"EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW" AKA the UK version

Right enough J

Album Of The Millennium

Autumn 1997 Channel 4 and HMV, in association with The Guardian newspaper, joined forces to find out what the British public considers to be the best music of this millennium. Every type of music was eligible: from the Beatles to Beethoven; from country to classical; from pop to hip hop. It was the most ambitious survey ever undertaken.

Sgt Pepper

1. The Beatles - Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
3. The Beatles - Revolver
4. Radiohead - The Bends
5. Oasis - What's The Story? (Morning Glory)
6. Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
7. Radiohead - OK Computer
8. Nirvana - Nevermind
9. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks
10. The Beatles - The White Album
11. Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks
12. The Beatles - Abbey Road
13. Miles Davis - A Kind Of Blue
14. Oasis - Definitely Maybe
15. The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
16. Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde
17. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?
18. R.E.M. - Automatic For The People
19. U2 - The Joshua Tree
20. David Bowie - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust
21. Massive Attack - Blue Lines
22. Velvet Underground - Velvet Underground And Nico
23. Fleetwood - Mac Rumours
24. The Sex Pistols Never - Mind The Bollocks
25. Prodigy - The Fat Of The Land
26. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds
27. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
28. Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill
29. Portishead - Dummy
30. Oasis - Be Here Now
31. Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland
32. Primal Scream - Screamadelica
33. Paul Simon - Graceland
34. Pulp - Different Class
35. Joni Mitchell - Blue
36. The Clash - London Calling
37. Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
38. The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street
39. The Beatles - Rubber Soul
40. Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go
41. Captain Beefheart And The Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica
42. Love - Forever Changes
43. David Bowie - Hunky Dory
44. Lou Reed - Transformer
45. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
46. Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run
47. Meatloaf - Bat Out Of Hell
48. Blur - Parklife
49. Pink Floyd - The Wall
50. Joy Division - Closer
51. The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed
52. Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life
53. U2 - Achtung Baby
54. The Verve - Urban Hymns
55. George Michael - Older
56. The Clash - The Clash
57. Pixies - Doolittle
58. Bob Marley & The Wailers - Legend
59. Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
60. Prodigy - Music For The Jilted Generation
61. The Band - The Band
62. Spice Girls - Spice
63. Leftfield - Leftism
64. Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced?
65. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV
66. Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
67. Michael Jackson - Thriller
68. Neil Young After - The Gold Rush
69. Queen - A Night At The Opera
70. The Doors - The Doors
71. Carole King - Tapestry
72. Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
73. Prince - Sign Of The Times
74. Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti
75. Bob Dylan - Bringing It All Back Home
76. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures
77. Frank Sinatra - Songs For Swinging Lovers
78. Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love
79. Patti Smith - Horses
80. The Smiths - Hatful Of Hollow
81. John Lennon - Imagine
82. Suede - Dog Man Star
83. Beck - Odelay
84. Ocean Colour Scene - Moseley Shoals
85. The Smiths - The Smiths
86. Jeff Buckley - Grace
87. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin II
88. Tricky - Maxinquaye
89. Van Morrison - Moondance
90. John Coltrane - Love Supreme
91. Bjork - Debut
92. Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions….
93. R.E.M. - Out Of Time
94. Television - Marquee Moon
95. Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
96. Michael Jackson - HIStory
97. DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
98. The Verve - A Northern Soul
99. The Eagles - Hotel California
100. Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Worth it for bob geldofs indignation about the stone roses. he thought only albums of his generation were worthy

Goes without saying but good god that list

Only British acts in the top 7. Would that happen today?

Yeah I remember that too. Bob and Paul were so disgusted The Stone Roses could be ahead of any Beatles (Even though they were number one anyway)

Sidestepping competing memories and opinions about musical quality for a minute, isn't it crucially significant that Be Here Now and New Jersey both sold roughly half as much as their predecessors? Ditto the Kaiser Chiefs, Scissor Sisters, Catatonia and Travis albums, whereas the Prodigy or Chems records sold twice as much. Bigger first-week sales but a 40-60% drop-off in the long run seems like as close to an objective working definition as you can get.

i know lots on here hate the roses but i was chuffed one of my fave albums got so high AND annoyed sir bob. Why should the canon stop after the 60s/70s .

