Most Iconic Britpop Women of the 90s

1. Justine Frischmann- Elastica/ Suede

Being the ultimate girl idol of Britpop, Justine Frischmann seemed to have it all- good looks, multiple Britpop celebrity boyfriends including Damon Albarn from Blur and Brett Anderson from Suede, and awesomely good music. The daughter of the engineering consultant behind the NatWest Tower, Frischmann was, in the awestruck words of Alex James, bass player with Blur, "cash rich" and privileged.

In 1988 Justine moved in with Brett Anderson, a boy from Haywards Heath who was soon to form the band Suede. After breaking up with Brett, Frischmann moved on to become the girlfriend of Damon Albarn, the singer with the fledgling and then super popular Blur. The awkward love-triangle created so much bitterness that each of them grew determined to become more famous than the others. Anderson made it first, when Suede released a beautiful album full of lovelorn songs about Frischmann. The jealous Albarn responded by vowing to "dethrone Brett and his group of cretins".

Nonetheless, the ex-singer and Britpop princess is now residing in the USA and paints in her spare time.

2. Louise Wener – Sleeper

Like so many in the 90s, Louise Wener dreamed of being a pop star in the UK. But for her it all came true. As the singer with Sleeper, she hit the big time during the Britpop era in the mid-1990s. The life was everything she had expected it to be, and more. Their first single, Alice In Vain, entered the charts at number 76 and Louise set about securing a future by writing stand-up Top 10 pop songs and garnering as much press coverage as they can.

She stepped out of the limelight because of the way the media treated her: "Because I wrote frank lyrics, I was depicted as sex-crazed and whorish (imagine such an accusation being levelled at a male rock star), and because I didn't lie down, look pretty and wax lyrical about my feminine angst, I was summarily demonised. One music paper even published letters in which men brayed for me to be burnt as a witch."

After the band split in 1998, Wener began a writing career and has written four novels: Goodnight Steve McQueen, The Big Blind (aka The Perfect Play) The Half Life of Stars and Worldwide Adventures In Love. Her autobiography, Different for Girls: My True-life Adventures in Pop (aka Just For One Day: Adventures in Britpop) was published in June 2010. In addition to writing herself, Wener has taught novel-writing. By 2011, she and Sleeper drummer MacLure had married and moved to Brighton, where MacLure teaches at a music college.

3. Miki Berenyi – Lush

Miki Berenyi is of mixed heritage and of Japanese and Hungarian blood. She is the daughter of Japanese actress Yasuko Nagazumi who played minor roles in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice and the TV series Space: 1999. At the age of 14, Berenyi met future bandmate Emma Anderson at Queen’s College in England. They found they had a common bond: their parents had bounced them both from school to school depending on family finances at the time. Two years later, the two teenagers wrote and produced a fanzine called Alphabet Soup, which only lasted for five issues.

Berenyi became the lead singer of the band Lush, which from1987 until 1996, she released several albums, singles and videos, and toured extensively through the UK, North America, Japan, Australia and other countries.

The band is actually returning to the music scene in 2016 for a new release, so check them out for the latest developments.

4. Sonya Madan- Echobelly

Sonya Madan was known for great things -a great many things. Besides the fact that many are struck by similarities with Audrey Hepburn, behind this exterior lies a talented musician who was the front-woman for acclaimed 90’s ‘Britpop’ band Echobelly.

The band formed in 1993 after Sonya met guitarist Glenn Johansson in a pub and the two actively pursued a career in music. They teamed up with bass guitarist Alex Keyser and drummer Andy Henderson, who had previously played with PJ Harvey’s band. Guitarist Debbie Smith, formerly of Curve, came on board in 1994.

Sonya recalls; “We formed just before ‘Britpop’ came into existence and we got caught up on the whole bandwagon. When we started, ‘Britpop’ didn’t exist and a year later it did, so everything happened very quickly. It was an amazing time. When you’re going through it you don’t think anything about it; you’re just part of it. Retrospectively it was an amazing time for British music – the buzz and the excitement that something was happening that belonged to us, and we were part of it. I know a lot of bands came from outside London, but most of them were here (in London), and we all used to go drinking together and clubbing – it was really good fun!”

5. Cerys Matthews- Catatonia 

Catatonia was formed in 1992, at the heights of the britpop scene (albeit a bit late). Cerys Matthew, being the front-woman of the Britpop band, subsequently sang lead vocals on, and co-wrote the music and lyrics for, the band's greatest hits. Songs she co-wrote included "You've Got a Lot to Answer For", "Mulder and Scully", "Dead From the Waist Down", and "Road Rage". Matthews also played guitar on the earlier material before second guitarist Owen Powell joined the band. She also performed a single with the band Space named "The Ballad of Tom Jones", which tells the story of two lovers who want to kill each other, but then hear a Tom Jones song that defuses their homicidal feelings.

By the late 90s Catatonia has gotten big and were everywhere, the toast of the town. But in 2001, after four albums, Matthews left the band, spent time in rehabiltation and dropped out of the limelight altogether. There are rumours that she moved to Nashville, USA, living in the woods and getting married. Matthews was voted the "Sexiest Female in Rock" in a 1999 readers' poll in the now defunct magazine Melody Maker.

Dave Rowntree - "There are always plans for Blur" - July 2011

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DAVE ROWNTREE

Then: Drummer, Blur. Blur have released seven studio albums, including the Britpop-defining No 1 albums Parklife and The Great Escape which sold 2.15 million copies worldwide. Having effectively split up in 2003, they reunited in 2009 for a run of successful gigs, headlining Glastonbury and playing to 100,000 emotional fans over two nights in Hyde Park.

Defining Britpop Moment: Winning the 'Battle of Britpop', beating Oasis to No 1 in August 1995 with "Country House".

