They say, in the eighties, there was nothing. Everyone just existed: some romanticised the good old days, some did electronic music, but generally - everyone was bored. Britain was not so great.

Oh wait! There was a punk movement.

By the end of the decade it was pretty much done though. So now people had nothing in particular to believe in. They still had their DIY clothes and wild hairstyles, but no wave already.

And this is as fashionable as it gets for sport fans.

Nirvana does Top of the Pops performance, where, not allowed to play live, they just show off all over the place. And as the UK youth saw this happening, they did not exactly fall in love with Grunge, but rather got the idea for their own attitude of the next decade. "The Scene That Celebrates Itself", as they call it, was finding its way.

It was this issue of the Select magazine that stated that Britpop is a thing. It featured Suede, The Auteurs, Denim, Saint Etienne and Pulp. No Blur and no Oasis yet.

Suede were one of the first bands to establish themselves in this new genre. They set the guidelines for everyone to follow. As the journalist
John Harris wrote, "If Britpop started anywhere, it was the deluge of acclaim that greeted Suede's first records: all of them audacious, successful and very, very British"

The similar go-get-'em moods dominate the art scene. Young British Artists, led by Damien Hirst, are making art as outrageous as possible. In 1995, Hirst himself gets the Turner Prize (the most prestigious prize in Fine Arts) for "Mother and Child (Divided)" - the installation consisting of a cow and a calf, divided in halves and put in tanks of formaldehyte.

The song Common People released by Pulp in 1996 is voted a Britpop anthem. In a 2012 question and answer session on BBC Radio 5 Live Cocker said that he was having a conversation with the girl at the bar at [Central Saint Martins] college because he was attracted to her, although he found some aspects of her personality unpleasant. He remembered that at one point she had told him she "wanted to move to Hakney and live like 'the common people'"