What was the fastest-selling album of the 1990s in the UK?
Have you seen the video? Of course, you’ve seen the video. The one of Oasis, the first night of the reunion, Liam and Noel Gallagher taking to the stage and belting out the track ‘Acquiesce’. That video.
I’m not going to sit here and say Oasis are representative of all the 1990s, because they weren’t. However, that sound, that rebellion, grit, and freedom which you can hear in the original studio material, and which was still present in that iconic video, seems to embody whatever it was that people who lived through the ‘90s forever try and convince you was magical about it.
Never has a decade been raved about more than this (probably because there were so many raves), but when you look at the array of music and the genuine excitement that people had for it, that excitement is pretty goddamn contagious, and while Britpop was a huge part of this excitement, it wasn’t the only music getting made in the ‘90s, not by a long shot.
I recently interviewed James Skelly from the Coral about the band’s documentary, and in discussing his vision for the film, he told me he didn’t want it to be about the band, but about a specific moment in time. That moment in time was the back end of the ‘90s and the very beginning of the ‘00s. Music was in a strange limbo, as Britpop was over, but the whole Meet Me In The Bathroom movement was yet to begin. There was a creative stagnancy present, and that resulted in real, haphazard artists breaking through.
“We didn’t want it to be just about us; we wanted it to be a reflection of a little forgotten pocket of time. You had Oasis, but what happened after Oasis? In Britain, it seems to skip to the Libertines, but there’s a little time before that, where it was like The Coral, The Bees, So Solid Crew, Ms Dynamite, The Streets, and we’d all be put in the same thing, but we were completely different. It was pretty eclectic,” said The Coral frontman, “It was a cool time, it was free.”
Skelly is right that these different acts were all breaking through the mould at the turn of the millennium, and the reason there was a platform for such a mix of artists to make a name for themselves only existed because that versatility was already beginning to take root in the ‘90s. Yes, we think about raves and Britpop, but there was so much more than that happening.
You may grow tired of people talking about such a decade, but when you consider these different factors, it’s difficult for people not to become ecstatic by the mere mention of it, which is why it begs the question, who were the artists that capitalised on this hype most effectively and what was, out of all the great LPs that hit record stores, the fastest-selling album of the 1990s?
So, what was the fastest-selling album of the 1990s in the UK?
Before I give you the UK answer, it’s worth us considering the fastest-selling album in the US so that you can really understand just how much was happening in music at the time. Out of all the great music released in that decade, the fastest-selling record in the United States wound up being Vanilla Ice’s To The Extreme. Yes, that looks embarrassing now, but it makes the point that people were open to listening to something different. In the US, that came in the form of hip-hop. In the UK, it came in the form of… you guessed it.
We circle back to that video. That clip of ‘Acquiesce’, the moment in time it captured, and the timelessness of that moment. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory was a record full of classics the minute it hit the shelves, and this is reflected not only in the song’s ability to stand the test of time, but in record sales as well, and during what was a pretty unpredictable decade for music, Oasis managed to claim the top spot for having the fastest-selling album out of those ten years. Now that is pretty biblical.
