by A few years ago, I was interviewing a record shop owner in Sheffield for Record Store Day, and he said something which resonated with me and inspired this list.
I don’t have the actual interview anymore, so I’ll need to paraphrase, but essentially, this man told me how much it baffles him that Pulp are one of his best-selling bands. This wasn’t a dig at the band but his perplexity at the fact that people live in Sheffield who don’t own Pulp records. He was incredulous wondering where these people had been and why they were only just buying these albums.
In recent years, following the resurgence of bands such as Blur, Pulp and Oasis igniting a discussion about musical movements and big periods in music, a lot of music lovers have been turning their attention back to Britpop. It’s a great style to dabble, but I wonder if those wanting to commemorate the movement within their record collection know where to start.
If you want a section which reflects a specific movement in music, it’s important that the albums are definitive. This isn’t a list of deep cuts or unheard pieces; these are classics that make up the Britpop movement and celebrate it, and hence need to form the fan collection at all times.
Five must-own Britpop albums for fans:
Pulp – ‘Different Class’
When Jarvis Cocker fell out of a Sheffield window, the time he spent helpless on the pavement and subsequently in hospital acted as a period of reflection, one that allowed him to better understand the topics he should be writing about: real people. This led to one of the greatest Britpop albums with a humanistic core, and you can argue with me all you want, but this is the way the list rumbles.
The result of such spontaneous pouring of the heart is songs that feel deeply personal but that you also feel comfortable blurting out in a field with 20,000 people. It seems as though Jarvis Cocker reached into your music-loving brain and picked out all the memories you want laid out to melody and breathed life into them on one of the most masterful LPs ever made to define a genre.
