Britpop's fundamental guitar players
By Sergio Ariza
If we had to draw a robot portrait of a ‘Britpop'
guitarist it would end up looking something like a mix between a mod and a
football hooligan, have a Gibson ES-335 or a 355 painted with the Union Jack
around its neck, be playing some power chords taken from the notebook of some
legendary British band like the Kinks,
the Small Faces or the Jam - while the band’s singer would
sing an irresistible chorus about how wonderful it is to be young and go out partying
as if there were no tomorrow. Britpop gave us few 'guitar heroes' but it was
one of the last big movements of guitar rock that reached the general public.
Their philosophy was simple, they were the arrogant and hedonistic; the reverse
of the depressive American grunge, they worshipped something so vain and, at
the same time, vital like being young and having the desire to party. They
didn't want to change the world, or denounce its injustices, they just wanted
to have a good time...
John
Squire (November 24, 1962)
If there is a band that can be considered the
clear precursor of the movement it would have to be the Stone Roses, and if we had to think about a guitarist in whom all
the members of Britpop looked to, it would be John Squire. His brilliant melodies, his tinkling arpeggios, his
riffs and his hypnotic solos were the sounds upon which all the heavyweights of
the movement looked to, from Blur to
Oasis. The band's brilliant first
album is Britpop’s Rosetta Stone; the place to look first to understand it.
Their second album, which took five years to be released, came out in 1994, and
saw Squire and the band move away from 60's pop to enter the classic 70's rock
sound, with Led Zeppelin as its main
reference. Squire parked his Gretsch Country Gentleman and 60's Stratocaster
and got the perfect guitar to get that unique sound, in riffs with slide such as
on Love Spreads; namely a Les Paul
Sunburst of 59. After the band split it still gave him time to form the Seahorses and leave a classic 'Britpop'
song: Love Is The Law. After a
meeting of the Stone Roses a few years ago it seems that Squire is going to
retire definitively and on March 4th he let go of most of his amplifiers,
including the Fender Twin Reverb with which he recorded the first album of the
Stone Roses. He was, along with Johnny Marr, the mirror into which the other members of this list looked and
the most important British guitarist of the 80s and early 90s.
Main Guitars: Grestch Chet Atkins Country
Gentleman, Custom Fender Jaguar, Fender Stratocaster de 1960, Gibson Les Paul
de 1959
Richard
Hawley (17 January 1967)
Hawley would end up achieving fame at the
beginning of the 21st century as a modern 'crooner' a là Roy Orbison and with
albums like Cole's Corner, but his
first steps were as the guitarist of the Britpop band the Longpigs, along with those he recorded their debut album, The Sun Is Often Out in 1996. His style
in the band has been described, by himself, as "a mix between Syd
Barrett and Hubert Sumlin". After leaving
the group he joined one of the most important Britpop bands, Pulp, led by his friend Jarvis Cocker.
He toured with them and he collaborated on their latest album, We Love Life, playing the 'lap steel' on
songs such as Weeds and Sunrise.
Main Guitars: Fender Telecaster, Gretsch
Country Gent
Noel
Gallagher (29 May 1967)
The most famous 'Britpop' guitarist and the
brain behind Oasis knows very well that he is not as good as guitarists like
Squire, Marr or Paul Weller. Noel knows perfectly
well that if he has gone down in history he has done so by writing anthems of
the stature of Wonderwall, Live Forever
and Don't Look Back In Anger and not
for his brilliance on the six strings. Of course his style perfectly matches
his compositions, simple, direct and melodic. There's nothing that stands out
especially, but when you're singing a chorus like Some Might Say or Cigarettes
& Alcohol it doesn't matter at all. Oasis was the band that best
exemplified Britpop and had the best songs, they ascended as fast as champagne
spray, and had a slow decay with their last albums. Gallagher may not be a
guitar virtuoso but most of the world's most valued guitarists would change
their technique for the possibility of writing songs as big as those who
appeared on the first two Oasis albums. They all bear his signature.
Main Guitars: Gibson Les Paul, Gibson ES-335,
Epiphone Sheraton, Epiphone Riviera, Fender Telecaster
James
Dean Bradfield (21 February 1969)
The Welsh Manic
Street Preachers have always been out their on their own; they started as a
punk group heavily influenced by the Clash,
but their lead singer and guitarist, James
Dean Bradfield, wore a Gibson Les Paul because he loved Slash from Guns N' Roses. That was punk. After the mysterious disappearance of
their rhythm guitarist and lead lyricist, Richey
Edwards, they decided to turn their sound upside down again and get closer
to a Britpop that was at its peak when Everything
Must Go appeared in 1996. His arpeggios for A Design For Life resulted in one of the movement's official
anthems.
