The Battle of Britpop was stupid, change my mind
Amidst Oasis reunion news, there's still one thing some fans can't let go of.
Father Damo: ‘Ere, which one do you prefer? Oasis or Blur?
Dougal: Blur.
Father Damo: WHA?!
Dougal: OASIS! I mean Oasis.
— Father Ted, S2E4 ‘The Old Grey Whistle Theft’ (1996)
Everyone and their mother has heard the news by now: Oasis are reuniting, the Gallagher brothers have somehow made amends, and Ticketmaster executives are rubbing their hands with villainous glee. Nobody thought that Noel and Liam would put aside their bickering for five minutes, but here we are. It’s a big day for bucket-hat-wearing, football-watching, beer-swilling lads and ladettes.
I can’t say I’m one of these folks. I mean, I’m a consummate Blur fan – let’s get that out of the way, first of all – but I also don’t really care. Oasis have never really done it for me with their Beatles-lite, simplistic, paint-by-numbers songwriting or their charming personalities. (That being said, put enough drinks in me and you will indeed find me singing ‘Champagne Supernova’ off-key if someone queues it up. Liam Gallagher is also ridiculously entertaining on Twitter. It’s sort of like watching a drunken court jester.) But I can also respect their impact on the music industry, both in the UK and the world at large, and their legacy is such that my partner suggested we actually try and go see them perform next year. Fat chance.
Inevitably, one opens up Twitter threads and YouTube videos and Instagram reels and other sources of mindless brain rot to see coverage of the Big Reunion. And despite the fact that we’re talking about Oasis, the comments will inevitably revolve around Blur, Blur and Oasis, Blur versus Oasis – all asking that age-old question: who’s the better band?
Even as a Blur fan, I concede the correct answer is actually Pulp.
But more importantly, who cares? It’s 2024, not 1994. I get it – band rivalries have always existed, varying from friendly fire to downright acrimonious. But no rivalry seems to have stuck around as much as Oasis and Blur. It seems impossible to disentangle their music careers from one another, like gum stuck to a shoe. And don’t get me started on the fanbases, the rabid Britpop disciples prepared to go to war over the most unserious of issues. Like, Kim, there’s people that are dying.
This entire debacle can be traced back to one media cesspool in the summer of 1995: the Battle of Britpop. Sure, maybe the Gallagher brothers and Damon Albarn had been taking jabs at each other here and there (although I think it’s far to say it was less of a jab and more of a full-on punch when Noel said he wished Albarn and Blur guitarist Graham Coxon would catch AIDS and die), but the Battle of Britpop was essentially the event that blew everything into outer space. In August 1995, when Blur pushed back their single release of ‘Country House’ to the same day as Oasis's ‘Roll With It’, a sudden media and music frenzy ensued. Which band would claim the top chart spot?
Spoiler alert: it was Blur, even though many would argue Oasis won the war, since Blur’s 1995 LP The Great Escape didn’t hold a candle – and probably still doesn’t, to be honest – to the success and legacy of Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. Plus, ‘Country House’ only shifted 50,000 more copies than ‘Roll With It’. But more importantly, you could also say a peace treaty of sorts has been signed, since Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher are friends now who collaborate on each other’s musical projects.
None of this matters, though, because people are still arguing about this in 2024 like it’s the hottest music debate of the 21st century. When I joined a band last year, the old Oasis versus Blur conversation came up somehow. Things were made slightly awkward when I said I was a Blur fan and the other guitarist sheepishly admitted he preferred Oasis. I mean, why should we care? It’s a matter of personal preference. Why am I being embarrassed by this? When it comes to music, I am annoyingly opinionated and it’s the one thing I’m unafraid to argue about for hours on end. Yet I wanted to sink into the floor that day.
That guitarist isn’t in the band anymore, though. I promise it’s not for Britpop-related reasons.
