Well, they were British. They were pop. It was the nineties. You do the maths.

Agreed about the leader part, although, having lived that time, i'd say The Verve were kinda late to the party, more like a transition between britpop and stuff like Travis and Coldplay.

The tru britpop band were stuff like Blur, Pulp and Suede. then Cast, Elastica... etc

I'd say Oasis was definitely britpop, because it was a cultural movement led by music. Oasis started it all really. Without Oasis, there would be no britpop. Even though all those bands are pretty different musically.

I thought Brit Pop was what Americans call Irn Bru?

The definition quotes it as having 'emphasized britishness'. The gallaghers are Irish. They also didn't emphasize any britishness. They never did anything to show how british they were. They played normal alternative rock music.

I find it a bit embarrassing how all the big players of British guitar music in the mid 90s resist so forcibly the Britpop tag. Not to mention pretentious.

So it's a catch-all term with little descriptive heft: that's all a name for an artistic movement ever is. Try to get a clear definition of Romanticism from a literary critic. At least people were attempting to define Britpop while it was still going on, and not a hundred years after, like every single literary movement (barring Postmodernism). 

And just like how it's hard to reconcile what William Blake did with, say, Charlotte Smith's sonnets or Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the links between Oasis and Pulp or Blur and Supergrass can seem a bit thin. But they are there to be found.

Blake wasn't famous until some time after his death, so we can't be sure the esteem he was held in by the other Romantics; but all the Britpop bands would definitely have known about each other. And that's enough to get something going, when you've got a lot of young, talented people off working on their separate creative projects all at the same time. You get a cross-fertilisation of ideas, and suddenly Oasis are releasing 'Bonehead's Bank Holiday', and the Manics are taking working-class solidarity to (near) the top of the charts after Pulp did the same thing the previous year. 

a union jack guitar??

Bon and raised in England. They may have Irish heritage, but they weren’t raised in that background, other than Tommy Gallagher’s Irish songs he used to play which I think did in some ways inspire Noel, if I recall this correctly from the Oasis bible (Hewitt’s Getting High).

Yes, nobody would confuse Oasis with an American alt rock band. But, if we remove accents from the equation, a different scenario unfolds. To put it this way, if you removed the accents from pulp, it still wouldn't sound like normal american music. Oasis on the other hand, would blend right in.

Oasis had an aggressive and abrasive edge to their music. This edge firmly separated them from the Britpop playfulness of Space & Dodgy & The Boo Radleys.

I don’t associate Oasis with Britpop at all. Oasis were a Rock band that came out at the same time.

Britpop was a tongue in cheek attempt to hark back to the swinging 60’s. If you listen to any of those Britpop compilations and Oasis stand out musically as much as Radiohead did. Britpop is a lazy tag to cover nearly every band which emerged from 93-97

Common People, Country House, Alright etc all have this jovial Britishness about them. Some Might Say for example doesn’t, it’s just a great rock song that came out in 1995

The Gallagher brothers are Irish to their core.

It’s in their sense of humour, their music, their hair and outlook on life, especially Liam.