# BRITPOP
*The Chart War, the Weekly Press, and the Invention of a Golden Age, 1993–1997*

Volume 26 of **Origin Story**, a history of popular music, one genre at a time. Published by Greenlight Publishing. Paperback, from $11.49 a copy: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/26-britpop.html

| | |
|---|---|
| Period covered | 1993–1997 |
| The machine | the weekly music press |
| Chapters | 25 across five movements |
| Extent | about 120 pages |
| Song lyrics quoted | none |
| Playlist | ORIGIN STORY: Britpop |
| Audiobook | 2h 53m |
| Ebook ISBN | 979-8-90623-919-8 |
| Audiobook ISBN | 979-8-90623-920-4 |
| Paperback ISBN | not yet issued |

## What the book is about

In August 1995 the question of which of two guitar bands had the number one single was reported on News at Ten, between items about actual events. No weekly music paper had ever pushed a story that far before. None ever did again.

This is the complete story of Britpop in about three hours, told the one way it has not been told: as the story of the machine that made it. Britain’s weekly music press — two surviving papers, floors apart in the same tower, owned by the same company and at war by commercial design — needed a movement to survive the nineties, and manufactured one in full public view: the cover that declared a band the best in Britain before their first single; the magazine package that named the genre under a flag its cover star says he never agreed to stand in front of; the rivalry engine that turned two bands into a national fixture and then lost custody of it to the tabloids and the television news.

It takes the money seriously, because almost nobody did at the time. Why the era’s release weeks were engineered — multiple formats, week-one discounts, a chart gamed by design. What an advance against a domestic-only market actually buys, and why a band could be famous, charting and unrecouped all at once. What failing in America cost, and why the exception mattered so much. And the publishing: one band with one writer, one band crediting all four, and the era’s most-played string arrangement earning its author nothing for twenty-two years.

It is honest about what the genre excluded. The best-selling British music of the period was not Britpop, and the frame’s choices — its nostalgia, its Englishness, its narrow cast — are stated factually, with the numbers attached.

And it answers the question most retellings wave away: what actually ended it. Not a death — a government reception, an oversupplied market, an exhausted set of musicians, and an album that sold four hundred thousand copies in a day and closed the era anyway.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like — the guitar wall with no daylight in it, the spoken aside under the disco pulse, the escalation machine of the era’s best single.

## What this book does not do

The rules of this book, stated plainly, because one of them removes the thing this genre is quoted for.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute, and song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. A book that quotes a little is a book making a legal judgement it cannot check. So this one quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

And it cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation, and there is no point pretending otherwise. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Britpop. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

You lose the jokes, and the jokes were genuinely part of it. You gain a decade of chart strategy, advances, marketing budgets and a rivalry that was substantially a press invention, the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where it came from, what made it possible, which records mattered and why, who got paid, who did not, and how it ended. That last question matters more here than in most volumes of this series, because this genre ended on a schedule almost everyone involved could see coming, and several of them have said so since.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

## Introduction: The Golden Age Business (opening)

Every genre in this series was named by somebody who was not in it. Usually the name arrives late, sticks awkwardly, and gets resented. What makes this volume different is that the naming was not an accident of journalism. It was the product line.

Here is the shortest honest version of what happened. Between 1993 and 1997, a group of British guitar bands (most of them very good, some of them merely well placed) were assembled by the country’s music press into a national story about a second golden age of English pop. The assembly was not a conspiracy and it was not a fraud. It was a business requirement. Britain had two surviving weekly music papers, each of which had to produce a new front cover every seven days, each of which was losing readers to glossier monthly magazines that wrote about records made twenty years earlier, and each of which understood (because it had done this before) that a movement sells papers in a way that nine unrelated bands do not.

The papers did not invent the bands. Nobody at a newspaper wrote the records described in Movement Three, and this book will spend a movement taking those records seriously as records, because they deserve it. What the papers manufactured was the frame: the sense that these bands constituted a single thing, that the thing was a war between two of them, and that the war mattered to the nation. And the remarkable fact, the fact this whole book hangs on, is that the frame worked so well it escaped. In August 1995 the question of which of two guitar bands would have the number one single was reported on the national television news, between items about actual events. No weekly music paper had ever pushed a story that far before. None ever did again.

The punk volume of this series has a chapter about the British music weeklies of 1977. There were four of them then, and the argument of that chapter was that they were the reason the British version of punk became the version everyone knows: four papers in competition could turn two hundred people in London into a national argument in six weeks. This volume picks that machine up sixteen years later, and finds it in trouble. Two of the four papers are dead. The survivors have watched their circulation slide for a decade and a half while a new kind of monthly magazine (born with the compact disc, aimed at the readers who had grown up and bought hi-fis) takes the older audience and the advertising with it. A machine built for discovering scenes has a new and more urgent need: to make the scene happen, visibly, on its own front pages, at weekly intervals.

