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NEW LABOUR'S Welfare to Work plans threatening dole payments for the young unemployed were the last straw for many of the party's supporters in the pop music industry.

People such as Creation Records' owner Alan McGee argue that the dole has played a vital part in building the UK pop industry, allowing talented beginners to work on their music for a few years with no distractions. Taking this basic subsidy away, they claim, would sabotage Britain's impressive record of producing internationally successful bands, and hit Britain's earnings from record sales abroad.

Mr McGee should know what he is talking about - he is the man who discovered Oasis.

Last week, Andrew Smith, the Employment Minister, announced details of the so-called "rock 'n' dole" scheme to allow 18-to-24-year-olds to continue claiming their Jobseekers' Allowance of pounds 39.85 a week for 13 months, providing they can persuade the job centre clerks that they are seriously pursuing a career in music. The Conservatives have called this a "scroungers' charter".

Music industry professionals will train job centre staff to filter out obvious time-wasters, before conducting a second screening process themselves. This promises a fascinating clash of cultures as Civil Service bureaucracy rubs up against the anarchic rock and pop industry. Successful applicants will then have meetings every two months with music industry volunteers to monitor their progress. But how can the scheme hope to distinguish between genuinely promising performers and the hordes of no-hopers?

Andy Saunders, head of communications at Creation Records, says: "What we are looking for is commitment and passion. Anybody who has got any nous about the music business can sit down with somebody and work out whether being a musician is the right thing for them. If you and I had a conversation for an hour, I think you'd find it very hard to bullshit me.

"Make no mistake about this - if the young person is not fulfilling their responsibilities, they're off the scheme. We don't want people who are half-arsed about it." Like Mr McGee, he plans to volunteer as a mentor under the scheme, and is confident that many other music industry workers will too.

Some people on the scheme will not become musicians, but will train for other jobs in the pop industry, such becoming a recording engineer.

Musicians themselves can take an "open learning" option that requires them only to keep a diary noting rehearsals that have been held and demonstration tapes recorded.

This conjures up the vision of a budding Liam Gallagher sitting down quietly at the end of the day to complete his work diary: "Smashed up hotel room, punched bloke in front row." Surely rock stars in the future, just like Gallagher himself, will be fuelled by their own unquenchable self-belief rather than this kind of disciplined approach?

"A lot of great rock music does come from unconventional and anti-establishment feelings," Mr Saunders concedes. "But people have already got to be disciplined enough to sit down with an employment adviser and persuade him that they've been looking for work if they want to claim unemployment benefit now.

"What we've done is take the lying out of the process. Musicians won't have to lie that they have been out looking for work when what they've really been doing is being a musician."

Once musicians have completed the open learning segment of the scheme, they can move on to playing live and hustling for a record deal. This entitles them to a training allowance, equivalent to their normal JSA plus an extra pounds 15.38 a week. Mr Saunders hopes the scheme will be up and running by September. Will Banks Lend To Budding Rock Stars?: We are not used to thinking of rock and pop bands as small businesses but, as the new scheme acknowledges that is just what they are.

Like any such business, a fledgling band must establish a customer base advertise its wares, and keep the money coming in.

But its line of work makes it all but impossible to produce the formal business plans other documents banks will demand with any loan application.

We put forward the case of a small band which has built up a loyal local following and now needs to borrow a few thousand pounds to record, press and package their own CD for sale at future concerts. How would the high street banks react to their request for a small business loan?

NatWest says: "We would view the band as a small business, just as we would the corner shop. The things we would look at are their experience to date, what sort of income they'd been getting and whether they had any collateral."

Rather than offering the band a business loan NatWest might encourage the members to take a personal loan or borrow on any credits they had instead.

At Midland Bank, Andrew Barnett says: "It's a difficult case, because its at the riskier end of the spectrum. What happens would very much depend on the people involved and what, if any, money they were likely to be putting into it themselves. But I'm sure it is something one of our managers on the ground would be prepared to look at."

Barclays Bank says: "The Welfare to Work proposals will probably encourage a lot more people to think more seriously about trying to pursue their musical ambitions. But when it comes to the bank, they would be put the same process as any business."

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NEW LABOUR'S Welfare to Work plans threatening dole payments for the young unemployed were the last straw for many of the party's supporters in the pop music industry. People such as Creation Records' owner Alan McGee argue that the dole has played a vital part in building the UK pop industry, allowing talented beginners to work on their music for a few years with no distractions.

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"The CoMusica Inclusion Programme will enable children and young people in challenging circumstances to progress personally, musically and socially through sustained engagement in high quality music provision."                An interesting initiative, is there something to be said about 'class' through different rhetoric on 'inclusion' and 'worth' of music? 

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"The CoMusica Inclusion Programme will enable children and young people in challenging circumstances to progress personally, musically and socially through sustained engagement in high quality music provision."                An interesting initiative, is there something to be said about 'class' through different rhetoric on 'inclusion' and 'worth' of music? 

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http://www.sagegateshead.com/comusica/about-comusica/

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Stuart Maconie: The privileged are taking over the arts – without the grit, pop culture is doomed

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Stuart Maconie: The privileged are taking over the arts – without the grit, pop culture is doomed

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The hordes of foreign travellers who visit Belgium's war graves rarely make a side trip to the small riverside town of Diksmuide, which was destroyed in the horror to end all horrors and, in its rebuilt incarnation, given distinction by a single grey-brick building.

Not just any building. The Yser Tower is 85 metres and 22 storeys high, dominating the view from the West Flanders flatlands for miles; at first sight, it looks like the world's tallest water tower. It is stark, dystopian, the stuff of nightmares, built in the shape of a distended gravestone, topped with a cross and the mysterious initials AVV VVK. The museum inside describes it as "Europe's largest war memorial and peace monument". This is an obfuscation.

The letters stand for Alles Voor Vlaanderen, Vlaanderen voor Kristus (All for Flanders, Flanders for Christ) and this is the unofficial shrine of Flemish nationalism. It was originally built in 1930 in reaction to a war in which Belgian soldiers - mostly monoglot Flemish peasant boys - were contemptuously given orders in French, the language both of Belgium's other half, Wallonia, and of the entire officer class. Folklore suggests there were sometimes disastrous consequences, and the memories sowed the seeds of a Flemish consciousness that in the 1930s found a natural affinity with the Nazism next door. A decade later this segued into widespread collaboration. One night in 1946 the tower was vengefully dynamited. No one knew who did it; everyone knew who did it.

The replacement is 60 per cent bigger than the original but the message is less strident and contentious. Much has happened in Belgium in the past 70 years, even if its politics rarely engage the attention of the outside world. Belgian prosperity was initially built on the coal of Wallonia ("Belgium in 1900 was like Kuwait is now," the diplomat Jean de Ruyt told me); Flanders to the north had nothing.

Then everything flipped. The mines were played out by the 1960s; in the 1970s the attendant steel industry tottered. The once-mighty Walloon city of Charleroi could now be used as the backdrop for a film set in eastern Europe circa 1955. Flanders has grown fat on the success of the Port of Antwerp and entrepreneurialism.

Belgium's extreme devolution means that neither the Flemings nor the Francophones (the split is 60:40) have to kowtow to the other linguistically or politically. Financially it is a different story, and Flanders has to subsidise Wallonia. Flemish bitterness about this lies close to the surface, as so much else does in the fields of Flanders. At the monument on an autumn morning I met a local writer, André Gysel: "There are six million Danish people; they have a country," he told me. "We have six million but we share our country with these other people and we give them €1,000 a year from each of us. And they never say thank you." He paused, witheringly: " Mer-ci!"

One of the many myths of Belgium is that it is bilingual. That is misleading. Many Flemings of a certain age can speak French but refuse to do so - even when asked simple directions. Their grandchildren simply don't bother learning it: it's not necessary and, frankly, they find English far more useful as a second language. The Walloons have never bothered much with Flemish - usually regarded as just debased Dutch - or English either.

