1996: the Year That England Went F***ing Mental

Revisiting Britpop, Block Rockin' Beats, the Euros, Trainspotting and more 30 years on

Jul 09, 2026

If you aren’t British, chances are that 1996 may not strike you as a particularly special year. Those aware of predictable cyclical events will likely remember it as a year for a US Presidential election (in which Bill Clinton comfortably beat Bob Dole) and that there would have been an Olympics also. 1

But pop culture? Only the true hip-hop/history buff would recall instantly tie 1996 to the murder of Tupac Shakur that September, or to the crossover success of The Fugees’ The Score. Only a pop historian or music journalist would similarly identify 1996 with Alanis Morrissette blowing out all-comers with her debut album Jagged Little Pill, which racked up 7.6 millions sales in the US alone, plus another 2 million in the UK where it was also biggest selling album of the year. And I suspect you’d need to be a dedicated film fan to recall that Independence Day was the year’s big movie, with the likes of Mission: Impossible and Jerry Macguire not far behind.

However, if you are British, or just lived in the UK in 1996 – and I did, for almost exactly six months right in the middle of the year – you will likely know 1996 not for Alannis Morrissette, Will Smith, the Atlanta bombing, Tupac’s murder or indeed anything connected to any other country than the US, as much as for it being the year that Britain, to take up the old chant of football fans whose team have just won a major match, went fucking mental. And if you want a reminder of just how fucking mental Britain went that year, you could do worse than to pop along to the Music Library at the Barbican (assuming you can find it!) which is hosting a modestly sized exhibition titled, with considerably less humility, 1996 30 Years On: The wildest year of Britain’s wildest decade.

OTT: Oasis and The Spice Girls both owned UK 1996

It’s hard to argue with the evidence. While 1995 was the year the expression “Britpop” rose to the fore and the year that the Oasis vs. Blur battle for the No. 1 spot took place on national news bulletins, and 1997 the year that Vanity Fair termed the phrase Cool Britannia, 1996 was the year Britpop went over the top and took over the national psyche.

1996 was the year Oasis hosted Britain’s biggest ever concerts at Knebworth in August, playing to 250,000 people over two nights.

1996 was the year of the Spice Girls, who saw it out with three number one singles in the UK, poised to conquer the States and the rest of the planet early in 1997.

1996 was the year of block-rocking beats, the year that both The Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers topped the UK singles charts. It was the year the Sex Pistols shocked everyone all over again, this time by reforming. The year that Loaded magazine became compulsory reading, of lads culture, of men behaving badly and girls encouraged to behave even worse. It was the year that Take That split up and Robbie Williams went off to become a proper pop star. The year the Stone Roses bowed out with a whimper at the Reading festival.

1996 was the year that the Manic Street Preachers returned without the missing Richie Edwards and, after years of critical acclaim but commercial disdain, had more Top 10 singles (four) than any other British band. It was the year Jarvis Cocker bum-rushed Michael Jackson’s performance at the Brits, was almost prosecuted for it, and became a headline news iten of his own [see below].

It was the year that, following the lead of Cocker’s Pulp and their overdue success with ‘Common People’ the previous year, any British indie band that had been likewise languishing in the sales doldrums in recent years promptly injected themselves with a near-lethal dose of Britpop and found themselves in the charts all of a sudden.

The role of such hit-makers old and new is almost ludicrous: 1996 was a year in which Kula Shaker, the Bluetones, Cast, and Ocean Colour Scene all had three top 10 singles apiece. In which Ash, the Beautiful South, Black Grape, Sleeper, Blur and Suede all had a deuce, and Supergrass, Shed Seven, Space, Dodgy, Babybird, and even Menswear also made the Top 10.

It was the year of Superclubs and Superstar DJs and big bold house anthems by the likes of Faithless and Robert Miles, plus drum-and-bass hits by Everything But The Girl and triphop classics by Tricky. It was the year Alex Garland published The Beach, and the year of Trainspotting as both hit film and hit soundtrack of 1996. Which means it was also the year that Underworld finally had a hit of their own too - even if all the pissed-up Brits singing “Born Slippy Nuxx”s refrain “lager lager lager” never quite cottoned on to the fact that these were the words of an ex-alcoholic.

It was a year about which we often have to do a political doubletake because it felt like Tony Blair was Prime Minister already. He wasn’t, anymore than Thatcher was Prime Minister when punk hit in 1977, another popular misconception. But 1996 was the last full year of a 17-year Tory reign that had started with Thatcher’s actual election in 1979, then shifted to John Major in 1990 – back then British Prime Ministers not only served a full term but sometimes served two – and you could feel the change in the air.