Bigger first-week sales but a 40-60% drop-off in the long run seems like as close to an objective working definition as you can get.

good point

right, lets work through these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_of_the_1980s_in_the_United_Kingdom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_of_the_1970s_in_the_United_Kingdom

http://www.pure80spop.co.uk/bestsellersalbums.htm

http://www.popjustice.com/forum/threads/25287-Top-100-Best-Selling-Albums-Of-The-80s

must be a level 42 album thats appropriate

Think I mentioned this on the og New Jersey thread, but surely Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys fits here?

But their last album was a comeback in every market, especially here.

is there a Genesis album that would fit?

But their last album was a comeback in every market, especially here.

Oh sure, not disputing that.

Not sure. Their last Collins album was We Can't Dance which was a huge hit. And with "Calling all stations", it's almost like it's a different band.

xpost genesis

We Can't Dance made the last New Jersey thread.

it def qualifies

we also put but seriously on the poll and man i gotta give it up for someone who plausibly released two new jerseys back to back

i mean talk about proof of omnipresence

i was going to say '13' by blur but i see i was beaten to it. i think Matt DC's suggestion of 'the great escape' kinda fits in a way, but it's more like the 'rattle and hum', in which the blur self-titled album is their 'achtung baby.'

if we're talking britpop, i might suggest supergrass 'in it for the money', which was more successful than the first album but i think it almost felt like they'd exhausted a lot of their energy already and the excitement was gone. like i think part of a NJ is that feeling that as happy or content you are to own the album in question, or at least you don't regret it, you as a fan no longer have a vested interest in getting the followup.

*speaking of U2, i'm a fan and i think in a sense 'how to dismantle an atomic' bomb fits here (also already mentioned!) funny thing is it seems to me obviously U2's weakest album, but also obviously that they thought they were being a bit experimental when it comes off as by-the-numbers. some of those songs are pretty great live, though, and vertigo is the better of their two 'highly compressed guitar hero singles' ('get on your boots' being the other.)

'no line on the horizon' is better than HTDAAB and 'songs of innocence' would probably be more highly regarded if it wasn't for the way it was delivered, which was something akin to how foie gras is made. i dunno, i like both their last two.

From the og thread:

so instead of studying for a test i'm trying to come up with TIERS
the New Jersey: a huge event album that's massive by all reasonable standards but is shadowed by the album(s) that ironically are the only reason it was massive, since it was pretty damn shallow on its own merits (i.e. New Jersey, Spellbound, For Those About To Rock, Spirits Having Flown, Afterburner, Fore!, Be Here Now in the UK)

the Fairweather Johnson: a huge event album that still sells better than it should've thanks to the band's previous success, but one could almost immediately sense fortunes going considerably southward even if one was a fan (i.e. Fairweather Johnson, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, Nine Lives, Be Here Now in the US)

― da croupier, Wednesday, 8 August 2012 23:25 (2 years ago) Permalink

Prepared to be shouted down on this one, but by this criteria is Pulp - This Is Hardcore sort of a UK Fairweather Johnson?

Replace 'still sells better than it should've' with 'still sells better than it might have otherwise', perhaps.

I let This Is Hardcore off the hook because it's a self-loathing rejection of pop success rather than a craven attempt to hold onto it. It was less Different Class Part 2 than Fuck Different Class, Fuck All of You.

it did come across more of an in utero self sabotage tbf

pulp was even higher profile with promotion etc in the us with this is hardcore, between that, singles like "party hard" (and in the us, "like a friend") and the fact that they submitted a fuckin bond theme i find the idea they were rejecting success kind of dubious

did the 2nd Darkness album have a big single/#1 album placing or was it just an almighty flop?

