What was Britpop? Well, it was a movement like any other: an energy that is hard to define but definitely felt like the ‘ambience’ of a great bar bustling out onto the streets at large. That feeling was given a name when Brett Anderson of Suede starred on the front cover of Select magazine in the summer of 1993 with a Union Jack draped behind him.
While Graham Coxon would say that the rallying behind the flag “was built on sand”, there was a notable difference between the sounds on either side of the pond. In truth, he said he was admirable of the noisy bands in the States, but there was a decided disparity in our separate cultures at that time, and in ’93, his bandmate, Damon Albarn, drew the battle line when he told the Guardian: “If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I’m getting rid of grunge!”
He wasn’t alone in this thinking, but every movement needed something to draw upon besides standing against the ‘other’. While, in truth, the Britpop bands may well have all been different, no one band was ever going to stand up against grunge, so an emboldened culture was needed. Well, there was already a movie out there defining the uniform for the new army of bands. In truth, it had been around for quite some time, seeding the revolution in 1979 and nurturing it ever since.
As it happens, ’79 was quite an unusual year in music. In the undulating waves of subcultures, it was a moment that happened to be at the precipice of the violent rise of punk, a snarling explosion that reached the rarefied stratosphere so quickly it was bound to burn out any minute. And when it did, John Cooper Clarke, and indeed many others, claim the “last real youth tribe” went with it. Interestingly, however, punk’s devilish detonation held all the hallmarks of the revived past itself.
Punk realised that rock ‘n’ roll had been harangued towards prog by the classically trained middle classes. In the process, the notions of ayahuasca epiphanies and viola solos dreamt up in the meadow at the bottom of a second home had perverted the original tenets of rock ‘n’ roll that looked to give the youth a revitalised voice. So, when punk burnt out, Britpop decided to take up the mantle when it felt like grunge was not fit to symbolise the working-class British experience.
However, the perfect encapsulation of that from ’79 in the form of The Who’s mod film Quadrophenia still stood. Despite centring on a six-year-old album, the movie seemed vitally fresh, which was in itself peculiar given that it seemed to couple punk and mod—both movements that delved into the past to reclaim the best of what it offered and reshape it. The main binding tie was that they were both definitively working-class youth movements, even if they did seem tribally different.
By the time of the early 1990s, the past would be candidly revived once more. It was thanks to Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia that the latest spark in the zeitgeist took its form. The film borrowed its narrative from The Who’s record and, vitally, gave it the all-important aesthetic and story that defined the rules of the game. As the film’s swaggering frontman, Phil Davis, once said: “If you listen to Paul Weller, The Jam… he decided that that was the look. Once they had the look, everything else followed, and that happens with a lot of music.”
That certainly seemed to be the case with the latest massive British movement: the Sex Pistols—a band assembled by a mogul and a fashion boutique to mimic the look of Richard Hell and make some incendiary music. But if punk was destined to be short-lived, then Quadrophenia boxed-clever by being somewhat more manageable.
For many kids, a little bit too young to be asking for a mohawk at the barbers but nevertheless enthralled by the movement, Roddam’s film offered up something that looked like a thrilling version of their own life. All the while, the music of The Who that intersperses the soundtrack alongside old sixties mod classics opened up a bohemian back catalogue for nineties kids to explore and brought the likes of The Kinks and The Small Faces into the future Britpop sound. Thanks to the film, the past was cool again, and covertly the rise of hip-hop was forcing musicians to be a little bit more swaggering too.
As Roddam said himself when looking at how influential the movie seemed on the likes of Oasis, who followed afterwards: “It is a working-class British film. If you’re in the north and you go to Manchester or Liverpool, they have a strong working-class ethic. What I mean by that is they see themselves as a tribal group, they see social injustice, and there’s certain things they will accept and will not accept. It’s all about experience. People like to see their own experience being dramatised on the screen. Quadrophenia was not unlike the experience of Liam and Noel Gallagher when they were growing up.”
Many youthful people identified with the movie, with what it had to say about social consciousness, and with the aesthetic too. In fact, Liam Gallagher identified with the film so much that he recently remarked that if he could only watch one movie for the rest of his life, it would be Quadrophenia. While that much might have been clear from the Parka’s and Lambretta’s that have become part of Oasis’ iconography, it is also readily apparent in the attitude of the band. Both Britpop and the film share a warts-and-all depiction of working-class life that remains uncompromising without ever being cynical—the cockroaches climbing the wall and the live forever attitude of pub-fuelled defiance.
A review in the New York Times upon the release of the film read: “A slice-of-life movie that feels tremendously authentic in its sentiments as well as its details.” Looking back, Britpop seems largely the same. It didn’t try to parody, satirise or glamourise working-class life; like the film’s view of the mod scene in 1964, it simply looked to offer up a movement that encapsulated existence with fidelity. Parklife.
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This content was originally published here.