1996 was also the year the IRA bombed London’s Docklands and then detonated the biggest bomb in Britain since World War II, in the heart of Manchester, an attack that caused enormous grief as well as immense physical damage in this most Irish of English cities, and which seriously backfired on the “PR” front. Again, you could feel the change in the air; it was the last such bombing on British mainland and two years later, the Good Friday Agreement was signed and an end to “the troubles” took hold.

Sadly, 1996 was the year of the Dunblane Massacre, in which a gunman killed 16 schoolchildren and a teacher. (And himself.) By the end of the year, a commemorative charity rendition of “Knockin’ On Heavens Door” had gone to number one and legislation effectively outlawing handguns was speeding its way through Parliament.

In the middle of it all, 1996 was the year England hosted the Euros international football tournament, and Ian Broudie’s newly popular Britpop band Lightning Seeds, accompanied by laddish TV football comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner (whose Football Fantasy League show served as a sort of precursor to the US’s Brit-presented Men In Blazers) released the “official” England team single “Three Lions.”

Broudie’s easy way with a melody, the everyday blokeishness of the video (above), and the inclusion of memorable cultural reference points all ensured that for the next several weeks the entire English nation went round singing the song’s refrain “Football’s coming home” at every opportunity, in a way that sounded fresh and exciting, truly optimistic and positive, making it something of an alternative national anthem. (The Welsh, Irish and Scottish understandably abstained.)

Also in the football world, 1996 was a year that Manchester United won the double which, given they’d done the same thing two years earlier, may not have been noteworthy – except that it was also the year that their latest young talent, David Beckham, turned 21 in the midst of those trophy wins, and in the process of some incredible displays both on and off the pitch, became a superstar, a heartthrob, and something of a national obsession. Seeing the Spice Girls on TV that year, Beckham supposedly told a mate he was going to marry the Posh One – Victoria Adams – and early the next year, introduced at the Man Utd’s Players Lounge, they do in fact start dating. The rest is history. (And hers.)

1996 was indeed fucking mental.

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with Dan Epstein . And I get to go the Barbican and write about it.

My own 1996 was suitably mental in its own ways: I had the worst injury/accident of my life – a freak one at that - plus my father died. Inevitably family secrets were revealed in he process, skeletons exhumed, and blood relationships collapsed, thankfully not forever. I initially wrote some of the details into this article, but they deserve a proper telling of their own down the line.

What matters is that at the end of February, with US and UK contracts in hand to write a Keith Moon biography, I came over to the UK with my wife and our brand new infant son of just five months, despite having my left arm in plaster and rods sticking out of the shoulder, and moved into a fantastic affordable little ‘pied a terre’ flat in a Battersea back street, successfully bringing my cushy side-gig as an A&R scout for RCA Records in New York with me. Having (illegally) sublet our average Manhattan apartment to a couple of young Brit girls starting out on their own adult adventures, the UK sojourn was cost-neutral at worst. I even sold a (necessarily automatic, due to the injury) little and loveable Ford car five months after buying it - for the same price I paid for it.

Those six months in 1996 were, despite the shattered shoulder and my dad’s death, some of the happiest of my life. Certainly having a delightful young baby on hand helped with all of that. But so did having my mother nearby (especially to babysit, when she wasn’t out and about in her own way), getting to see Crystal Palace play on a regular basis, reconnecting with friends, and the fact that we’d landed at a time that Britain had gone fucking mental.

It wasn’t all champagne supernovas. I spent at least half my time tracking down anybody who had anything to do with Keith Moon, driving all over the country to talk with his ex-schoolfriends, bandmates, girlfriends, music biz acquaintances and anyone else who had a story to tell. Some of these encounters were glamorous – going to John Entwistle’s mansion in Stowe, to Ireland to interview Oliver Reed, being wined and dined by Steve Harley, sitting up close and personal with Jeff Beck – but many of them were not. I had a lot of cups of watery tea with people whose proximity to Keith was the stand-out event of their lives. I also spent a lot of days at the British Library, mornings on the phone calling one possible connection after another, and engaged in frequent Post Office trips to send letters to people for whom a physical address was the only contact available.

Of course, almost as soon as I arrived, The Who announced they were ‘reforming’ – of a fashion – for a one-off performance of “Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia” at Hyde Park in the middle of summer. Perhaps, now that we can look back 30 years, there was something about the popularity of Britpop and the enduring hold of mod fashion that inspired Townshend to reclaim his and The Who’s status as that most British of sixties icons. If so, it paid off in the long run, and it said something for The Who’s standing even then that Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton were among the support acts.

I attended that Hyde Park show, a rare connection between the retrospective research I was conducting for the Moon book and the madness of living in London in the midst of 1996. Many of my long-standing UK contacts, people I’d come of age with a decade earlier, before I had left the UK – people like Alan McGee at Creation and his former publicist, Geoff Barrett at Heavenly – suddenly found themselves in the very centre of the action. They weren’t used to this; the indie scene was, by very definition, not the mainstream. Nobody knew quite how to behave, so most of them just carried on behaving like they would at the Good Mixer in Camden. (I never went.)

