It is a Tuesday evening, and in the suitably 1990s environs of Soho’s Groucho Club, Robbie Williams, resplendent in pair of dungarees, is in the process of launching his new album. It’s called Britpop, features some songs co-written with Gaz Coombes of Supergrass, and is, he attests, “the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. This was the brief period where he attempted to establish himself as an adjunct to the mid-90s wave of hugely successful UK alt-rock, releasing a string of audibly Oasis-influenced solo singles, palling around Glastonbury with the Gallaghers and temporarily employing one of the band’s inner circle, Creation Records’ former managing director Tim Abbot, as his manager. “I’ve been musically aimless for a little while,” Williams said to the assembled press. “I’ve just spent the last 15 years looking backwards. I think with this album, if I am gonna look backwards, I might as well just clear the decks and go back to the start and head off from there.”
His determination to revisit the Britpop era feels slightly odd. His Oasis-influenced singles met with declining public interest, nearly scuppering his solo career before Angels and Let Me Entertain You came to the rescue. His relationship with Abbot ended with each suing the other in a dispute over Abbot’s contract (they settled out of court), he later said Oasis were “gigantic bullies” (Liam Gallagher replied that he’d “never bullied anyone in my life”) and when he talked about the period when I interviewed him in 2016, it was in terms of trauma: “There was an indie fundamentalist mentality … I was looked down on when I was in conversation with a lot of people … [it] starts to make you feel agoraphobic and second-guess everything you do”. But his appearance at the Groucho is the latest in a series of 90s-themed publicity stunts by Williams – he’s also unveiled fake blue plaques in Camden, proclaiming it “the home of Britpop”, and Soho’s Berwick Street, where the photograph on the cover of Oasis’s (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory was taken.
All of this is timely at the very least, coming amid a huge wave of nostalgia for Britpop. In part, it’s obviously fuelled by the fact that Blur, Pulp and Oasis have all reformed to considerable acclaim over the past two years, but it also feels more general than just fondness for any one band. It’s as if people have retrospectively fallen in love with “Britpop” as an idea, a signifier of something beyond music, something more nebulous.
The first signs of a notion of Britpop detached from the actual music might have come last year, when a succession of artists who sounded nothing like Blur or Oasis – drum’n’bass star Nia Archives, music producer AG Cook and singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri – began adopting the era’s visual signifiers, union jacks and all, and Dua Lipa claimed its “honesty and attitude” had influenced her album Radical Optimism. There have been a succession of Britpop books – a quick search reveals titles called Faster Than a Cannonball, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Feeling Supersonic, A Field Guide to Britpop, The Britpop Bible, The Birth and Impact of Britpop and at least three Britpop-themed romance novels. There are Britpop walking tours, Britpop festivals and a plethora of non-specific Britpop tribute acts.
There is Britpop Classical, a reimagining of the era’s hits with a 20-piece orchestra, fronted by Blur’s Alex James. Inspired, he says, by seeing “everyone arms aloft crying their eyes out, singing along to 90 minutes of hits” when the dance-themed Ministry of Sound Classical headlined the Big Feastival, the festival he hosts on his farm in the Cotswolds last year.
There are Britpop clothing collections – “classic British countryside meets 90s indie cool … countryside heritage with that Camden edge”, as the press release from designers Maude and Fox puts it – and there is a Britpop play, The Battle, about the feud between Oasis and Blur. It’s been written by novelist John Niven, will star Matthew Horne and is scheduled to open in February.
It’s the idea of theatrical producer Simon Friend, who says he thought the show would initially appeal to a niche audience – “to sell a play that is new, by someone who’s completely unknown in the theatre industry is hard, in fact nigh-on impossible” – but instead found himself booking it on a six-month tour around the provinces: a West End run is to be announced and it’s been optioned for television by Universal.
“About ten years ago, nostalgia for the 80s was really prevalent – the theatrical version of Dirty Dancing could not have been hotter, for instance,” Friend says. “I think there’s a 30 year cycle of nostalgia: ten years ago, the 90s were still in the rear view mirror. Now, if you look at video footage or photos in the 90s, it does feel like a historical period compared to where we’re living now. It looks more fun. There is a certain anarchy about that time that, from a distance, people have a fondness for”.
