Sleeper’s Louise Wener has reflected on the decline of Britpop by the late ‘90s, saying that the genre grew to become “embarrassed of itself”.
The singer spoke about the rise and fall of the genre in the ‘90s during a new interview on Radio X. It comes as the band have recently announced plans to hit the road later this year in celebration of their classic single ‘Inbetweener’ and breakthrough debut album ‘Smart’ each turning 30.
During the discussion, she looked back at the band’s split in 1998, after releasing their sophomore album ‘The It Girl’ in 1996 and ‘Pleased To Meet You’ in 1997, and explained why the members thought it was right to call it quits.
“It just sort of came to the end of the road, really. The third album didn’t sell that great,” she said while on The Chris Moyles Show. “Britpop was kind of… It kind of had an implosion. It fell apart a little bit. I also think it also became a little embarrassed of itself.”
She continued: “It became so arch and so ironic and everyone started making quite dark albums. [So] the mood changed, I think.”
Sleeper in 1996. CREDIT: Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Sleeper would later re-form in 2017 and share their comeback album ‘The Modern Age’ the following year. In 2021, they shared ‘This Time Tomorrow’.
When asked by Moyles if the upcoming anniversary tour means that the band are working on new material, Wener confirmed that the members have already begun writing music together.
“Yes, there definitely will [be], yeah. It’s gonna be amazing,” she said. “I’m demoing stuff now and it’s coming about in a slightly different way that I’m not going to talk about too much, but I’m really, really loving it.”
In total, 12 new tour dates have been confirmed, kicking off on September 25 with an opening night at the Tramshed venue in Cardiff. It continues with stops in Bristol, Leeds, London, Wolverhampton, Newcastle, Glasgow, Nottingham and Oxford. Tickets go on sale this Friday (January 31) and will be available here.
Wener isn’t the only Britpop star to openly talk about the decline of the genre in recent years. Back in 2019, Suede frontman Brett Anderson admitted in an interview that he hated the term and tried to move the band away from it.
“I disassociated myself from that very early on, as soon as I saw what I saw as becoming this kind of laddish, jingoistic, cartoon happening, which became Britpop, I very quickly distanced Suede from that,” he said.
“I saw what was happening with Britpop and for me, it felt quite distasteful. It felt nationalistic, it felt like there was, sort of, quite a strong thread of misogyny and I didn’t think Suede should be part of that.”
Brett Anderson from Suede performs in 2023 CREDIT: Per Ole Hagen/Redferns/Getty Images
Around that same time, Skunk Anansie singer Skin also hit out at the ‘90s tag describing it as a “big fat dead bloated fish”.
“It’s all anybody wanted to talk about: Britpop, Britpop, Britpop, Britpop,” she told NME.“But after a while as it got bigger and bigger and got more and more bloated and succulent like a big fat blowfish or something we were like, ‘You know what? We really don’t wanna be in that shit.’”
A similar outlook was shared by Supergrass frontman Gaz Coombes last September, as he spoke to NME about the band’s tour celebrating 30 years of their debut ‘I Should Coco’.
Looking back at the huge reunions in recent years – including Pulp, Blur and Oasis – Coombes admitted that he wasn’t a fan of the connotations that came with the term ‘Britpop’. “The mid-90s were a wild time. For us, it was different to how it seemed. When you look back at the lad culture and messiness, we weren’t part of it nor did we really enjoy that side of it,” he said.
The year prior, Pulp drummer Nick Banks opened up to NME about his memoir, So It Started There: From Punk To Pulp, and recalled how he thought Britpop seemed like a “joke” at the time.
“At the time, we thought it was all a bit laughable and crazy to try and lump a band that had been going for 17 years into some kind of new movement – it all seemed a bit of a joke to us,” he said, recalling how they became one of the flagship bands of the era. “People had tried to shoehorn us into other failed musical categories before, which we found equally comical.”
Liam and Noel Gallagher perform as Oasis. CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images
That perspective isn’t just held by those who were a part of the movement either, as pop star Dua Lipa recently looked back at the genre and described some of the bands’ past behaviour as “obnoxious”.
“Sometimes you have to separate the art from the person… It’s more like the music element, the aspect of it that I’m really connected to,” she recalled. “The way that [some Brit-pop artists] acted, the things that they’ve done, they’re obnoxious for sure. That’s their whole thing.”
As for Sleeper, back in 2019, Wener spoke to NME as part of the Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?! series, and put her memory of some of the band’s biggest moments to the test. You can find that full interview here.
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