The Policy Blender

The charts are now so boring that last month's move of Top of the Pops to Sundays on BBC 2 which "marks an exciting new era for the show" according to BBC Two controller Roly Keating has been axed after three shows having gone from an audience of 2.4 million viewers to 1.1 million.

Yesterday's show, in a desperate bid for musical gravitas, played a recording of Ah Ha's 1985 performance of 'Take on Me'. The previous show featured Jeremy Clarkson as a guest presenter.

The recent chart-topping appearance of an animated frog's mobile phone ring-tone illustrates how extraordinarily meaningless chart success is nowadays. The reason is simply that people just aren't buying singles anymore.

The people that are, are the middle of the roaders and kids spending their pocket money. That leaves the BBC, who host the official charts, with the impression that the people really want to hear bland mind-numbing crap all day everyday, thus the Radio One playlist is selected as one might flush a toilet.

Commercial radio, on the other hand, has become wise to this illusion of bad taste. Virgin are particularly music-savvy, with Kiss100, XFM and others also keeping the crap down to a minimum.

It's difficult not to feel sorry for poor Radio One DJs, who clearly are driven to distraction by the endless product placements they are forced to make under the guise of playing popular music. Young half-witted 'pop-stars' have become the ultimate consumable - Andy Warhol was perhaps exaggerating a bit with fifteen minutes, because at three and a half minutes a pop, each screechy pubescent 'band' would need over four hits to take their place in Warhol's prophetically cynical world of temporary fame.

Ten years of public school life is the best grounding for a career in pop
By James Delingpole
(Filed: 09/08/2005)

A few months ago, I was sitting in a bar in St Moritz when a puppyish, Old Harrovian young Cresta rider came bounding up to me and urged me to listen to this "Abs'l'y amaaazing" new album by a guy called James Blunt which he just knew I was totally going to love. "Go on. Put it on again," he called to the barman. "What? Again?" the barman said, but did as he was asked. And I listened in polite but unrapt silence, feeling superior and ever so slightly smug.

The reason I felt superior and smug was because, as a rock critic, I'd been sent the album at least a year before, played it a couple of times and decided it was bound not to go anywhere: too smoothy-chops; too bland; too handicapped by the fact that its author was an Old Harrovian ex-Guards officer. Clearly what I'd stumbled on in this St Moritz bar was yet further evidence that your typical public schoolboy wouldn't know what a hit record sounded like if it bit him on the bum.

Since then, of course, I have been forced to eat my bobbly St Moritz hat. From tiny beginnings, James Blunt's After Bedlam - with the help of its number one single You're Beautiful - has become this year's biggest word-of-mouth success, selling 800,000 copies, and eclipsed in sales only by Coldplay's X & Y. And, far from being a hindrance, Blunt's soundly upper-middle-class background and Household Cavalry service in Kosovo appear to have given his career the biggest boost. In these dark and troubled times, it is being said, what the public wants is the reassurance of traditional songs with verses and choruses and tender lyrics, all sung by an old-fashioned gent who has risked life and limb for his country.

Another explanation is that dreamy, floppy, public schoolboy music - "bedwetter music" as Creation Records' founder Alan McGee once cruelly put it - is very much in vogue at the moment, and has been for quite some time. It started with Radiohead (who met at Abingdon school) who in turn inspired Coldplay (Sherborne) who in turn prepared the ground for Keane, the well-spoken trio who take their name from a beloved tea lady at their public school, Tonbridge. And if you think it needs more than three to make a trend, how about Will Young (Wellington) and Dido (Westminster)?

Not, of course, that even now a private education is something many pop stars spend too much time boasting about in interviews. I remember once being begged by Groove Armada's publicist not to bring up their public school background because it so damaged their credibility in the dance world. And it's true that among the sneering tastemakers of the music press - many of them self-hating ex-public schoolboys, of course - a terrible form of inverted snobbery has long prevailed whereby a working-class background is considered to be the only true form of rock 'n' roll authenticity. The only rock star who has ever been forgiven for going to public school is the Pogues' Shane MacGowan and only then because the thought of this snaggle-toothed Irish drunk attending Westminster seems so preposterously unlikely it counts as cool.

But when you think about it, five or 10 years of private education ought to provide a far better breeding ground for a career in pop than might your "authentic" bog standard comp. You're denied access to the vast amounts of drink and drugs that will one day send your career down the pan but not just yet; you have an endless supply of things to rebel against; you spend your evenings denied access to the opposite sex, cooped up in bed-study with your teenage thoughts and your sexual frustration, with nothing to do save scrawl introspective pop lyrics and play endlessly with your, er, guitar.

There is, too, I think a particular strain of public school music that goes some way towards explaining why Coldplay, Blunt and Keane et al sound the way they do. Public school kids tend to be drawn more strongly than most to melody (they come from nice homes, where classical music is played a lot) and anything that sounds grandiloquent and epic (e.g. early Genesis - most of whom met at Charterhouse, Pink Floyd - who ought to have gone to public school even if they didn't, and more recently Radiohead). They listen to and make the sort of music that goes so nicely with gargantuan old buildings, cricket pitches and extensive grounds.

Of course, the current vogue won't last for ever. Already people are proudly sporting "Make Coldplay History" T-shirts; it has been some time since Radiohead poked their heads above the parapet; and one Keane song does sound very much like another. Some time soon, no doubt, a new wave of snotty, dirty oiks will come to sweep away the current generation of musical poshos rather as the punks did with Genesis and Pink Floyd in the late 1970s.

In musical terms, this will surely be a good thing. The charts are full at the moment with far too many melodic, vaguely epic, nice but dull bands who sound rather too much like Coldplay. James Blunt (or Blount, as he's actually called - the "u" was removed in an attempt to make him sound more street and accessible) makes a pretty enough sound, but he's still very much the sort of person you buy if you only buy about one new record a year. He's not a muso's artiste. He's not the new Neil Young. He's not as interesting as Gravenhurst.

On another level, though, I will feel slightly bereft when the charts no longer ring to the sound of (carefully concealed) public school accents. In the 10 years I've been writing about music, I've grown heartily sick of the bile gratuitously poured by my contemporaries on any pop star who comes from a nice, middle-class background. I'm nice and middle class myself, and I think it's a jolly good thing that should be encouraged at every opportunity.

There is one thing that worries me, though. I've just been forced to take both my children out of private school because I can no longer afford it. And though I understand that in Tony Blair's brave new Britain, the state education they are about to get will vastly increase their chances of securing a place at Oxford or Cambridge, becoming an MP or a High Court judge or whatever, I'm not sure that these are what I really want for them. I want my daughter to be as rich as Dido; I'd like my son to stand a fair chance of pulling someone in the league of Gwyneth Paltrow; I want my children to have the ears of presidents, prime ministers and popes, like Bono does. And, for this, a public school education may be their only hope.