And there is Britpop wine, lager and cider, also Alex James’s handiwork: he has actually trademarked the word “Britpop”, at least for food and drink. “Trademarking is incredibly tedious, it turns out,” he says. “You have to do it by territory and category. The word ‘Britpop’ used to totally give me the ick, as I think it maybe did for a lot of bands in that era. You know, ‘Britpop rocker Alex James’ – oh, God. I had to take control. So I thought, ‘that actually sounds like a really nice drink’.”
This is Britpop as a branding exercise, which begs the question: what does the word signify? “I guess now it just sort of means good times,” he shrugs. “Maybe when outlooks were more positive, and there was less doom and gloom and scrutiny. Maybe it’s like ‘the swinging 60s’, only not quite as naff. You hear the phrase ‘swinging 60s’ and you’re like ‘yay!’, aren’t you?”
The writer and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer agrees. Her contribution to the pantheon of Britpop literature, Uncommon People, was published last year, and she’s just launched a podcast called Talk 90s to Me. “What is it about Britpop that appeals? There was a sense of ‘fuck you, we’re going to have a good time’, which Liam Gallagher definitely epitomised. And there’s an optimism – the gatekeepers had changed, different people were running Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, and a load of bands became absolutely huge without really changing what they did, or compromising. Blur didn’t change, Pulp didn’t change, Oasis obviously never changed – they just got worse. Someone like Tricky, who record companies would previously have told to fuck off, got really big.
“It felt like youth culture was winning. You couldn’t believe it was happening, and there’s a sense of optimism attached to that. That’s an amazing feeling that can be sensed by others.”
You can see why people old enough to remember the mid-90s first-hand might be drawn to reliving their youth 30 years on – generally your teens and 20s look appealingly carefree from the perspective of middle age – but the striking thing about the current wave of Britpop nostalgia is that its market isn’t exclusively drawn from the ranks of forty- and fiftysomethings. Alex James says he was “really, really surprised” at “how many kids, people my kids’ age” were at Blur’s 2023 reunion gigs. Promoting Uncommon People at literary festivals, Sawyer was struck by the audiences she attracted. “I thought it would just be people my age, right? What I didn’t expect was people in their late 30s and early 40s. Everybody, I think, is always slightly obsessed with the era when they were just born: things that were going on that were adult, that seemed exciting and just beyond you on the telly. And then, every time, there were always at least a couple of 17-year-olds, mostly girls, interested in music, want to be in bands, and they want to talk about Elastica.”
If you buy the idea that what the Britpop brand represents is optimism, positivity and youth culture winning without compromise then you can see its appeal to a 17-year-old in 2025. Who wouldn’t hanker after the notion of a prelapsarian world before the scrutiny of social media, 9/11, the rise of the “alt-right” et al? And the era’s “fuck you, we’re gonna have a good time” excesses look alluring in an age of wellness influencers and constant cameraphone surveillance.
Of course, they’re being sold a very rose-tinted and reductive notion of the past. The Britpop era played out alongside the Conservative government’s back-to-basics campaign, which felt a little like a culture war, replete with talk from John Major about “traditional values falling away” and having “allowed things to happen that we should never have tolerated”. Unemployment rates were around twice as high as they are now and there was genocide in eastern Europe, while even Sawyer notes that when she interviewed Garbage’s Shirley Manson and Sleeper’s Louise Wener for her book, “it was like we already knew each other, because we’d been through the 90s as women, like you’d been through some kind of trench warfare”. But that’s nostalgia for you: the past with the crap bits tactfully excised.
Given his own experience of the mid-90s you might expect Robbie Williams’ take on Britpop to be less idealistic. Certainly the cover of his album hints at that – it’s a photo of him at Glastonbury in 1995 on a gallery wall, being defaced by protesters. But when the subject comes up at The Groucho Club, he bats it away, restricting himself to talking jokily about the tracksuit he’s wearing in the photo. “So that’s the album cover,” he concludes. “We’re Britpopping.”
