the boo radleys
The Strange Legacy and Unexpected Return of The Boo Radleys
Three decades ago, The Boo Radleys made a psychedelic masterpiece that was hailed by NME as one of the top albums of 1993. Their next album spawned a sunny Britpop hit and rose to No. 1 on the U.K. album charts, and the next one was rumored to have influenced Radiohead. So why is the band so overlooked today? “I think we just confused people,” says lead singer Simon “Sice” Rowbottom on the eve of the band’s first album in 23 years. Sice observes that the Boos’ willingness to transcend genre—originating as a My Bloody Valentine-inspired shoegaze outfit; melding roaring guitar with eclectic instrumentation and avant-noise psychedelia on 1993’s extraordinarily potent Giant Steps; then being labeled a Britpop act with 1995’s Wake Up!—left critics and fans unsure how to categorize the group. In...
The 25 Best Albums of the Britpop Era
Contrary to popular belief, Britpop was not a subgenre. It was also not a catchall for every bit of culture being manufactured in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (That would be “Cool Britannia,” and like Britpop it almost exclusively applied to English entities.) Instead, Britpop was originally a press-driven crusade to champion domestic talent that represented the customs and lifestyle in their music. The credit (or blame) for the whole thing really goes to journalist Stuart Maconie, whose “Yanks Go Home” cover story in the April 1993 issue of Select framed indie acts like Suede, Pulp, Saint Etienne and the Auteurs as an antidote to the “bad grunge” that was “killing British music.” Although Suede frontman Brett Anderson graced the Select cover, he publicly derided th...