Now: Trainee Solicitor. Having worked as an animator for several years, setting up his own company, Nanomation, and producing two series of Empire Square, Rowntree enrolled at law school and is halfway through his training contract at Kingsley Napley, a London firm.

Lives: East London with his girlfriend, a music publisher. He is 47 years old.

'Around five years ago, I was having a mid-life crisis. I lay awake at night thinking, 'Haven't I wasted my life? Hasn't it all been rather trivial? Hitting things for a living, isn't that rather stupid?'.

Then I talked to a friend who was a lawyer. He said his grandfather had sent him to the Old Bailey, saying 'Go and sit there for two weeks and, at the end of it, you'll know if you like law or not'. So I did that and it was brilliant. Everything that my mid-life crisis was telling me I needed, I found in that courtroom.

The space between things with Blur was growing quite wide so I went to one of the leading legal aid criminal firms in east London and did a bit of work experience. I fell in love with it. It was everything I was looking for – genuine hands-on helping of people with serious crises. I went to law school, passed all my exams and in a year I'll be a qualified solicitor. Now I work five days a week. Crime is what I love but I'm unusual in that I quite like tax law, too.

Around the same time I started to get more involved in the Labour party. I'm a local activist and helped David Miliband on his leadership campaign, which was very exciting. I also stood for parliament in Westminster at the last election, though I had no hope at all of winning. It's all part of trying to bring some kind of meaning to my life, arranging it so I'm a giver rather than a taker. What stuck in my craw was the feeling that my life was selfish. I was turning into somebody that I despised.

The band wound down without my permission, because of Graham and Damon falling out. It wasn't being in the band that I hated. I still love doing that and I'm pretty sure that if I could still do it full time, that's what I would be doing. It's all speculative, because to be able to do it full time you have to be a bit younger.

At the time, it was very hard to gauge the scale of what was going on. First we were a tiny indie band and suddenly we were the mainstream, at number one. We became pop stars which wasn't in the plan. Some of us accommodated that better than others. At the height of our success, I used to fly the band around on tour in my plane. It was brilliant – proper rock-star behaviour. These days I share a plane with a few friends. It's an incredible luxury, really, my one nod to stardom.

Otherwise, I felt about a mile from being involved in any kind of movement, even Britpop. The idea that we were involved in a movement, especially one with such a terrible name, definitely wouldn't have appealed to us.

The Hyde Park reunion [in 2009] could have been a disaster. When Graham and Damon put their differences to one side we decided to go into the rehearsal studio and see if the old magic was there. It was clear immediately that it was. But we all had misgivings. I was very surprised at how quickly the first show sold out. It was really nice that people still felt that way about us.

We keep in touch with each other and there are always plans for Blur. But it's quite fragile. We're grown men now and we don't want to ruin anything. If we do anything else, it's got to be interesting. There has to be a good reason."

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Interesting read, and in particular the part that caught my attention was the bolded red paragraph. At least that's nice to hear, good news for us fans! But we still don't know anything about their plans. 

Here's Justine Frischmann's part in the article. For those who don't know, Justine was the ex-girlfriend of Damon Albarn and frontwoman of Britpop band Elastica. Read below to know what's going on with her.

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JUSTINE FRISCHMANN

Then: Lead singer and guitarist, Elastica. Britpop's cool head girl who dated Brett Anderson and Damon Albarn. Elastica's eponymous first album entered the charts at No 1 in 1995, then the fastest-selling British debut in history. They split up in 2001.

Defining Britpop moment: Starring on an NME cover alongside Thom Yorke and Brett Anderson in 1994, before Elastica had released an album.

Now: Artist. A graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture, Frischmann co-presented a BBC series called Dreamspaces. She also collaborated with her old flatmate MIA, co-writing songs on her first album Arular. Last year, Frischmann had her first solo exhibition at the Michelle O'Connor Gallery in San Francisco and this year showed her work at New York's Sloan Fine Art.

Lives: North Bay, San Francisco with her husband, a climate scientist and professor at the University of California-Davis. She is 41 years old.

'Music never felt like a sustainable career to me in the emotional and physical sense. I was never that comfortable in the spotlight. I'm actually a pretty quiet kind of person who needs a lot of peace, calm and stability around me.

When I think of Britpop, I remember how exciting it was to see friends breaking through in such a short time. At first the media's attempts to pigeonhole us all together seemed forced. But the concept of 'Britpop' soon gained momentum and it became clear that it had become an entity in its own right. That redefinition of English music and identity felt important at a time when so much of the popular culture seemed to be coming from America. There was a desire to make work that celebrated where we were living, using our own imagery, vernacular and humour. There was also a softening of boundaries during that era – in a way, Damon working with Phil Daniels had some parallels with Tony Blair representing the Labour party... a reappropriation of traditionally working-class iconography by middle-class intelligentsia.

I left the UK in 2005 to study Fine Art at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I was ready for a total change, I wanted to leave the UK and go back to school. When we were touring I loved the land in the American West and felt drawn to come back. Naropa is the only Buddhist university in the US. I thought it would be interesting to look at the creative process from a contemplative point of view.

I have a parent who is a Holocaust survivor and the Holocaust is something that, I think, has driven me all of my life. My love of Modern design and aesthetics also comes from my parents, who were influenced by the Modern movement, partly, I believe, because we had lost our family history on both sides.

The only Elastica member with whom I'm in touch is Donna. Last time we spoke she was working as a music therapist. Brett [Anderson] is still a good friend. In terms of the music scene today, I still think that Maya's work [MIA] is interesting. But I'm the wrong person to ask. I live in rural northern California where there are coyotes wandering in the streets. And I don't own a TV."