It was a mark of how mad the British music industry had got that I went in to RCA’s Fulham office one day to find the entire A&R department was just heading off to Sweden to scout a band (almost certainly The Wannadies) and I was casually invited to join them as if they were just popping down the road for a quick pint. (I demurred, aware that I might not get such a trip past the US office’s expenses department. Though then again…)

It was a mark of how I presumed the madness to be universal that when attending the Phoenix festival alongside RCA’s visiting head of A&R (we were scouting Dodgy primarily though I remember being especially taken by Placebo and missing David Bowie entirely, as did many others), we stayed in a castle converted into a hotel. That itself seemed so utterly par for the course that when I saw two glasses of champagne in reception the next morning I just presumed it was for the guests and helped myself to one. The receptionist politely informed me they had been put aside for the bride and bridegroom of a wedding party expected any moment. The Head of A&R may have concluded for his part that I had a drink problem. If so, I was in good company; so did most of the country.

It’s not totally unrelated that my mates in The Charlatans suffered a calamity in the middle of the year, when keyboard player Rob Collins, who I had considered one of those mates, died in a car crash driving home to Rockfield Studios, and the group’s decision to go ahead with their prime support slot on the second of Oasis’ record-breaking Knebworth shows less than three weeks later became headline news of its own. The band was nice enough to put my wife and I on the guest list. My memory of Knebworth is nonetheless largely all about crowd size and how there were multiple layers of VIP admissions and everyone was trying to get into the section ahead of the one they were already in, a series of competitive one-upmanships that rather defined the real (anti-) spirit of “indie” 1996. Also, that getting out of Knebworth in the car felt like an all-night process and that the Monday was a write-off as a result.

Still, Oasis put on a show that night. It was funny, it was arrogant, it was loud, it was a celebration, it was momentous. [Watch them performing “Wonderwall,” a carry-over number one hit from 1996, at the first night of Knebworth above.] Oasis wanted to be the biggest band in the world and at that point, they were, at the very least, the biggest in Britain which, from inside the tornado of Britpop 1996, felt like much the same thing.

But it was obvious even in the moment, even as What’s The Story, Morning Glory was being touted as the biggest selling British artist album in Britain of all time (a subject we discussed on this free-to-all episode of Crossed Channels), that there could be nowhere to go from here but down. And having seen Oasis in their element at Roseland the year before, and at Wetlands the year before that – and having had to ask Noel Gallagher to stop sound-checking his own songs at the Limelight when he was roadieing for the Inspiral Carpets the year before that - there wasn’t an enormous amount of joy for me to have alongside the 100,000 people out of the 125,000 who likely could not have named another Creation act if they tried. Plus, nobody mistook me for Bonehead.

This is something the UK is spectacularly good at though, however: the national obsession. I’ve often wondered if it’s to do with population, the fact that England, in particular, is so densely crowded, that FOMO is built into the national psyche. Everyone wanted to be at Knebworth that August just like, a year later, everyone (but me) wanted to put flowers down outside Buckingham Palace for the late Princess Diana. And just like how, in 1996, as already observed, everyone English was singing “Three Lions” at every opportunity.

In hindsight, the refrain of “football’s coming home” seems as internationally and culturally tone deaf as aiming the question “Do they know it’s Christmas?” at a country of starving African Muslim children.2 England may have hosted the first organized football league, but its claim to perpetual ownership of the game was a jingoistic defence mechanism born of the realisation that the Empire had collapsed, and that the national team had only once ever been good enough to win something – and that in the year it served as host nation for the World Cup. 3

Still, as the weather warmed up and the country enjoyed a proper seasonal summer, England felt like a fun place to be. These weren’t words I generally put together in the same sentence. I’d left England in the late 1980s because it was so NOT fun. But my memory of that summer is one of picnics in parks with fellow new-parenting old friends, of Sunday pub lunches on the Triangle in Clapham Common, of having friends over for dinners on the back patio, of gradually getting running again in Battersea Park, of rewarding my painful physical therapy sessions with a veggie fry-up at a local café, and of a form of English pride in the Euros that felt inclusive in a way English football had rarely been before.

The 1980s had been the nadir of the English game, concluding with calamities at Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford. But something had shifted with the 1990 World Cup in Italy – Gazza had something to do with it on the pitch, but New Order had a lot more to do with tying the team to pop/rave music culture with the official single (and Number 1 hit) “World In Motion” - and as hosts in 1996, this was England’s chance to show that it was no longer a land of hooligans as much as a land of hedonists, and that there was a difference.

