Blur, Pulp, Oasis or Suede: who is the best Britpop band?
We all have our No 1, but for an objective answer, we looked at the data

Sunday November 20 2022, The Sunday Times

Britpop is back, if it ever went away. Thirty years after Blur, Oasis, Suede and Pulp soundtracked a nation about to be swept up by Euro 96, Tony Blair and Cool Britannia, the songs that playlisted the half decade from 1992 to 1997 are, once again, dominating headlines and you and your best mates Spotify streams.

Did you get your tickets for next summers Blur and Pulp gigs? Suede are touring, and Noel and Liam Gallagher are headlining festivals to, essentially, play Oasis. The nations last great unifying musical era is impossible to resist. Even one of the bit players is back, as the Lightning Seeds redo Three Lions for the World Cup.

So forgive people of a certain middle age for spending more than £200 to see Blur and Pulp in the space of a week in July, where they will probably awkwardly bump into several exes.


It was a question then and remains one now. Who is best? Who has aged the best, and who can claim to have won the battle of Britpop? Because it always was a war. A hyper-competitive slag-off of petulance and arrogance that reached its peak in 1995 when Roll with It by Oasis came second to Blurs Country House in the singles charts, and Noel said that he wished Damon Albarn would catch Aids. Neither track was near the bands best, but the story was on the evening news. It was a weird time. If Oasis lost that chart battle, they have won the war, commercially speaking at least. Our data has them topping nearly all categories, from album sales and number ones to Brit awards and monthly Spotify listeners. With 125,000 fans a night attending two shows at Knebworth in 1996, they dwarf their old rivals live too.

Blur come second in most categories, but Pulp deserve a special nod. Jarvis Cockers band never won a Brit (though he deserved one for thrusting his bum at Michael Jackson) and boast far fewer streams and sales, but can still play to 50,000 people standing in a field. They won the Mercury music prize though, for Different Class, in 1996 beating Oasiss (Whats the Story) Morning Glory? that year. Suede won for their debut album Suede in 1993.

Critical success, however, is down to taste. Which means many will disagree when I say Britpops real champion is Albarn a polymath whose Gorillaz outstrip Oasis on Spotify, while their creator finds time to dabble in opera. His observations about Britain in This Is a Low, The Universal and most of Modern Life Is Rubbish have not aged at all. They just got sadder.

And before anyone says Radiohead are better than the lot, they were too miserable to be Britpop, even if they sold 21 million albums. And this is fun, isnt it? Arguing like we did when it was CDs and Adidas Gazelles. A simpler time. No wonder we pay £100 a ticket to revisit it.



They cite total album sales figures. For Pulp it's the dubiously looking round figure of 10m - I've seen this cited before on Wikipedia but that seems to have been speculative.

Different Class sold 1.2m in the UK, less than 100k in the US. I can't see how they sold enough in smaller markets across the rest of the world to make up the remaining eight and a half million plus.

Eamonn wrote:

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I can't see how they sold enough in smaller markets across the rest of the world to make up the remaining eight and a half million plus.

-- Edited by Eamonn on Sunday 20th of November 2022 09:32:16 PM

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 Maybe because of idiots like me who have 8 copies of DC (and 7 more in my wantlist). 10m does sound an awful lot though.

Then again, and in response to the article, it feels like Pulp's reputation has fared the best of the bands of that era. Perhaps we're biased here, but the way the tour dates sold out seems to support the idea. I enjoyed Oasis, Blur, and other bands of the time, but I seldom play the records now, and they don't have a special place in my heart they way Suede and Pulp do.

I was really quite sad to miss out on tickets, but at the same time astonished and pleased that they did so well. The 'We Love Life' tour played in much smaller venues than DC & TIH, and it felt to me like they were unfairly neglected, and chucked out with the rest of the post-Britpop dishwater. [though the forest tour, and Eden project looked big crowds to me]. Now it's wonderful that they are getting a final valedictory success, and seem to be loved by old fans, middle aged fans (me), and still with young fans finding them.

With Pulp being so special to me for so long, it's easy to take them for granted; but they really were and are something extraordinary, aren't they? I still hope to get resale tickets, because I really want to be, for a final time possibly, among a crowd, and see the delight on faces half my age as well as older fans (though twice my age would be a stretch).

Eamonn wrote:

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Blur, Pulp, Oasis or Suede: who is the best Britpop band?
We all have our No 1, but for an objective answer, we looked at the data

Sunday November 20 2022, The Sunday Times

Britpop is back, if it ever went away. Thirty years after Blur, Oasis, Suede and Pulp soundtracked a nation about to be swept up by Euro 96, Tony Blair and Cool Britannia, the songs that playlisted the half decade from 1992 to 1997 are, once again, dominating headlines and you and your best mates Spotify streams.

