The fad for naming summers has turn into one thing of a cultural phenomenon. Suppose for instance of 2019, which used to be branded a “hot girl summer”, encouraged by means of rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s track.
In 2021 there used to be the much-ridiculed “white boy summer” (named after a track of the similar identify by means of Tom Hanks’s son, Chet). Then 2022 used to be “feral girl summer” and 2024, in fact, used to be a “brat summer”, after Charli XCX’s cultural phenomenon album Brat.
And this summer time? Neatly, with the likes of Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, Suede, Shed Seven and Solid all taking part in UK dates between June and August, it’s “Britpop summer”, in fact. The query is, regardless that, whether or not those names are in fact (and appropriately) representing the zeitgeist, or if they’re simply the results of savvy advertising methods.
Such issues might now be happening extra continuously, however they’re not anything new. The 12 months 1967 used to be famously coined “the summer of love”, a moniker supposedly invented by means of the Californian native govt to position a favorable spin at the druggy, furry, hippy gatherings going down around the state.
Then, simply over twenty years later, there got here the imaginatively titled “second summer of love” in 1988 which, like its predecessor used to be drug-inspired, however this time concerned British ravers taking ecstasy in London warehouses as a substitute of hippies “dropping acid” in San Franciscan parks.
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The “summer of love” has in large part been offered to us as a psychedelic utopia, in which London used to be the “swinging, cool and hip” epicentre of a brand new cultural motion. Everybody used to be blissfully stoned, with messages of peace and love on their lips, kaftans and floral blouses on their our bodies and plant life of their hair.
In fact, regardless that, in the United Kingdom no less than best 8% of adults had in fact attempted hashish and less than 1% had taken LSD or acid, and the craze of the day (for males, anyway) concerned good slacks and short-back-and-sides.
Such un-psychedelic appetites additionally spilled over into mainstream tune. Even supposing it’s now the United Kingdom’s bestselling album ever, in 1967, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band used to be best the sixth-biggest album of the 12 months relating to gross sales. It used to be bested by means of the very suitably non-flower-power Herb Alpert, The Monkees and The Sound of Tune soundtrack.
Red Floyd’s debut album, The Piper on the Gates of Crack of dawn – “the founding masterpiece in psychedelic music” – offered 275,000 copies in 1967 in the United Kingdom (in comparison to The Sound of Tune’s 2.4 million) and used to be quantity 34 at the checklist of big-selling albums in the United Kingdom that 12 months.
The similar 12 months, 1967, additionally noticed the “best double-A side ever released”, The Beatles’ Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Perpetually. It used to be saved off the #1 spot by means of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Please Unencumber Me.
Within the so-called ‘second summer of love’.
It sort of feels, then, that for many of the British public, it used to be much less a “summer of love” and extra a “summer of Humperdinck”. Rapid-forward 5 many years, and we see the similar forms of issues taking place. The 12 months 2019 used to be a “hot girl summer”, Megan Thee Stallion’s track best peaked at 40 in the United Kingdom singles charts and her gigs offered poorly.
Like our “summer of Humperdinck”, had been such issues in response to reputation, we can have anticipated a “Sheeran summer”, with Ed Sheeran’s duet with Justin Bieber, I Don’t Care, dominating the charts and airwaves.
In a similar fashion, even though 2024 used to be a “brat summer”, Charli XCX’s album used to be in fact best the United Kingdom’s eighth-biggest promoting album of the 12 months, with Taylor Swift’s very un-Brat-like The Tortured Poets Division reaching 783,820 gross sales – nearly double Brat’s.
Britpop summer time
Britpop itself can have peaked in 1995, however in the summertime of 1996, with Oasis and Blur nonetheless omnipresent, Tony Blair speaking concerning the prospect of freedom, aspiration and ambition, England progressing throughout the Euros on house soil, and sunny day after sunny day, it used to be (consistent with The Mum or dad, no less than) probably the most positive length in contemporary British historical past the place anything else gave the impression imaginable.
Pulp carried out a secret set at Glastonbury 2025 to very large crowds.
We might all have turn into extra cynical within the intervening years, however in the middle of every other heatwave, with Pulp at Glastonbury, and the Gallaghers reunited, it does really feel like there’s one thing within the air once more.
Certainly, status amongst tens of hundreds of fellow tune enthusiasts within the sweltering warmth looking at Jarvis Cocker strutting his gangly stuff, if I disregarded the gray in his beard, the iPhones within the crowd, and the aching in my legs, it would were the nineties far and wide once more.
Britpop summer time? I’m curious about it. And possibly this will likely be one time that the identify truly does constitute the country’s temper.
