Thirty years ago, the UK was gripped by a battle of the bands – reminding us that the past really is a foreign country and they definitely do things differently there.
Blur and Oasis, the pre-eminent Britpop music acts of the era, released their respective singles Country House and Roll With It on August 14, 1995.
Such was the popularity of the two bands at the time that if the release dates of their songs had been staggered, then both would have claimed the coveted number one spot in the weekly charts. But when Blur and Oasis chose the same day for release, only one could claim top spot.
In this pre-streaming era of 1995, weekly sales were the hard currency of the day and the Blur-Oasis contest ensured nearly 500,000 copies of the two singles combined were sold that week, a huge number in a time when about 70,000 sales pretty much guaranteed a number one hit in the UK. The rising tide lifted all the boats that week, as single sales raced to record heights for the decade. Country House won out, with the UK finding out the results through the Sunday evening radio broadcast of the chart countdown.
Anyone old enough to recall the “Britpop battle” in the UK will have a memory of the extraordinary late summer of 1995, when those two bands occupied the entire cultural space. Maybe your memory might be jogged still further when the moment is dramatised in The Battle stage play, which will open in the UK next year.
The contest set up the most binary moment in households across Britain, particularly as it tugged at the class and geographic schisms of UK society, apparently pitting northern, working-class Oasis against southern, middle-class Blur – or surly Mancunians and chirpy Londoners, as some described it. Yes, the mid-90s really were a peak moment in derogatory labelling.
John Harris’s 2003 book, titled Britpop: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock, describes the week in which the bands locked horns as a period that birthed “an outpouring of comment and coverage that turned Britpop into an inflated caricature of itself”, while noting that the two singles in question were close to being their worst work of that era by both bands.
Contemporary critics also described both singles as lacklustre – describing Country House as mod pastiche and Roll With It as stadium rock quality – not that it mattered much given those level of sales and the fevered interest in the bands. Decades later, Roll With It doesn’t appear on Spotify’s popular Oasis songs list, but Country House does show on Blur’s streaming platform roll of honour.
Oasis have been entertaining huge crowds on their revival tour this summer and have played Roll With It on every night so far, according to Set List data. Blur, meanwhile, played Country House to generous applause during their Abu Dhabi Grand Prix post-race set a decade ago, providing a relatively rare outing for the song. It didn’t feature at all during their last live outings at Coachella in April 2024.
Roll With It may be a firm fan favourite this summer, but it wasn’t the favourite in that summer week of 1995.
Blur claimed victory in the chart battle, but within months Oasis were said to have won the war, by dint of superior album and concert ticket sales. Less than a year later, the Manchester band were playing two huge sold-out concerts at Knebworth House, while Blur appeared to wear the spoils of that August 1995 victory wearily.
Beyond the nostalgia and the moderately ripping yarn of that 1995 moment, what else is there to take away from a peculiarly British cultural moment?
First, it reminds us how radically the metrics of success have changed over time. In the streaming era, the battle is almost irrelevant; it is the war for long-term dominance and overall consumption and attention that matters. And yet, in a playlist and suggested-for-you driven world, the individual song is as important as ever in the compounding nature of the subscription economy. Those millions of listens your favourite artist accrues every month are more likely to have been gathered from cleverly selected platform playlists than from the 20th-century tradition of listening to an album from start to finish.
The mid-90s were a peak time for tribalism and the primary way of showing your colours was to actively go out and buy physical media. People still wanted to own the music they loved in those days, something far removed from the habits of now.
As the relative popularity of those two songs on platforms shows us, there can also be unlikely twists and turns in the history of a popular release. Oasis’s song for the ages, Wonderwall, released later in 1995, didn’t make it to number one on the UK singles chart either, but is one of the top 3 most streamed songs from the 1990s, only bettered by a pair of songs that also did not top the charts when released. The 1980s provides other examples of the same trend and underscores, perhaps, that past performance is not indicative of future results.
Back in 1995, a piece published in The Telegraph the day after the result was known compared it to the fuss to 30 years before, when the Rolling Stones and The Beatles were chart rivals and speculated that “it seems unlikely that, in 2025, either Blur’s or Oasis’s offerings will have earned similar status in the rock n roll pantheon”. Some might say, predictions are a fool’s errand.
