Who were the gatekeepers who made the country swing again? Travel back to 1992, and meet the DJs, producers and journalists who made Britpop a global juggernaut.
Almost 30 years on from the peak of Britpop, you might assume it was inevitable that artists as oddball as Pulp and Blur and as strange as Radiohead and PJ Harvey should have smashed their way into the UK’s central culture simply by being really good at being themselves. Perhaps the world was waiting for the alternos to come through. But when Suede’s The Drowners first made the single charts in late May 1992, the charts were full of novelty pop (Right Said Fred, Mr Bean), rave remnants (K-Klass, Altern 8, 2Unlimited), quite a lot of metal (Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, ZZ Top) and serious-face dull-rock (Annie Lennox, Genesis, Eric Clapton, Chris de Burgh). Indie bands made an appearance (St Etienne, Kingmaker, The Levellers), but the idea that Suede, who had been going since 1989, or Pulp, who Jarvis had dreamed up in a school economics lesson back in 1978, or Blur, whose left-turn from baggy into English scuzz-pop had seen their chart positions crumble, would bang onto the front pages and take over the mainstream… well, that wasn’t anyone’s idea at all. Oasis? Creation’s Alan McGee wouldn’t even meet them for another year. The mad explosion of UK 90s indie wasn’t inevitable at all. So how did such offbeat outsiders become the most popular people in the land? How did they get the VIP stamp?
There were many reasons, but one that isn’t often acknowledged is: the bouncers had changed. There’d been a clear-out in the management layers above everyone’s heads, and suddenly new names were on the guest list and we were all blagging in with them. In the early 90s, there was a shift in the media landscape. In 1992, Bob Geldof, Charlie Parsons and Waheed Alli (yes, that Lord Alli) merged their TV companies to create Planet 24. Geldof, as an ex-punk, understood the power of youth culture, and Parsons and Alli had already created The Word, a nutty late-night music and chat show that featured Nirvana’s first ever on-screen live performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit (Kurt Cobain shouted ‘Courtney Love, the lead singer of sensational pop group Hole, is the best fuck in the world’), and would also give us Oasis’s first ever live TV too, playing Supersonic. And in 1992, Planet 24 came up with The Big Breakfast, a live, daily, early morning show hosted by Chris Evans, utterly different to anything else that had been broadcast at that time. It wasn’t music-based, but it was young: bright, laddy, silly. Bands popped in and out.
Over at Radio 1, the big change came in 1993, when Matthew Bannister was put in charge. He made a lot of weird decisions at first, bringing in Emma Freud and Danny Baker as hosts, but he also put Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley on air and, a couple of years later, brought Zoe Ball to the station. Even more importantly, he scared away the old guard. DJs like the skin-itchingly hokey Simon ‘Our Tune’ Bates; Dave Lee Travis, the appalling ‘Hairy Cornflake’ who resigned on air in full flouncy disgust, ‘changes are being made here which go against my principles’, and was convicted, in 2014, of indecently assaulting a 22 year-old on The Mrs Merton Show; and ‘Wooh’ Gary Davies, who was actually alright, and is now back on Radio 2.
But possibly the most important above-our-heads appointment happened in 1994, when Ric Blaxill became producer of Top of the Pops.
‘I remember when he started, they designed a new Top of the Pops studio,’ says Matt Everitt, ex-Menswear drummer, now BBC 6Music presenter. ‘It had five stages and before they ever used them on screen, they asked Menswear to play each one, as a dress rehearsal for the cameras, so they knew how to film bands on each stage. We were the test band. In return for us doing that, Ric put us on Top of the Pops a week before we even had a single out. And whenever you went on the show, he’d be down in the studio, not tucked away in another room. He’d have a chat, he was a compadre.’
Blaxill, who’d also worked at Radio 1, didn’t usher in such an overtly radical change as Bannister – it wasn’t like he banned Lionel Richie or Backstreet Boys – but he did give a few favours to new young UK indie bands, such as Menswear, Echobelly, Marion and Gene. He got some band members to present Top of the Pops, too: Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Justine Frischmann of Elastica, Louise Wener of Sleeper. Oh, and Kylie Minogue, Keith Allen, Lily Savage, Vic and Bob, PJ and Duncan – aka Ant and Dec – and, oops, Gary Glitter. Blaxill bumped into Allen recently, who told him it was one of the highlights of his career.
