What were the five best-selling Britpop singles of the 1990s?
Britpop wasn’t meant to change the world. It was supposed to be the antidote to grunge: a wry dose of cheeky Britishness, often cooked up in a Camden bedsit by mockney-voiced class tourists pretending to be skint. But, for a brief moment in the mid-1990s, it defined British pop culture. Indie guitar bands stopped pretending to be outsiders and started scoring hits on the official singles chart. Songs that once peaked at student unions were suddenly being piped into supermarkets.
It’s easy to romanticise the era as a golden age of laddism and Red Stripe-fuelled revelry. But Britpop was always a contradiction: it framed itself as working-class insurrection while being quietly bankrolled by the majors, mostly by stealth. It mocked the mainstream while ever-so-slowly becoming it. Beneath all its tabloid headline nonsense, though, was a deep hunger to be heard. That’s what makes the five best-selling Britpop singles of the decade so telling. Not necessarily the smartest or most beloved, but the ones that punched through and landed somewhere bigger, sometimes even accidentally.
Take ‘Brimful of Asha’ by Cornershop. Originally a niche, crate-digging ode to a Bollywood singer, it began as a slow Velvet Underground-style groover and only really caught fire after Norman Cook’s dance remix turned it into a feel-good juggernaut. Suddenly, this oddball little floor-filler was blaring from every pub jukebox and student dive in Britain. It didn’t sound like Oasis, and that’s exactly why it worked.
Then there’s ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’, a seven-minute slab of apocalyptic Zeppelin-aping, complete with helicopters, Morse code, and Liam growling through his nasal cavity like he’s nursing a sinus infection—it’s preposterous, bloated nonsense. It was proof that by 1997, Oasis weren’t really releasing songs; they were trying to summon a ‘people’s anthem’ without ever saying anything concrete, but it didn’t matter. People didn’t buy it because they liked it, they bought it because not buying it felt like treason. “All my people right here, right now”, indeed.
‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ remains The Verve’s defining moment, and Britpop’s most tragic irony. Built around a looped orchestral sample, it gave Richard Ashcroft his own spiritual monologue until the lawyers stepped in. A technicality handed the royalties to The Rolling Stones’ former manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, leaving the fledgling band with all the acclaim but none of the money. A bittersweet moment, The Verve’s masterpiece became someone else’s payday.
And then there’s ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, which somehow ended up as a national hymn of sorts. A brazen Lennon pastiche that dresses up pub wisdom in a parka, it’s where Noel Gallagher finally took a swing at posterity and scored himself a number one for his troubles. For all of Oasis’ lad-sneer posturing, this is the moment they actually tried to say something, and millions gladly shouted it back. Just don’t mention that he nicked the guitar solo from Primal Scream, though.
What was the best-selling Britpop song?
‘Wonderwall’, obviously; nothing else even comes close. Over 1.4million UK sales, still streamed, still covered, and forever destined to echo through pub gardens on Friday nights in Swindon for eternity, it’s not really a song anymore. It’s a karaoke fallback. And the strange thing is, it’s not even that direct. For all its sing-along ubiquity, the track is full of hedging: “Maybe,” “I don’t believe,” “You’re gonna be the one…”; it doesn’t really say anything beyond simply gesturing.
Maybe that’s why it stuck. Britpop was full of certainty, arrogance, snarl, swagger, but ‘Wonderwall’ wasn’t. You didn’t need to understand it. You just had to feel like it meant something, and somehow that was enough. The best-selling Britpop single of the decade was vague, sentimental, slightly misread, and accidentally eternal. Which, depending on how you squint, might be the most honest summary of the Britpop era as a whole.
The five best-selling Britpop singles of the 1990s
- ‘Brimful of Asha’ – Cornershop
- ‘D’You Know What I Mean’ – Oasis
- ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ – The Verve
- ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ – Oasis
- ‘Wonderwall’ – Oasis
