The Britpop battle: what started the feud between Oasis and Blur?
Every generation needs a good band rivalry every now and then. The 1960s tended to be split between The Beatles fans and The Rolling Stones fans, and you can’t bring up an outfit like Megadeth without talking about Dave Mustaine being slated by the members of Metallica. As the grunge revolution shifted towards optimistic acts with the rise of Britpop, though, you couldn’t escape the nasty rivalry between Oasis and Blur.
When looking at both bands, it’s not like they are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both of them made music that was indebted to the sounds of early 1960s acts, but if Oasis were cribbing from The Beatles, Blur seemed to be ripping a few pages out of The Kinks’ playbook, with a few alternative influences thrown in for good measure.
Although the media may have been hyping the feud up to the moon when both bands started the Battle of Britpop with different singles, everyone seems to have a different account of where everything began. If you were to ask Liam, all of the group’s bad press on the matter would have come down to his brother.
It’s not like Liam was that far off the mark, either. Once you’ve made a claim that your rivals should catch AIDs and die, you’re not going to be walking away from that and not look like an instigator. But while Noel was happy to go to bat for Blur back in the day, something behind the scenes led to Liam and Albarn falling out first.
Speaking in the book Don’t Look Back In Anger, Noel said that the feud may have started from pieces of romantic tension between Liam and Albarn, saying, “Liam and Damon were shagging the same bird, and there was a lot of cocaine involved. There was an NME Awards where we were photographed with Blur, and Liam said, ‘Fuck you, you cunt, blah blah blah.’”
Even though Noel took it in stride, he started to see things unravel a little more when both bands found each other crossing paths on the circuit. Throughout his appearance on Reel Stories, Noel thought that everything started to get to him when Blur started moving their singles to the same week that Oasis were, saying, “I think there was a week where we wholly uninterested in it. Then, the whole thing started to catch fire, and we became interested very quickly. And if anyone picks a fight with me, it’s fucking on.”
If Noel hadn’t started it, though, he would have done everything in his power to ensure that his band came out on top. After throwing down the gauntlet with The Battle of Britpop between Oasis’s ‘Roll With It’ and Blur’s ‘Country House’, Noel evidently had to admit defeat when Blur came out on top, where he would eventually make his comments about Albarn catching AIDs and dying.
While Blur may have instigated the chart battle, Albarn ended up seeing the Manchester hooligans as nothing more than just spoiled brats, saying in No Distance Left to Run, “Noel Gallagher used to take the piss out of me constantly, and it really, really hurt at the time. Oasis were like the bullies I had to put up with at school.”
Albarn was ready to turn everything up even more, announcing that they would be playing a show in the same city and on the same night as Oasis. This caused Noel to pull their gig so Blur could have their cake and eat it right in front of the Gallaghers’ faces. If this was their way of gloating about their win, it wasn’t something Noel wanted a part of anymore, having now run the risk of their fans potentially getting into fights with Blur fans.
The battle lines also came down to where each band was located. Oasis may have been seen as the hooligans from the working-class of northern England, but Blur were the art-school kids who went over a lot better with the critical viewers of the world. In the end, the music world ended up winning out half the time, with both groups putting out some of their best material during the feud, from Oasis conquering the world with What’s the Story Morning Glory while Albarn steered Blur through Parklife and The Great Escape.
While the Gallagher brothers are the last people to kiss and make up, the story did end up having a sort of happy ending, with Noel eventually getting up onstage with Albarn to play ‘Beetlebum’ and even co-writing a tune for the Gorillaz project Humanz. As for Liam, he’s still not ready to roll over, mentioning to Vogue that Blur is both his guilty pleasure and the most overrated band of the 1990s.