## Contents

### Movement 1: The Room
1. The Hangover
2. A Pub in Camden
3. The North Replies
4. Who Was Actually There

### Movement 2: The Machine
5. Four Papers, Then Two
6. The Week
7. The Cover Is the Product
8. The Broker Economy
9. The Rivalry Machine
10. The Week of 14 August 1995

### Movement 3: The Records
11. 1993. The Counter-Offer
12. 1994. The Year the Door Opened
13. 1995. The Imperial Year
14. The Records the Canon Dropped
15. 1996–1997. The Overrun

### Movement 4: The Money
16. The Release Week
17. The Advance Against a Small Country
18. America, the Missing Half
19. The Publishing
20. What a Britpop Record Actually Earned
21. What These Records Earn Now

### Movement 5: The Ending
22. What Exhausted It
23. What It Became
24. What the Story Leaves Out
25. The Last Weekly Golden Age

## Timeline

Dated entries from the back of the book. Free to quote with attribution to *BRITPOP*, Origin Story volume 26.

**1991**
- Spring, Sounds and Record Mirror close within weeks of each other. Two of punk’s four weeklies remain.
- May, challenged over his band’s authenticity after a show in Norwich, Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers cuts 4 REAL into his forearm. The NME publishes the photograph.
- Autumn. Nirvana’s second album detonates in Britain; American bands begin two years of dominance over the weeklies’ covers.

**1992**
- April, Melody Maker puts Suede on its front cover as the best new band in Britain, before their first single. The single, The Drowners, follows in May.
- November. Factory Records enters receivership. The Madchester era ends in paperwork.
- Also this year. Creation Records sells a 49 per cent stake to Sony; Blur return from a miserable American tour and begin writing English.

**1993**
- April, Select runs its Union Jack cover package on Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne, Denim and the Auteurs. The genre is named in print.
- May. Blur release Modern Life Is Rubbish.
- 31 May. Alan McGee sees Oasis at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and signs them to Creation.
- September. Suede’s debut album wins the Mercury Prize.
- October. Matthew Bannister takes over Radio 1 and begins rebuilding it around new music.

**1994**
- April, Parklife enters at number one; Pulp release His 'n’ Hers. Kurt Cobain dies the same month; the American counter-narrative ends.
- May, Loaded launches.
- August, Definitely Maybe enters at number one, reported as the fastest-selling British debut to date.
- October. Suede release Dog Man Star; Bernard Butler has already left.
- December, the Stone Roses return with Second Coming, giving their comeback interview to The Big Issue rather than the music press.

**1995**
- February. Blur take four Brit awards.
- 1 February. Richey Edwards disappears. His car is later found near the Severn Bridge.
- March. Elastica’s debut enters at number one, reported as the fastest-selling British debut yet; Radiohead release The Bends.
- April. Tony McCarroll leaves Oasis; litigation follows.
- May, Common People enters at number two, behind Robson and Jerome.
- 14 August, Country House and Roll With It are released head to head. ITN reports the chart result as national news. Blur win the week, 274,000 to 216,000 by the figures usually given.
- September, The Great Escape; Noel Gallagher’s remark about Albarn and James is published in the Observer and retracted in a written apology. Portishead’s Dummy wins the Mercury Prize, beating Definitely Maybe.
- October, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and Different Class released three weeks apart. Wonderwall is held at number two by Robson and Jerome.

**1996**
- February, at the Brit Awards, Blair presents an award to Bowie, Noel Gallagher names Blair from the stage, and Jarvis Cocker interrupts Michael Jackson’s performance. He is released without charge.
- July, the Spice Girls release Wannabe; it reaches number one in dozens of countries.
- 10–11 August. Oasis play Knebworth to a quarter of a million people; applications are usually given as around two and a half million.
- September. Suede’s Coming Up and Kula Shaker’s K enter at number one in the same month. Pulp’s Different Class wins the Mercury Prize.

**1997**
- February. Blur release Blur and renounce the genre at number one.
- March, Vanity Fair declares that London swings again.
- 1 May. Labour wins the general election by a landslide.
- June. Radiohead release OK Computer.
- 30 July, the Downing Street reception. Noel Gallagher attends; Albarn declines.
- 21 August, Be Here Now sells over four hundred thousand copies on its first day, by the figures reported at the time.
- 31 August. Diana, Princess of Wales, dies in Paris. The national mood inverts.
- September, the Verve release Urban Hymns; Roni Size/Reprazent’s drum-and-bass album New Forms wins the Mercury Prize.