These divisions break down to an extent among the elite in the capital: geographically in Flanders, linguistically more French, culturally deracinated. But elsewhere the chances of a relationship across the language line are vanishingly small because the two sides never meet. One 2007 report put the figures for Flemish-Walloon marriages at 1 per cent, far below the percentage of black-white marriages in the UK, for example.

Yet the notion of Flemish independence attracts no clear majority and seems to have no positive energy to go with the contempt. A senior government official insisted to me it would never happen: the problem of how to split Brussels was intractable; the costs would be outrageous; and Belgians are, above all, pragmatists. "It's like a bad marriage, isn't it?" I said. "No, he replied. " Un mariage de raison. A marriage of convenience."

For a British visitor this makes Belgium uniquely difficult to grasp. Overwhelmingly, the British believe in the nation state, even among those outside England who would prefer to live in a different nation state. Yet here at the very heart of Europe is a small but, in the EU, influential country with a diametrically opposite viewpoint.

Sure, we in the UK have multiple loyalties. But Belgians have up to half a dozen of those: to Europe, to their country, to their linguistic grouping, to their social "pillar" - liberal, Catholic, socialist, whatever - to their commune and perhaps to their village. And Belgium, which went 589 days in 2010-11 without a fully-formed government, is a long way from being loyalty No 1. It might even be the least important.

One former British prime minister, when irritated by the Belgians who are often so prominent in the EU high command, snorted: "Belgium! It's not even a country!" (And Donald Trump once called it "a beautiful city".) One might put it more politely: it is the world's first developed post-nation state. On one level it is a stunning success. If the two sides habitually whacked each other, the BBC's John Simpson and Jeremy Bowen would have spent their careers here in flak jackets on the Romance-Germanic linguistic frontier. Instead the Belgians just chunter and occasionally seethe.

But there are drawbacks. Britain has spectacularly failed to imbue huge numbers of its own immigrants with a sense of loyalty to their new country. We should know by now that immigration without acculturation is doomed to fail. But it is infinitely harder to inculcate that in Belgium, which has a minimal sense of loyalty to itself. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California: "There is no there there."

So, what does unite Belgium? Certainly not religion, which was the primary reason for its separation from the rest of the Netherlands in 1830. Now the Belgians ignore their Catholic churches, just as the Dutch ignore their Protestant ones.

Years ago I was told that the answer was "the monarchy, football and beer". However, beer is hardly a uniting factor; you might as well say that Belgians are loyal to chocolate or moules frites. The Belgian football team had good runs in the past two major tournaments, but of its nature that's spasmodic.

The monarchy? Well, successive kings have been masterful at transcending the language divide; republicanism has no traction because a president would necessarily be either French or Flemish and thus unacceptable to the other side. This is a country where even Radio Nostalgie needs not merely different wavelengths for different languages but also for completely separate sets of cultural reference points.

What seems to unite Belgium more than anything else is a penchant for net curtains, which occasionally twitch. In newer houses, among younger families, these are usually replaced by vertical blinds but the principle is unchanged. The Dutch have houseplants in their windows or just let the light flood in. The Belgians tuck themselves away, perhaps from an atavistic fear that they might wake up to find yet another invading army marching past. Expats say it is very rare ever to be invited into a Belgian home, though they will be given warm hospitality in restaurants.

Perhaps allied to this, there seems a curious lack of self-confidence. As Martijn Vink, a Dutchman long resident in Brussels, put it: "We Dutchmen have strong opinions and never mind offering them. But the Belgians... If you show them a banana and say 'What colour is that?' they will look at each other and consult before saying anything."

"I teach interpreting to all nationalities all over the world," another old Brussels hand told me, "and the absolute worst are the Belgians. Ask for a volunteer: silence. Ask for anything: blank looks. Look at the floor, table, ceiling anywhere but me. It is quite striking and completely different from all others. Like talking to a bloody brick wall."

