Latest news with #CoolBritannia
The Guardian
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I love England so much': From TV to pop, film to fashion, the UK is enjoying a cultural resurgence
In the opening episode of Lena Dunham's Netflix show Too Much, a heartbroken New Yorker moves to London to live out her fantasy of British life and love stories. Jess is quickly swept up in her feelings for an indie musician, dreamily referring to him as 'My Mr Darcy, my Rochester, my Alan Rickman'. Produced by the team behind Bridget Jones, Notting Hill and Love Actually, the show was inspired by Dunham's own move to London in 2021. But the wholehearted embrace of the UK by a quintessential New Yorker – 'I loved Jane Austen, I loved Charlotte Brontë … I was one of those little anglophile kids' – reflects a wider cultural pivot. Three decades on from Cool Britannia, cultural commentators say we are in the throes of a 'Brit-culture renaissance': British men are once again a romantic ideal, Oasis are back together, 'Britishcore' became a viral social media trend and Jane Austen is getting more reboots than Marvel comic books. 'Cool Britannia is back!' Tatler declared, as it dedicated its new August cover to the offspring of Britpop stars. 'Youth culture today is more visually and sonically proud of its Britishness than it's been in decades,' said Luke Hodson, the founder of Nerds Collective, a youth marketing agency. 'The UK's global output is hitting differently right now.' This summer, thousands watched Olivia Rodrigo profess her love for all things British during her headline set at Glastonbury. 'I love England so much. I love how nobody judges you for having a pint at noon. I love English sweets, all the sweets from M&S, Colin the Caterpillar specifically,' said the pop star, dressed in union flag shorts. 'I have had three sticky toffee puddings since coming to Glastonbury. And as luck would have it, I love English boys,' she added, referencing her beau Louis Partridge. Over the past year, Google searches for 'British men' have increased by 21%, while Americans have been writing of their preference for dating Britons. Even though Taylor Swift has traded Hampstead Heath for Americana (and wrote So Long, London to mark the end of years spent in the company of British people), other high-profile transatlantic relationships are spotlighting UK-US links: Tom Holland and Zendaya are regularly spotted in New Malden's Waitrose; Andrew Garfield took Monica Barbaro to Wimbledon. Are we Britons confirming our own bias? Maybe not. Fresh on the tail of Too Much, Netflix's My Oxford Year is yet another series about an American student falling in love among the city's dreaming spires. But there may be something more here than just a transatlantic love-in. The UK's resurgent pop culture moment has coincided with a 1990s renaissance that has swept across music, film and fashion. Call it Cool Britannia 25. Its potency, according to Hodson, lies in its blend of 90s national pride mixed with a celebration of a more inclusive and globally resonant British identity. 'This isn't a repeat of Cool Britannia as we knew it,' Hodson said. 'This is a redefined moment, powered by a more diverse and globally connected Britain. Back then, it was Blur, Oasis, the Spice Girls – iconic, sure, but also largely monocultural. Today's wave feels less like a marketing push and more like an organic reclamation of British identity by the communities who were historically left out of the narrative.' Hodson referenced Stormzy wearing a union flag bulletproof vest designed by Banksy at Glastonbury in 2019, AJ Tracey wrapped in the union flag for Dork magazine, Central Cee performing in British flag graphics and streetwear brands such as Lostboys and IDA incorporating the flag in their designs. Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion 'You've got kids in the US dressing like inner-city Londoners, using UK slang, mimicking Skepta. That used to be unimaginable,' he said. Analysis shows that British slang words such as 'bonkers' and 'cheeky' are increasingly being adopted in the US, thanks to music and gen Z's liking for television shows including Love Island. This has been expressed by megastars including Drake collaborating with British rappers and Charli xcx storming the world with her album Brat – a quintessentially London aesthetic that evoked turn of the century excess and rave culture. Are the original Cool Britannia generation happy to see their little bit of history repeating? Not all of them believe it is. Daniel Rachel, the bestselling author of Don't Look Back in Anger: The Rise & Fall of Cool Britannia, said 90s culture could not be easily separated from the sociopolitical circumstances of the time – including the after-effects of Thatcherism and a renewed national pride with the election of Tony Blair, who 'few people would measure Keir Starmer against'. 'The decade exploded because of the desperation and repression creative people felt and engineered into their work,' Rachel added. 'We may be living through a similar pattern of events, particularly with the troubling rise of rightwing rhetoric across the globe, but if Cool Britannia is to be repeated the seeds will not be found in glossy Netflix-commissioned sitcoms or attention-grabbing social media influencers. 'They will be bubbling in the underfunded, underpaid, backstreets of the UK where our country's greatest artists have always risen from.'
