In July of 1995, I flew from Vancouver to London for a three-week holiday. I had graduated from university the previous autumn and had gone straight into the workforce, securing a job as a high school teacher. I loved my new career, but I was exhausted and looking forward to a change of scenery; more importantly, I was anticipating a summer vacation full of incredible live music from the bands that I had come to love.
For the last few years, I had been buying weeks-old issues of the NME and Melody Maker from the local record shops and the newspaper vendors who carried international papers and had followed the fortunes of my favourite British artists from the 1980s (Morrissey, The Cure, Paul Weller, Stephen Duffy, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen) along with the rising crop of new artists (Suede, Blur, Oasis, Echobelly, Lush, Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead). And while I knew that missing Glastonbury (which always takes place at the end of June) meant missing the one place I could have seen most of them, I was hopeful that there would be more shows to catch when I got to the UK. But when I arrived in London and picked up a Time Out Guide I found that most of the bands were on the festival circuit playing dates all over the UK and Europe, but not necessarily when I would be able to see them. However, there was one festival I could get tickets to: the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which was a massive event hosted to promote Amnesty International. I could only make one of the days, as I had already made plans with a friend to travel to Scotland that same weekend, but the day I was there absolutely blew my mind.
A train strike on that first day of the festival meant that I had to take a series of buses through a variety of towns and cities, but I managed to get to the bed and breakfast I’d booked by late afternoon, and I was on the festival grounds just before it was getting dark. There was a massive main stage set up, a smaller secondary stage off to the side, a still smaller jazz stage, and a techno tent, as well as food and clothing vendors, fairground rides, and even a bungee jumping area (it had recently become quite popular). As a (then) young, Black Canadian twenty-something, I was immediately aware of how white the crowds were, and while I didn’t exactly feel out of place (we’re all music fans, right?) it didn’t escape my attention. However, when I saw a group of Black men walking together with a sense of purpose towards one of the stages, I found myself gravitating towards them, just to see if they knew something I didn’t’. One of them had quite an impressive afro, and they all had a coolness that suggested they weren’t from around there. I lost them in the crowd, but within minutes saw them again as they climbed up onto the small jazz stage. It was then that I learned they were none other than the legendary Roots crew, and the show they put on was engaging, dynamic, and raw. When they finished their set, I headed over to the main stage in time to catch first Tricky (who seemed like he might have been more comfortable in a smaller club setting), and then later Suede (who had convinced the promoters to put them at the top of the night’s bill – above Bob Dylan, who took it in stride and, in his silver coat and dark sunglasses, put on a solid show of past hits). The skies opened up and drenched the audience throughout Suede’s set, but the energy level was insane. With only two albums to their name, the band put on a blistering show, with frontman Brett Anderson roaming the stage like a late-70s Bryan Ferry and very much delivering the goods, fully earning their top of the setlist spot for the night. I suppose too that the E I had taken before they started playing probably had some influence on my enthusiasm. As I toured the UK, I was only able to get in a couple more gigs (location and cost made catching more than that difficult – the British Pound was worth over two Canadian dollars, meaning a £10 ticket was closer to $22 CDN), and they were in small clubs. But I was now in the same country my favourite music papers came from, so I was able to follow the newest and latest music news in real time. Of course, the big story was the Blur vs Oasis rivalry that was being promoted due to the fact that the two titans of Britpop were both releasing a new single on the same day in mid-August, and both would be releasing new albums sometime in the autumn. There were as many promotional posters for Oasis’ “Roll With It” single and Blur’s “Country House” single in the Tube stations as there were in the windows of HMV and the Virgin Megastore. I also read weekly interviews with the lead singers of other bands, and while I was already familiar with the writing style in the NME and Melody Maker I still found myself struck by how different the format was from North American music writing. There was a sort of familiarity in the British interviews, and the frequency with which people like Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Gene’s Martin Rossiter, Sleeper’s Louise Wener, and Suede’s Brett Anderson appeared in these papers made them seem almost like friends of a sort. They were asked about their likes and dislikes, who they were listening to these days, and where they’d been lately; it was like social media without the internet. I also discovered the market vendors in Camden Town who sold bootleg cassettes of bands doing radio shows and live performances, as well as collections of obscure demos and b-sides. I bought a couple of them and while I was a little bit disappointed at how poor the quality was I was also astonished by the realization of how much I missed out on by living on the West Coast of Canada rather than in a major music city like London. I still have those cassettes, and while the sound hasn’t gotten any better over the years, my appreciation of them as treasured items has increased.
By the time I was scheduled to fly back to Vancouver, I had managed to see only a small handful of the many, many artists I had grown to love through the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I was grateful to catch the acts I did. Some of those bands I wanted to see but didn’t eventually made it across the pond and I had a chance to see them in Vancouver (Gene, Echobelly, Portishead, Massive Attack, Oasis, Blur, Paul Weller), but many never made it over; others have simply disappeared into obscurity. Still, for that one summer, when Britpop was at its peak and London was the most important city to be in if you loved new music, I was lucky enough to have been witness to a musical moment in time that rippled outside of my headphones into the pages of the music press, on to the billboards of the urban landscape, and into the language of the culture that created it.