"if it wasn't for the way it was delivered, which was something akin to how foie gras is made."

I appreciate this line v much

dog latin there's a new prodigy track

did the 2nd Darkness album have a big single/#1 album placing or was it just an almighty flop?

Christmas single in between the two albums was a big hit, but the second album went silver to the debut's 4x platinum.

did the 2nd Darkness album have a big single/#1 album placing or was it just an almighty flop?

― Cosmic Slop, Monday, January 12, 2015 6:53 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It did really startlingly poor business right off the bat. In at number 11 with a bullet. Two singles scraped the top 10 but left no trace. Only two years earlier they were inescapable.

I do recall being surprised at the time that This Is Hardcore got to number 1; despite the massiveness of Different Class (and the fact that TiH is pretty great) it didn't seem like a given at all. But it sold around 50,000 in the first week? which was not to be sniffed at, in early 98.

2nd Darkness more analogous to 2nd Duffy - confident late-November release for the follow up to the hugest thing imaginable; zero impact; no way back.

(Adele was playing catch up to Duffy for all of 2008 but her timing was rather better 2nd time around)

I forgot all about Duffy

I know that Be Here Now is often held up as being the album that "killed Britpop", and in some ways I agree with this thinking. In hindsight, it's fucking insane how much was expected of that album for a whole lot of people, and it's easy to forget how much was expected of that album at the time. Thinking about it now, from a 2015 perspective, there was absolutely no way that Oasis could possibly have delivered what Be Here Now was supposed to be in the minds of many, and when people heard it back then and were disappointed by it, I think there was this sense of people trying to convince themselves that it was a good record. Goodness knows why. Possibly they thought that Be Here Now was meant to be the Britpop record to end all records and they were gutted that's not what they got.

On the other hand, it's tempting to say that the death of Britpop actually began with not just the Oasis vs. Blur chart war, but the Oasis vs. Blur thing in general. While on one hand, the media attention from this created a huge surge in popularity, it was also a change from Britpop as musical statement (as Blur intended it to be on Modern Life Is Rubbish), to Britpop as a "cultural moment". Record companies started capitalising on the surge in popularity by signing a whole slew of bands, a lot of which weren't actually very good. The popularity of Oasis led to the popularity of retro-rock (dubbed by the NME as Noelrock) in general. Britpop stopped being about albums like Suede and Modern Life Is Rubbish and became more about (What's The Story) Morning Glory? and Moseley Shoals and "mad fer it" and "let's have it" and all that stuff.

So what happened as a result of all of that is that the likes of Blur moved on while retaining an audience, yet the retro-rockers (Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene etc.) stayed the same to diminishing returns, and people eventually got bored shitless and moved on.

HOWEVER!

I do seem to recall post-Be Here Now that there was this sense of "okay, what now? Oasis have blown it, who is going to be the next Oasis-level success?" in the press. The press latched onto the Manic Street Preachers (great things were expected from This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours), The Verve (Urban Hymns) and Radiohead (OK Computer). Of course, the Manics delivered their worst record to date, so it wasn't going to be them. The Verve split up, so it wasn't going to be them either. Radiohead had released what many were already deeming to be an absolute classic with OK Computer, so things started to go down that route: first Travis, then Coldplay and Muse.

In hindsight, Kid A could have easily been a Be Here Now if they'd chosen to just re-do OK Computer but bigger, but instead of going the Be Here Now route they went the Blur route and played the "get out" card.

if we're talking britpop, i might suggest supergrass 'in it for the money', which was more successful than the first album but i think it almost felt like they'd exhausted a lot of their energy already and the excitement was gone. like i think part of a NJ is that feeling that as happy or content you are to own the album in question, or at least you don't regret it, you as a fan no longer have a vested interest in getting the followup.