The Guardian
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Human Traffic review – one-crazy-night 90s clubbing comedy provides euphoric rush of nostalgia
A warm nostalgic glow surrounds this likably daft and zeitgeisty one-crazy-night clubbing adventure from 1999. It's a Cool Britannia time-capsule written and directed by Justin Kerrigan, starring John Simm, Shaun Parkes, Lorraine Pilkington, Nicola Reynolds and a cherubic young Danny Dyer making his movie debut. Dyer's character ends up down the pub moodily swearing off drugs for ever – and if we wondered how that was going to turn out, we can flashforward to his performance this year in Nick Love's Marching Powder, in which he does much the same thing. Human Traffic revolves around a group of gurning mates: a classic 90s ensemble of mononymous characters – Jip, Koop, Lulu, Nina and Moff – individually introduced in freeze-frame voiceover in that distinctive 90s Britmovie style, as popularised by Danny Boyle's Trainspotting and Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But those films were from Mars and this one is from Venus. It's a sweeter story of the loved-up. They struggle through terrible jobs in the week and prepare for a massive night out on a Friday involving landlines, smoking indoors, proto-Ali G characters, no smartphones, no social media and some cameos from Howard Marks, Carl Cox and Andrew Lincoln (in those days an icon for his role in TV's This Life). It's a comedy, with some very funny stuff from Dyer when his character has drug-induced epiphanies about Star Wars. There's a reference in the opening credits to demonstrations against the anti-rave Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, but these are otherwise remarkably apolitical characters, whose ideology consists in being cheerfully pro-drugs, pro-hedonism and pro-having a laugh. Yet a weird earnestness comes through so often; at the time, critics mocked this film's fantasy scene in which the young people stand up to sing their alternative 'national anthem' about how mixed up and alienated they feel: 'We're running out of new ideas … Who is the Queen?' Now, it feels like a striking and interestingly surreal moment. I'd also forgotten that Jip's mother is supposed to be a sex worker. In another type of film, that fact simply would not be allowed to pass without some terrible crisis, or some consequent tearful and cathartic bonding between mother and son. Jip is also supposed to be suffering from erectile dysfunction and he is secretly in love with Lorraine Pilkington's Lulu, but none of that is supposed to be anything to do with his mum who is basically cheerful about everything. Human Traffic is a reminder of that interesting 90s moment when euphoria and uncomplicated fun had cultural cachet. Now we need a rerelease of that other one-crazy-night ensemble drug comedy from 1999, Doug Liman's Go, starring the formidable Sarah Polley. Human Traffic is in UK cinemas from 16 July and on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from 21 July.
