2025 Is The Summer of Britpop – And We've Never Needed It More
What year is it?
In the end, it was the washing machine that did it. Not the swagger, not the sneers, not even the sibling warfare that made Oasis the biggest band in the world for five magnificent, messy years. It was, metaphorically at least, the washing machine cycling endlessly in the background of the Gallagher family home, that Noel claimed he could no longer bear to share with his brother.
″I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer,” he said, and fifteen years later came the reunion announcement with all the fanfare of that same appliance’s instruction manual: a simple black and white image, a date, the sound of a million middle-aged hearts collectively skipping a beat.
But Oasis getting back together is just the most obvious symptom of something bigger happening in 2025. Britpop – that glorious, ridiculous, utterly unsustainable moment when British bands ruled the world by acting like they already did – is having what the marketing people would call “a moment.”
Virgin Radio has launched a dedicated Britpop station. Robbie Williams is back with a new album and tour literally called “Britpop”. Pulp have the number one album with More. This summer you can catch Sleeper, Cast, Ocean Colour Scene, Kula Shaker, Supergrass and Suede on tour. Suddenly everyone’s talking about the mid-90s like it was some sort of golden age, rather than the era that gave us Mr Blobby and the BSE crisis.
And it’s not just nostalgia capitalism operating on its usual 30-year cycle of anniversary editions and box sets. There’s something different about this particular resurrection. Something that feels less like grave-robbing and more like a genuine hunger for what Britpop represented: the radical idea that you could matter.
There’s a thing about Britpop that everyone forgets: it was never just about the music. It was about believing you mattered. About insisting that your voice, your story, your three-chord anthem could change the world.
It was working-class kids from Manchester acting like rock stars until they became rock stars. It was middle class pseuds from Colchester reimagining Englishness as young and classic-sounding and brilliant, in an age where John Major was talking about “warm beer and old maids cycling to Evensong”. It was the sound of a country that........
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