Which album truly kicked off Britpop?
When looking back at the development of major cultural shifts, it’s often easy to spot the era they defined. But pinpointing exactly where a movement begins? That’s a trickier business. It’s usually a slow build – a string of small moments that eventually snowball into something massive. Britpop was no different. It became a full-blown cultural phenomenon, but where did it all really start?
It’s a tough question to answer because it asks us to attempt to do the somewhat impossible: define a cultural moment. In the same way that explaining a genre feels like the hardest task, or describing a work of art leaves you feeling inarticulate, attempting to boil an era-defining trend down into a few words feels almost offensive.
Britpop makes it especially hard, given that it was so much more than just the music. The music alone is challenging, for it isn’t enough to simply say that guitar rock was back when it was more intricate than that, but beyond the sound, the genre filtered into fashion, film, and even general celebrity culture, informing the way the press wrote and the way celebrities behaved.
An easy mistake to make would be saying that the era was defined by patriotism, because that wasn’t it at all. While Britishness was a vital part, it wasn’t the royalist, flag-shagging type of pride you’d imagine, but more a pride in what it means to live in Britain: going to the pub, being sarcastic, playing out as kids, witnessing class divides, getting on with it, stuff like that.
Pub carpets, Fred Perry, ugly council estate play parks, grey brick buildings, tinnies on the bus, football chants, nights out, it’s that sort of Britishness that led Britpop, and as its leading musical players emerged and dominated throughout the 1990s, each one seems to present a different shade of it.
However, it’s difficult even to begin plotting out a timeline of the period when it’s not like Britpop hinged on a new technological development; instead, it can really only be figured out by vibe alone.
So, what was the first Britpop record?
On that vibe reading, the general answer for where Britpop began lies in 1992 with the moment when Suede released ‘The Drowners’, which is typically considered as the first true Britpop track, capturing the sound that would define the era that merges classic rock and roll with a more theatrical edge, seemingly combining decades of past British legends like both The Beatles and Bowie into one sound.
Then, in March 1993, the band followed it up with their self-titled debut album, which also takes the medal for the first real, proper Britpop album. Blur always come in at a close second, both with their single ‘Popscene’ and their second album, Modern Life Is Rubbish, but the evidence stacks up for Suede being the leaders.
Most of it comes down to the record itself, wherein their debut became the fastest-selling in British history, and it kept that record for over a decade. That alone suggests the start of something new, like suddenly the youth was racing face towards this new sound and new moment in music that the band seemed to spearhead.
But part of it comes down to the branding as well, as in April that year, a month after the record’s release, the band’s singer Brett Anderson appeared on the cover of Select Magazine against a Union Jack background with a tagline reading “yanks go home!” and talking about the new bands fighting “the battle for Britain”. Officially declaring the era of Britpop open, it was Anderson chosen to be the face of it and Suede’s album that launched the charge.