Telegraph
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Britain should be thanking Thatcher for the Oasis reunion
With the much-anticipated Live '25 reunion tour by a newly-peaceful Oasis spectacularly kicking off at Cardiff's Principality Stadium last weekend, there is an unlikely heroine linked to the Mancunians' meteoric success, the birth of Britpop and the 90s Cool Britannia movement which exploded in its wake. Labour's Tony Blair may have basked in the morning glory of Cool Britannia, hailing its protagonists in Downing Street in 1997 and riding the wave of a creative tsunami which saw music, art, fashion, film, the media, politics and football coalesce in an unimaginable way. Yet there is an improbable political figure who some might say deserves acclaim for the popular culture juggernaut which raced through Britain almost exactly 30 years ago. Step forward Margaret Hilda Thatcher. Thatcher and the Gallagher brothers may seem implausible bedfellows and Lady T may have exited her stage in 2013, but without one of her government's 1980's policies in particular, Britpop – and thus this momentous Oasis Live '25 tour – may have never birthed. The reunion is projected to gross £400m and takes Liam and Noel across Britain, to the Americas, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Working for The Sun in the 1990s and becoming editor of its show business column, Bizarre, I had a ringside seat for the group's – and the accompanying movement's – explosion onto the front pages. I witnessed the band's bombastic live shows from 1994 in London and via Tokyo, California, Oslo, Milan, Majorca and Exeter, but peaking at Manchester's Maine Road and Knebworth in 1996, around the time of The Sun's highest ever daily full-price sale of 4.78m, in March of that glorious year. Musical, media and technological landscapes have fractured so significantly over the past decades that I cannot envisage any British group hereafter emerging with such impact and cultural significance. But, according to leading figures from that era, the seeds for the Gallaghers' rise and resurrection may have been sown back in 1983, when Thatcher launched the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. The brainchild of her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, its aim was to stimulate entrepreneurship, with the jobless rate standing north of 11 per cent. Recipients were provided with £40-a-week for up to a year and claimants needed to prove £1,000 in savings and to have been unemployed for at least eight weeks. The scheme supported 103,000 people annually at its peak, but received criticism from those who felt it was simply shielding true jobless figures. It is, however, credited with helping 325,000 people to become self-employed. But an unanticipated side effect of the policy was its stimulation of the creative sector with many key Cool Britannia figures taking advantage. One man the PM helped was somebody firmly on the other side of the political divide – Creation Records' Alan McGee, the man who discovered Oasis in 1993. He admits: 'Say what you like about Thatcher, may she rot in hell, but her enterprise allowance helped me and a lot of others who probably wouldn't want to put their hand up to it. It's what funded most people at Creation Records to begin with.' Young British Artist Tracey Emin, synonymous with Cool Britannia, thinks Thatcher should be credited for her role in the creative industries – and the artist's own career, insisting: 'How did I get here today? The Enterprise Allowance: thank you Margaret Thatcher. It was a really difficult time, but whatever Margaret Thatcher was or wasn't, she obviously did some things right. It was f---ing brilliant. You set up your own business and got a guaranteed income for a year. Life on the enterprise allowance was so much better than life on the dole. The majority of us were really grateful for every little bit we were given from the government.' Other Thatcher beneficiaries include Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, back at Number One in the album charts last month, Portishead, Chris Donald, the founder of Viz magazine, Julian Dunkerton of fashion label Superdry, and Turner Prize-winning artists Jeremy Deller and Rachel Whiteread, its first-ever female recipient. Another was Keith Jeffrey, who used the funds to establish Newcastle's legendary venue The Riverside where Kurt Cobain's Nirvana played their first ever non-US gig in October 1989. So, Thatcher brought grunge to Britain, too. Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder is adamant that Britpop and his role in the Madchester scene, which predated and inspired it, would not have happened without Maggie's Magic Money Tree, admitting: 'We probably wouldn't even be in a band if it wasn't for her, she started us up with the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. So when we was on it, it was guys setting up their shoe-selling business or people going into selling flowers and we was setting up a band. Because there was no jobs around at the time, you either went into crime or into making music.' When asked whether Thatcher saved him from jail, Shaun answered: 'I guess so.' Tory stalwart Lord David Willetts believes Thatcher would have been proud of her creative legacy: 'She liked the idea of get-up-and-go, encouraging entrepreneurialism. The benefits bill was surging so much that you could justify relatively modest schemes like this. I'm sure that's how it was sold to her. It wouldn't have been her taste in music, but she was a fan of anything that made Britain prominent. I'm sure she'd have found their politics juvenile, but as long as they didn't end up back on benefits, that was fine.' And Thatcher's successor John Major concurred: 'Success is economically good for our country. Ian McKellen's skills as an actor or Tracey Emin's as an artist, and so on. It's not only the great captains of industry or the politicians, or the big companies that build our national success. It's also the aggregate importance of individual effort that adds to the diversity, the culture of our country, and this our national economic well-being.' And the Oasis dates will certainly benefit a struggling UK economy with experts estimating they will generate £940 million in fan spending. According to research from Novuna Personal Finance, almost 1.4 million fans will spend an average of £682.80 per person on tickets, travel, food, drink, accommodation, and shopping. Most is expected to stay within local communities, with 57.9 per cent of the total spend – equivalent to £544.9 million – projected to flow directly into the economies of the four host cities – Cardiff, Manchester, London and Edinburgh. Fellow Mancunian Morrissey of The Smiths, an Oasis hero and influence, once sang about his dream of seeing Thatcher on a guillotine. But, according to the cast of Cool Britannia, the controversial leader helped fashion a musical and artistic legacy which will live forever and continues to stimulate the UK economy today.
