The Battle of Britpop: the dullest beef in the history of beefs

This week, it's 25 years since the Blur / Oasis 'Battle of Britpop'. They went head to head in a battle for number one in what became a definitive moment for 1990s indie music. 

The battle lines were clearly drawn. You were either a chirpy Blur fan prancing around like a jolly Cock-er-nee chimney sweep, or you were a swaggering Oasis fan ready to have a scrap with "our kid".

You had to choose one or the other, like the Mods or the Rockers, like the Beatles or the Stones, like Gordon the Gopher or Edd the Duck. And if you couldn't chose, you just feigned a Jarvis Cocker swoon and kept your nose out of it.

Blur got the number one spot and Noel Gallagher tried to curse them with "catching Aids", but the victory meant nothing. This all-consuming pop war was hollow: a clanging bell full of sound, fury and cobwebs. Yes, there was the class war aspect: the Leadbetters against the Goods, upstairs versus downstairs. But my real issue is one of quality.

It now seems criminal that two bands used their worst singles to create the dullest beef in the history of beefs, resulting in half a million record buyers being ripped off with sub-standard product.

Roll With It is a leaden dirge that wasn't even worthy of a Slade b-side. Country House was Blur at their most annoying, so faux posh that you could imagine Jacob Rees-Mogg enjoying it. That's right: just imagine Rees-Mogg snuggling under the covers with his gramophone, flicking himself off to the line "everything's going jackanory".

I wouldn't mind if this had been a couple of crap bands scrapping it out: if the Cheeky Girls wanted to have a fist fight with Las Ketchup, I'd have just left them to it. But these lads were at the top of their games – and they farted out such nonsense. I can only drool at some alternate universe in which The Masterplan went up against The Universal. Instead we got, in the parlance of South Park, a turd sandwich versus a giant douche bag.

That was only the beginning. The massive media attention then morphed into 'Cool Britannia', the broadsheet-friendly Union Flag-waving version of Britpop that saw Ginger Spice become ruler of South Africa or something. Meanwhile, indie music never quite recovered: this fatal breach of quality opened up the beige hell-mouth that was the Stereophonics, Travis and Satan's favourite band Coldplay.

I'm not necessarily saying that the Oasis versus Blur battle killed indie music forever: that's for you to decide. But what a con it was. Thank goodness for the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy soldiering on during it all, cementing a glorious electronic future, otherwise there'd be no music left worth listening to apart from the ever-fading echo of disappointed sighs. 

As a great philosopher once wrote, "I think I've got a feeling I've lost inside." You, me and the rest of us, Liam.

Further Fats: Christmas chart battles and the chamber of echoes (2014)

Further Fats: 1997: what the flip was going on? (2017)

The best thing I heard in June was… (drum roll, please)

I heard many amazing things in June. Here is a list.

1. A magpie warbling like a crazy little thing inside a bush
   
   
2. Game Of Thrones – the soundtrack bit, not the head-chopping-off bits
   
   
3. A chap singing the Danger Mouse theme tune in the style of Pulp
   
   
4. The sound of my bedroom fan white-noising my overheated self to sleep
   
   
5. The 808 State listen-along for #TimsTwitterListeningParty
   
   
6. Actually, yes, the head-chopping-off bits in Game Of Thrones
   
   
7. A chap chopping the head off Danger Mouse in the style of Pulp
   
   
8. Magpies hitting my fan to the rhythm of 808 state.... inside a bush

All these sounds are undoubtedly exquisite audio sculptures that make your ears feel like a carpet of velvet unicorns. Why not recreate the above sounds using cardboard tubes, a staple gun and some glitter?

Despite all that noise nonsense, there is one sound that topped them all. There is one sound that was undoubtedly the best thing I heard in June...

In fact, a whole bunch of us picked our favourite music of the month on the Picky Bastards website. One writer picked the new Phoebe Bridgers (pictured) album that everyone's banging on about. Someone else picked Lady Gaga's Chromatica. My pick? I chose Special Request's lightning-sharp Spectral Frequency, a track released a short while ago but rereleased this month on vinyl. It put a rocket up June's bum like nothing else.

Read all about the track's resonating drums and sweaty rave flashbacks on the PBs website (my choice is at the end because I always submit last). Have a read there, and have a listen below.

The Guardian puts a clonk on it

If you're quick, you can still get the Guardian's tribute to Warp Records, cut it out with your mam's sewing scissors, and plaster it on your wall like a great big fanboy.

'Bleep Of Faith' is a neat little feature looking back on 20 years of the electronic music label.

It contains all the obvious gems of Warp mythology, listed here for your easy digestment, plus one or two lovely stories. I especially like the image of LFO fighting on stage like they were some kind of Kraftwerkian Gallagher brothers.

- Warp Records was conceived in a bedroom. Arf!;

- modern electronica was born with the release of the Artificial Intelligence album;

- the first release (Track With No Name) was flogged from the back of a car;

- they fooled Pete Tongue into thinking the future of music was something called "clonk";

- they happen to make some pretty bloody good films (the best of which is This Is England)

- LFO used to fight on stage. Like Brian Jonestown Massacre;

- the label was started with a £40 Enterprise Allowance grant;

- Richard David James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin, is something of a 'maverick'. You'd never guess;

- signing the likes of Maximo Park had purists spluttering into their chai tea;

- the early releases apparently sounded exactly like Sheffield, which makes Warp totally different from Pulp, who also sounded exactly like Sheffield... who were, incidentally, totally different from the Human League, who also .... you get the idea.

The Designers Republic vs B12 Records: are the 1990s dead?

I was sad to see The Designers Republic close its doors last week.

Through work for many bands (Autechre, Aphex Twin, Pop Will Eat Itself, Pulp) and classic video games, they pretty much defined 1990s graphic design for me.

According to a piece in the Creative Review, founder Ian Anderson explained:

“We’d lost a couple of clients, didn’t win a couple of pitches, got a tax bill which should have been sorted out and wasn’t and a major client who didn’t pay the money they owed us – in themselves any of those things would have been fine but when they come all at once there’s not much you can do.”

So sad.  They made a Google image search look sexy.  Their record covers looked like the music, like a kind of creeping Talented Mr Ripley metamorphis.  Wipeout 2097 wouldn't have been the game it was without their abject coolness, and they utterly defined PopWill Eat Itself's image.

They're not wiped out for good (did you see what I did there?) as I'm sure something will rise from the paint fumes.  Speaking of paint fumes, the picture of Designers-style graffiti at the top of this post was taken by John Wardell.  No-one needs Banksy when you have this graf in the basement.

On a more positive vibe, B12 are keeping the 1990s well and truly alive by rereleasing their complete back catalogue in a seven volume Archives series.

Rewind to the early '90s for a moment.  Modern electronica came out of the dregs of rave culture, when a cluster of assorted dredded dancers and smiley pill-poppers wanted music for the head as much as for the body.

B12's Archives series tracks the invention of IDM and intelligent techno, and spans many important moments in post-rave electronica.  It includes tracks used in the Electro Soma and the Artificial Intelligence compilations, the former of which you can hear at the bottom of this post.

Absolute techno nirvana, in seven double-CD chunks.  Volume three is out this week, which largely contains tracks from '91 and '92 and contains four unreleased tracks.  The 1990s may be dead visually, but the beautiful noise lives on.

[THE EMBEDDED MEDIA THAT WAS HERE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE]