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 Back to: Archive · 2005
Battle of Britain

From Q magazine, cover date: October 2005. Article by John Harris.

On Sunday 30 April 1995, Oasis achieved their first Number 1 single, when Some Might Say toppled Take That's Back For Good from the summit of the charts. According to some of their more over-excited champions, conveyor-belt pop music was now breathing its last, and the future belonged to electric guitars, retro casualwear and groups who knew their musical history. Such a vision, which had been gaining ground since early 1994, was denoted by one now familiar word: Britpop.


Thanks to Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher's new girlfriend, Meg Mathews, a party to mark Some Might Say's success was thrown at the Mars Bar, a plush bolt-hole in London's Covent Garden. By way of displaying a bit of camaraderie, its guests included Blur bassist Alex James and singer Damon Albarn, winding down after a day's work on the band's fourth album. "I went to their celebration party, just to say, Well done," Albarn later recalled. "And Liam [Gallagher, Oasis frontman] came over and, like he is, he said, Number f***in' 1, right in my face. So I thought, OK. We'll see..."


Four months later, the idea planted that night in Albarn's mind exploded into one of the most bizarre episodes in modern musical history. Thanks to a combination of corporate hard-headedness and Albarn's competitive streak, Blur grappled with Oasis, with a Number 1 single as the prize. The press, for want of anything more important to write about, worked themselves into such a lather that the two groups seemed to be battling for nation's soul; in the words of the Daily Mail, this was "the battle of the bands which became a full-scale class war".


When the smoke cleared, such talk inevitably seemed rather overblown. The sense of an anti-climactic comedown wasn't helped by the belated realisation that Country House and Roll With It hardly numbered among either band's best work. One fact however, was undoubtedly true: the Blur-Oasis battle had changed the rules of British music forever.



That February, Blur had been catapulted to a wholly unexpected level of fame by that year's Brit Awards. Hailed for 1994's Parklife, they received four statuettes - for Best Group, Best Album, Best Single and Best Video. As a result, they were rudely shoved into the world built around the paparazzi, daily appearances in the tabloid press, and the affections of the kind of people who only buy one CD a year. The following month, Damon Albarn visited the Houses of Parliament to drink gin and tonic in the company of Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and John Prescott, and discuss how he might assist New Labour's bid to secure the youth vote.


If the Brits had marked some dizzying moment of career advancement - "crossover", as the record industry would have it - at least one member of Blur had difficulty entering into the right spirit. "I couldn't really enjoy it, because our table was next to Oasis's, and Liam was giving me so much f***ing grief," says ex-Blur guitarist Graham Coxon. "I thought he was going to slap me. Every time I came back to the table, he would say, Look me in the eye and tell me you deserve that, you w***er. It was just totally stressful."


Strangely, Blur had used their brief acceptance speeches for the climactic Best Group trophy to pay tribute to Oasis; Albarn had said the award should have been shared between both groups, while Coxon offered the Gallagher brothers "love and respect". "I think it was getting a bit embarrassing by then," he says. "And I wasn't being sarcastic. I knew I had to go back and sit next to Liam [laughs]. It was probably meant to be a way of calming thing down. But it didn't. It was like waving a stick in a doggie's face."


The following day, Blur resumed work in the studio. Their new album - in essence a gaudier, more pantomimic update of Parklife - would be entitled The Great Escape. Among the music already put to tape was a song named Country House. "The demo was just guitar, bass and drums, and these witty lyrics," says Coxon. "I thought it was a great song. But then it became this thing - a big production with can-can girls."


That June, Blur played a huge outdoor show at the Mile End Athletics Stadium in East London. Country House was in the setlist, and the audience's frantic response to a song they had not even heard before was enough to mean it would be Blur's next single.



Throughout the opening months of 1995, those in charge of Blur and Oasis's careers had kept in regular contact about the release dates of their respective albums. Marcus Russell, Oasis's manager, was a friend of the Parlophone MD Tony Wadsworth, and each camp seemed only too happy to co-operate. "We were very, very careful," says Andy Ross, then the chief of Food Records, Blur's home since 1990. "It was always, If there are any changes of the release plans for either record, keep us posted. Everyone got quite relaxed about the fact that there wasn't going to be a problem."


In May, Oasis had begun the recording of (What's The Story) Morning Glory?. It was interrupted by at least one bout of brotherly violence (in which Noel had attacked Liam with a cricket bat), but put to tape in well under a month. It was slated for release in October, while The Great Escape was scheduled to appear around a month before. Thus, on the basis that the first single from an album tends to appear two or three weeks in advance of the main event, the Blur camp understood that the next Oasis single would be released a good month after Blur's return. What could possibly go wrong?


As it turned out, however, Roll With It - an energised though rather drab song, pitched somewhere between Status Quo and The Beatles circa 1964 - was planned to come out a week before Country House, on 14 August. "It wasn't meant aggressively," says Tim Abbot, then Oasis's marketing chief and a close associate of Noel Gallagher. "That's the way Creation worked. It was, Well, if it's ready, we'll put it out."


"We thought they were being mad," says Andy Ross. "But a Number 1 record tends to have a better-than-evens chance of being one the week after, just because it's on Top Of The Pops, and all the kids hear it. So by that logic they'd have had an extremely good chance of staying at Number 1, even if Blur had a good crack at it."


This, it seemed, was too much to bear. Moreover, the idea of delaying Blur's next releases seemed equally unpalatable. So it was that Andy Ross met Damon Albarn and Blur's manager Chris Morrison in a Marylebone pub, where - with the aforementioned Mars Bar moment presumably lurking in the back of the singer's mind - the three of them resolved to go head-to-head.


"With all the advertising booked, and posters with the release dates, you can't say, Well, hang about. Stop it," says Andy Ross. "Also, that would have looked like we were chickening out. The Oasis lot were - as had become clear - slightly vocal. There would have been no end of it: Soft Southern poofs duck out of fight with Oasis. So it was, Let's go for it. F*** 'em. We did it deliberately."


"Watching Damon, it was a bit like seeing your brother nicking things from a shop," says Graham Coxon. "I didn't really want to admit that it was going on. But at the same time, I wanted to say, What the f*** are you doing? In a way, it was quite exciting, because we could really see who was the greatest. But that's so pathetic, isn't it? It was such a big deal - that we had to find out who was the best."



"Blur are a bunch of middle-class w***ers trying to play hardball with working-class heroes," reckoned Noel Gallagher, whose words suggested he was only too happy to take the bait. "There'll only be one winner. Our ambition is to have more achievements and milestones than anybody in England." His aides seemed only too happy to echo such sentiments. Johnny Hopkins, the band's usually soft-spoken PR, reckoned that Blur were "the Chas & Dave of pop". Owen Morris, the producer of What's The Story, was scarcely more charitable. "I don't like Blur," he said, to no-one's great surprise. "They're not even cockneys. They're from Cheltenham or something." ("Owen Morris is fat, Welsh and has a tendency to wear women's clothing, so I wouldn't believe a word that comes out of his mouth," offered Noel).


Aside from the occasion when Damon Albarn appeared on Chris Evans's Radio 1 Breakfast Show, singing the Status Quo hit Rockin' All Over The World over Roll With It's opening bars, the Blur camp's strategy seemed to place more emphasis on marketing nous than playground joshing. Unlike the Oasis single, Country House was available on two CD formats, one of which sold at the knockdown price of £1.99 ("It's like an arms race," explains Andy Ross. "Once the gloves are off, you use the maximum means at your disposal"). And while Oasis's video was a nondescript performance job, Blur went for a gaudy, high-production affair, directed by Alex James's new friend Damien Hirst, and starring his close compadre Keith Allen. The idea was simple enough: thanks to the casting of glamour-model co-stars Joanne Guest and Sara Stockbridge, the Country House video melded Benny Hill and Loaded magazine.


For Graham Coxon, this led to no end of trouble. At the time, he was in a relationship with Jo Johnson, then the guitarist and singer with the angrily feminist indie quartet Huggy Bear, who were the de facto leaders of the UK wing of the short-lived upsurge known as riot grrrl. "Blur was democratic," he says, "but three people were saying, Yeah, I love this idea, and the other one was going, Well, I'm not sure, but I don't really want to say no, because I'll be a stick-in-the-mud. So we did it.


"I felt it was just a matter of time before my private life blew up about that. And it did. But that was the way that Blur worked: you kept your private life and your emotions pretty much out of it. This was business. It was, If we're going to make a video with girls rubbing their boobs, dressed up as milk-maids, that's how it's going to be. And we don't care if it's going to ruin somebody's relationship."


As far as Blur's presence in the press was concerned, the video did its work. The Sun ran a series of cleavage-centred stills, with the headline May Bust Men Win. This was only one instalment in a run of borderline-absurd coverage that peaked with the tale of Richard and Mandy Vivien-Thomas, from Redcliff, near Bristol. "Oasis-mad Mandy and Blur fan Richard have waged a war at home as the bands battle to be Number 1," the paper explained. "Mandy, 24, was so angry at Richard constantly playing new Blur disc Country House that she went on a nookie-strike, banished him to the sofa and threw his Blur CD collection out of a window." Her husband, meanwhile, put her Oasis CDs in a microwave and "brazenly wore a Blur T-shirt around the house".


Elsewhere, the battle was portrayed in slightly more orthodox terms. In the deluge of coverage that ran through the week the singles were released (the high point of which found a haughty-looking John Humphrys reading out a news item in front of a BBC backdrop featuring both groups' logos), there were two abiding themes. First, the two bands were supposed to be re-enacting the alleged '60s rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones - who, in actual fact, had always sought to avoid any clashing release dates. Second, there was the mouthwatering subtext of class conflict. For The Guardian, it was a matter of "working class heroes" battling with "art-school trendies". The Daily Express, meanwhile, claimed that, "It's not just a conflict of attitude, image and style. It's a battle of pitbull versus poodle, squat versus mansion and armpit versus deodorant."



