‘Beetlebum’: the song that popped the Britpop bubble
I used to live in a neighbourhood that technically never existed. Other residents of the area used to say that’s where they lived, and people would understand exactly what they meant, but the reality of the situation was that they lived somewhere else entirely. The name we gave it was simply something initially invented by estate agents to drive the sale of properties in an area that was deeply unpopular, and the more gentrified area of the existing neighbourhood was therefore given a new name to trick homebuyers into purchasing houses there. This might seem irrelevant to an article about Britpop, but in essence, this is exactly what Britpop was.
One could make the claim that Britpop never really existed. British music was struggling to make an impact overseas in the 1990s and had been on the decline throughout the previous decade as far as international acclaim was concerned. Music industry executives and journalists were desperate of finding a way to market the emerging bands in a way that would appeal to audiences in Europe, America and beyond, and when a small pocket of groups began releasing a style of indie rock that felt quintessentially British in its presentation, that’s when the term began to develop a wider usage.
The sound of Britpop was so deeply rooted in British culture of the early ‘90s, and was strongly linked to fashion trends and singing about specific societal phenomena exclusive to the nation, often in a regional accent. Marketing the output of a nation’s musical vanguard on this seemed like a shrewd idea, and sure enough, it sparked a sense of patriotism and pride in the country that hadn’t been seen since before Thatcherism strangled the life out of the country from 1979 to 1990.
One thing that can be said about the bands who were burdened with the Britpop tag is that the music had a seemingly chipper and happy-go-lucky attitude about it. Blur and Oasis were at the forefront of this, battling it out for the top spot in the charts on a number of occasions, but the main appeal of their singles was that they had sing-along choruses and a cheerful outlook on life. Audiences were seemingly fed up of hearing how shit things were in the UK both at home and abroad, and so this bubbly demeanour that Britpop had attached to it appeared to be the perfect antidote to the morose and dejected attitude that had been prevalent before.
The peak of Britpop arguably arrived in 1995, when Oasis released (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and Blur countered it with the release of The Great Escape. Both albums had smash hit singles, and it looked as though Britpop was here to stay as the nation’s most beloved musical export. Audiences around the world were beginning to pay attention to these two high-flying acts, and it seemed as though the UK had finally cracked the code to gaining international success once again.
However, beneath the surface, cracks were already beginning to show, and with Blur seemingly demonstrating that their own musical ambitions were at odds with how they were being presented, they began to work on music that was dramatically different from their previous output, and that was decidedly more introspective and bleak in its themes. At the same time, Oasis had their own tensions rising within the band, with the ever-feuding Gallagher brothers butting heads and struggling to write anything that was able to follow up their previous two masterpiece records.
When Oasis released Be Here Now in 1997, the disappointment from the record-buying public was palpable. They’d produced an overblown and overproduced mess of an album that seemed to be trying too hard to cash in on former glories, and the critical reception dismissed it as an overwhelming disappointment. However, while you could point to any number of the songs on this record as being the death knell of Britpop, it at least still played into the idea that there was a particular sound to be latched onto. The same could not be said for Blur.
In early 1997, they released the first single from their self-titled fifth album, ‘Beetlebum’, and the band themselves thought that if they were ever going to escape the limelight and gain recognition for being a creatively adventurous group, then this would surely be the career suicide and artistic rebirth that they were after. ‘Beetlebum’ didn’t sound like ‘Charmless Man’ or their biggest hit, ‘Country House’. It didn’t have a whimsical attitude or a story about a quasi-fictitious character attached to it; the feelings were real, and they were dark.
‘Beetlebum’ is the sound of frontman Damon Albarn hitting rock bottom and opening up about his struggles with heroin addiction. It’s the sound of guitarist Graham Coxon expressing his tiredness and frustration at having to keep up this vibrancy on record. ‘Beetlebum’ is raw, uncompromising, and gritty; the antithesis of everything Britpop had been painted as until this point.
While the band thought that releasing it as the lead single from their hotly anticipated next album would separate the wheat from the chaff, alienating the fans who only wanted to hear them sing buoyant pop songs that you can chant on the football terraces in a mockney accent, it actually proved to be a resounding success for the group, helping them reach number one in the UK for a second time. Perhaps the Britpop audience had grown up with them and were eager to hear something that reflected the change in their outlook that embraced the toughness of life, or perhaps it was just evidence that Britpop had finally run its course.
Of course, if you look a little deeper, this was far from the first time that Blur, or any other ‘Britpop’ act, had released something that was a little darker, but it was the first time that they’d had success with it. For example, ‘This Is A Low’, taken from their 1994 album Parklife, is a similarly moody song that doesn’t sound anything like the fun-loving ‘Girls and Boys’ that the album opens with, and is far removed from the cheeky-chappie vibe of the album’s title track. They’d always been capable of switching styles on their records, but it just hadn’t been demonstrated in the form of a hit single.
What ‘Beetlebum’ achieved was ultimately what burst the bubble of Britpop, but it also encouraged and freed other bands to exist and express themselves in whatever manner they pleased without having to consciously adopt a certain style that seemed to be in fashion. You can argue whether Britpop was ever real or not, but Blur unwittingly started it when they released ‘Popscene’ in 1992, then it only felt right that they should be the ones to dismiss any notion of its existence by hammering the nail in its coffin half a decade later.
