The wide ranging landscape of British music has forever carved out outlets for emerging styles, developing movements and more importantly new stars. As a nation, our complex geography allows for pockets of diverse creativity and culture to emerge out of the most unique outlets. Unlike the rest of popular culture, the British music scene has always derived from the suburbs of some of our largest cities and has been a response to the cultural bubble in which artists find themselves. Iconic musician and journalist John Robb has spent a lifetime on the fringes of these concentrated communities and has had a unique front row seat to the indie music revolution.
The lead singer of the punk band The Membranes, who formed in Blackpool in 1977, played alongside Mark Tilton on guitar, Martyn Critchley on vocals and Martin Kelly on drums.
John Robb developed a nose for documenting and recording the biggest landmarks in popular music. Finding himself in the midst of the punk scene, John had a unique insight into the inner workings of this musical revolution and in retrospect the movement wasn’t as radical as history suggests. Arguably John Lydon, however antiestablishment he might have seemed, in his own way was still a product of his time and the rebellion that he created was quashed by the Thatcher government just two years later. Punk was merely a concept that existed in the late seventies and was different from the non political music that was around. It seems that every generation has a creative response to the political turmoil of the day and punk just happened to be the 1970’s version of a potent musical movement.
The Membranes split in 1990 just as the Grunge revolution began and now as a music journalist, John was in the perfect environment to record this. Having been a member of a punk band offered him an advantage over his peers as he knew what it was like to live the rock and roll lifestyle. Being one of the first people to ever interview Kurt Cobain is now a fascinating tale to tell given the legend still surrounding him and Nirvana to this day. Yet over thirty years ago, it was less than glamorous as not many people had actually heard the name Nirvana yet and so the interview didn’t hold much significance. Robb recalls calling up the Cobain family home where Kurt still lived with his parents and asking for him. This is when it hit him just how incredibly young Cobain actually was and within a few months he would become one of the most famous people in the world. He was so young and fresh faced and had yet been tainted by the concept of fame and its only with hindsight that John is able to realise how truly significant this interview was.
April 1994 was a defining month for music. It’s funny how events tend to happen in a concentrated period of time which creates a rhetoric for the press to pounce upon when in reality they could be totally unrelated. On the morning of the 5th of the month, reports from Seattle were surfacing that Cobain had shot someone in his house. Ever unphased by the eccentric behaviour of powerful rock stars, Robb merely thought it was just the latest in the series of publicity stunts that Cobain’s team had planned in order to further create the enigma surrounding him. However, by the afternoon, the conversation had changed and by a few hours later it was confirmed that Cobain had tragically committed suicide. Musical revolutions aren’t uniformly paced, they don’t have a definite beginning or end and it’s naive for journalists to create a narrative to do so. Yet Cobain’s death came to signify the end of the American Grunge era which had dominated magazines, popular mainstream radio and the charts since the late eighties and now music was changing once again.
The other major musical event in April 1994 was an altogether more homegrown affair. For years, John Robb had been brandishing the term britpop in reference to a particular sound of the music scene. Everyone from The Kinks to The Stone Roses had each come to represent that quintessential British rock sound and in order to conceptualise it, journalists were required to put a concrete label on this rustic, laid back sound. Therefore Robb coined the term to describe this neuence in the music scene. So when Stuart Maconie touted the concept in his article for the Select magazine, Robb thought Maconie was slightly late to the party. To him, britpop had been within the music journalist’s lexicon for years and for it now to take on a shorthand for what was happening in Manchester and London for men and guitars was a surprising concept. Britpop then took on a whole new meaning and Robb still finds it amusing that Maconie is still cited as the person who coined Britpop when this might be slightly historically inaccurate.
If the term remains ambiguous then for John, the concept of Britpop has become the victim of romanticism as the years progress. The spine of Britpop is forever cited as the battle of Blur versus Oasis which was a clever publicity ploy by their respective record companies to maximise sales. This was of huge benefit to the PR companies as it gave Britpop a hook on which the press could create stories which ultimately sold papers and records. Whether the so called feud between protagonists Damon Albarn and the Gallagher brothers was a legitimate battle was irrelevant because the media had been presented with the perfect story which they could bleed for all that it was worth. It served its purpose to heighten this musical trend into a social movement. The Country House and Roll With It battle may have been one of the defining moments in the Britpop movement but it was still predetermined by the record companies to maximise the commercialism of the movement at this time. This may be quite a pessimistic view of one of the most potent musical movements in history but Robb’s unrivalled musical heritage has arguably qualified him to make such radical statements.
Despite the domination of Britpop, Robb is quick to cite the huge significance of Matthew Bannister’s revolution at Radio 1 to the explosion in popular culture. To have broadcasters on Britain’s flagship youth orientated radio station was hugely significant in shaping record sales and establishing trends. The antithesis of the Britpop movement came in May 1997 with Labour’s landslide victory when it wasn’t only record companies who wanted to get a handle on the youth demographic but also the government. To see Noel Gallagher and Alan McGee entering Number 10 Downing Street was a defining moment for the music industry. For some people, they had never seen a Labour government during their lifetime and this was the ultimate triumph for the man in the street. The new sound of Radio 1 seemed to go hand in hand with this new societal change and the Gallagher brothers became the unlikely poster boys for such a revolution.
The Oasis reunion has rekindled the Britpop sound and the battle of Blur versus Oasis. The various Blur reunions over the last decade has brought them back into the discussion about who actually won the battle despite Country House beating Roll With It to the Number 1 spot in August 1995. However, the narrative keeps evolving as the years go by and Oasis’s highly anticipated reunion has arguably laid this theme of pop culture to rest for good. There’s no doubt that this battle came to define Britpop and thirty years later it’s still celebrated as one of the seminal milestones in British music. For Robb who was one, maybe two generations removed from the protagonists of Britpop, he believes that the nineties was arguably the last period when music reflected what was happening in society. Every era is dogged by political turmoil and a need for change but throughout the nineties there was a sense of togetherness which seemed to unite the nation.
Labour’s landslide victory in May 1997 was the perfect climax to the philosophy of Britpop and John still has defining memories of where he was on such a seminal night. There were people of the Britpop generation who had never experienced what it felt like to live under a Labour government and the liberation of the Britpop revolution made it appear the perfect time to shake up the establishment. The notion that Alan McGee and Noel Gallagher could find themselves inside the esteemed walls of 10 Downing Street would have been unthinkable just a year earlier but this was the astonishing thing about Britpop: literally anything was possible!
Still in demand as a writer, journalist and musician, John remains in love with the art of making music and has just finished collaborating with the great Alan McGee on the book How To Run An Indie Label which was released in October 2024. It was a pleasure to welcome the iconic John Robb to Beyond The Title and with a formidable career behind him, it’s almost impossible to predict what awaits him next!
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