Alex James’ Britpop Classical
O2 Apollo, Manchester
14th March 2026
Alex James brings his Britpop Classical spectacle to Manchester’s O2 Apollo, combining a full orchestra, guest vocalists and a catalogue of 90s anthems in a celebration of the era that briefly put British guitar music back on top. Thomas Sidwell heads along to see how the songs of Britpop fare with orchestral backing.
Britpop has always been a strange thing to try to bottle. It was never only a musical movement, more a moment of cultural weather: sometimes laddish, euphoric, contradictory, occasionally ridiculous and sometimes genuinely barnstormingly transcendent.
Three decades on, these songs remain stubbornly lodged in the national bloodstream, still built for one thing: rooms full of people singing them together. The premise of Alex James’s Britpop Classical feels inevitable, arriving in the wake of successes like Haçienda Classical and Ministry of Sound Classical. A full orchestra, a rock band, a rotating cast of guest vocalists, and a repertoire drawn from the era when British guitar music briefly believed it ruled the world. Maybe it even did, if only fleetingly.
After debuting the concept last year at James’ own Big Feastival, a performance that apparently had promoters ringing the next morning asking to take it on the road, the project now arrives at Manchester’s O2 Apollo. Tonight, the travelling nostalgia machine rolls into a city where many of these songs first took on mythic proportions. Before the band appears, a video montage flickers across the stage, charting the cultural moment Britpop emerged from. Familiar faces, DJs, musicians and fellow survivors of the 1990s appear onscreen reminiscing about the era when British music rediscovered its swagger. It sets the tone for a show that understands Britpop didn’t appear out of nowhere.
The opening musical sequence nods to those roots with a brisk run through some of the British pop lineage that shaped the movement: Help! by The Beatles, Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks, Get It On by T. Rex and My Generation by The Who. It’s a clever framing device. Britpop was always a kind of musical archaeology: a generation of bands rummaging through British pop history and rebuilding it in their own image.
Here, the Manchester Concert Orchestra, conducted by Matt Roberts, give the songs scale rather than polish. Strings swell beneath familiar riffs, brass punches through choruses that were already designed for stadiums. It’s a fun touch and adds a layer of enjoyment to iconic riffs and anthemic choruses’.
The first major guest of the evening, Simon Fowler of Ocean Colour Scene, strolls out to deliver The Riverboat Song, its swagger intact even with orchestral muscle behind it. Then the tempo spikes as Saffron of Republica storms the stage for Ready to Go. Streamers explode into the air as the chorus detonates across the room. Nearly thirty years later, the song still feels gloriously indestructible. Then James throws a love letter to the city hosting the show.
“Most of my favourite bands are from Manchester,” he tells the crowd. “Here’s our tribute to your fair city.” What follows is a joyous Mancunian mini-set that the Apollo greets like returning heroes. Two Oasis numbers, Fuckin’ in the Bushes and Rock ’n’ Roll Star, kick things off with predictable but welcome swagger. From there, the set roams across the city’s musical landmarks: Step On by Happy Mondays, The Only One I Know by The Charlatans and the hypnotic groove of I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses. Then comes perhaps the most powerful moment of the sequence. Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division floats through the Apollo with orchestral melancholy. It’s safe ground, in Manchester, that song could probably start a party at a funeral. The crowd gleefully obliges.
Back in Blur territory, Country House lands as a stone-cold classic before Gary Stringer of Reef storms onstage for Place Your Hands, still delivered with the kind of full-throttle enthusiasm that made it a festival staple. He absolutely rocks the stage, gesticulating wildly, and everyone laps it up. You and Me Song by The Wannadies arrives next, for some of us forever associated with Richard Hillman trying to murder his family in Coronation Street, before Girls & Boys sends the audience to their feet.
Even the occasional curveball lands well. Tubthumping by Chumbawamba turns into a mass chant before the orchestra takes centre stage for an instrumental interlude: Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve, accompanied by lasers and some playful orchestral detours around the familiar string motif. The emotional core of the evening arrives with Creep by Radiohead, a song James has said convinced him the concept could work when he found himself unexpectedly crying during rehearsal. From there, the closing stretch becomes pure catharsis.
There She Goes by The La’s, arguably one of the greatest pop songs ever written, glides through the room before Pulp take centre stage via Disco 2000 and Common People. By this point, the entire venue is dancing hard enough to make the Apollo’s upper balcony visibly tremble. And of course, you can’t do a Britpop show in Manchester without tipping your hat to Oasis one last time. Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger arrive as the inevitable closing sing-alongs, thousands of voices carrying every word with the kind of communal fervour that defined the era in the first place.
The evening closes with the full cast of the night returning to the stage for The Universal by Blur, the orchestra swelling behind a crowd of guest singers and musicians who have spent the last two hours revisiting the songs that defined an era. It’s a safe and classic choice for a finale. Where much of the night has been rowdy, communal and occasionally chaotic, this one arrives with a touch of grandeur, the strings lifting the melody into something widescreen and euphoric. These songs were never meant to be treated with reverence. They were written for nights out, for crowded rooms, for voices slightly out of tune but entirely committed to the cause.
In a musical landscape that has become increasingly dominated by algorithms and dour playlists, there is something reassuring about the stubborn endurance of these songs. They belong to everyone now. Leaving the Apollo, my partner and I found ourselves asking the obvious question: which songs playing in tonight’s arenas will people be screaming back three decades from now? Neither of us had a convincing answer.
Alex James may spend much of his time these days making cheese in the Cotswolds, but tonight he proves that the spirit of Britpop: messy, joyous and defiantly communal. still travels remarkably well. And judging by the noise inside the Apollo, people aren’t quite finished singing along yet.
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More on Alex James’ Britpop Classical can be found on their website here | Instagram | Facebook
Words by Thomas Sidwell, more work on his author profile here
All photos by Kristy Eighteen: Instagram | Portfolio | Facebook
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