It worked a treat, and Play became the industrialised world's soundtrack.Of late, two of British music's brightest new hopes, the Mancunian singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy and Home Counties four-piece Coldplay, have adopted the same approach, in a desperate attempt to fly under the notoriously parochial defences of American radio. The results were plain to see even before Christmas: "The Shining", the unfathomably gorgeous ballad that opens Badly Drawn Boy's debut album, was now being used to sell chinos for The Gap. Somehow, it never sounded the same again.So, let us once again survey the fate of our New Bob. Bursting with songs, but resigned to the fate of playing his old ones for the next two years; compliantly handing his repertoire over to any brand with a switched-on ad agency and a big enough chequebook.
Inwardly, he will doubtless know that the game is up: that the chances of convincingly laying claim to the outlaw lineage that contains the Stones, Hendrix, Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all are perilously close to zero.Not that his audience will mind. Here, we reach the most crucial cause of rock's death the fact that, to use the snarled words of the Jam's 1980 hit "Going Underground", the public gets what the public wants. Pete Townshend of the Who, still one of rock music's most intelligent voices, has long claimed that the best groups act as a mirror to their audience. In his case, he spent a good deal of the 1960s smashing up his guitar and writing songs of generational revolt because that's what his fans demanded. Back then, the mind-set of Anglo-American youth was still bound up with scattershot anger and defiance; the groups that emerged from their ranks had little option but to ooze the same qualities.And now look at what's happened.
Sometime between the early 1990s and now, what with the expansion of higher education, the seemingly endless economic boom, and the disappearance of the street corner as a viable teenage meeting-point (these days, you can hook up at Starbucks instead), the UK has managed to pull off the impossible and call a generational truce. The moment was commemorated by Noel Gallagher's visit to 10 Downing Street in August 1997: respectably suited and booted, his new wife Meg togged up in a nice floral number, he shook hands with Tony Blair and implicitly declared the game was up. Rock music was now friends with the Government.Strangely, the rock audience hardly flinched. The era of the archetypal outsider had long gone: no longer did post-adolescent existentialists squat in the common room, poring over the NME and plotting revenge on the adult world. Consequently, rock music was simply a leisure option: as uncoupled from its dissenting roots as the modern Labour Party is from the far-flung world of Keir Hardie and the Taff Vale Judgement.The groups that have appeared since only further the impression of a stultifying peace. There are the Stereophonics, three earnest lads from the South Wales Valleys, whose last single, "Mr Writer", shook the establishment to its foundations by taking aim at music journalists. About to return to the fray are Travis, a band whose sweet songs of love gone wrong ooze a very fatalistic kind of resignation (in the words of one very erudite critic, most of their songs translate as, "Don't get your hopes up, kids").
