I love doing them and there’s an interesting community feel to them. Ticketmaster has sucked all the joy out of seeing my favourite singers live Jon Rogers, 42, from Norfolk, has co-run a Britpop night called Common People for the past six years. It will be amazing to get to see them live again.’ ‘ Every penny from a paper round bought me a new Britpop cassette each week‘ My love for the 90s music has always remained, it’s never gone away and it never will. Thirty years on and I’m now at an age when I can travel to gigs, my kids are a bit older and I have disposable income, so I want to listen to music from my roots. The rest is history, I went out and brought it on CD the next day and have done about 30 full band shows since. Then one day I was sitting watching Top Of the Pops and The Bluetones – Bluetonic came on and I thought ‘oh I like this’. Oasis’ Be Here Now had just come out and we were all sitting in the back singing our hearts out. We got in his mum and dad’s Escort after school, me and three other lads and it was awesome. I went with some friends at school, one of whom had just passed his driving test. My first Britpop gig was The Seahorses in 1997 at the Doncaster Dome. Rebecca has started to embrace her music taste once again (Picture: Supplied) So many things I heard for the first time on there. I can remember listening religiously to the Evening Session with Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq whilst doing my homework. My friend lived in a pub with a jukebox so we’d have parties and hang out there. We’d sit in the park and someone would bring a CD player and we’d study for our GCSEs listening to Ocean Colour Scene. It was real people that you could relate to. I remember buying Whatever on single and sitting on my bedroom floor looking at the packaging and just playing it over and over again on my first ever CD player. I was all about Take That and then Oasis came along. We had to travel for two hours to get to Sheffield to see anyone.īut then, when I was about 14, Britpop suddenly started appearing everywhere. I grew up in sleepy Lincolnshire and we didn’t have any good music within 100 miles of us. Rebecca (left) adored Britpop after Oasis became popular (Picture: Supplied) Perhaps back in the day at times it felt like they were going through the motions, but now everyone is just enjoying it. So many bands we see just seem so happy to be back on stage and that energy spreads throughout the crowd. People started to put on nights again and people realised there was a gap in their lives. Suddenly a real momentum started to build up and there were all these gigs being announced and bands getting back together who we never thought we’d get to see again. We were on our Valentine’s Day meal and I was frantically on my phone trying to get tickets before it sold out. I remember when Sleeper announced they were playing again in 2015. They were our first love and our first proper gig together seeing them at Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1996, after that we saw Stereophonics, Embrace and Feeder and so many more right up to this day. He just came over and said ‘Bluetones, can I come?’. We had mutual friends and he heard me talking to one of his girlfriends about gig I was going to, to see The Bluetones. Skinheads with mop tops, Docs, Levis, Fred Perry, Ben Sherman, suits, brogues… we looked fabulous!ĭave and I got together through Britpop. Not only did the music speak directly to kids like me, but the style of the band at that point provided a template for our wardrobes. It was direct and very British, a response and reaction to the grunge thing. Blur’s second album Modern Life Is Rubbish was also a gamechanger for me as well. The lyrics and their look and sound were so exciting and so dangerous and thrilling. I was never beguiled by the lad rock side of it, like Oasis and Dodgy. There were always new bands on the front of NME, new records to buy and it was even reflected in cinema. There was an optimism and a genuine sense that things were changing. You could feel that something was happening. The fashion side was as important really for everyone, it wasn’t just a music thing. We’d go to places like Merc on Camden Street and buy vintage Ben Sherman’s. We’d go to Blow Up, which was the 90s night to go to, buy bootleg tapes from various gigs and trawl through record shops. I’d also go to Leeds and Manchester and about once a month down to London on the overnight 10-hour bus from Glasgow. I would travel in and out of Glasgow and Edinburgh for gigs and I saw Suede, Elastica, Blur, Saint Etienne and so many others during those early months of Britpop.
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