbanging to Therapy?, but as grunge took off, we had very little ownership of music in this country.”
Why wasn’t grunge quite hitting the spot?
“Weirdly, a lot of the grunge bands who moved to major labels were very unobtainable. At the start, it felt glamorous because a lot of fans wanted to romanticise more about Seattle than they did about Stourbridge. After a while, everyone became so removed. I think one of the reasons that Britpop happened was that everyone was so accessible. If you wanted an interview with anyone – Louise Werner of Sleeper or one of Elastica – you just phoned them up or went to [Camden pub] The Good Mixer. You could raise some copy from [Blur guitarist] Graham Coxon on a Friday afternoon just by popping round the pub if you wanted to.
“That helped provide Britpop with a sort of gang mentality – that was part of its success. We needed a bit of glamour, and Suede were the band that opened that particular door. It was glamour mixed with the sound of the things we understood. We were getting bored of American angst and wanted some British angst instead!”
How seismic would you say that the death of Kurt Cobain was in allowing Britpop culture to breed?
“It’s massive, really. Without the talisman figure, grunge really struggled for direction. The fact that it all happened within days says a lot. It was days before we found out that Kurt Cobain had died in the UK [in April 1994], but that same night that he died by suicide was the same that Oasis played live for Radio One at Sound City and John Harris did his now legendary interview with them for NME.
“So there were two things happening. One was that without Kurt Cobain, grunge became rudderless as no one could be a spokesperson, as no one else could be looked up to in the same way. At the same time, Britpop was ready to go. If you’d started the gestation period in March 1993, then you had a year to gather momentum. Elastica, Sleeper, Echobelly all had singles out that month and you had successful Mercury Prize nominations for bands like The Auteurs, and there was already enough there. Blur were about to make their comeback, coincidentally inspired by their terrible time in America and with something that was the complete antithesis of US culture.
“In that era, people really wanted pop music they could believe in, and here was something ready to go. Had Kurt Cobain died a year earlier, then I don’t think Britpop would have been ready to take that place – things would have happened very differently.”
There’s an image you mention near the start of episode one of the podcast where you mention former counter-culture hero Morrissey catching flak for stepping on stage draped in a Union Jack in 1992. How likely did it seem back then that the Union Jack would be co-opted by counterculture again so soon? That everything around British iconography would become cool again?
“That’s true, isn’t it? I don’t know how the Union Jack had ended up being dragged down so badly. There have always been various right-wing factions trying to infiltrate pop music. I don’t know whether it was partly due to what it had come to represent. In a lot of people’s minds it had almost become a racist symbol, but after living under the Tory government for a long time a lot of people felt it was representative of an establishment that didn’t particularly care about them.
“Even I am surprised, though, at how much we took ownership of the flag and our culture again through the ‘90s. By the time we got to Cool Britannia, you couldn’t move for Union Jacks – every magazine cover had to have one. I remember that I was working at Select by March 1993 when they did that issue with Brett Anderson superimposed on a Union Jack. Both Suede and Suede’s press office were slightly uncomfortable because of what the Union Jack could represent. In the end, that was the start of its metamorphosis back into something cool. Everyone from Noel Gallagher to Spice Girls was using the Union Jack.”
There’s also a point in the first episode where you talk about the many scenes that music journalists were trying to invent back then. That must speak of the hunger that you had for something like Britpop to come along?
“To be fair, there were actual scenes. Shoegaze became an actual scene despite the fact that it was quite a jokey and disparaging term. Other scenes, however, were just invented to get bands in the paper. If you were trying to get an article on Silverfish commissioned, but the features editor didn’t want it, then fair enough. But if you went back saying that Silverfish were part of the burgeoning ‘Camden Lurch’ scene then automatically you had two pages! David Quantick comes up with the headline ‘Chords Of The New Lurch’ and that’s it – you’re sold! You’ve got three bands in the paper!”
“You know what it’s like. A scene can really pull things along by creating something that people want to belong to. If ‘grunge’ didn’t have a name and was just some disparate American bands, then would people have really identified with the things? A scene creates a fashion, then a thought process, then a manifesto. We’re always looking for something we could gather people around – however marginalised when we sat in the pub and tried to invent them.”
And of course, all of these Britpop stars at the time were real characters…
“They were, very much. Some of them had a chance to develop that character. There were points during my journalistic career when we were dealing with new bands who were really quite young. They had masses of enthusiasm and energy but often no stories to tell. Jarvis Cocker, meanwhile, has lots of stories to tell. Noel, having been a roadie with Inspiral Carpets, had lots of stories to tell. Blur had been through the mill, had a couple of hits but nearly experienced game over, but their character changed and was more complex than that of a brand new band. Even within Blur: you’ve got the incredibly driven and artistic Damon Albarn, the slightly punk and DIY spirit of Graham Coxon, the dandy that is Alex James and the serious one who also liked a drink, Dave Rowntree. You couldn’t have given them Spice Girls-style nicknames, but they were all different.
“One of the things about Britpop is, it gave us tremendous copy. That’s why it eventually ended up all over the tabloids as well, because even those journalists said, ‘Have you seen what these people are saying and doing? There’s a story every day’. We hadn’t had that since Happy Mondays. It was copy on a plate and everyone was a character; at least in that first wave when everyone was different.”
There’s a Jarvis quote in the podcast about the Michael Jackson BRIT Awards incident where he says, ‘It’s strange when you do something on the spur of the moment and then have to live with it for the rest of your life’. It must have felt like inconsequential drunk happenings becoming history day-by-day.