― LIKE If you are against racism (omar little), Monday, January 12, 2015 5:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I totally disagree. I considered In It For The Money their best record in 1997 and still consider it to be one of their two strongest records. It made me more excited for a follow-up than I Should Coco did. I continued to buy Supergrass albums up until they split, but if there is any record of theirs that I could point to and say "yeah, that's the turning point", then it's the self-titled record. 'Pumping On Your Stereo' and 'Moving' were the hits, but after that record they were definitely playing for the fanbase.

xp otm until "absolute classic" obv, best just to say be here now killed it and leave Radiohead out of britpop discussion- theyd exited the conversation at that stage anyway

pulp was even higher profile with promotion etc in the us with this is hardcore, between that, singles like "party hard" (and in the us, "like a friend") and the fact that they submitted a fuckin bond theme i find the idea they were rejecting success kind of dubious

― da croupier, Monday, January 12, 2015 6:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's from a US perspective, though. From a UK perspective, the single choices from This Is Hardcore were almost like an extremely sobering slap to the face for anyone who had ever got caught up in the "spirit" of the Britpop times of '95-'96. I mean, they came back from Different Class with 'Help The Aged', of all things! Not to mention they then followed it up with the very uncommercial title track, and then 'A Little Soul' after that. 'Disco 2000' and 'Common People' these tracks certainly weren't.

As for 'Party Hard', which was the final single, the entire lyric was the complete opposite to the "I'm feeling supersonic/give me gin and tonic" let's-be-havin'-it spirit that Britpop developed into at its commercial peak. I love the track, but it did very explicitly spell out that as far as Pulp were concerned, the party was over... and in '98, for those still clinging onto the idea that the spirit of the times of '95-'96 could be replicated, that eventually the right band were going to come along and it was all going to blow up again like it did in the mid '90s, that was the very last thing they wanted to hear.

I remember '98 being a really strange year... Britpop was obviously dying on its arse post-Be Here Now, but there was still this sense that people were trying to resuscitate it any way they possibly could, because they wanted the moment to last just that little bit longer. I can think of no other explanation for the likes of Embrace and Catatonia.

won't hear a word against In It For The Money i'm sorry, an ILX fave iirc.

I get that This

(Whoops, phone)

I get that this is hardcore was against the grain, and not pandering to britpop, but I don't see that as a rejection of "success" - they were still doing big shows, big videos, prospective bond themes. If anything THEY got rejected. No one says ok computer rejected success because it was successful but that too was a step from britpop

Radiohead were never really a Britpop band, though. Even though they were around at the same time, played guitars, were British, and (some) people who also bought Suede/Blur/Oasis etc. records also bought Radiohead records. Because they were around at the same time, and The Bends was a successful record, it was very easy for some to lump Radiohead in with the Britpop thing. In actual fact, they weren't really part of it: they did not write about British life in the same way that Suede, Blur or Pulp did, and nor were they part of the "mad fer it"/"let's be havin' it" Noelrock side of things. They seemed very much apart from it all, like the Manic Street Preachers did circa The Holy Bible. I personally saw Radiohead as being more in keeping with R.E.M. than Suede, Blur or Pulp, and I remember Thom Yorke being extremely scathing of Oasis in the mid '90s circa The Bends, actually. Pulp, on the other hand, were very much considered a Britpop band, and therefore the expectations people had for those two bands were different. That's not to say that Radiohead weren't accused of "rejecting success", though, because they were, except with Kid A rather than OK Computer.

So many bands were "Not Britpop" in retrospect, but were at the time.. St Etienne, Auteurs, Radiohead and so on, Punk was like that too, look back to UK Subs, Sham 69 and so on, whereas what you don't get from looking back is a sense of what the future might hold.

I didn't have St. Etienne down as a Britpop band at the time, either. I definitely had Super Furry Animals down as a Britpop band, even though they detested the term, but they were allowed to quietly develop and grow into their own skin because the weight of expectation placed on them to deliver commercial successes was next to nothing compared to Blur and Oasis. As much as I used to love that band back in the '90s, if you'd told me around the time of Fuzzy Logic that they'd end up releasing 9 albums and become one of the more acclaimed bands of the era, I would have laughed my tits off.