In other circumstances, this can morph into a magnificent disdain. On my first day in Brussels I was trying to buy a transport pass. There were two windows: one young man was serving a growing queue that moved with pitiful slowness; his colleague was sanitising his keyboard, a procedure that occupied many minutes. He looked up at the queue, walked to the cupboard behind him, fetched a different cloth, returned, looked up again, and then began sanitising the mouse.

Never was there a country so pointlessly annoying. I remember driving north through Wallonia once, heading towards a city called Anvers, obviously a place of some importance even if it seemed unfamiliar. Then it vanished, obliterated from the map, and Antwerp appeared in its place. The signs were not there to help: they were there to make a political point.

Brussels's iconic Grand Place - or Grote Markt. But it's a myth that Belgium is bilingual. Photo: Gallery Stock

To reach Diksmuide, I was instructed to change trains in Gand. At the appointed time, I arrived at a station where the word Gand appeared nowhere. It was Gent. I was lucky there was a sign at all. Aiming to get off the Brussels metro at Schuman, the station serving the HQ of the great and wonderful European Union, the cynosure of 510 million pairs of eyes (2019: 450 million), there was a single sign on the platform giving the name, and no audible announcement. How many signs on each platform at Westminster? A hundred? More?

The incompetence of the Belgian police and security services came under global scrutiny after the Islamic State terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels four months later, both executed from the inner-city Brussels district of Molenbeek. This was no isolated failing. Belgium is run on the principle of Britain's railways: everything is always someone else's problem.

There is also a well-attested pattern of corruption to an extent associated with much warmer climates. It is accepted among residents that if you want something done, better give a bung. Yvan Mayeur, the former mayor of Brussels, resigned in June over €36,000 he received to attend two years' worth of meetings that never took place. This might not have been noticed so much had the meetings not been intended to help the homeless.

Perhaps in mitigation, it can be said there is a certain pervasive eccentricity, bordering on weirdness. Sometimes it can be delightful: "You'll be cycling in the middle of Belgium," mused an Irish expat, "and you'll suddenly come across a museum of something completely insignificant." Sometimes it seems even odder. There is a long-established philanthropic organisation called Les Noirauds, full of prominent Brussels figures who black up and parade in clown outfits to solicit donations for a children's charity. One story I heard concerned someone standing at a bus stop approached by a blacked-up clown who turned out to be the foreign minister.

Sometimes it is far weirder than that. The case of the child torturer Marc Dutroux, perhaps the most repulsive of all modern serial killers, involved police ineptitude on an industrial scale in the 1980s and 1990s. And yet the only Belgian film I can ever remember seeing was a mockumentary about a serial killer.

Even Belgian art tends to be peculiar. There is Magritte, of course, and also Paul Delvaux, James Ensor and Antoine Wiertz, the 19th-century painter whose huge, hopeless, horrid canvasses are permanently displayed, under contractual obligation, in a government-funded museum on a prime site near the European Parliament, which hardly anyone visits. Only in Belgium. (Delvaux [1897-1994] specialised in dreamy nocturnes generally involving naked women or railways, often both. At the excellent museum devoted to his work in the seaside resort of St Idesbald, the woman at the desk told me: "The Englishmen who come here always say they want to see the trains.")

On a sunny Saturday I wandered the streets of Molenbeek, which might almost have a sign describing itself as the bomb-making capital of Europe. Most Brussels districts seem to be entirely Turkish and Moroccan or otherwise entirely Eurocratic. Molenbeek felt like a suburb familiar from home, one in transition.

At street level, it certainly didn't feel unsafe. Almost all the old working class had gone, though a few houses - said to belong to lingering Flemish widows - still had both net curtains and flowerpots. Now the migrants who had taken over were themselves in danger of being replaced. Arty studios were popping up by the canal, and a young woman was putting the finishing touches to a new organic food shop due to open on the Monday; she even invited me to a street party (which I failed to find). I asked her if what the world thought about Molenbeek was right. She used her hands to make a balancing signal. " Vrai," she concluded. " Et pas vrai." It was only later that I was told about the turf war between police forces said to have taken place at Molenbeek's metro station. It was resolved by the federal police taking charge of the platforms with the locals at street level, leaving the mezzanine ticket office as a kind of no-cops' land.

