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Britpop

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 Primary Stylistic Influences:
Alternative Rock, The British Invasion, Madchester, Baggy, Glam Rock, Mod Revival, Punk Rock, Indie Pop


Secondary Stylistic Influences:
Pop, Hard Rock, Post-Punk, New Wave Music, Power Pop, some bands influenced by Psychedelic Rock, Progressive Rock, Shoegazing or Electronic Music

Britpop was a somewhat ill-defined scene in British Alternative Rock that first had its origins within the late 1980s and generally flourished in the mid 1990s.
There are a lot of eager tagging of bands, but what exactly Britpop was is difficult to define. One thing that does tend to be agreed is that the genre was kickstarted by the Manchester band The Stone Roses, with their debut album released in 1989. This album included much of what would categorise Britpop – influences from The British Invasion, Glam Rock and Punk Rock, local identity and regional British accents (the Roses themselves were associated with "Madchester", a cultural scene with roots in The Haçienda night club and involved with indie music, house, psychedelia … and lots of ecstasy), and catchy hooks and lyrics relevant to Britain's generation of young people. There was also Liverpool band, The La's, who were either twenty years ahead of their time or twenty behind. They too released an album with very much the same influences, albeit a lot less psychedelia, and managed a single hit with "There She Goes". These two bands were viewed as the ones who were slowly setting the scene in stone.
But it was The '90s where it started to really explode. When in 1991 Nirvana released "Smells Like Teen Spirit", Grunge quickly took over the British music consciousness: suddenly everyone had long hair and scrappy clothes again. A loose rabble of musicians in Britain took exception to this and turned to picking up where the Stone Roses and the La's had left off — to produce music that was somehow 'British' rather than the American stuff.
One of the two bands credited as truly starting the boom was Blur, a band already with minor commercial success that, after touring America in 1992 and finding the experience dreadful, delivered the song "Popscene", which along with the ensuing albums (such as Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife) helped make them one of Britpop's leading lights, with a sound best summed up as "The Beatles and The Kinks meet XTC". Suede were the other band that were starting the boom, glam rockers taking cues from David Bowie who camped it up around Camden Town and got their picture on the cover of Melody Maker before they even released their debut single "The Drowners�, which along with their debut album was definitely worth the hype.
Various other bands that had been around for more than five years, such as Pulp (a former post-punk band formed by a few teenage friends in 1978 and personal favourites of radio legend John Peel), The Boo Radleys (who were initially more part of the Shoegazing and Dream Pop scenes) and The Charlatans (who, like The Stone Roses, were part of the Madchester scene and delivered the hit album Some Friendly a few years beforehand), began to embrace Britpop and gain commercial success as a result, with Pulp's Different Class and The Charlatans' Tellin' Stories cited as two of the genres' most important albums. One of the first bands to form out of this new boom was Supergrass, a band of teenagers formed out of the ashes of their earlier band The Jennifers. They played a significantly pop punky brand of Britpop and would deliver one of the genre's most iconic songs, "Alright".
Radiohead is … a mixed bag. Whether or not they count as Britpop is still highly debated to this day. Though they were British and were experiencing their height of popularity in the 90s, their music is agreed to not be intentionally evoking the "Britishness" as the others and were generally more introspective and experimental; in fact their debut single "Creep" was much more in line with Grunge. They didn't even really get to their peak until Britpop ended (explained below later). But they're still cited as influential by Britpop's successors, and The Bends was poppy (to the point where it's the one album of theirs most commonly called Britpop, if not Post-Grunge), so who's to say no?
But the band that most likely comes to your mind when you hear the phrase "Britpop" would be Oasis. Emerging in 1994, they were big Mancunian fans of the Beatles and simple, big, stadium-filling rock 'n' roll. One of the "Big Four" (alongside Blur, Pulp and Suede), they were by far the most successful act to come out of the Britpop years, and the only ones who really made any impact in America.
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