Check out Sorted! A Beginner’s Guide to Britpop
In July of 1995, I flew from Vancouver to London for a three-week holiday. I had graduated from university the previous autumn and had gone straight into the workforce, securing a job as a high school teacher. I loved my new career, but I was exhausted and looking forward to a change of scenery; more importantly, I was anticipating a summer vacation full of incredible live music from the bands that I had come to love.
For the last few years, I had been buying weeks-old issues of the NME and Melody Maker from the local record shops and the newspaper vendors who carried international papers and had followed the fortunes of my favourite British artists from the 1980s (Morrissey, The Cure, Paul Weller, Stephen Duffy, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen) along with the rising crop of new artists (Suede, Blur, Oasis, Echobelly, Lush, Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead). And while I knew that missing Glastonbury (which always takes place at the end of June) meant missing the one place I could have seen most of them, I was hopeful that there would be more shows to catch when I got to the UK. But when I arrived in London and picked up a Time Out Guide I found that most of the bands were on the festival circuit playing dates all over the UK and Europe, but not necessarily when I would be able to see them. However, there was one festival I could get tickets to: the Phoenix Festival in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which was a massive event hosted to promote Amnesty International. I could only make one of the days, as I had already made plans with a friend to travel to Scotland that same weekend, but the day I was there absolutely blew my mind.
A train strike on that first day of the festival meant that I had to take a series of buses through a variety of towns and cities, but I managed to get to the bed and breakfast I’d booked by late afternoon, and I was on the festival grounds just before it was getting dark. There was a massive main stage set up, a smaller secondary stage off to the side, a still smaller jazz stage, and a techno tent, as well as food and clothing vendors, fairground rides, and even a bungee jumping area (it had recently become quite popular). As a (then) young, Black Canadian twenty-something, I was immediately aware of how white the crowds were, and while I didn’t exactly feel out of place (we’re all music fans, right?) it didn’t escape my attention. However, when I saw a group of Black men walking together with a sense of purpose towards one of the stages, I found myself gravitating towards them, just to see if they knew something I didn’t’. One of them had quite an impressive afro, and they all had a coolness that suggested they weren’t from around there. I lost them in the crowd, but within minutes saw them again as they climbed up onto the small jazz stage. It was then that I learned they were none other than the legendary Roots crew, and the show they put on was engaging, dynamic, and raw. When they finished their set, I headed over to the main stage in time to catch first Tricky (who seemed like he might have been more comfortable in a smaller club setting), and then later Suede (who had convinced the promoters to put them at the top of the night’s bill – above Bob Dylan, who took it in stride and, in his silver coat and dark sunglasses, put on a solid show of past hits). The skies opened up and drenched the audience throughout Suede’s set, but the energy level was insane. With only two albums to their name, the band put on a blistering show, with frontman Brett Anderson roaming the stage like a late-70s Bryan Ferry and very much delivering the goods, fully earning their top of the setlist spot for the night. I suppose too that the E I had taken before they started playing probably had some influence on my enthusiasm. As I toured the UK, I was only able to get in a couple more gigs (location and cost made catching more than that difficult – the British Pound was worth over two Canadian dollars, meaning a £10 ticket was closer to $22 CDN), and they were in small clubs. But I was now in the same country my favourite music papers came from, so I was able to follow the newest and latest music news in real time. Of course, the big story was the Blur vs Oasis rivalry that was being promoted due to the fact that the two titans of Britpop were both releasing a new single on the same day in mid-August, and both would be releasing new albums sometime in the autumn. There were as many promotional posters for Oasis’ “Roll With It” single and Blur’s “Country House” single in the Tube stations as there were in the windows of HMV and the Virgin Megastore. I also read weekly interviews with the lead singers of other bands, and while I was already familiar with the writing style in the NME and Melody Maker I still found myself struck by how different the format was from North American music writing. There was a sort of familiarity in the British interviews, and the frequency with which people like Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Gene’s Martin Rossiter, Sleeper’s Louise Wener, and Suede’s Brett Anderson appeared in these papers made them seem almost like friends of a sort. They were asked about their likes and dislikes, who they were listening to these days, and where they’d been lately; it was like social media without the internet. I also discovered the market vendors in Camden Town who sold bootleg cassettes of bands doing radio shows and live performances, as well as collections of obscure demos and b-sides. I bought a couple of them and while I was a little bit disappointed at how poor the quality was I was also astonished by the realization of how much I missed out on by living on the West Coast of Canada rather than in a major music city like London. I still have those cassettes, and while the sound hasn’t gotten any better over the years, my appreciation of them as treasured items has increased.
By the time I was scheduled to fly back to Vancouver, I had managed to see only a small handful of the many, many artists I had grown to love through the late 1980s and early 1990s, but I was grateful to catch the acts I did. Some of those bands I wanted to see but didn’t eventually made it across the pond and I had a chance to see them in Vancouver (Gene, Echobelly, Portishead, Massive Attack, Oasis, Blur, Paul Weller), but many never made it over; others have simply disappeared into obscurity. Still, for that one summer, when Britpop was at its peak and London was the most important city to be in if you loved new music, I was lucky enough to have been witness to a musical moment in time that rippled outside of my headphones into the pages of the music press, on to the billboards of the urban landscape, and into the language of the culture that created it.
Check out Sorted! A Beginner’s Guide to Britpop
