Could British music be in the throes of a golden age? At this moment, it might
seem a perverse question. But isn't that the thing about golden ages - they
just start? No prior announcements. No preparation. Then, just when you
least expect it, you look around and realise it's already happening. Last
Sunday was one such moment. At the 2009 Grammys in Los Angeles, M.I.A. - the
West London daughter of a Tamil freedom fighter - carried her
nine-months-gone, polka-dotted bump before a worldwide television audience
and sang her hit Paper Planes.
About a minute into her extraordinary performance, the curtain pulled back to
reveal an accompanying cast that featured Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne and
T.I. Oscillating between M.I.A.'s song and Jay-Z's Swagga Like Us, the four
most bankable rappers on the planet paced the stage like rutting stags, all
of them competing around the heavily pregnant star.
Far from an isolated moment, M.I.A.'s performance was merely a highlight in a
night when, repeatedly, American celebrities opened golden envelopes only to
see a British name staring back at them. Radiohead, Adele, Duffy and Estelle
returned victorious. Three-times winners Coldplay audaciously begged
comparison to a previous British invasion by adapting their French
Revolutionary finery into Sgt Pepper outfits. “Sorry, boss,” Chris Martin
said to a watching Paul McCartney, looking far from apologetic - while, over
in Britain, the tabloid headlines struggled to conceal an air of palpable
surprise. “Is a British invasion under way?” asked one newspaper. Under way
in what sense? In that it's already happening?
To say that it couldn't have come at a better time is an understatement.
Forget the saucy 3am reports on Lily and Amy's extracurricular activities -
this is an industry that was in recession before the rest of us and needs
all the help it can get. Last year CD sales sank by 14 per cent. Our last
remaining British-owned major label, EMI, is barely able to balance its
books. In the wake of the demise of Top of the Pops, nobody appears to know
or care who is in the singles chart. So this coming Wednesday at the Brits -
when the massed ranks of the industry gather for their annual works do -
what's to stop the whole thing feeling any less like a last hurrah than it
did last year?
To answer one question with another, consider this: If the Brits imploded -
what would replace it? Like Top of the Pops, the answer is not terribly
much. There would be a palpable pop-culture hole. Why is it that we sniff at
the pop mainstream? Take away these bun-fests, and you take away the water
cooler around which people conduct their discourse - ie, have a good rant.
After all, even cynicism needs something to feed off - a point echoed by
Mike Smith, managing director of Columbia Records. “The things that happen
at the Brits are major cultural events. Jarvis Cocker undermining Michael
Jackson; John Prescott being humiliated by [the agit-prop band]
Chumbawamba.”And who didn't smirk last year when Sheffield lad Alex Turner,
dressed as a gamekeeper, wielded a stuffed duck aloft and took a playful pop
at Brit School alumni.
Chumbawamba would no doubt disapprove of any attempts to defend an event
partially designed to congratulate the executives who, at some level, have
been responsible for sustaining James Blunt's success. Twenty years ago, as
I lay in the bath waiting for my 501s to shrink, I may have agreed with such
sentiments. Ten years ago, holding down a job as an A&R man at a major
record label, I inevitably developed a measure of sympathy for the
infrastructure that - in good years - manages to alchemise the fragile egos
of tantrum-prone young musicians into something that remunerates all parties.
As Guy Hands, the beleaguered helmsman of EMI, is beginning to realise, it
isn't as easy as it looks. Talent is not a predictable, corporeal commodity.
As the cautionary tales of the Stone Roses and My Bloody Valentine - bands
who made classic albums, only to slowly stall - serve to attest, you find
yourself ploughing millions of pounds into something that may never
materialise. Or, if it does, is frankly rubbish.
As I eventually came to realise, there really are easier, less pressurised
ways to pay the mortgage. There are few more heroic enterprises at this
moment in time than that of the young music fan who decides to start a
record label. The former Cocteau Twins guitarist Simon Raymonde is head of
Bella Union records. Currently boasting a No3 album with the Fleet Foxes'
eponymous debut, his current success conceals ten years of dogged
perseverance, attempting to pay his two staff with the proceeds of CDs that
he has to price more cheaply to compete against the likes of Amazon and
Tesco.
“If you didn't love music, there is every chance you would go mad,” he says.
“You invest a lot of faith in bands who may or may not become successful.
And even if one crosses over, the rewards aren't as great as you would
think. A promoter putting on a successful band at, say, the Albert Hall for
three nights can generate as much profit as a small label can after a whole
year's work.
“But when it goes well,” he says, “it's hugely vindicating. For a band like
Fleet Foxes to make an album financed from borrowing money on a credit card,
and for it to be nominated in two Brits categories - as long as there is
scope for that sort of thing to be acknowledged at the Brits, it has to be a
good thing.”
If it's surprising to hear someone from the indie sector jumping to the Brits
defence that perhaps says rather more about us than them. We've become hung
up on the chasm between indie and mainstream sensibilities. Inasmuch as it
prompts discourse (doesn't all conflict?), it's a chasm that the music press
has always been happy to perpetuate. As anyone who works with bands will
tell you, such prejudices are hard to maintain once you start making
records. Anyone in the audience when Radiohead were on Later ... With Jools
Holland won't have failed to notice the joy with which Thom Yorke was moving
to Mary J Blige's vocal performance.