**1998–2001**
- Vox closes; the drop lists clear the mid-table; This Is Hardcore examines the hangover. In December 2000 Melody Maker is folded into the NME; Select closes soon after.

**2018**
- The NME prints its final paper edition.

**2019**
- Jagger and Richards sign the Bitter Sweet Symphony credit and income over to Richard Ashcroft.

## Sources

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

The standard histories. The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock, John Harris, the fullest documentary account of the period, written by a journalist who worked inside the machine this book describes, and used here both as history and, where flagged, as testimony from a participant. Don’t Look Back in Anger: The Rise and Fall of Cool Britannia, Daniel Rachel, an oral history assembled from the musicians, journalists, politicians and strategists of the era, and the best single source on the political adoption described in the ending movement. Both are read with the caution the last movement’s audit chapter argues for: the historians were, in several cases, the manufacturers.

Memoirs by participants, all to be read as interested accounts, which is why they are valuable: Alan McGee, Creation Stories, for the Creation and Oasis side, including the King Tut’s signing in its author’s own famously variable telling; Louise Wener, Just for One Day, the sharpest first-person ledger of the mid-table economics in Movement Four; Alex James, Bit of a Blur, for the Blur camp and the songwriting-credit money; Brett Anderson, Coal Black Mornings and Afternoons with the Blinds Drawn, for Suede’s formation and the press ignition, including his account of the Select flag; Luke Haines, Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall, a corrosive insider’s dissent that keeps every other source honest; Miki Berenyi, Fingers Crossed, for the era’s touring and press culture as experienced by a woman conscripted into the frame; John Robb’s scene histories, and his claim on the coinage of the genre’s name, noted where the naming dispute appears.

The music press of the period itself (the NME and Melody Maker weeklies, 1992–1998, and the monthlies Select, Q, Vox and Mojo) for release dates, reviews, the war coverage, the covers described in Movement Two, and the letters pages, which remain the best record of what the audience actually argued about. The April 1993 Select package and the August 1995 battle coverage are the two artefacts most cited. These publications are simultaneously this book’s primary sources and its subject, and the final chapter of Movement Five states plainly how that double role has been handled.

On the business. The mechanics in Movement Four (advances and recoupment, the deduction stack, the separation of publishing from recording income) are standard industry practice of the period, set out in any reputable music-business text; All You Need to Know About the Music Business, Donald Passman, remains the clearest general explanation, and the specific percentages in this book are illustrative shapes, flagged as such where they appear. Chart mechanics, format caps and eligibility rules are drawn from the trade press of the period and the published histories of the Official Charts Company, whose compilers’ rulebook changed repeatedly across the decade, the text says so rather than fixing a single year’s rules as eternal.

For chart positions, sales and certifications: the Official Charts Company archives, BPI certification records, and (for the United States) Billboard and RIAA records. Where a widely repeated figure cannot be tied to a ledger (first-day sales of Be Here Now, the Knebworth application count, the battle-week format pricing, the size of any advance or settlement) the text gives it as reported and names the reporting rather than asserting it.

On the litigation and settlements (the Elastica credit adjustments, the Oasis settlements, the McCarroll case, and the Bitter Sweet Symphony dispute and its 2019 resolution) the accounts rest on contemporary press reporting and the parties’ subsequent public statements. Out-of-court settlements are private by design; this book reports their public shape and does not pretend to their terms.

Where accounts conflict (who moved the battle date and why, what was said in which Camden pub, the exact circumstances of the King Tut’s booking, the Select cover’s assembly, the reasons Butler left Suede) the text either presents the disagreement or attributes the version given to its teller. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. In a period this thoroughly narrated by its own participants, they are the record.

## Related volumes

- Volume 25: the American boom this genre defined itself against, and the gold rush that taught the majors the category-buying this book’s money movement describes
- Volume 27: where the industry went next: the writing camp, the audition, and the machine that replaced the music press as the maker of stars
- Volume 22: the other Britain of these same years, excluded by this volume’s frame and vindicated by everything that followed

## Questions

**What is Origin Story volume 26 about?**

The Chart War, the Weekly Press, and the Invention of a Golden Age, 1993–1997. In August 1995 the question of which of two guitar bands had the number one single was reported on News at Ten, between items about actual events. No weekly music paper had ever pushed a story that far before. None ever did again.

**What years does BRITPOP cover?**

1993–1997. The volume is numbered 26 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

**What made BRITPOP possible?**

The weekly music press. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

**Are there song lyrics in it?**

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

**How long is it?**

About 29,000 words: 25 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 53m.

**What is in the back of the book?**

A dated timeline of 39 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

**Can I buy BRITPOP in print?**

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.

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Origin Story volume 26. Buy the paperback direct: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/26-britpop.html