It’s time for a Friday tune-up post for the Dead Air Kickstarter campaign! This week it’s our main character Michelle’s Britopia CJNK radio show playlist, a two-hour round-up of the best Brit-pop to have been released right up to the 1997 timeline of Dead Air’s story. Check it out by clicking here, or at the following link:
I was personally a big Brit-pop fan in my teenage years, and surprisingly Quebec was fairly open to the genre, which barely made a dent in the United States at the time it was enjoying massive popularity in the UK. I structured this playlist based on what Michelle would have played on a ‘best of’ show at the end of her final semester at Rook University, an angle that allowed me to include multiple tracks from the same artists and, occasionally, from the same album, to reflect my own personal favorites.
As a young man just discovering modern pop (having spent much of my childhood listening to, and playing, jazz, classical, oldies, and country), Brit-pop offered me an exciting entry point to a wider world of music. Of the bands on this playlist perhaps none was more important to me than Elastica, a foursome lead by the blazing guitar and arresting stage presence of Justine Frischmann. I was so obsessed with the first eponymous Elastica album that I even bought a black Telecaster just like hers as my ‘serious’ instrument after I had graduated from the entry-level Strat-copy that got me started on the instrument.
Echobelly was another group that broadened my horizons, thanks to front woman Sonja Madan’s soaring vocals and harmonies, and the band’s ability to transition from energetic rock to multi-layered soundscape. Then there was Supergrass, whose second album “In It For The Money” remains an incredible achievement to this day, and Lush, which is an interesting case for me: I had “Lovelife” in rotation as a teen, but didn’t discover their earlier work until much later in life. I have come to appreciate the more atmospheric pop the band produced outside the catchiness of singles like “Ladykillers” and Single Girl.”
Brit-pop burned bright, but not long, and so there are a sprinkling of artists in here whose careers didn’t have much staying power on the international charts past a few memorable songs (Ash, James, The La’s, Kula Shaker) or that never made it past Britain’s radio waves past a few thousand import CDs (Manic Street Preachers, The Charlatans, Mansun) eagerly spun by college DJs across North America. And of course, there are the bigger names that you simply can’t ignore, groups that largely transcended their Brit-pop origins to overstay the 90s and keep making music into the next decade, with Blur and Pulp being the most prominent on this playlist.
I hope you enjoy listening to two hours of Michelle’s Britopia as much as I loved putting this playlist together.
