Britpop Night - DJ Joolsy P

I ask Jools, the Lansdown manager who is running a new edition of his popular Britpop night, if he agrees with this statement, lifted from Q Magazine. ‘Britpop started with the chart race between Blur and Oasis and ended when Gareth Southgate missed his penalty in the Euro 96 Semi Final.’ He doesn’t. “It was a term bandied around in the 60’s originally, but I would date the most recent Britpop explosion from the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays in the late eighties and would say that it is still influential today with bands like The Arctic Monkeys and The Kooks. People grew sick of acid house music when it went mainstream and they started liking guitar-based music again. A lot of people still do.”

Jools knows his stuff. He went to see Oasis 20 times (there’s a tale or two to tell about that) from the days when they were playing in front of 150 people before they cut a single. When they did release their first single he had to cut the centre out with a soldering iron to make it fit onto the old-style 45 juke box at the Snowdrop, where he used to work. “There will be quite a bit of stuff on Saturday from lesser known bands like Menswear, These Animal Men and Northern Uproar,” he says, “then towards the end of the night I’ll throw in some floor-filling classics where everyone knows the words, jumps up and down and throws their beer at each other. Literally.” Roll with it, cigarettes and alcohol, whatever. Where were you when they were getting high? AL