Telegraph
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
My life on the road with Oasis, the greatest rock band of the modern age
This piece has been updated since its first publication One weekend in August 1996, a quarter of a million fans gathered in the grounds of Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, to crown Oasis as rulers of Cool Britannia. Drums thundered, guitars rang out, strings soared and horns blasted through climactic anthem Champagne Supernova, whilst songwriter Noel Gallagher beamed in smug satisfaction and the bug-eyed figure of his onerous sibling Liam Gallagher spread his arms wide and roared 'Where were you when we were getting high?' Well, I know exactly where I was. I was standing deep in the heart of that crowd, with my arm over the shoulder of my own brother, singing along at the top of my voice. As I wrote in the Telegraph at the time: 'Great earthshaking, groundbreaking, world-beating rock and roll occurs at a point where the expression of an artist and the needs of the audience coincide. Right now, this is where Oasis stand.' Later, when the band had been helicoptered away to continue fighting, cursing, slurping and snorting at their leisure, their audience were left to shuffle painfully towards the exits. For three hours, packed in bomber jackets and bucket hats, we barely moved. Yet all that time, we kept our spirits high by singing Don't Look Back in Anger, Wonderwall and Live Forever. And now we are all singing those songs again, serenading the return of Britpop's favourite sons as if no time has passed at all. The comeback concert by Oasis in Cardiff's Principality Stadium was everything a fan could have hoped for. The band was loud. The crowd was louder. Delivering a solid gold set of 100 per cent proof Britpop bangers, Oasis blasted away the years in an incredible blizzard of noise, distorted guitars, bombarding drums, rumbling bass, soaring melodies and tens of thousands of voices raised in song. Noel frowned at his guitar like it was a problem he was still trying to solve whilst peeling off immaculate solos and licks. Liam shook his tambourine and spat out every lyric like he was ready to burst his lungs and shred his throat in fierce and exultant delight. 'Yes, beautiful people, it's been too long,' he declared, which was pretty much the only indication that this marked the end of 16 years of separation. It was a magnificent return, everything anyone could have hoped for, with a little bit more on top. The sight and sound of multitudes of fans too young to have ever seen Oasis before uniting in song with old Britpop veterans was something to behold, as an all-ages audience became a mass extension of the band, punching their arms and singing, until we were all swallowed in a big, rocky vortex of sound and community. Britain has produced many gold-standard rock bands, and I would cite The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen and The Clash as the greatest of all time. To that pantheon we must add Oasis, the outstanding British rock band of the modern age. I know there will be scepticism about such a proclamation, although not amongst the 14 million people who desperately scrambled to buy tickets when the reunion was announced, or the two million set to attend 40 shows of a world tour that has kicked off with ecstatic five-star reviews from every critic, publication and media outlet privileged enough to cover it. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Oasis (@oasis) The hi-def screens may have been bigger, wider and more dynamic than anything Oasis would have dragged out on tour back in the glory days. But otherwise nothing had really changed. A band of men stood spread across the front of a stage, playing hard and loud. Oasis perform as if showmanship is beneath them. They stand still, battering out songs with thunderous drums, fuzzy guitars and barely a hint of musical nuance. Liam spits out lyrics as if he is ready to take on the whole world in a fight. Noel's elegantly rising and falling melodies do the rest, inspiring the biggest communal sing-alongs you could ever hope to hear. 'You can't argue with a good tune, man,' as Noel once told me. Oasis songs are absurdly catchy, bristling with earworm hooks and snappy lyrics performed with total commitment, putting melody at the heart of hard rock. It is like hearing a whole history of British rock in three-minute bursts, the power of Led Zeppelin playing Beatles songs with the swagger of The Rolling Stones. 'I've never been interested in pushing music forward,' according to Noel. 'Life is so chaotic in Oasis anyway, I don't want to be experimenting as well. 