“At this point, it’s Israel/Palestine. Rangers/Celtic. No one remembers how it got started. All they know is, ‘I like this team and I don’t like that team.’ The whole country’s gone fucking mad. It’s what happens in a civil war – everyone starts thinking with the blood.”
In a new play merely titled The Battle, these phrases are spoken by a fictionalised Damon Albarn, as he leads his band Blur into a contest with Oasis for a summer time No 1 and the de facto kingship of Britpop. But then he recoils as he wonders what on earth he has acquired concerned in. Musical issues inevitably take second place to gross sales figures, as the transient, superficial friendship between the two teams curdles into a toxic loathing, principally on the Oasis aspect. And, sarcastically, the band that has a completely uncomplicated relationship with fame and success – the one fronted by the dependably mad-for-it Gallagher brothers – finally ends up dropping out to a quartet whose victory immediately fills them with angst and vacancy.
The Battle – two hours of vivid, knockabout pop-cultural historical past, which I simply noticed at Birmingham Rep, forward of its transfer to Manchester – is the work of John Niven, the former musician and music trade insider who just lately printed a profoundly transferring household memoir titled O Brother, however remains to be most famous for his grimly comedian 2008 record-biz novel Kill Your Friends.
Turned into a movie in 2015, the story drew on all the extra and venality of the interval The Battle is ready in. What this new work most vividly offers in, although, is the everlasting British fixation with class, which the Blur-Oasis conflict was steeped in, one thing proved by a skip by means of the mountain of press protection.
As nicely as comparisons with the Beatles and Rolling Stones, this subtext was in all places. The Guardian’s most pointed headline was, “Working-class heroes lead art-school trendies”, whereas in the eyes of the long-defunct Today, “Clean-cut middle-class southern boys” had been preventing it out with “Rebellious working-class northern lads”.
Niven’s script is stuffed with sharp signifiers of these items. When Liam Gallagher tells Noel he fancies Justine Frischmann (Albarn’s then-girlfriend and the chief of the three-quarters feminine quartet Elastica), he’s advised he ought to keep in his social lane: “Her and Damon, right, they’ve got degrees and that. They’re sat round reading the Sunday Times and making fucking risotto or whatever.” Risotto, described by Noel as “rice cooked in Bovril”, quickly turns into a operating joke. Most of all, it’s class that explains the deep distinction between the songs created by Noel and Albarn: in relation to the frequent individuals, says one character, Albarn “writes songs about them”, whereas Noel “writes songs for them”.
As Albarn’s “thinking with the blood” soliloquy suggests, there’s a sense right here of cultural premonition. Once the giddy, carefree Nineties had handed, Britain slowly moved into the regional division and seething polarisation that was symbolised by the Brexit referendum of 2016, and arguably nonetheless defines its nationwide situation. There are loads of moments in The Battle, the truth is, when latterday divisions (Leaver-Remainer, woke v unwoke) are seemingly projected on to the occasions of 30 years in the past. In that sense, what actually hits house is the considerably tragic sense of a comparatively harmless Britain the place such variations may very well be entertainingly performed out in a thrillingly daft conflict between two bands, relatively than by means of a nation truly tearing itself aside.
At three many years’ distance, it must be mentioned: the Blur-Oasis struggle centred on two singles that hardly quantity amongst both band’s finest. The former’s Country House was an outwardly easy pop music that hid a lyric about despair (witness not simply a reference to Prozac, however the crestfallen center part: “Blow, blow me out, I am so sad I don’t know why”) which was arduous to discern in all its oompah-oompah merriment. Roll With It, in the meantime, was a poor relation to Noel’s finest work as a songwriter: its energetic nod to early Beatles was mixed with the leaden vibes of Status Quo, one thing mockingly identified by Albarn throughout an interview with Chris Evans on Radio One’s breakfast present.
But, inevitably, inventive issues didn’t matter. The race for No 1, which climaxed on Sunday 20 August 1995, was the good story to fill the traditional summer time information vacuum, whereas bringing much more cash into the coffers of a music trade that Britpop had spectacularly revived.