The lingering tribalism bequeathed on generations of music fans by punk has
blinded us to the fact that, actually, it's all part of the same thing. As
Michael Bracewell puts it: “I don't see anything wrong with people liking
mainstream music. It's funny that today it's fine to enjoy the mainstream
music of other eras, such as John Barry or Johnny Cash, but not our own.”
The point is echoed by Joe Foster, who with Alan McGee helped to found
Creation Records: “If you look on the Polydor roster in the Sixties, you'll
find that they had James Last as well as the Velvet Underground. It's all
showbusiness.”
But perhaps showbusiness is changing. Just because the history of pop has been
marked by experiences shared, usually, via the medium of television - it
doesn't necessarily follow that its future will run along the same lines.
Chris Anderson's brilliant book The Long Tail is named after the part of a
sales graph that stretches on like an endless tail after the large body of
mainstream sales. Thanks to the internet, Anderson argues, in years to come,
the new business model for music and books will involve a thousand acts
selling a thousand products each, rather than one act selling a million.
Of course, even without mainstream labels bankrolling mainstream successes,
Britain would still be a nation in rude musical health. You don't need to
trawl through networking sites such as MySpace to hear exciting new music -
you only need to watch an episode of Skins, making sure to stay tuned
throughout the commercials.
At the beginning of this year, you couldn't move for lists of bands set to
establish themselves in 2009, from the poptastic performance poetry of
Florence and The Machine to the yearning bedsit electro of Little Boots.
That among newspaper critics there was almost no unanimity on their
favourite new bands seemed to confirm Anderson's picture of a nation in
which musical predilections have shattered into a million shards of
individual preference.
So why do we need a mainstream business if there are always so many “cool”
“hot” and above all “new” bands regardless? The answer is that without the
mainstream, there is no business. It becomes a cottage industry.
Effectively, we return to folk music. Some people may think that's a good
thing, but even if that were the case musically, consider the loss in
revenue to Britain, which is second only to the US in terms of generating
revenue from music.
Since the advent of online music culture, from the early file-sharing
controversy generated by Napster to its recent and possibly most dramatic
incarnation, the seemingly fathomless free online library Spotify,
revolution has been in the air. Artists have been encouraged to think that
they can do it all themselves - and yes, in some cases, they can. Also
victorious at the Grammys, Radiohead's In Rainbows made its first appearance
by bypassing the entire infrastructure of the music industry. It is all too
easy to ignore, at times, the fact that, without the backing of a Universal
or XL, Duffy and Adele may not have ended up collecting Grammys. Easy as it
is to get sweaty-palmed and sniffy about fat-cat record company moguls who
do nothing but rip off their artists or back no-talent opportunists, without
them, the industry and many of our best bands would be lost.
Young artists need care and time. Crucially, they also need a shedload of
cash. Radiohead wouldn't have been in a position to perform at this year's
Grammys had it not been for EMI. Their debut album did not do well in the UK
and it was only after sustained support from Capitol in America that their
breakthrough hit Creep did well enough to sustain them until their second
album, The Bends.
These days, new bands don't get as much time as Radiohead were given. Despite
all of this, however, record companies are still the only place where a
hotly tipped act can go for development money, recording costs, tour support
and guidance. Sure, you can make and release your own record, but if you
want that record to secure you a profile, fame even - record companies still
run the machinery to make that happen. Even an artist held up as a paradigm
of the internet age - Lily Allen - was reasonably traditional in her
approach. She used the resources of a major label in tandem with her regular
MySpace blogs.
In fact, Allen is the embodiment of a Brit artist. She may not be appearing at
this year's ceremony, but the instant success of her second album It's Not
Me, It's You is already set to reap a barrowload of gongs at next year's
awards. She encapsulates everything that has always been great about British
pop music. She effortlessly reflects the zeitgeist. She is self-deprecating
while also being a show-off. Her appeal spans a huge age range. Best of all,
she writes a great song. As long as we can somehow keep producing artists
like Allen, the music industry will be just fine. By Tuesday this week, It's
Not Me, It's You was well on the way to achieving gold status.
If nothing else, it all helps to show that people are still prepared to dig
into their pockets. Given the ubiquity of free music, that's amazing. And
yet the stats speak for themselves. Last year, for the first time, sales of
UK downloads matched those of the single at its late Seventies peak. History
tells us that music thrives in straitened times. It happened in the early
Eighties when the last bunch of British artists invaded the US charts -
Culture Club, Duran Duran, Dexys et al.
And if it happens again, last Sunday's formidable Grammys haul - far from
being an aberration - might be the beginning of something just as big.
Come Wednesday's Brit Awards then, perhaps it's time, just for one year, to
ditch the air of studied detachment. If enough people shell out cash for
decent new British music, we'll reap what we sow. Then finally, we can take
as much pride in our awards beano as the Yanks do in theirs.
Additional reporting by Pete Paphides
