Why Britain Will Never Stop Making Guitar Bands
From The Beatles to Oasis and Arctic Monkeys, the guitar band has been declared dead repeatedly. Britain keeps bringing it back.
On 29 August 1994, Oasis released their first album. Britain had spent the early part of the decade listening to American grunge. Then, from Manchester, came a band who seemed to have absolutely no interest in being miserable.
Definitely Maybe
Definitely Maybe was loud, cocky and unapologetically British. There were songs about wanting to be a rock ’n’ roll star, drinking, boredom and getting out of an ordinary life. It sold 100,000 copies in its first four days and made guitar music feel enormous again.
That story has happened in Britain before. And it has happened since. The interesting question is not why Britain has produced so many great guitar bands. It is why the country repeatedly turns them into something bigger than music.
Liverpool, 1963
When Please Please Me was released on 22 March 1963, The Beatles were not yet the untouchable cultural institution they would become. They were four young men from Liverpool who had spent years playing clubs, including the Cavern, and had developed the sort of live reputation that only comes from playing the same rooms over and over again.
The album was recorded in a single day, capturing much of the energy of their live set. Eight of its fourteen songs were Lennon–McCartney compositions. By May, it was at No. 1 in Britain, where it stayed for 30 consecutive weeks.
The more important change was happening outside the charts. The Beatles looked like people their audience could actually become. They spoke in Liverpool accents, wore suits, played guitars and wrote songs. A teenager did not have to dream about becoming a crooner. They could buy a guitar.
Birmingham, 1970
Seven years later, another British band appeared with a very different idea of what a guitar could do. Black Sabbath’s debut opens with rain, a church bell and a riff built around one of the most unsettling intervals in Western music. It sounds like something has gone badly wrong.
The band came from Aston in Birmingham, surrounded by the factories and industrial landscape that shaped the city. Their music was slower, heavier and darker than almost anything else being played at the time. While critics wrote them off, people bought the records. Black Sabbath reached No. 8 in Britain and eventually sold more than a million copies in the United States.
Black Sabbath did not need critics to tell their audience they were important. Their audience already knew.
Manchester, 1989
By the end of the 1980s, the guitar band had another problem: the dancefloor. Acid house was everywhere and standing still in front of a band was beginning to look old-fashioned. Then The Stone Roses arrived.
John Squire’s guitar sounded psychedelic and distinctly 1960s, but underneath it Mani’s bass and Reni’s drumming gave the songs a physical, almost danceable pulse. The old categories started to collapse. The indie kid could go to a rave. The club kid could buy a guitar record.
By Spike Island in May 1990, bucket hats, baggy clothes, dancing and guitars had somehow found themselves in the same photograph.
Manchester, 1994
Oasis understood something similar, but they understood scale. The Gallaghers were loud, funny, argumentative and completely convinced they were going to be famous. There was nothing delicate about it.
Definitely Maybe arrived when Britain was ready for that attitude. Songs such as Rock ’n’ Roll Star and Cigarettes & Alcohol took ordinary frustrations and inflated them into something aspirational. You might live in a council house, work a boring job or have very little money, but none of that had to determine the size of your dreams.
They did not sound like they wanted to escape Britain. They sounded like they wanted Britain. The accents, football shirts, parkas and swagger became part of a moment when Britishness itself became fashionable again.
Sheffield, 2006
Then the internet changed the rules. Arctic Monkeys did not have to wait for a record label to manufacture an audience. Their songs had already passed between fans online before the band released a debut album.
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not sold 363,735 copies in its first week and became the fastest-selling debut album in British history. Alex Turner documented the small details of British nightlife with the precision of somebody who had actually been there. Sheffield was not a vague backdrop. It was part of the music.
That is another reason guitar bands work so well in Britain: they tend to come with a place attached. You do not just hear the bands. You hear where they came from.
The guitar band is never really dead
Britain keeps producing another group of teenagers drawn to the sound. They hear the records their parents grew up with, discover a band from twenty years before and decide that guitars still sound pretty good.
They start practising in bedrooms and garages, form bands with their friends and eventually find a room somewhere that will let them play. Every time the guitar band seems to have run its course, another generation finds a reason to make it matter again.