Did you get your tickets for next summers Blur and Pulp gigs? Suede are touring, and Noel and Liam Gallagher are headlining festivals to, essentially, play Oasis. The nations last great unifying musical era is impossible to resist. Even one of the bit players is back, as the Lightning Seeds redo Three Lions for the World Cup.

So forgive people of a certain middle age for spending more than £200 to see Blur and Pulp in the space of a week in July, where they will probably awkwardly bump into several exes.


It was a question then and remains one now. Who is best? Who has aged the best, and who can claim to have won the battle of Britpop? Because it always was a war. A hyper-competitive slag-off of petulance and arrogance that reached its peak in 1995 when Roll with It by Oasis came second to Blurs Country House in the singles charts, and Noel said that he wished Damon Albarn would catch Aids. Neither track was near the bands best, but the story was on the evening news. It was a weird time. If Oasis lost that chart battle, they have won the war, commercially speaking at least. Our data has them topping nearly all categories, from album sales and number ones to Brit awards and monthly Spotify listeners. With 125,000 fans a night attending two shows at Knebworth in 1996, they dwarf their old rivals live too.

Blur come second in most categories, but Pulp deserve a special nod. Jarvis Cockers band never won a Brit (though he deserved one for thrusting his bum at Michael Jackson) and boast far fewer streams and sales, but can still play to 50,000 people standing in a field. They won the Mercury music prize though, for Different Class, in 1996 beating Oasiss (Whats the Story) Morning Glory? that year. Suede won for their debut album Suede in 1993.

Critical success, however, is down to taste. Which means many will disagree when I say Britpops real champion is Albarn a polymath whose Gorillaz outstrip Oasis on Spotify, while their creator finds time to dabble in opera. His observations about Britain in This Is a Low, The Universal and most of Modern Life Is Rubbish have not aged at all. They just got sadder.

And before anyone says Radiohead are better than the lot, they were too miserable to be Britpop, even if they sold 21 million albums. And this is fun, isnt it? Arguing like we did when it was CDs and Adidas Gazelles. A simpler time. No wonder we pay £100 a ticket to revisit it.



They cite total album sales figures. For Pulp it's the dubiously looking round figure of 10m - I've seen this cited before on Wikipedia but that seems to have been speculative.

Different Class sold 1.2m in the UK, less than 100k in the US. I can't see how they sold enough in smaller markets across the rest of the world to make up the remaining eight and a half million plus.

 

-- Edited by Eamonn on Sunday 20th of November 2022 09:32:16 PM

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Suede are curious. They had a zeitgeist all to themselves in '92/93 and a front man who looked amazing and gave great quotes. But maybe they got trapped in the weekly music magazine world too much to break out.

Their second coming in '96 was a year after the other three had usurped them with era-defining singles and albums.

Pulp's catalogue is slimmest and their commercial heyday also the shortest but Common People and Disco 2000 are still so potent to a general music audience. Wedding party/karaoke stone-cold staples 27 years on. Suede never managed that.

Add in the cult of Jarvis - his looks and moves from those days were an iconic part of British culture and the Brit Awards debacle just made him more (in)famous.

It is ironic as Saw mentions that Jarv Is... would just never be offered the type of slots that the Pulp "brand" can command. And Jarv Is... doing a Pulp-heavy set including CP and Disco2K live probably wouldn't make a difference.

Yet, 90%+ of people who go to see Pulp play live next summer wouldn't be able to name another band member and Steve (or Russell) not being there, won't make a blind bit of difference to them. Funny how it all falls away.

Eamonn wrote:

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Pulp's catalogue is slimmest and their commercial heyday also the shortest but Common People and Disco 2000 are still so potent to a general music audience. Wedding party/karaoke stone-cold staples 27 years on. Suede never managed that.

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Very true.  Interesting that suede had 14 top 20 hits, yet pretty sure if I asked my sisters (the women in the street), I doubt either of them could name a suede hit as readily as they could a pulp hit.  Similar with oasis & blur.  

Next weeks Sunday Times needs to debate the best glam act.  Sweet, Slade, Bowie, T. Rex or err Glitter

perhaps not.

inspirit wrote:

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ArrGee wrote:

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 Next weeks Sunday Times needs to debate the best glam act.  Sweet, Slade, Bowie, T. Rex 

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 Waste of time if half the readership haven't heard of them... University Challenge last night, music round, name the band; they play T.Rex doing 20th Century Boy: 4 blank faces, no clue. Astonishing.

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That was very funny when they answered Pink Floyd 

I suspect there are a lot of Times readers who havent heard of Pulp, Blur, Oasis and Suede.  My daughter (18) thinks pretty much every thing I listen to is Pulp, often when it isnt.  It was Roxy Music the other day.  Happy Mondays another time.   And weirdly my son (23) came in when I was listening to The Damned and proclaimed "what is that racket you are listening to?" . Just like my dad in 1977  .  Kids today