'Let's try this in an urban cyber-sonic punk style.' No, give us that Marshall stack and that guitar, I know where I am, thank you very much.' When Oasis signed to Creation Records in 1993, Noel had one question for the label: 'We're going to be the biggest band in the world. Can you handle it?' I remember a time before Oasis, when rock felt moribund, an old genre fading in the dawn of a new electronic and digital age. Pop was splintering into a sci-fi slipstream of techno, jungle, trip hop, big beat and jangly psychedelic indie. Ubiquitous yet unfocussed, all this amorphous noise was strangely easy to ignore. Pop music was everywhere, yet nothing was holding the centre. There were no songs we could all sing together. And then boom. In April, 1994, Supersonic was the perfect debut single for the Britpop era, riding in on an insolent riff, sneering vocals and euphoric surrealistic lyrics bound by the assertion that 'you can have it all.' It only reached number 31 but it was enough to put Oasis on Top Of The Pops and give Britain a glimpse of its future. A month later, Definitely Maybe became the fastest-selling debut album in UK pop history. When we think of the Nineties, the monobrow image of the Gallagher brothers is stamped across the decade. It was surely one of the oddest love affairs in pop history, when a gang of coke-snorting, heavy drinking scallywags were clutched to the collective bosom of the nation, celebrated from Coronation Street to Downing Street whilst waving two fingers at everyone, including each other. Oasis scored 22 consecutive top 10 singles and eight number one albums between 1994 and 2008, with an estimated 75 million record sales. Their second album, (What's the Story) Morning Glory was the biggest-selling album in the world in 1995. The Gallaghers became the nation's favourite soap opera. They fought, they swore, they stormed off tours, cancelled gigs and fell out with each other and every original member of the band, and yet achieved something no pop group since the Beatles had done, infusing a whole country with their own self-belief. Britpop was a great time to be a music journalist. There was a blurring of lines between bands, fans and media. I had many memorable encounters with Oasis, one of the oddest being Liam playing peacemaker when a food fight broke out in a café between members of the Spice Girls and All Saints. The most surreal was driving across San Francisco Golden Great Bridge in a van with U2 and Oasis after a stadium double bill, everyone singing U2's anthem One. 'I love stadium gigs,' Noel told me, eyes shining. 'How many bands can do this? How many?' He proposed a topsy-turvy theory of rock status. 'We are the underground and everybody else is the mainstream. Cause they're all afraid of success!' Britain grew heady with notions of musical empires, and Cool Britannia became a briefly triumphalist catchphrase, echoing tothe rise of New Labour's champagne socialism. Into this funnel would pour the Spice Girls, Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley, Baddiel and Skinner, Fantasy Football, Three Lions, Loaded magazine, Katie Price, Vinnie Jones, Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, Chris Evans, TFI Friday, Robbie Williams, Harry Potter, Damien Hirst's factory produced spot paintings and a £150,000 price tag on Tracey Emin's unmade bed. It almost goes without saying that it all ended badly. The way Oasis swept everything before them, there was an assumption that the sky was the limit. In 1997, third album Be Here Now was initially proclaimed a masterpiece, yet despite notching up six million sales came to be regarded as overworked and hollow. As members left and were replaced, each successive album was scrutinised through a lens of their explosive past and found mysteriously lacking. The critical consensus was that Oasis had lost their way, but it might simply be that the pop zeitgeist moved on, whilst Oasis continued surfing their own mighty wave. They released towering singles throughout the 2000s (Go Let It Out, The Hindu Times, Songbird, Lyla, The Importance of Being Idle, The Shock of the Lightning). Epic ballad Stop Crying Your Heart Out became the soundtrack to the England football team's quarter final defeat in the World Cup in 2002. There was a generosity of spirit in Oasis that put their critics to shame. When the whole country has its dreams shattered, who would you want to sing to you? Radiohead? S Club 7? Or a bunch of stout hearts from Manchester who could never admit defeat? With the public onside, Oasis continued to play packed stadiums to the bitter end. And it was bitter, rooted in the antagonistically contrary personalities of the duelling brothers. For a while their sibling conflict had provided much public amusement, with tiffs conducted in a ludicrously comedic language. Noel characterised Liam as 'the angriest man you'll ever meet. He's like a man with a fork in a world of soup'. Liam branded Noel a 'working-class traitor' for the sin of eating tofu. Yet the animosity directed towards each other was counterbalanced by the unity with which they faced the outside world, performing anthems of togetherness such as crowd favourite Acquiesce, duetting 'We