In August, as an estimated 14 million people scrabbled for tickets to next year’s Oasis reunion, the mid-90s Britpop movement was back making headlines once again.
Britpop was a cultural scene legendary for launching offbeat alternative bands into the mainstream, from Pulp and Suede to The Verve, culminating in Blur and Oasis’s battle for the number one chart position in 1995 with their respective singles Country House and Roll With It.
So a new book from respected music journalist Miranda Sawyer couldn’t be more timely.
In Uncommon People: Britpop And Beyond In 20 Songs, she turns a spotlight on the bands and musicians who dominated the 90s charts, including Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers and The Prodigy, to explore the ground they broke and the legacy they left.
But what was it like for the female songwriters and musicians suddenly giving men a run for their money on the soundstages of Top Of The Pops or in grimy Camden gig venues?
Miranda answers the question through the experiences of stars including the Dorset-born rocker PJ Harvey; Sleeper’s lead singer Louise Wener; girl-band Elastica (although they had a male drummer) and Garbage, the US rock band fronted by Scottish Shirley Manson.
“People were getting attention in a way that you never expected,” Miranda says. “Bands like Pulp and Blur should have just been NME-famous, playing the indie circuit, and then suddenly they were tabloid famous.”
The women who found fame in the Britpop era weren’t conventional pop stars either, yet it was still their personal lives that attracted the most interest.
Louise Wener had co-written Sleeper’s platinum-selling album, The It Girl, but because she’d broken up with the band’s guitarist Jon Stewart and started a new relationship with their drummer Andy Maclure, journalists only wanted to know about her love life.
It was the same for Elastica co-founder Justine Frischmann. Though Elastica’s debut album became the fastest-selling in UK history, selling over a million copies, journalists were more interested in her boyfriends who included Brett Anderson from Suede and Damon Albarn from Blur.
“Do you care who Jarvis [Cocker from Pulp] went out with? No, you don’t,” says Miranda.
“She had views on loads of things, she was really well read, she was fun. Her relationships weren’t the most interesting thing about her by any means. It sent Justine a bit mad that part of the reason why they got the attention was because she was seeing Damon.”
With their masculine aesthetic and uncompromising attitude, Elastica were another unlikely band to hit the big time. “They looked amazing but they weren’t conventionally feminine,” she says.
But then women were also criticised if they did look feminine. “Louise Wener was dressing in a cute frock. But if you didn’t wear the boots and the jeans and the cardie as an indie girl then you got a bit dismissed.
“Shirley Manson mentioned that as well. She was wearing little neon frocks with big boots and a lot of make-up. And at the time, the look – if you wanted to be taken seriously – was no make up and plaid shirts. There wasn’t space for women to be themselves. You had to tick certain boxes.”
Sawyer was 23 when she started writing for music magazine Select, the title credited with coining the word ‘Britpop’, and she found herself at the heart of the action.
“The British music industry and music magazines were going through a boom period,” she says of the mid-90s. “We were lucky to be working in an industry that at that time was just exploding.”
The music scene was initially small, with musicians and journalists closely intertwined. “It was an exciting time because we were the right age and in the right place and some of the music was absolutely fantastic.
“There’s something about being young that’s completely brilliant, that ability to bang through seven evenings on the trot, stay up for 48 hours. It’s living on adrenaline.
“But when you get older, people tie the era up in a big bow and go, ‘It was like this’. I wanted to show that it was a bit of a messy era. Its narrative flow wasn’t perfect.”
In fact, she says, it was, “better… more interesting, more thrilling and weirder,” than Britpop is now considered to be.
Sawyer started out on wacky pop magazine Smash Hits, before moving to Select. “I absolutely loved my job,” she says. “I was aware that I was very privileged to be there. There were a lot of very nerdy men and I couldn’t beat them on knowledge of obscure B-sides but I could be quite noisy and funny.
“I could work hard – I’d stay up all night and write. I was busy, I was enjoying myself. I was in the right place, right time.”
It helped that she was a similar age to many of the bands she was despatched to interview. “I was sent to hang out with them in pubs or travel around with them for a few days on tour. Most of the musicians were out at the places I was, or knew the same people, so I could fit in.”
She hung out with Blur before they’d even chosen their band name, drinking and playing darts with them in Soho pubs, or crossing paths at gigs.
“I saw them [perform] when they were tiny and drunk and great but kind of mental,” she recalls. She could tell they’d be successful, though no one foresaw how big they’d become.
Miranda always felt that “indie boys” on tour welcomed her into their predominantly male environments.
“They were just happy to have a woman around to talk to. I never felt threatened by anybody. None of the bands I featured in this book were like that. There were a lot of really great people.”
Though Miranda is unaware of any #metoo moments on the Britpop scene, she recalls interviewing a wide range of female musicians in 1996 for a piece about indie groupies. Off the record, several interviewees mentioned, “the occasional creepy music journalist, who was pushy and wouldn’t leave them alone. Separately, they told me the same names, over and over”.
Now, she reflects, “It was a laddy time so you were meant to be able to bat these people off. Women told themselves, ‘That’s how they are, it is what it is.’ Avoid him, warn other women and don’t leave them with him. “It didn’t occur to me to do anything about it. Who would I have told? If I’d said anything, it would have fallen on deaf ears.”
Yet despite the limitations of the era, Sawyer’s female interviewees look back fondly upon the 90s.
“It was a really exciting time and we were lucky to be working in the industry. It was a creative explosion and the music these women made stands the test of time.”
Uncommon People: Britpop And Beyond In 20 Songs by Miranda Sawyer, £25 (John Murray) is out now.
