Britpop meets Breakbeats: How ‘Setting Sun’ perfectly captures 1996
Once the dust had settled on the great Britpop chart battle of 1995, 1996 brought around some new sonic horizons for Noel Gallagher.
On one hand, he was still riding high with Oasis, in a year that saw them famously dominate the Brit Awards and stage their iconic Knebworth gigs, rubber-stamping them a place in history, as if it was ever going to be in any doubt. But looking left from the heights of rock and roll stardom, a new music phenomenon was starting to rise, and it couldn’t help but catch the elder Gallagher’s attention.
After all, if there was one thing the ‘90s were known for outside of the bubble of Britpop, it was the club scene and dance music that came with it. In the years that followed, as the ire between the Oasis brothers reached its height, Liam would criticise his sibling for having someone in the High Flying Birds playing scissors on stage. But the decade of their height was a precursor to that.
Indeed, Liam may have looked more closely at what his brother was doing at the time, as it might have given him some context clues as to the state of mind he seemed to find so perplexing for so many years. When the guitarist Gallagher teamed up with The Chemical Brothers to release ‘Setting Sun’, it was capturing the zeitgeist in a perfect cultural crossroads.
In many ways, you would never really know Gallagher played a starring vocal role on the track. Its whole purpose was to be a car crash of noise and sound, not interested in being particularly palatable or polished, but instead making a statement to rile up the masses and get them to truly feel something.
Of course, it goes without saying that one of the major components was the shared societal haze of drugs that, no matter their sonic background, every inch of the music industry seemed to find itself sniffing. While it was obviously somewhat of a prerequisite for the dance scene, Gallagher was naturally no stranger in his own field. It truly was a match made in trippy heaven.
But aside from ‘Setting Sun’ being a fun collaboration that summed up the club culture, it spoke to a far more insightful point in ‘90s culture that we can look back on, exactly 30 years down the line, and revel in. Whichever one of The Chemical Brothers had the foresight to realise that the Britpop and Breakbeat scenes were not warring sides, but actually harmonious in their aims, deserves to be hailed as a genius.
Because, on the face of it, those two genres couldn’t have been more different. But the fact of the matter was that they co-existed in a time where the masses were yearning for an outlet to let loose and break free, and in their own ways, they both cultivated that. It was a remarkable feat to bring them together, but through some tenacity and perhaps a cocaine high, they absolutely mastered it.
Rather than seeing Britpop and the Breakbeat scene as two distinct emblems of the 1990s, it was far more emblematic of the time, particularly of that halfway point of the decade, to converge them together as a systemic railing against authority, fighting against the norms, and making their case known. Of all the anthems out there, ‘Setting Sun’ might truly be the best.