“The Blur versus Oasis debate is stupid,” I always say. But then a musician I like will mention they prefer Blur, and I will turn around and fistpump the air and make joyous declarations of what good taste they must possess. See? I’m not immune to all this idiocy either, and that makes me despise the Battle of Britpop even more. It’s not the only reason, though.
The Battle of Mid
I’m going to start off with the elephant in the room. Both songs in that chart battle were a bit shit, frankly. Naturally, I’ve listened to ‘Country House’ the most, since it’s on every Blur: Best Of compilation and I watched the footage of Blur playing Hyde Park in 2009 almost religiously in high school. It’s not one of my favourite Blur songs, but it’s catchy. I don’t think it’s terrible, despite usually skipping it if it comes on. If I do feel like listening to it, I usually sing along in the most affected southerner accent I can muster, because I feel like that’s what the song deserves. As for ‘Roll With It’, well, maybe I’m showing my biases here, but it’s a miracle I didn’t fall asleep relistening to it in the first minute.
During an interview in the 2010s, Noel Gallagher suggested that the battle may have had more merit if the singles had been ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ and ‘Girls & Boys’. I’m inclined to agree with him there. If the songs had been good, maybe the battle would have been worthwhile, or at the very least, interesting. But when you peel back the layers of it all, it was never really about the music, was it?
A Tale of Two Cities
“...in a week where news leaked that Saddam Hussein was preparing nuclear weapons, everyday folks were still getting slaughtered in Bosnia and Mike Tyson was making his comeback, tabloids and broadsheets alike went Britpop crazy.”
— NME, 1995
I have never seen a nation more split by north and south quite like the UK. Of course, every country’s got their class divides and different lifestyles depending on where you go, but England in particular has this intrinsic, insidious fracture that permeates so much of its culture. Whether it be hearing anecdotes from my dad, who’s English, or reading musical memoirs from Northerners like Stephen Morris and watching British television, the contrast in reputation and mutual distrust from either side of the country is astounding to witness.
The north are the working class, salt of the earth types. They’re friendly and warm, even if they aren’t always well off. The south are posher, more prude. Stuck up. They resent the north for being more rough around the edges. The north resent the south for their coldness and their holier-than-thou attitude that comes with getting all the money. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than this. Throw in the long-term effects of Thatcherism and the Industrial Revolution and we’ve got ourselves a history lesson on our hands. But that’s the general gist of it, if a little lacking in nuance.
Imagine the British press’s glee when they realised that the Battle of Britpop’s two primary players came from completely different sides of the country. Oasis hailed from Manchester, while most of Blur came from Colchester in Essex. On top of that, the Gallagher brothers came from a working class family and underwent a rough-and-tumble upbringing of sorts, whereas Blur began its life as a band at Goldsmiths, a London art school. Hell, they were even initially called Seymour after a J.D Salinger short story. The picture painted itself: a chart battle between Oasis, the working class underdogs, and Blur, the pretentious middle class art students.
As you might expect, the press made this as binary as possible. Damon Albarn became a source of public ridicule in a matter of minutes. Albarn, who had been bullied at school, said the experience made him feel “stupid and confused”, while bassist Alex James added that “Damon was the People’s Prick for a short period…a loser”. They were all deeply uncomfortable with what the battle had become, especially Graham Coxon, who had ironically also grown up working class too as an army child.
This is not to say that members of Blur weren’t posh, or didn’t grow up middle class. This is also not to deny Oasis their day in the sun. But what annoys me extraordinarily – and I would say it’s this aspect that annoys me above all – is that the Battle of Britpop became less about the music and more about the UK’s ridiculous fascination with class. Talk all you want about how socioeconomic context influences music! It’s an interesting topic for sure. But it has absolutely nothing to do with which song was better, let alone which band was better. The Battle of Britpop wasn’t about which band could produce a better pop song. It was about which band had a more worthy upbringing. It became how much income the members’ parents made. Who went to grammar school and how many GCSEs everyone got. It was all so utterly English, which I suppose does fit in with the whole Britpop thing.