The conflict was the results of Blur’s individuals receiving phrase that Oasis had been releasing Roll With It a week earlier than Country House, and fearing it might preserve their band off the high spot. As the late Andy Ross, co-founder of Blur’s report label Food, later advised me: “We thought they were being mad. But the thing is, a No 1 record tends to have a better-than-evens chance of being No 1 the week after, just because it’s on Top of the Pops and all the kids hear it. We had to move the release date. We could have pushed it back a week or two, but that would have looked like chickening out.”
And so, amid loads of ill-advised bravado, the battle commenced. I was 25 at the time. I’d spent three years at the New Musical Express, for which I interviewed each bands. (A single titled Wibbling Rivalry, a recording of the verbal dust-up between Liam and Noel that outlined my encounter with them, reached No 52 in the singles chart in 1996.) I had simply taken a job as options editor at Q journal, which was busily transferring away from pre-90s pop and rock aristocracy – Chris Rea, Dire Straits, Simply Red – and embracing Britpop.
Our workplaces had been in the similar block as the HMV store close to Oxford Circus. I keep in mind two issues about the week Roll With It and Country House got here out: every day visits downstairs to attempt to suss out which single is likely to be in the lead; and operating into Alan McGee, president of Oasis’s label Creation, after shopping for Country House. I confirmed him what I’d bought and excitedly mentioned it felt like voting. He shrugged and mentioned: “The whole thing’s mad.” I may inform he actually was bamboozled.
So had been a lot of different individuals. In the run-up to the supposedly massive week, there was a sense of the two bands twisting themselves into contorted and unbecoming shapes. In Blur’s case, the aggressive drive that had first set Albarn in opposition to grunge music, then his arch-enemies Suede, then Oasis, not solely acquired the higher of him, however briefly distanced him from Graham Coxon, the guitarist and inventive accomplice he had recognized since faculty. Meanwhile, in an interview with the Observer’s Miranda Sawyer, Noel determined for instance his loathing of Albarn and Blur’s Alex James in the most terrible means conceivable: “The bass player and singer, I hope the pair of them catch Aids and die, cos I fuckin’ hate them two.”
Such was Oasis’s unstoppable momentum that this incident – which Niven’s script combines with homophobic discuss from Liam that sits awkwardly with the play’s sense of levity – was rapidly forgotten. Partly as a result of Blur put out a second CD of Country House, their music bought 274,000 copies, whereas Roll With It managed 216,000. But as anybody over 40 is aware of, having misplaced the battle, Oasis then comprehensively gained the battle.
By the finish of 1995, Wonderwall had taken them into an orbit that was theirs alone, and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, their second album, was promoting big quantities, not simply in the UK, however in the US, a market Blur had by no means managed to interrupt into. “The end of that year was the Wonderwall Christmas, wasn’t it?” James later mirrored. “I remember Damon coming round to my flat one evening, with real fear in his eyes. I think he’d been told he was a wanker and thumped six times on his way round. He was the uncoolest man in Britain at that point.”
To its credit score, The Battle is true to the breathless, cartoon-strip sense of the time, stuffed with understanding traces and a deep appreciation of the characters who converse them. For anybody acquainted with the real-life story, a few of the casting will appear relatively off: Mathew “Gavin and Stacey” Horne performs Andy Ross as a calculating svengali relatively than the self-deprecating, wily man he was; and why the famously urbane Frischmann speaks in an adenoidal estuary accent stays a thriller. But the portrayal of Noel and Liam Gallagher by two unknowns – respectively, Paddy Stafford and George Usher, who has by no means acted professionally in a theatre earlier than – is ideal. Stafford is all furrow-browed function and management, whereas Usher utterly inhabits a position outlined by the lack of any brake or filter.
Liam may maybe behave like that as a result of, by fashionable requirements, the Britpop technology’s world was so small. There was no social media. Careers had been made by the weekly music press and Radio One. If 1995 did see “civil war” and “thinking with the blood”, it was largely pantomimic. As the viewers filed out of the manufacturing I noticed, you can sense what was coursing round their minds: the feeling that, in each conceivable means, such a battle won’t ever, ever occur once more.
