I bought Definitely Maybe a short while after it came out. Urban Hymns too. The singles were everywhere, absolutely unavoidable. I liked the psychier bits of the Verve. Never learned to play Wonderwall properly, but sang it over the chords to Glory Box instead, as a kind of joke which went down well enough at the time.
The other 90's
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
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comelately
Wild Horses
Yeah, that's fair - the likes of Sleeper obviously fall into that category. I just don't think there was that many Scotsmen. What indie bands had, largely for the first time, was the possibility of being A or B playlisted on Radio 1 and having a Top 10 hit - and then having a successful album for the car driving crowd if you didn't do anything too outlandish - I mean even The Verve dialled it the fuck down for Urban Hymns.
Some of them definitely fancied a bit of that and got with the program. It's understandable.
Interestingly, they got a much better drummer who took a lot of persuading to join them as he thought they played 'Britpop shite'. But I think they clearly were trying to reach beyond that...again sometimes one's grasp exceeds one's reach. Also they fail the 'reacting to the 80s' test pretty clearly - they were essentially Tears For Fears.
Tbf it's not like 'Britpop/Noelrock/Post-Britpop' acts ever really dominated the charts, it was a noticeable presence in terms of first-week sales but the dominance is certainly easy to exaggerate. Oasis never held the No. 1 spot for more than a week - they had one real hit; Wonderwall. Rest of their stuff went in and out of the Top 10 pretty quickly. Bands like Travis and Coldplay were there in the millenium, and Blur were still getting in the Top 10.
I like Haddaway as much as anyone but there was plenty of pop music and pop-dance for that matter in the Britpop period. 'Some Might Say' by Oasis was knocked off No. 1 by Livin' Joy. And I remember one of the MM journos celebrating that very fact next issue.
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comelately
Wild Horses
pattycakes_
Can turn naughty
Ah yeah, you're right. There was a weird connection between oasis and Labour though. They had Noel and a bunch of other hip 90s celebs over to number 10 and Tony apparently had one of oasis' discs on the wall.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eight-years-later-how-the-party-ended-for-the-cool-britannia-set-526457.html
Feel like they used Live Forever for some video montage of something at some point though. Man, that Cool Brittania was some dumb shit.
comelately
Wild Horses
Yeah Noel joined the likes of Eddie Izzard, Mick Hucknall and Piers Morgan at a No. 10 shindig
I've said this before to Luke i think. I do mourn the death of the Turkish hackney-er or dalston-er. one of my aunts lives in Latonstone and she's pretty much from that generation. the community is too dispersed now though. even Turks in Surrey, and Chiswick of all places.
I'm too lazy to read through this whole thread, but (and I know defending trip-hop is hardly the cool thing to do) I don't agree with this. Sure, some (a lot?) of this stuff was terrible, but there were numerous gems along the way. Basically the stuff that was instrumental hip-hop with mad samples could be a lot of fun. IMO, the biggest issue with trip-hop was the editing - a lot of it was simply too long. Most of these tracks revolved around one or two ideas, so six / seven minute tracks (common on the albums) were just way too much. It's not like these were functional dancefloor tracks - with more judicious editing a lot of this stuff could have been chopped down to 3 or 4 minutes, which would have solved a lot of the core structural problems with trip-hop. Look at the first couple DJ Krush albums - short tracks, great albums. So much of the rest of this genre suffered from decent ideas bloating out way past their ideal end point.
Clearly, it all sounds really dated now, because anything vaguely hip-hop-oriented from before the Long March of the Autotune sounds dated now.
Also, to be honest, trip-hop's bad reputation is at least partly down to James Lavelle committing the greatest of English sins, namely taking himself very seriously.
version
Well-known member
Yeah, it's jungle, rap, hardcore, etc. with the intensity stripped out.
other_life
bioconfused
don't quote my old posts! i was not well
other_life
bioconfused
gonna pull a version on all my old posts
version
Well-known member
They deserve the gulag for the name alone.
luka
Well-known member
he was an aspiring music journalist and wrote for Leeds university's answer to NME. he interviewed sleeper. havent you noticed how he knows all about neal kulkarni and taylor parks etc too?
version
Well-known member
Thought he was just a fan and followed them on Twitter.