LETS ALL MEET UP IN THE YEAR…2025: WHY BRITPOP WILL LIVE FOREVER
By Resonate | March 4, 2026
One of the most significant news events in British music this year and last was Oasis’s reunion tour. After fifteen years of inactivity and solo work, the notoriously fraught relationship between the Gallagher brothers was patched up enough to go out onstage again in the latest wave of big reunions. Following that, Radiohead announced their first tour in eight years of inactivity and side projects, with no forthcoming album planned.
As everybody knows, both times, ticket prices shot straight through the roof, computers crashed under the weight of all the prospective buyers, and the lottery left people frustrated and empty-handed.
Pulp got back together to make their first original material since 2002; they, along with Suede, Stereophonics and Shed Seven, burst into the top reaches of the albums chart, Feeder sold out the Bristol Beacon for Comfort in Sound, and Gen Z saw the whole thing happen. It’s hard to imagine the kids of the year 2000 doing this for any of the living dinosaurs of 1970s rock.
Not only did the big reunions make more waves this year than anything else besides the controversies at Glastonbury, but many peripheral artists from that time who had never gone anywhere suddenly came into the most attention they’d have had in years.
In the summer, Turin Brakes took on the Harbourside stage for Bristol Sounds 2025 and played to a massive crowd in support of Scottish alt-pop mainstays Texas. An acoustic duo with one top-ten single and two top-ten albums to their name, they were a smaller-level band with radio hit potential, never quite reaching the same level of popularity as their contemporaries. In their early days, they, among others, were hailed as the embodiment of the Britpop style, moving into a more honest, emotional place.
Hailing from the same scene, Starsailor played a show at the O2 Academy in November, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their debut album Love Is Here. Fittingly enough, they described their show as a career retrospective, playing half of that album’s contents and giving one or two picks from each of their following albums. Based around a wider-scoping lineup that incorporates multiple keyboards, their style was always more intense than Turin Brakes or Coldplay, drawing on Jeff Buckley and the Beatles for deep, pillowy soundscapes of acoustic guitar walls, vocal harmonies, and contrasting stripped-down tracks with lyrics delving into emotional trauma and dashed hopes. Always a personal favourite of mine, they have nine top-forty hits and three certified albums, and the crowd was packed all across the stadium.
There would have been no Britpop without baggy, and Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays is one of the “big three” faces of the scene, alongside The Stone Roses’ Ian Brown and Tim Burgess of the Charlatans. The most personally messy of them, he spent a long time lambasted as a drug-fuelled has-been in a series of run-ins with the press and reality TV, while Step On, Kinky Afro and Hallelujah continued to light up the rooms of hipster bars in the background.
Happy Mondays quietly rekindled their partnership in 2012 with the original lineup of six, and continue to be a sought-after veteran act who can command a stage alongside younger artists at Bristol’s Forwards festival this year. Adding to this victory lap, Black Grape, the seemingly long-forgotten follow-up project from the bulletproof Ryder (accompanied by rapper Paul “Kermit” Leveridge, now the only other member) have been on the road for the past decade: never a darling of critics or nostalgic radio hosts, they nonetheless maintained enough name recognition to top the bill at Electric in December for the anniversary of their number-one album It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah.
After I left the venue, I got on the bus home and opened Ticketmaster to buy tickets to see Gene and Ocean Colour Scene in 2026. No regrets.
Whenever you look up listings for Bristol’s larger venues, artists like this are always there, never going away as long as they play the classics, play it safe, and keep hold of their appeal. Tickets are never as pricey as the decade-defining megastars, and with their followings being mostly British and European, you’re likely to see them stop by once or twice a year.
Why do these artists retain such large followings that grow year after year? They came of age commercially in a time when the music press made the mythologies that activated the older generations who got their music news from radio, TV and magazines, spreading downward to younger fans in search of prestige, sure they’ll see someone polished with some mainstream appeal and perhaps a few nostalgia-bombs for a time they never experienced, where the radio was the exponent of all of the new and wacky, the unpleasant and the unpolished.
In 2000, the physical music market reached its peak in the UK for singles and albums sold, shortly before the launch of iTunes and a decade before streaming services became viable. As the transmission mechanism breaks down for new bands who nowadays depend on more flaky followings and uneasy breakthroughs on social media to get started, the old world is still very much around as an old copy of Silence is Easy or a compilation such as The Album Volume 2 looms behind young charity shoppers trying on jeans. With the cultural memory of mass media reaching distinct from today’s individualised methods of discovery, “old” music has never been more popular; the hipsters of the 2010s and those put off by the current fifteen-minutes-of-fame norms of the 2020s are always finding a rabbit hole to go down. As pop culture continues to cannibalise the past, the music of one’s parents’ generation carries less and less of a disparaging stigma.
This gives the bands in question a live afterlife in regional show slots, long after their youthful heydays, with word of mouth keeping their modest stories alive and social media allowing them to reach new fanbases where they can content themselves with being living legends. (of a sort). Their music is easily found and ever popular on streaming, and the production styles of the late 1990s and early 2000s are barely ageing with the passage of time, unlike so many artists “of their time” who came before. After that, who knows how we will collectively, rather than individually, mythologise the 2020s, or, for that matter, how much we will at all?
WORDS BY DINO BREWSTER