need each other, we believe in one another.' Until they didn't. Oasis split minutes before a concert in Paris in August 2009, when another trivial argument escalated, guitars were smashed and Noel stormed out. His subsequent statement made it sound like he was suffering from PTSD, insisting 'I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer.' The Gallagher brothers may be the most psychoanalysed siblings in rock history, yet a tragedy of their relationship is that they have rarely seemed interested in examining it themselves. Noel is the elder by six years, a clever man with a good heart and a lot of humour, whose company I always enjoy. Instinctively opposed to self-analysis, Noel considers songwriting 'a calling' and once told me 'I don't aggressively pursue songs, all the great ones just appear.' He recognised recurrent themes, 'escape, love and hope' but insisted his songs were not autobiographical. 'I write from the perspective that there's this imaginary person called Noel-and-Liam,' he told me in 2007. 'Really, I'm quite a private person and I don't want anybody to know what's going on inside my heart.' For a rock star of his magnitude, Noel is almost entirely without airs and graces. 'I like to think I keep it real,' he said, 'and Liam keeps it surreal.' Yet one thing that always baffled me is Noel's blindness to his volatile brother's neediness. Was it really so hard to detect in Liam's provocations a desire for the unforthcoming approval of his older sibling? It was Liam who first formed Oasis, and Liam who invested Noel's songs with a charisma you could cut with a knife, a magnetic performer who could dig out emotion in even his brother's most cryptic lyrics. 'When I go on stage I try and eat that microphone,' he told me. 'That's it really. I'm not Jumping Jack Flash. I stand as still as I possibly can. I'm in a bubble, man, singing them songs, trying to blast through people's souls, change their lives. I'm not thinking about anything except getting the message across. I don't even know what the f---ing message is! I just wanna blast them with rock and roll.' I have had some fun times in Liam's company, but I've also been attacked and insulted by him and once endured an interview where he thought it would be amusing not to answer any questions ('I'm not joking, man, I just can't remember,' was pretty much all I got). But I don't demand of rock stars that they be sane, normal, well-balanced human beings. Liam and Noel's furious internal chemistry might be the very definition of a unit greater than the sum of its parts. Sixteen years after breaking up, Oasis still have 25 million monthly listeners on Spotify, over twice the number of their erstwhile Britpop rivals Blur. Their eight number one studio albums and three major compilations remain regular fixtures of the British charts, collectively amassing 1,824 weeks in the top 75. Wonderwall has clocked up 2.4 billion streams on Spotify, a service that was only launching in the UK when Oasis broke up. According to music data analytics site Chartmetric, Oasis are still ranked in the top 20 British artists in the world, and in the top 10 in the UK itself. It is not unusual to hear spontaneous outbreaks of crowds singing Oasis songs at public gatherings. An impromptu rendition of Don't Look Back in Anger in St Ann's Square, Manchester in July 2017 in response to the Manchester Arena bombing was a powerful demonstration of its enduring emotional significance. What's fascinating is how much Oasis matter to people too young to remember Britpop. Both Noel (now 58) and Liam (52) have carved out arena-level, chart-topping solo careers, but it is Liam who has really carried the Oasis torch. He played to 170,000 fans across two nights at Knebworth in 2022, a larger audience than Oasis drew in 1996. They certainly weren't all men of a certain age fishing out bucket hats for one last hurrah. Liam has a near legendary status amongst younger British music lovers, who have been indoctrinated by their parents' record collections while connecting with his wackily amusing online personality and steadfast refusal to mature beyond the lairy spirit of rock'n'roll. Liam is widely celebrated as The Last Rock Star Standing, a man who delivers every note of every song in a tone that cuts right through the mix and burns to the soul. Ultimately, it is the songs that have kept Oasis in the ether. Noel may talk down his sophistication as a songwriter, but he has a rare gift: the magic that makes things flow. His songs are not always particularly clever, and are rarely radical or earth-shattering, but there are moments when you hear them and nothing else will do. And that moment has arrived once more. The second coming of Oasis offers something more substantial and joyous than just a rapprochement between battling siblings, it represents a reunion between an audience and their favourite band, a reunion between Britain and rock and roll.
