'Village greens and terraced streets': Britpop and representations of 'Britishness'

The term ’Britpop’ was coined by the media during the mid 1990s as a way of describing the musical style and, to some extent, visual image of new British bands such as Blur, Oasis and Pulp. The term was immediately embraced by a music industry anxious to reassert Britain’s trend-setting role in the pop music world. Indeed, some observers have argued that Britpop was (and is) primarily a marketing strategy, a way to put British popular music back in the frame in the aftermath of ’grunge’, the US neo-punk style pioneered by bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam (cf Storry & Childs, 1997: 320-321). However, it is also possible to view the lasting appeal of Britpop in a rather different light. It could be argued that Britpop endorses and thus reinforces particular ideas about what it means to be British in an age when the concept of a British national identity is becoming increasingly problematic. During the course of this article I want to consider a number of possible connections which can be made between the commercial success of Britpop and the (re)construction of a British national identity. The article is in three parts. In the first instance I want to set the scene a little by briefly discussing several studies which have looked at the relationship between music and national identity. I will then move on to consider several of the bands which could be described as having made up the first ’wave’ of British popular music during the 1960s, bands such as the Beatles, the Kinks and the Small Faces. Each of these