If so, it was marginal. I went to one of the Euros matches, at Wembley, the quarter-final between England and Spain, a 0-0 draw that ended with an English victory on penalties, and in all the excitement and choruses of “football’s coming home,” and despite not really thinking of myself as the nationalist, patriotic sort, I ended up at Trafalgar Square on something of a post-match bender. At a certain point, I realized the police presence had increased exponentially and looking behind me from my vantage point abreast one of the four lions, noticed that the “England” crowd was now chanting heavily anti-IRA Protestant battle-cries and that it was all about to kick off. I made my exit, as did England in the next game four days later.

That particular game, the Semi-Final, was against Germany, a country that had been an avowed enemy on and off the pitch throughout the 20^th Century. Though football fans of the preceding era were keen on singing “Two World Wars and one World Cup,” fact was that (West) Germany had already made a post-1966 habit of knocking England out of major tournaments – assuming England qualified for them, that is. Along the way, the Germans had also made a habit of making it to the World Cup Finals, winning three along the way. If they had a terrace chant about their national football team in 1996, it didn’t deign to reference England.

And yet for all that Britpop, the post-rave dance culture, the nation’s shift to the left and Tony Blair as PM-in-waiting suggested the UK was becoming a more cosmopolitan, post-colonial community than the racist, backwards-looking one I’d grown up in, as soon as that Semi-Final fixture was confirmed the tabloid media reverted to the worst of stereotypes. You can see them for yourself at the Barbican’s 1996 exhibition.

Actually, you can see them below, the Daily Star with its pathetic “Herr We Go: Bring on the Krauts” headline and the Daily Mirror – supposedly a Labour-supporting tabloid – with its even more deplorable “Achtung! Surrender” headline and sidebar editorial in which the paper’s Editor takes credit for declaring “football war on Germany” in a presumed-to-be-funny rewrite of Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of actual war in 1939.

This ongoing obsession with past battles said more about the UK’s perpetually wounded psyche than we might want to know. It may be enough to note that this match – held on our third wedding anniversary, I now see - went to penalties as well, and when former Crystal Palace captain and future England manager Gareth Southgate sailed a must-score over the bar, Germany once more had the last laugh. The next morning Southgate was predictably pilloried in the press, while the summer weather broke and it rained throughout the morning rush-hour, which was both slowed and alleviated by a national hangover. “Three Lions” suddenly sounded hollow – so ludicrously optimistic in the face of inevitable defeat somewhere along the way – that nobody could bring themselves to play it.

Perhaps it then says even more about the English national psyche that this one song has been revived pretty much every two years since, almost as reliably as Christmas hits by Slade, Wham! and The Pogues; indeed, it was revived for a Christmas charity hit one year as well, on its way to some 15 Top 20 chart placements by my count. Sure enough, when I watched England overcome a defiant DR Congo in the Round of 32 at a pub in the Angel Islington last week, and despite the fact not that many people were really watching, a scrum of fans nonetheless broke out in a chorus of “football’s coming home” upon the final whistle. Old habits die hard.

Then again, thirty years after 1996, almost every band that made the charts that year and subsequently broke up during the inevitable champagne cocaine supernova hangover – from Oasis and Blur to Shed Seven and Kula Shaker – has subsequently reformed. Indeed, the Oasis reunion shows in the summer of 2025 (though I did not attend, I was witness to the crowds all around London) were the biggest since 1996 – by anyone – and suggest that Britain remains in constant longing to relive a period in which everything was f***ing mental, but in a good way.

Suitably, Trainspotting is about to launch as a musical. And the England footballers have taken to singing “Wonderwall” with the fans at the ongoing World Cup, at least after a win. I’m not sure that anyone on the team other than Harry Kane had been born when it was first released.

1996 30 Years On: The wildest year of Britain’s wildest decade does not run deep; this is not a museum art exhibit with academic suppositions and interpretations. It does not so much as ask, let alone attempt to solve, questions of national identity such as I have ruminated upon. There are multiple showcases full of memorabilia, lots of gorgeous printed photographs, some posters, some costumes, some musical instruments, a couple of interesting art commissions, some videos, a whole bunch of magazine covers, and those rather embarrassing tabloid front pages.

It also happens to have been curated by a former editor of The Sun newspaper, who has conveniently published a memoir, heavily promoted at the exhibition, the title of which he claims to have had a “Backstage Pass” to “the Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade.”4

However, as confirmed by the wide range of age of attendees – and indeed nationalities - alongside me when I visited the Barbican last Saturday, you don’t need a Backstage Pass to relive 1996. For one thing, the event is free (and the book is not). More to the point, as also confirmed by the memorabilia on display and my own vivid memories, the “wild”ness of 1996 England was lived out in full public view. It was, for sure, fucking mental.

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