I enjoyed the pieces of Mark E Smith's wisdom (as culled from his 'autobiography' - of sorts, Renegade) in the Guardian recently (1, 2), particularly his thoughts on modern music. "Too much of what I hear nowadays reminds me of Stars On 45 - they were a novelty act from Holland in the early 80s," he grumbled. "Madonna, for instance - spending two million or whatever sampling Abba's 'Gimme, Gimme, Gimme'. What's the point? If you spent a week working at it you could whistle a tune as good as that. It's not just her, though, they're all bone idle."
Modern pop musicians idle? Maybe, but they do work very hard at getting to enjoy that luxury. Smith - as ever - has his point, but for me the real cancer eating away at modern music is the complex system of education and styling now in place to effectively manufacture musicians as completely as beans. They go to stage schools, they go to courses to learn about the industry. "You have to learn to be industry savvy," explained one budding hopeful - designer 'alternative' floppy fringed barnet fixed in place - on TV only last night. Today's stars are groomed, schooled, taught, styled... hardly any wonder that they all end up sounding very much the same, with very few opinions that matter. The singer of the Kooks, Katie Melua and Lily Allen all went to stage school. Bob Dylan and Kraftwerk didn't.
You see, it hasn't always been like this. Pop stars used to be inspired by their favourite records, pick up a tennis racquet and rehearse in front of the mirror, grab Auntie Elda's curtains for a costume and somehow emerge as David Bowie. Through hardship and lack of resources or knowledge came creativity, even mystique. It's all too easy nowadays to end up in one of the innumerable identikit bands that the industry mass produces in seeming collaboration with Radio One. I'm not sure why it is, but the dole queues are not producing bands in the quantity and quality of the days when the Smiths, Stone Roses, UB40 and Portishead all came from the ranks of those signing on. Maybe music course kids with industry connections have an unfair advantage, and the rest have given up. Or maybe they're all dealing drugs or learning high finance rather than picking up guitars. But it's a shame. Surely the way forward for pop is to abolish the stage schools altogether, or even raze the lot of them to the ground. It worked for Henry The Eighth with the monasteries. Or maybe the teachers and lecturers should all be sacked and the job handed over to Mark E Smith. He has probably produced more musicians than the lot of them, and they've all been in The Fall. He finds most of them in the pub, until joining his ranks they can often barely play a note and they usually end up dumped at a motorway services or abandoned at an Australian airport. But they're never idle!
Dave Simpson is the author of The Fallen, to be published in September 2008.
