Oxford Alternative
A ring road city of student bands and apple-shed studios, where shoegaze, Britpop and math rock share a rehearsal room.
What you're really asking
Not a sound — a catchment area. Oxford is a small city with a big student turnover, no record industry of its own, and a ring road full of cheap rehearsal space, so bands formed in school year groups and stayed weird because nobody local was watching.
What ties Ride to Foals isn't a guitar tone, it's the habit of building something intricate in a provincial town and only showing it to London when it's finished.
Where it sits
The Jericho Tavern in the mid-to-late eighties is the pivot: Talulah Gosh played the C86 circuit out of Oxford from 1986, Ride and Swervedriver both signed to Creation around 1990, and Radiohead were signed to Parlophone after a Jericho show in late 1991.
Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge recorded the band at Courtyard Studio in Sutton Courtenay and ended up managing them. A local fanzine, Curfew, ran from March 1991 and carried the earliest reviews of Radiohead and Supergrass, back when they were On A Friday and The Jennifers.
When the Venue, the Jericho Tavern and the Hollybush all closed in late 1994 the paper folded, restarting in July 1995 as Nightshift as the Zodiac and the Point opened. Truck Festival began in 1998 on a farm at Steventon.
Foals, Young Knives, Stornoway and Glass Animals all came through the same venues.
The scene
Who: Ronan Munro's Nightshift, the Jericho Tavern, the Zodiac on Cowley Road, the Cellar, Courtyard Studio, and the Bennett brothers' Truck Festival. What: guitars treated as texture rather than riff — Ride's wash, Swervedriver's drag, Foals' interlocking clean lines — and a vocal that sits inside the band, not on top of it.
How it works: Nightshift and the Rotator Discs shop started Shifty Disco, issuing one single a month in runs of 1000, half reserved for subscribers. Launched January 1997, its early releases became John Peel staples.
A demo review and a Punt slot were the door.
The leading records
Radiohead
OK Computer
1997
Cut largely in a converted apple shed near Didcot and a Bath manor house — the Oxford record that stopped being an Oxford record.
Supergrass
I Should Coco
1995
Three Oxford teenagers at Sawmills with Sam Williams; the speed and the harmonies came from the same pubs Radiohead played.
Swervedriver
Raise
1991
Creation's heaviest signing — shoegaze with a muscle car in it, built on Adam Franklin's detuned drone rather than chorus pedals.
Foals
Antidotes
2008
Dave Sitek mixed it, the band remixed him back; the trebly, interlocking guitars came out of Oxford's math-rock houses, not from Britpop.
Ride
Nowhere
1990
Two Banbury art students on Creation; the drums push where the guitars blur, which is why it reads as pop under the reverb.
Young Knives
Voices of Animals and Men
2006
Relocated to Oxford, started on Shifty Disco, ended up Mercury-nominated — angular post-punk sung in an unflattened English accent.