“Yes! Isn’t it weird? On the last night of Sound City, when everyone was still talking about Oasis’ set from the day earlier, and it’s just before the news breaks about Kurt Cobain, Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawumba walked naked through the reception area of the hotel and no one battered an eyelid because they weren’t the story. Then, come the BRIT Awards some years later, Chumbawumba very much are the story!
“There was a feeling that people could do anything. Look at Elastica making their label buy them a curry and walk to the top of Primrose Hill before they’d sign their publishing deal. I didn’t see inside some of the chaos of those early Oasis tours, but there was just carnage in some places. I found a cassette of an interview I did with Noel for Creation Records. A few days after the incident at Newcastle Riverside where someone tries to land a punch on Liam and Noel tries to get involved and the gig is abandoned, I’m on the phone and say, ‘You’ve had an interesting few days…’ He replies: ‘You don’t know the half of it. On Saturday, we were in a hotel in Sweden with us, Primal Scream. The Verve and Motorhead’. You just think, ‘Wow, I wouldn’t want to be the night porter’.”
And to the fall of Britpop – when did you start to sense that the party was over?
“As we came to some of the third albums. The problem was that everyone was having to work really quickly, and there were quite a lot of drugs in the music industry at the time. I don’t know if anyone noticed that. Some of the decisions being made weren’t that sensible and the egos were huge. The fact that the British music industry had made some money, and quite a lot of money, didn’t mean that they were going to be entirely responsible with it. They made a lot of mistakes with it.
“The whole thing just became oversaturated with bands who weren’t as good as the original wave. You were getting records that you’d paid money for but were ultimately underwhelming. Back then, you’d release three singles before the album so would have to write at least another 12 songs just to fill all the different formats. That was quite demanding and bands didn’t have the time off to stop and think about what was coming next. Artistically, the whole thing just ran out of steam and the people who survived it were the people who had a clear vision of what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go and how they wanted to progress.
“As one scene becomes really big, you get an alternative one as a reaction. That was the Scottish scene of bands like Mogwai and then different things with bands like Spiritualised. It was all quite interesting and meant Britpop lost some momentum and fans that had been there quite early on. We still haven’t put a pin in when Britpop was all over. Is it after Oasis at Knebworth when there was nowhere left to go? Was it after The Verve’s big moment at Haigh Hall? Was it when the ticket sales started to dwindle so that by the time you get to the end of 1997, bands who were easily selling out Sheffield’s Leadmill were playing to half full venues? The best groups made it through, and others fell by the wayside.
“For the groups themselves, you just couldn’t live that fast for more than three or four years before the massive comedown.”
There was a chasm between Britpop and the coming of The Strokes and the garage rock revolution. Just to look at the NME covers around that turn-of-the-millennium era, you’d have Slipknot, Kelis, Craig David, Starsailor all rubbing shoulders. Is that because of the lack of a scene or because of increased internet speeds and Napster and people clamouring in all directions?
“You know what, I hadn’t thought about the impact of the internet. The problem with pop music is it never does what you want it to do when you want it to happen. We were lucky at the start of the ‘90s in that it gave us what we wanted. At the start of various decades, when you really need pop music to give you something, it just doesn’t! You have a fallow year and there’s just nothing.
“There was a slight malaise after Britpop, which was a reaction to the music and how big it had all got. People were just a bit confused about what their ambitions were. Remember that the music industry had been quite badly burned as they’d spent quite a lot of money on Britpop. It took the British end of the industry ages to realise that none of these bands selling over here were selling in America. Whatever was going to come was going to be in the shadow of Britpop and constantly compared to it. We needed a little bit of distance before we put our faith back in something.”
Is that sort of mass ‘watershed’ moment still possible when there’s so much noise out there?
“I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, I’d say it’s very difficult. It’s not likely. You’d need three of four groups that no one took any notice of for about a year, who went about their own business doing stuff, then eventually finding each other then things take off from there. Like with Two Tone when Madness didn’t even know The Specials existed. This little thing was just left to gestate in the back rooms of Birmingham pubs and the Dublin Castle until everyone was ready. Then we had a vision and people to drive it.
“Everything is so different now: the money in the industry, the media or lack of it in places to bring everything together. With the exception of things like NME, there aren’t very many places where you can read about loads of things that might not have come into your orbit. There’s no Top Of The Pops and everything is so fractured now. It’s just different. You can still feel the references to Britpop. The Lathums aren’t overtly Britpop – they remind me more of The Housemartins – but there’s something about the enduring power of a big pop chorus that will bring people together. That’s what Britpop did so well.”
“Never say never, but it would have to be something really powerful and new to bring different sections of society together and make people feel good about themselves, wherever they were from.”
Do we need more tastemakers like the Evening Session, with everything having become so diplomatic and democratic?
“It’s really worth fighting for radio and really good objective journalism. That’s crucial at this point in time. Otherwise, it’s just carnage out there. That’s possibly why music fans just stay in the bit they know. You need something, whether it’s on the radio or good online journalism. Along with someone willing to say, ‘Actually, this isn’t very good’. The media can be a bit shy of pulling people up.”
The Rise and Fall of Britpop, presented by Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq is available now on BBC Sounds. Steve Lamacq will be exploring the history of Britpop every Thursday in July on BBC Radio 6 Music, 4pm-7pm.
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Andrew Trendell
NME