Still, it’s infuriating. Nobody is being judged on the merit of their skill and craft as musicians. Time and time again, Britain loves to divide north and south through something ridiculous and arbitrary. In 1995, it was the records you bought. A sale for Oasis was a vote for the north, and vice versa. The focus on who was the better, bigger band had been lost entirely, disappearing into a world of class and stereotypes and stupidity.
We’re Only In It For The Money
“I would have liked to have had a Number One quietly, but there’s probably no such thing as that. I wanted our band to be Number One just because Number One is a special thing, but it’s become not special… I wish the releases had been staggered because then Oasis would have got to Number One as well. We don’t need this fake war, this preposterous chart war.”
— Graham Coxon, 1995
Following the success of ‘Country House’, Graham Coxon tried to jump out of a sixth storey window, but he’d been talked out of it. Britpop had become a circus, a freak train, and he wanted out. Most Blur fans are familiar with the infamous Italian TV performance where the band mimed ‘Charmless Man’. Instead of Coxon on guitar, they replaced him with a cardboard cutout instead. While both fans and band members alike look back at it with some amusement, I think it’s fairly symbolic of what Britpop had become by that point: a disingenuous, two dimensional version of itself. As much as I have a soft spot for The Great Escape, there’s a reason why Blur made such a drastic shift in sound on their eponymous follow up.
Would Britpop have eventually died out on its own? Of course. Much like punk, its shelf life wasn’t bound to last for longer than a few years, but I’d argue that it’s more than likely that the Battle of Britpop sped up its expiration. Again, there were obviously other contributing factors, but the media frenzy, the pomposity and the sheer excess of everything simply destroyed Britpop from the inside out. Nothing holds up a mirror to it quite like the music video for ‘Country House’, which features scantily clad models running around and taking bubble baths with band members. So much for being artistic.
Whether or not you believe it was a farce from the start, the Battle of Britpop exposed the scene at its most farcical. It never really cared about the music or integrity. What it really cared about was hype, attention, and perpetuating the never-ending cycle of Britain’s north-south class quarrelling. Yet its impact seems to have outlasted far beyond the very movement it was covering.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Throughout all of this, it would be remiss to ignore the fact that the Battle of Britpop did capture the cultural zeitgeist of 1990s Britain, for better or for worse. In that regard, I can understand why its legacy has been as long lasting as it is. But people truly need to get over it. It’s been nearly thirty years. Three decades of fans bickering and people squabbling. I saw Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in 2019 when they opened for U2 on their Joshua Tree anniversary tour, and I honestly didn’t mind singing along when they pulled out the Oasis classics. I didn’t feel like I was betraying some allegiance to Blur. If my 16 year old self could do it, then why can’t some geezer in his forties get over himself now?
To me, it feels like the ‘90s equivalent of what being chronically online is now. Investing far too much time into the lives and success of people whom we don’t even really know (or who don’t really know us) can’t be good. If the Gallagher brothers and Damon Albarn can let bygones be bygones, then surely so can their fans. I’m sure there’s Blur fanatics in the north and Oasis diehards in the south. It’s not a sin to listen widely. But to be honest, I don’t know. Maybe the only possible glimpse at world peace we’ll see is the hordes of Liam Gallagher x Damon Albarn gay fanfiction ripe on Tumblr. As is the response to so much chronically online behaviour today, I suggest the same solution here: let’s all go outside and touch grass.
Additional reading (that I found interesting): https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/blur-and-oasis-big-britpop-chart-battle-the-definitive-story-of-what-really-happened-757277
Check out my review of Graham Coxon’s memoir, “Verse, Chorus, Monster!”, here: https://deadletteroffices.substack.com/p/review-verse-chorus-monster-by-graham
The whole “battle” was bollocks really, the real winner was Damon Albarn with Gorillaz. Blur has the more interesting and consistent discography while with Oasis, after the first two albums, it’s just slim pickings really.
With the reunion of Oasis being on July 2025, Liam and Noel have about 10 months to not want to kill each other then. Good luck to them.