Who coined “Britpop”?
Short Answer
Depends who you ask. Stuart Maconie gets the credit. But John Robb had it in print years earlier, long before it made the front cover of Select.
Long Answer
Like most cultural labels, Britpop wasn’t invented. It evolved. It was kicked around in fanzines, muttered in passing, and eventually repackaged by the music press into something sellable.
The common claim is that Stuart Maconie coined it in 1994, in a Select magazine feature with Brett Anderson on the cover. “Yanks Go Home” shouted the headline, and suddenly this loose collective of guitar bands had a name, a face, and a flag. Blur, Oasis, Suede, and Pulp were handed a cause. The public bought it. The press doubled down.
But the word itself had a longer tail. Music writer John Robb had been using Britpop since the late 1980s, originally as a cheeky twist on Britcore, a term used for a wave of punk bands. It appeared in his fanzine Rox, and later popped up in reviews for Sounds. It wasn’t serious. It was one of many throwaway inventions, like “Scallydelic” and “noisenik”, thrown into the mix to see what stuck. For years, Britpop floated in the background of British music writing, rarely defined, never trademarked.
It wasn’t until the Blur vs Oasis circus that it cemented. The media needed a label. Britpop was lying around, catchy and convenient. So it got picked up, polished, and stuck on everything from CD racks to Channel 4 documentaries.
So yes, Maconie named the moment. But Robb had already named the noise. Like punk, it wasn’t about who said it loudest. It was about who said it first, even if they were only half-joking.
