The Columbia Hotel: Where Britpop Burned Bright (and Sometimes Burned Down)
No one expects a faded West London hotel to become the beating, booze-soaked heart of a music revolution. Yet if you look back at the ’90s Britpop invasion, the Columbia Hotel stands out as the place where bands like Oasis rewrote the rules of rock-star living—and breaking things.
In the 1970s through the early 2000s, the Columbia wasn’t posh or chic. It was cheap, rough around the edges, and, for musicians watching every penny, a godsend. The main draw wasn’t just the bargain beds. It was the 24-hour bar—open when most of London was asleep—where bands could keep the party going long after the venues had closed. For groups shuffling between gigs and recording sessions, it was a place to hide, unwind, and sometimes blow off steam in spectacularly destructive fashion.
No band embraced the chaos quite like Oasis. The Gallaghers and their crew treated the Columbia as home turf, sometimes blurring the line between camaraderie and open warfare. Tabloids couldn’t get enough of the boys’ escapades—punch-ups, trashed rooms, and enough alcohol to fill a small swimming pool. Once, Liam and Noel Gallagher’s arguments turned so heated that a cricket bat and even a tambourine were weaponized. Another night, a television went sailing out of a window; the staff shrugged it off as all in a day’s work. In one 1994 MTV interview, Liam summed it up like only he could: being around all these bands was fun, until it definitely wasn’t.
The hotel, of course, didn’t take endless abuse lying down. Eventually, Oasis were barred from staying—Noel later joked that their behavior should have warranted a better place, not a ban. Still, the Columbia’s legacy as a Britpop headquarters was cemented. Every band that mattered—Blur, Suede, and countless others—passed through, sharing bottles and stories, catching each other at their best and worst. The Columbia wasn’t about glamour. It was about energy, attitude, and a genuine sense of community—if community means sometimes having to dodge flying furniture.
Legacy: A Run-Down Hotel, a Britpop Legend
The Columbia’s raucous spirit represented the wild side of the music industry, a world away from carefully managed PR and curated “bad boy” images. Here, bands who started as scrappy unknowns could, just for a night, act like they owned the world. Even as Oasis’s infighting made headlines—culminating in now-legendary onstage fights and spectacular meltdown moments—the Columbia was part of their origin story.
No mention of The Killers or Noddy Holder in the hotel’s wild annals, but honestly, the Columbia never needed extra star power. Its story is all about British bands—swaggering, stumbling, spitting, sometimes breaking things—that helped shape an era. When Oasis played Knebworth in 1997, drawing a quarter million fans, it was a long way from the Columbia’s worn-out carpets and peeling wallpaper. Still, those chaotic hotel nights were the backdrop for some of the most iconic moments in British music history. The Columbia might have looked ordinary to passersby, but step inside and you stumbled into the core of Britpop’s glorious mess.
