how Britpop came to light in the 90s

Blur VS. Oasis, NME issue 12 August 1995

[...] In April 1994 Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was found dead, a story which affected not only his fans and readers of the NME, but would see a massive change in British music. Grunge was about to be replaced by Britpop, a new form of music influenced by British music of the 1960s and British culture. The phrase was coined by NME after the band Blur released their album Parklife in the same month of Cobain's death. Britpop began to fill the musical and cultural void left after Cobain's death, and Blur's success, along with the rise of a new group from Manchester called Oasis saw Britpop explode for the rest of 1994. By the end of the year Blur and Oasis were the two biggest bands in the UK and sales of the NME were increasing thanks to the Britpop effect. 1995 saw the NME cover many of these new bands and saw many of these bands play the NME Stage at that years Glastonbury Festival where the paper had been sponsoring the second stage at the festival since 1993. This would be their last year sponsoring the stage, subsequently the stage would be known as the 'Other Stage'.

August 1995 saw Blur and Oasis plan to release singles on the same day in a mass of media publicity. Steve Sutherland leapt on this and stuck the story on the front page of the paper. This saw Sutherland come in for criticism for playing up the duel between the bands. Blur won the 'race' for the top of the charts, and the resulting fallout from the publicity led to the paper peaking in sales during the 1990s as Britpop became the dominant musical genre. After this peak the paper saw a slow decline as Britpop burned itself fairly rapidly out over the next few years. This left the paper directionless again, and attempts to embrace the rise of DJ culture in the late 1990s only led to the paper being criticised for not supporting rock or indie music.

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source: wikipedia.org