The musicians who helped Damon Albarn survive Britpop hate: “I did get quite upset about it”
Should Blur have really been compared to Oasis?
The more I engage with bands as a journalist myself, the more I feel increasingly uncomfortable that they were. Of course, we all enjoy partisanship in life (to a healthy degree), but really, music isn’t the place it should be harvested. Artists should be judged through their own lens, based on the merits of the music they create, and while Blur’s discography offered plenty of nuance in that regard, the world was hellbent on comparing them to Oasis.
Maybe it was the full-throttled excitement of Britpop, or maybe it was fuelling a divide between the North and South, but something at the heart of culture decided these bands couldn’t coexist without competing with one another. Their music didn’t warrant the rivalry; Oasis were kings of the four-chord rock song, delivering anthemic choruses that were custom-made to unite the nation, while Blur were building on decades of art-rock before them, but popularising it in an obscure and alternative way.
The latter made Blur the natural villain in the narrative. Its pursuit of nuance made it more difficult to understand for some and, in turn, easier to slander with frontman Damon Albarn, unsurprisingly heralded as the face of the hate campaign. He didn’t have the effortless charisma of Liam Gallagher, nor Noel’s penchant for anthem writing, and so he became the awkward dork in the corner, primed for national bullies to pick apart.
While the heady excitement of Britpop allowed the entire rivalry to be marketed as jovial ribbing between two wildly successful bands, there is no doubting that the needle became a little pointed at times. The ribbing Albarn had to face from Oasis became a little personal and at times bullyish in its approach, and most of the music world lapped it up.
But Albarn insisted that amidst it all, two figureheads of the British music scene abstained from joining the herd and instead showed him a level of respect that he has never forgotten since.
“I love Shaun Ryder,” he boldly started, “During the whole Oasis thing, he and Bernard Sumner were the only two who cared about what I was going through. Being constantly taken the piss out of by [the Gallaghers]. How can you fight when you’ve got the tabloids and a working-class attitude on your back? You’re fucked. But Shaun was really sweet to me and made me feel a whole lot better about it. Because I did get quite upset about it.”
Ryder and Sumner were cut from a similar cloth as the Gallagher brothers. Born and raised in the shadows of Manchester and crucial to its rise to the top of the British music scene, they could have adopted the same partisan approach as everyone else, with more venom, but instead, they saw that within the discourse existed an important sense of nuance.
But despite their undeniable influence on the music industry, they couldn’t sway the rest of the public, who felt as though there was no way to understand Blur without understanding Oasis, and therein lies one of the biggest problems British music endured.
