Leader Luke Haines hated many things, not least the classifying of his arty indie band under the Britpop umbrella. Before the fatal hubris of the Cool Britannia phase, which generated an NME article proclaiming Noel Gallagher the most influential person in Britain, Britpop’s bands were clever and observant, or at least interesting.
But it wasn’t always the embarrassing uncle that nobody wants to acknowledge. And that’s how many remember Britpop today: a backward-looking bubble of we-are-the-champions triumphalism. Along with marking the moment Oasis’s creative well ran dry, it turned out to be Britpop’s endgame, sweeping the whole genre into the dustbin. This year is the 20th anniversary of Oasis’s Be Here Now, an album ripe for sympathetic reappraisal, if only because any record that attracts so much rancour can’t be all bad.