‘It was about Top of the Pops having its own identity and community,’ says Blaxill, who’s now a music and content director at Bauer. ‘Previously, bands would perform in front of a backdrop of their album cover. We made the stages look amazing, with a perforated floor so we could shoot lights up through. And I was obsessed with going out to see bands, so I could see there was something happening, and I wanted to show that.’ He got Radio 1 DJs to talk about Top of the Pops, on the breakfast show or the chart show, and changed the rules about artists’ appearances (it used to be that TOTP had to book the highest new entry, as well as the highest mover – the artist whose track had made the biggest leap within the Top 40). Paul Weller said he’d only appear if he played live, so Blaxill let him: ‘I wanted to make the whole experience as enjoyable as possible.’ Oasis often didn’t want to play live, so he let them mime.
Top of the Pops was important then, in a way that seems almost ridiculous now. (‘It’s like you’ve made it when you’re on Top of the Pops,’ Noel Gallagher later said. ‘It was only after we went on that that my mum accepted that what we were doing was in any way valid.’) It was weekly, primetime, appointment TV, and, in an era when a chart position mattered, when a top ten entry could change a band’s life, getting on Top of the Pops was vital. Plus, as the TOTP studio was situated a long way out of town, with a canteen that was also shared by EastEnders, going there was a full-on laugh. You spent all day there before the actual show, hopping between dressing rooms, drinking with Boyzone and Barbara Windsor, playing pool with Sid Owen or Urban Cookie Collective. That was what Oasis liked to do, rather than keep sober for a performance.
There were other strange mid-90s gatekeepers, such as, of course, the music press. This was in its pomp, week by week deciding who was in and who was out among indie bands. The usual complaint about Britpop is that the inkies – the weekly music papers, NME and Melody Maker – invented the scene, made it all up when it didn’t really exist. But those bands existed, and quite a few of them were friends. The music press just gave the whole time a terrible name.
I went through a few of the inkie papers, and the music press of those days was like an early form of social media. A format dominated by people who were good with words but constantly on the front foot, emotionally. People who wanted the world to know what they thought of a band, what they stood for, what they represented. People who wanted to have an argument about this. Everyone must know how I feel! This is important!
NME and Melody Maker came out once a week, and the writers wrote as individuals, rather than representatives of the paper. So one writer would champion, say, Manic Street Preachers, and another would argue that they were terrible and everyone should be into Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, or Ice-T. Writers were friends – or workmates, at least – but they were also rivals. And the papers themselves were also fighting each other, for attention and readers. One of the reasons why Melody Maker editor Steve Sutherland put Suede on the front cover in April 1992, with the headline THE BEST NEW BAND IN BRITAIN – before the band had even released a single – was to steal a march on the NME.
Anyway, because they were encouraged to be individuals, the writing could be wild. Paul Morley, a genuinely amazing writer, would offer analysis such as ‘It is a tormenting wind murmuring. It is a curious germination. It is pleasure playing a trenchant and mystic melody on the sharp edge of a thin dream’ – about The Prodigy. Others were less high-falutin. Meanness about looks was completely standard and sexism was part of the atmosphere, the sea that we swum in. Most female musicians were asked the standard question: ‘What’s it like to be wanked over?’ Many female writers were told, to their faces, that the only reason they got a good interview must have been because they slept with the band.
Other important factors to Britpop becoming big? Cheap rents and crappy flats, meaning we all lived close to each other, within Zone 2, and we all went out rather than staying in (no internet, often no heating, definitely no cooking skills). A generation of indie musicians who wanted to step into the spotlight, who didn’t run away from photos, or refuse to be interviewed in teen magazines. Who had excellent hair and enjoyed being a front person, a star. Plus, of course – and this is easy to forget, somehow – there were the songs; some of which have lasted and some of which haven’t. ‘They’re working through old Top of the Pops on BBC 4,’ says Blaxill, ‘and they’ve finally got to the era when I was there. And they showed one show where we had an exclusive of Pulp playing Common People, and on the same show we had McAlmont and Butler playing Yes. And it was brilliant.’
We didn’t realise at the time, but none of this would have happened if someone in authority hadn’t opened the door to the VIP room just a little bit. Just enough so that if you pushed hard enough, that door might open. You only needed determination, and enough of you to keep the pressure up. Like the entrance to a rave, like the fence around a festival. In 1995, 20,000 people got into Glastonbury for free. ‘Me and my friends just shook the fence til it fell over and we all climbed in,’ said one intrepid festival goer. A rush and a push and the land is ours. Look mum, we’re winning.