Scotsman
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
19 releases from the Cool Britannia era that became incredibly valuable over the years
The Britpop revival has been underway for months, but it's really come into vogue after Oasis's triumphant, sometimes still unbelievable return in Cardiff last night. Those nostalgic moments many felt at the show will no doubt conjure up the zeitgeist of Cool Britannia; when Britain ruled the airwaves both sides of the Atlantic, interest in British music was at a level akin to the British Invasion of the '60s, and a number of acts were giving their US counterparts a run for their money. Then, of course, there were the numerous releases – which is what we're focusing on today. We've taken a look at Discogs, the online music marketplace, to see what releases from a number of Britpop acts are worth a small fortune – with one release in particular having sold for just over £800 previously on the website. Some of these records are incredibly rare, while others, for music fans of a certain age, might just be lounging in your collection begging to be played... or sold, depending on your feelings about the artists in 2025. So, what have been some of the most valuable records from the era of Cool Britannia, and what were the most they sold for through Discogs? Read on to find out! 1 . Echobelly - On (Vinyl, LP, Album Vinyl, 7_, 33 ⅓ RPM, 45 RPM, Single, Limited Edition - Rhythm King – FAUV 6 LX, Rhythm King – 7 FAUV 6, UK, 1995) Echobelly's sophomore album, On, released in 1995, cemented their status as sharp, melodic, and socially aware voices of the Britpop era. Led by the charismatic Sonya Madan, this record showcased their evolution from their debut with tracks like Great Things. This particular UK pressing, a limited edition LP with a bonus 7-inch single, is a highly sought-after item by collectors, having fetched a highest price of £85.02 on Discogs. | Getty Images/Discogs Photo Sales 2 . Sleeper - Smart (Vinyl, LP, Album Vinyl, 7_, 33 ⅓ RPM, EP All Media, Limited Edition - Indolent Records – SLEEPLP 007A, UK, 1995) The electrifying debut from Sleeper, Smart burst onto the Britpop scene with Louise Wener's witty lyrics and infectious indie-pop hooks. It's a foundational album for the band and a defining moment of the era. This UK limited edition LP, accompanied by a bonus 7-inch EP, is a prime example of a valuable original pressing, with a highest recorded sale on Discogs of £95.00. | Getty Images/Discogs Photo Sales 3 . Cast - All Change (2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Numbered, Stereo, Gatefold - Polydor – 529312-1, UK & Europe, 16 Oct 1995) Cast's debut, All Change, was an instant Britpop classic, soaring to number seven in the UK charts. With John Power's distinctive vocals and anthemic tunes, it perfectly captured the optimistic spirit of the mid-90s. This valuable pressing is a UK & Europe limited, numbered, and gatefold 2xLP set, making it a highly desirable and rare find for collectors, fetching a highest price of £100.00 on Discogs. | Getty Images/Discogs Photo Sales 4 . Ocean Colour Scene - (2 × Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM, Album, Gatefold - MCA Records – 60048, UK, 15 Sep 1997) Marchin' Already, released in 1997, continued Ocean Colour Scene's phenomenal success, becoming their second consecutive UK No. 1 album. It solidified their blend of mod-influenced rock and soulful melodies. This UK original 2xLP pressing, mastered at 45 RPM for superior sound quality and housed in a gatefold sleeve, is a premium item for collectors, with a highest sale price of £104.99 on Discogs. | Discogs/Getty Images Photo Sales Related topics: BoostMusicAlbumsArtistsVinyl
