Rocking in the UK

 Add your view

 

By mid-afternoon, 112,000 people will be gathered in several scruffy fields in the most inaccessible part of Somerset for the three-day Glastonbury Festival. They will have braved gridlock to complete their pilgrimage and will face log jams on the way home. There will be further queues for sanitary facilities, and sleeping conditions are crowded.

Every festival-goer has paid £100 for admission, and all tickets sold out within 18 hours of going on sale. Most people - even those who come home stripped of their belongings, suffering from heat exhaustion or afflicted by trench foot - will have such a wonderful time that they will return next year.

For those wary of the cutting edge, in Edinburgh tomorrow Robbie Williams will play the first of two sold-out nights at Murrayfield Stadium; in August he will sell out Knebworth for a further three nights.

The rest of the summer flourishes with outdoor events for all tastes: the V Festival, Reading, T in the Park, Womad, The Big Chill and Cambridge, not to mention the usual seasonal bonanza of enormous single-artist gigs at Hyde Park, Old Trafford and Liverpool Docks.

These are huge presentations which no spectator activity outside Premiership football can even contemplate matching.

The British music industry, both live and recorded, employs more than 100,000 people and generates around £3 billion a year, yet it is perceived unquestioningly to be in the slough of despond. The hand-wringing reaches its apogee on Wednesday when Britain's most popular radio station, Radio 2, devotes five hours to The Great British Music Debate, hosted by Stuart Maconie.

It should be fascinating: there will be segments on A&R policy, label politics, the canard that is piracy and the plight of the singles chart. What it fails to have registered is a sense of wonder at how culturally important pop music has become - how it has evolved from a Fifties teenage fashion to a cross-generational staple of British life. "It is not the British music industry on trial," argues producer Malcolm Prince, somewhat strenuously.

In fact, all things considered, the British music industry is in robust health - and not just because Mark Knopfler's latest album went to number one in Norway. Naturally, not all is coming up roses. The singles chart has long been the eunuch in the harem, impotent but ever-present, while the headlong rush of jerrybuilt pop acts spawned by reality television is wearily dispiriting. These problems are not, however, terminal.

It is no bad thing that singles are down, since nothing will crush TV's Popstars faster than falling sales. Singles function as loss leaders for albums. They would regain their potency if they were cheaper and available at the time they are first heard on radio - usually there is a month's gap between airplay and availability.

Pop's past lives on as a mostly glorious legacy, and history is being rewritten in a positive way: it is not for nothing that Nick Drake, a singersongwriter who sold few records and never appeared on television, is more revered than, say, the hit machine that was Brotherhood of Man.

The present, as ever, takes care of itself. Those bovine but handsomely rewarded executives who signed Girls Aloud, Darius and their ilk will soon need to seek alternative employment. Rumours of pop's descent to pre-teen level are risible. This week, the bestselling British pop band are Saturday's Glastonbury headliners Radiohead, a group who make music so cerebral and complex as to be almost anti-pop.

Struggling at number four in the album charts are the ultrapop S Club 7. In television terms, it is as if Panorama attracted more viewers than EastEnders; from a sporting point of view as if a four-day county cricket match sold more seats than a Manchester United home game. And Radiohead are hardly an aberration.

In every area where British music is active, there is hope. The music industry - always one to cry wolf - may give every impression of being about to wave the white flag of surrender, but secretly it has been stockpiling weapons. A succession of newer acts is ready to explode.

In conventional rock, The Thrills, from Dublin but very much part of the British scene, have already had a Top 20 hit single with the sublime One Horse Town, and their imminent debut album, So Much for the City, is a reminder of the simple adage that great songs never go out of fashion. They are an attractive outsidebet to take the most kudos from Glastonbury.

Then there are British Sea Power and Elbow, who filter Radiohead's complexity and passion through an accessible cipher; Adam Masterson, 22, is a songwriter of extraordinary promise and depth; Jim Moray is single-handedly trying to spark a folk revival, and just to show that everything is cyclical, the hotly tipped The Darkness are "humorous" heavy metal hot-wired back to 1973.

Britain might have never produced a lasting dance movement, but the search for the next Massive Attack has not been called off. Un-cut merge drum and bass with classic soul stomping. So Solid Crew singer Lisa Maffia's debut solo album, First Lady, has a touch of class and cogitation that contradicts the aura of violence and unpleasantness that surrounds her. Meanwhile, Outlaw, the debut album from Leeds's truculent one-man-band LSK, takes the urban ennui of The Streets towards a more interesting place altogether.

These artists won't all break through, but they are the tip of an infinite iceberg, which renews itself efficiently. As the hordes converge on Glastonbury, they might look around, hear the bands and wonder just where all this talk of doom is coming from.

 

What's on today   What's on tomorrow

Receive our newsletter