Main Guitars: Gibson Les Paul
Graham
Coxon (12 March 1969)
Graham Coxon made his flaws a virtue and gave
Blur a characteristic sound through his guitar. Along with an enormous number
of Boss pedals he always looked for his own, original and experimental style
that served to compensate for his lack of technical skill, which made Blur a
group with a totally distinctive sound, with Coxon in a role similar to that of
The Edge in U2. If on their first albums they were viewed as totally British, with
the Kinks in mind, from their fourth
album on Coxon began to more and more draw on influences from American
alternative music, of groups like Pavement
and Sebadoh; making Blur one of the
few groups of the movement that knew how to age with class and without
repeating itself until the point of parody.
Main Guitars: Fender Telecaster
Steve
Cradock (22 August 1969)
Steve
Cradock is one of the best guitarists in the genre,
something that is proven not only by his albums with his band Ocean Colour Scene, but also in his
role as a guitarist in Paul Weller's
band (he has played on all of Weller’s solo albums). But his high point came
with Ocean Colour Scene's second album, Moseley
Shoals, either with The Riverboat
Song's distinctive riff or the mining of the Beatles' psychedelic period with The Day We Caught The Train.
Main Guitars: Gibson Les Paul Custom, Gibson
SG Standard, Gibson ES-335
Bernard
Butler (1 May 1970)
Of course, if someone were to be chosen as the
'guitar hero' of the movement, this would have to be Bernard Butler of Suede.
It was his band that appeared on the cover of Melody Maker without even having
released a single song, and it was the success of their first singles and their
first album which represented the start of Britpop. If Brett Anderson, the singer, acted as an androgynous Bowie, Butler reserved for himself the
role of Mick Ronson with some wild riffs
and some intense, raw solos. But, in spite of opening the door to success for
the whole of Britpop, Suede always went against the tide and while Oasis, Blur
and Pulp took over the reins of the movement, Suede surprised with a second
album, Dog Man Star, which was dark
and melancholic. It was the sound of a band separating, with the guitarist
facing down the other members and recording his parts separately, with Butler’s
guitar playing some of the best parts on the album. Before finishing the record
however he was sacked, with Suede continuing on its his way and Butler his; but
the intensity of those first two albums was never repeated.
Main Instruments: Gibson ES-355, Gibson Les
Paul, Vox AC30, Boss DS-2 Turbo distortion
Nick
McCabe (14 July 1971)
Nick
McCabe was never a guitarist looking for the main
focus; since The Verve's first album
he was into textures, sound and groove. It was a sound based on echo and reverb
that led to lysergic spaces in which the band immersed themselves live. With
their second album, A Northern Soul,
more defined songs began to arrive, retaining the power of McCabe's guitar,
while Urban Hymns was the epilogue to
Britpop. It was the album that gave them fame and the ‘most Richard Ashcroft and least McCabe’, but
the guitarist would leave his mark, such as his country slide part for The Drugs Don't Work, his wah in Weeping Willow, or creating with his Les
Paul an atmospheric wall of noise that would be the fundamental element of
songs like the psychedelic Neon
Wilderness, the intense The Rolling
People or the 'Zeppelian' Come On.
Main Instruments: Gibson ES-335, Gibson Les
Paul, 1979 Fender Stratocaster, Watkins Copicat
Gaz
Coombes (8 March 1976)
The dictionary says that effervescence is
"agitation, ardor, heat of tempers".
Well, if there was an album in the 90s that could be described as
'effervescent' it is none other than the debut of the British trio Supergrass, I Should Coco. Fresh out of adolescence, Gaz Coombes released an
album that celebrates the pleasure of being young, having fun and the wonderful
feeling of having your whole life ahead of you in songs such as Alright, Caught by the fuzz and Mansize Rooster. His guitar style is but
an extension of all this, as can be seen in the solos of the aforementioned Alright or Pumping On Your Stereo.
Main Guitars: Gibson ES-335, Burns Dream,
Fender Telecaster Deluxe, Fender Telecaster Plus, Gibson SG
Richard
Oakes (1 October 1976)
We had left Suede going their separate ways to
Bernard Butler in 1994, - and no one gave a damn about their future, including
a Noel Gallagher who spoke of Suede without Butler as 'Morrisuede', - but that same year a 17-year-old boy sent them a
tape to apply for the position. While the singer, Brett Anderson, was listening
to the tape, Suede’s drummer approached him and said that the new demos sounded
very good. That was all it took for Anderson to ask Oakes to join the band and
prove that they weren’t yet done. With Oakes as his new songwriting partner,
Anderson would deliver some of the best songs of his career, such as Trash and The Beautiful Ones on the hit Coming
Up; the luminous side of Dog Man Star
showed that Suede, with Oakes on board, had a long career ahead of them.
Main Guitars: Fender Jaguar, Gibson ES-355