As the RIAA once again awards dozens of Grammy statuettes to deserving musicians, whither the rock band in the digital era?
In 1985, Live Aid was watched by millions upon millions around the world. Queen rebooted their career and U2 moved into the stadium rock bracket of performers.
Ten years later, in 1995, Oasis put out (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, an album about being young and British, and then five years on from that, in 2000, Coldplay launched themselves as heirs to U2’s messianic rock’n’roll with Parachutes, a post-millennial album which wraps its listeners in a warm embrace. It contains hit songs with the lines ‘oh no what’s this?’ and ‘look at the stars’.
In 2005, Arctic Monkeys put out I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, a UK number one smash that preceded the album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, an album about being young and British.
Those four huge anniversaries celebrated in 2025 reflect the specific cultural moment: from the rise of rock’n’roll philanthropy, which was invented by George Harrison in 1971, to three bands that mattered, two of whom are playing multiple dates at Wembley Stadium this year. As I write, Alex Turner and Matt Helders, the respective singer and drummer of Arctic Monkeys who both live in the USA, have no plans to mark the 20th anniversary of their debut album and single. The latter, one of the most exciting moments of the decade, still sounds like lightning in a jam jar.
If they are smart, they will talk to the Gallaghers about supporting Oasis in stadiums across the USA this August and September, because without Oasis’s Burnage swagger there would be no market for Sheffield scallywags muttering about Mecca dobbers and riot vans. The Monkeys gained fans through Myspace, a music discovery portal which majored on community; The Libertines, who are perhaps the last great London rock’n’roll band, did this at the very nexus of the real and virtual worlds, and it was such a shame that I was two years too young to fully fall for them. I do know people who know the band, and who have been photographed by their photographer Roger Sargent.
The Libertines are also the last great music press band, who gave good quote and did, to use a euphemism, interesting things. Peter Doherty of the band gave a sit-down interview to Kirsty Young for her interview show, and he just sounded like a bloke from West London. Twenty years ago I heard back-to-back Libertines on BBC Radio 1; now he’s popping up on the grown-up station Radio 2, the 45-year-old dad running through the Tracks of His Years with Vernon Kay, who is 50 and remembers clubbing as a teenager when Manchester was the epicentre of UK youth culture.
The Libertines reset that centre to London, after the Camden scene of the 1990s had incubated guitar rock bands; this is where I am duty bound to mention footage of a teenage Pete Doherty in the queue outside HMV Oxford Street to buy Oasis’ disastrous third album Be Here Now. No rock band will sell half a million albums again, let alone that number inside four days, because rock is a heritage genre.
I spent 6,000 words wanging on about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently, and I observed that rock and roll is now a spirit rather than a musical genre. I predict Mariah Carey will go into the Rock Hall soon, and she is a balladeer who also helped bring hip-hop cadences into her form of black music. The Libertines might get into a British Rock Hall, but the likely entrants in 2025 will be the aforementioned Oasis and Coldplay, both of who are eligible and would ensure people pay attention to this year’s Rock Hall induction. They might also book tickets to the museum in Cleveland, the home of rock and roll.
Sheffield is a principality of rock and roll, having given the world not just Arctic Monkeys but also Jarvis Cocker, The Human League, Heaven 17 and Jon McClure aka the Reverend of the band Reverend and the Makers. Fun fact: Jon’s brother Chris is the tipsy smoker on the cover of the Monkeys’ debut album.
Then there’s national treasure Richard Hawley, whose catalogue was turned into the magnificent musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which played at the National and Gillian Lynne Theatres in London. It makes me wonder if Alex Turner’s songs will be turned into a musical, and what it would be about. It would obviously be set in Sheffield, perhaps with the children of characters from the Hawley musical.
With their Nokia mobile phones and Myspace pages, they would be chasing a great night out, scoring weed, trying not to spew all over a taxi and arguing with their parents who think they are throwing away their education to get wasted at the Leadmill on a Wednesday night in 2006.
‘Tonight there’ll be a ruckus,’ sings Turner in the first verse of the album’s opening track The View from the Afternoon. Later he consoles a Mardy Bum who has ‘got yer face on’ and hears a policeman chastise a teenage drinker as he is bundled into a riot van. We end with A Certain Romance, one of Turner’s greatest copyrights complete with a bittersweet diminished chord running throughout the song.
We open with clothing and footwear, ‘classic Reeboks or knackered Converse, or trackie bottoms tucked in socks’, before Turner sighs how ‘there in’t no romance’ in his Sheffield, with ‘kids who like to scrap with pool cues in their hands’. And this is before austerity gutted much of British life. The quotable line ‘there’s only music so that there’s new ringtones’ – a rival to ‘you’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham!’ – is both out of date and prescient.
The final verse at least sees Turner admit he has friends who ‘might overstep the line’ but ‘cannot get angry in the same way’. There is no resolution to an album full of pathos and pain, where record company men offer ‘stale’ stories and ‘condescending’ snarls, and ‘a scumbag’ hangs out with ‘girls of the night’ (When The Sun Goes Down).
Thank goodness for Domino Records, who have let Turner be Turner for 20 years, including allowing him and his band to only put out two studio albums in the decade since their US breakthrough AM, a fine rock album that mixed Sheffield wit and LA guitars. Four of AM’s songs have over 1bn Spotify streams, and the poet John Cooper Clarke’s pension has benefitted from the band’s cover of I Wanna Be Yours.
‘I’d met the lads after a show at the Boardwalk,’ the Bard of Salford writes in his memoir, delighted that they had read his poems for GCSE English. ‘The name of a group is important and that one is unforgettable,’ he sighs. ‘There’s a whole wide world in those two words…the North Pole is no place for the higher primates!’
The reasons why rock music has less of a pull on youth culture today is a whole other argument, but for now I will direct you to the debut album by those Arctic Monkeys, which says more to me about my life than government policy or, indeed, Wonderwall or Fix You.