(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 5 August 2025 10:00, UK
There are zero studies to back this claim, and no responsible person would finance one, but I’m going to go ahead and say that most Oasis fans are “dog people” and most Blur fans are “cat people”.
This is not to suggest that these former Britpop rivals or their fan bases are as diametrically opposed as the old narratives would have you believe.
Sure, there are some oft-discussed dividing lines along class, geography, fashion, and more, but really, the reason Oasis ultimately won “the war”, as Damon Albarn acknowledged, is that people will always forgive a bad dog. Pooches are lovable, predictable, sporty, and usually give you the positive attention you want, so much so that you don’t even mind all the barking, slobbering, and shit-picking.
Cats, by contrast—while certainly cute and cuddly in their own right—are less inclined to win back the people who already fear or dislike them. They’re not gonna fill a concert set exclusively with big guitar hooks and sing-along choruses. Instead, they’re probably gonna bring a harpsichord on stage, and perhaps some congas, a melodion, an omnichord, and a zither. They will show you their bellies, then claw you when you don’t know the words to ‘Girls & Boys’.
Maybe I’m mixing up the metaphor a bit here. The guys in Blur aren’t really that feline-ish themselves, but as Graham Coxon was explaining even way back in 1994, they always enjoyed the element of surprise—letting their songs jump out from behind a sofa and attack the listener’s ankles from time to time. And for the people who respected that sort of independent spirit, it was a winning formula.
“Yeah, that’s what we wanted,” a 25-year-old Coxon told The Rocket in Seattle, referring to the tracks on Blur’s third album, Parklife. “We wanted these songs to roll uncomfortably into the next; for each song to be its own world. I suppose that’s the sound of Blur.”
In the same interview, conducted at a time when the American press were still figuring out what this intriguing young pop band was all about, Coxon was asked about the then-recent remix of ‘Girls & Boys’ by Pet Shop Boys—a group presumably happy to work with dogs and cats alike.
“They asked us if they could have a go at it without being paid or anything,” Coxon said, “And we said, ‘yeah, go on’… We wanted [‘Girls & Boys’] to be a football hooligan chant, but quite camp. We made it as camp as we could, and [Pet Shop Boys] took it even more to the camp side. So it turned really [into a] gay club [song], which is really cool, ‘cause we wanted football hooligans, cabbies, grannies and a great cross-section of people to appreciate it. And I suppose that’s why it’s done so well.”
For all the words used to describe the Gallagher brothers and the music of Oasis in the mid-1990s, “camp” was rarely, if ever, one of them. Blur’s comparative willingness to go more in that direction, despite their own penchant for a football chant, didn’t necessarily make them wildly unique for the time period, but it might have created a subtle line in the sand. A separation of the cats and the dogs at the top of the Britpop food chain. Whether their fans were hipsters, grandmas, or cabbies, the potentially confusing mash-up of football hooliganism and camp club pop was generally embraced without judgment; emblematic of a cat owner’s patience.
“That’s our Blur,” they all said, “They’re not gonna play fetch and they won’t respond to their own name, but when you get to know them, it’s soooo rewarding.”
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