It was announced recently that the UK’s global share of recorded music had declined from 17% in 2015 to 12% last year. The drop reflects the improving reach of nations such as South Korea, with its K-pop phenomenon, and it still leaves Britain holding on to a significant slice of the international market.
But I can’t help feeling that the British music scene is not as vibrant or influential as it once was. Of course, every generation tends towards nostalgia when it comes to popular culture, and I can recall thinking as a teenager in the late 1970s that I’d missed out on a golden era of British music – the Beatles, the Stones et al – 10 years earlier. In fact, I was living through a wonderful period in its own right but didn’t have the perspective to realise it. I grew up in Camden Town, which was, and remains, a music hub in London. I went to a school in Chalk Farm, opposite the legendary Roundhouse, where just about every music act from Jimi Hendrix to Split Enz has played.
I recall skipping school to queue for free tickets for an Elvis Costello concert at the Roundhouse, in which he was previewing his second album.
From that same school, my friend Dan Woodgate joined a band called Madness that I used to watch in a pub in Camden. I also saw Ian Dury before he was famous, Squeeze, the Clash, the Jam, the Police, the Pretenders, the Smiths and the Pogues.
It wasn’t hard to find great music or the subcultures it fostered. In many ways, London then wasn’t the sophisticated global city that it has become – the food was terrible, pubs closed at 11pm, and everything was a bit tatty and rundown. But the music was vital and flourishing.
You can still find live music, of course, although it’s not at the cutting edge of very much. And there are obviously a number of big international British performers: Harry Styles, Ed Sheeran, Adele. But what they have in common is a commercial sound detached from any place or tangible experience.
Whatever their talents or merits, they sound like they were created in a studio or on a talent show, as though they come from anywhere or nowhere. When I think of London nowadays, there are very few well-known musicians who seem to embody its spirit or character. Perhaps Stormzy, but I struggle to think of others.
The irony is that the most compelling London album I’ve heard in a long time is Hackney Diamonds, by a group of seniors hitting 80 – the Rolling Stones.
I remember seeing the Stones at Wembley Stadium in 1982 and thinking at the time they were well past it, and lamenting that I hadn’t seen them a decade earlier in their prime. Had someone told me back then that they’d still be playing 40 years later (my wife saw them last year in Hyde Park and said they were fabulous), I would have asked to have some of what they were smoking.
Yet, I’ve found myself walking what Jagger calls “the dreary streets of London” on one track (Whole Wide World) and listening to these old men bring the place alive.
As I write this, the Beatles are No 1 in the UK charts with the execrable piece of grave-robbing, Now and Then. There’s something desperate and cynical about that example of commercial nostalgia.
With the Stones, though, I don’t just marvel at what men of their advanced age can achieve (there’s hope for me yet!), but their album also reminds me that this small island is still capable of producing a sound that reverberates around the world.
Andrew Anthony is an Observer writer and is married to a New Zealander.