Dunno, I'd have placed a bet on them, maybe for the very reasons you say.

e.g. When punk first happened, there was such a shortage of bands that a lot of the pub rock groups got included (Dr Feelgood, Sean Tyla, Roogalator) most of which looks daft even 6 months later.

I remember '98 being a really strange year... Britpop was obviously dying on its arse post-Be Here Now, but there was still this sense that people were trying to resuscitate it any way they possibly could, because they wanted the moment to last just that little bit longer. I can think of no other explanation for the likes of Embrace and Catatonia.

Yeah I remember this, even starting as early as '96 with bands like Space, Kula Shaker and stuff. '98 really did feel like a nadir for all that though. Britpop grows up and buys a car. But coverage was starting to move in a slightly different direction IIRC.
I remember an article in Select in '98, coming off the back of 'Hello Nasty', no doubt (which felt like a very significant release for me and my friends at that point), about how the eighties were due for a come-back. As a teenager who'd rejected the majority of 80s music until then, the concept of reviving styles and fashion from that decade felt very alien to me. A Q poll of the 100 best albums ever only featured a tiny clutch of albums from the eighties, which goes to show how much the 90s had felt like a rejection of that decade.
Somehow though, being sold the eighties as a revival of graffiti and old school hip-hop culture seemed enough though. And then a few years later of course, the world rediscovered electro and post-punk and it was like the eighties had never gone away.
But this all made for a general shift away from UK guitar music as a going concern for quite a while. Select closed down and the NME lost customers. Teen-oriented Britpop begat adult-oriented Travis/Coldplay/Texas. Pitchfork became the go-to place for alternative music news. Electroclash, garage and mashup culture opened up the realms of dance music for a lot of former indiekids. As for indie-rock, the US Amerindie scene seemed a lot more inspired and leftfield in the 2000s than much of the UK landfill set. Overall, there was a noticeable shift in interest away from Manchester and London, over to Europe and the US.
The rise and fall of Britpop is something I don't think UK music has ever really recovered from, even with the mid-2000s Arctic Monkeys/Libertines axis, it wasn't really enough to make something significant out of. Britpop was, as is well-documented, a shallow media-led construct with a torrent of terrible bands involved. While I'm happy that it gave us Modern Life Is Rubbish, Wake Up! and Different Class, there's not a lot to mourn about this scene. I do kind of miss feeling that the UK is a significant 'world-power' when it comes to music though (he says while ignoring the huge swathes of dance music influencing global dancefloors).
Just looking at my EOY albums list and I'm surprised to find there are as much as 7 UK acts out of 25 on my list - one of whom is based in Berlin, another a comeback from the 90s. I have a feeling that at one point the UK would have dominated my list though.

Once the media channels opened up, the Americas came in and took over, thanks to having all the money to start with.

Oasis hit the top, and when they got there they kicked back with a bottle of champagne and went Wahayyy. Whereas when Coldplay and U2 hit the top, they kept working as much as they had before. What Holly Johnson called the Shooting Stars principle.

away from britpop : how about goldie and his "saturnz return" release ?

big hopes after the success of the debut, dashed by a fucking dreadful hour long dirge that opens the sonic marathon.

seems to have killed his solo career dead (other than compilations/mixes/tv etc .. ).

I'd forgotten just how big The Verve were during that 97/98 peak - Urban Hymns the 17th best-selling album of all time in the UK.

The gig that was televised on prime time saturday night BBC1

Turrican otm re: In It For The Money. I thought I Should Coco was tremendous (especially the drumming), and IIFTM almost as good, with a similar nearly-off-the-rails band dynamic happening. But after that, every Supergrass record I heard was markedly blander than the previous one. Coincidentally or not, the drumming suddenly lost the character that had thrillingly propelled their early records.

Loved I Should Coco but never heard any other SG albums until, strangely, Road to Rouen which was... okay I guess. I do have a huge soft spot for the singles on the s/t album though and things like Moving and Pumping On Your Stereo are songs as big as any by Supergrass in my mind.