On Sunday 20 August, Radio 1 announced the result. Early signs had suggested a slight lead for Oasis, but as it turned out, Country House had sold 274,000 to Roll With It's 216,000. The Blur camp threw a celebration party at the upmarket members-only club Soho House, at which Graham Coxon displayed his discomfort at being involved in a "circus of freaks" by attempting to jump out of a window. Oasis, meanwhile, kept quiet. "No matter where you went," says former Oasis guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs, "people would always bring up the big question: So what do you really think of Blur? Do you really hate them? It didn't really concern me. But I was secretly gutted, deep down, when they got to Number 1."


So, it seemed, was Noel Gallagher. "The thing is, I wanted my five [Number 1s] in a row, didn't I?" he mused, two months later. "So now I'm back to square one. The Jam had four and I wanted five, but that's just me. I was more pissed off about the way it happened. It was their decision to release the singles on the same day, and we knew that all along. Very childish."


Not entirely surprisingly, the resentment lingered on. Later that summer, it became clear that the two bands were set to play in Bournemouth on the same night. Oasis would be at the town's International Centre, and thanks to the idea of an unlikely tour of tiny seaside venues to accompany The Great Escape, Blur were to perform in the rather more compact Showbar. The tabloids thus speculated about the possibility of punch-ups between opposing fans, and the Oasis camp snapped.


"Marcus Russell and I were sitting by a swimming pool in Tokyo," recalls Ian Robertson, then the band's head of security. "And he was writing a letter to Blur's management... it was, Pull the show. We booked ours first. We're not interested in this marketing exercise. We don't want to play. Drop it." As it turned out, it was the Oasis show that was called off: when bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan fell victim to what amounted to a nervous breakdown, the Bournemouth date was among the casualties.


As the ensuing weeks and months passed, two aspects of the contest's legacy became all too clear. First, it was now established that for even the most bog-standard guitar groups, chart success was obligatory; as Alex James later put it, "At some point after that summer, it wasn't good enough to have your single go in at Number 18. Indie bands had to be selling." Second, though Oasis had supposedly been defeated, the whole brouhaha had afforded them a brilliant PR leg-up. The stage was thus set for the release of (What's The Story) Morning Glory?.


It was while he was engaging in the requisite promotional chores that Noel Gallagher let slip with the outburst that would send the two bands' rivalry to new depths of unpleasantness. Asked by The Observer's Miranda Sawyer whether he liked Blur "as people", he responded as follows: "The guitarist I've got a lot of time for. The drummer I've never met... The bass player and singer - I hope the pair of them catch Aids and die, because I f***ing hate them two." He later apologised, though his claim that he had "immediately retracted" the comment turned out to be false. Whatever, it was some token of Oasis's infallibility that, whereas more fragile careers might have thereby entered a terminal slide, the episode caused only a momentary hiccup.


"I don't know if he was going with the press thing, getting on the f***ing bandwagon, and convincing himself that he really did hate that band so much," says Paul Arthurs. "Cos I certainly couldn't. Whoever the band is, unless they've done something spiteful to you, how can you hate them? I could never get on board with Noel's hatred. I felt a bit of a dick to be involved with it at that stage."


Blur, meanwhile, fell into one of the more perilous periods of their career. By early 1996, howling tensions had become all too obvious: that February, the nadir of the post-Great Escape period found Damon Albarn and Dave Rowntree miming on Italian TV alongside a cardboard cut-out of Graham Coxon and a dutiful roadie named Smoggy, drafted in as temporary replacement for Alex James. As evidenced by 1997's "American album", Blur, Coxon effectively made the band's exit from "Britpop" the condition of his continued involvement - though by then, the B-word had already gone elsewhere. Whereas it had once denoted Blur and their London-based contemporaries (Pulp, Elastica, Menswear et al), it now referred to the '60s-fixated groups - Cast, Ocean Colour Scene, Kula Shaker - who were grouped by the weekly music press under the unpromising banner of "Noelrock".


Ten years on, that switch in the zeitgeist seems a little less important than the contest's most enduring legacy: its kicking-off of the era in which the kind of music that used to dominate festivals and student unions is pretty much everywhere. In the summer of 1995, the tabloids finally discovered that slightly unstable British musicians provided altogether better copy than either pop acts or the moneyed rock aristocracy; equally importantly, there would now always be room in even the most upmarket TV shows for the odd item involving electric guitars.


And that, for better or worse, is the way things have remained. Kirsty Wark interviews Pete Doherty on Newsnight; The Killers, Kasabian and Franz Ferdinand have to quickly adjust to life in The Sun. And Blur and Oasis, not entirely surprisingly, still don't like each other very much.