My father was born in Belgium in 1912. He left Antwerp for England when he was two, after the Boche invaded, at a time even more tortured than our own and in circumstances I can now only try to imagine. He had no memory of it and naturally I never asked my grandparents when I had the chance.

I had sometimes wondered about whether I could apply for Belgian citizenship; maybe I could play international cricket that way. Before travelling, with the added impetus of Brexit, I enquired about my prospects at the Belgian embassy in London. The woman was very snotty: five years residence and a test in an official language, she said sternly - German acceptable, thanks to the tiny enclaves of German-speakers in the south-east corner; English, the nearest Belgium has to a lingua franca, emphatically not.

After a week in Belgium I had gone off the idea. Just before getting here, on Estonia's border with Russia, I felt a surge of enthusiasm for the vital importance of the EU. Here, trying to live on a New Statesman budget amid restaurants designed for Eurocrats, I was starting to feel decidedly Faragist. As Kim Philby may have reflected during his long years in a Moscow flat, one should never defect to a country even more dysfunctional than one's own.

For the next article in our series "The Lost Continent" Matthew Engel will visit Slovenia, once part of Yugoslavia

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Stuart Maconie: The privileged are taking over the arts - without the grit, pop culture is doomed

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The hordes of foreign travellers who visit Belgium's war graves rarely make a side trip to the small riverside town of Diksmuide, which was destroyed in the horror to end all horrors and, in its rebuilt incarnation, given distinction by a single grey-brick building. Not just any building.

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A colleague on the arts desk here at Guardian Towers recently reminisced about a wedding she'd attended, where the guests divided roughly into northern and southern camps. Come the disco, she reported, the two tribes divided just as clearly on the dancefloor: the northerners came out in force for rock and indie, the southerners saving themselves for funk and dance. Now, it's likely sociologists - or, in fact, anyone with half a brain - would not accept that as scientific evidence of a north-south divide in musical taste.

But here's something else (though the caveats about sociologists and anyone with half a brain still apply). In March, we published an interactive map of the UK which took the 10 acts most streamed on Spotify in 22 different towns and cities, and enabled you to see how popular each act was in each city. Now the people at Spotify have gone a step further. The two most popular acts overall were Arctic Monkeys and Bastille, so Spotify's Martin Vacher mapped them against a wider selection of towns and cities, highlighting which act was the more popular in which place.

Guess what? Arctic Monkeys dominate the north; Bastille dominate the south. Now, obviously, both bands are huge right across the UK - which is why Arctic Monkeys play massive outdoor shows in London at Finsbury Park, rather than a support slot at the Half Moon in Putney. But the divide is absolutely stark. So what can we learn from this research?

1. Towns with beaches and football clubs are outliers

Sunderland - grimy, industrial, depressed (pick your cliche) - was the only true northern town to choose Bastille. Brighton - hipster, metrosexual, fashionable (pick your cliche) was one of only two southern towns (alongside Luton) to go for Arctic Monkeys. What links Sunderland and Brighton? They both have beaches. And football clubs. And last season both football clubs were managed by Spanish-speaking men. That's science.

2. The south now encompasses the east Midlands

Disagree all you like, people of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. But if you were culturally aligned with the north, you'd prefer Arctic Monkeys. You don't, though. It's probably something to do with the east Midlands being so flat (topography may also explain Luton's preference for Arctic Monkeys: Bedfordshire has the Dunstable Downs, which is, in a very real sense, the south's answer to the Lakeland fells).

3. Nothing

Truthfully, that's what we can learn from this map. But it's kind of interesting, anyway.
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Arctic Monkeys and Bastille: a north-south divide in music?

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A colleague on the arts desk here at Guardian Towers recently reminisced about a wedding she'd attended, where the guests divided roughly into northern and southern camps. Come the disco, she reported, the two tribes divided just as clearly on the dancefloor: the northerners came out in force for rock and indie, the southerners saving themselves for funk and dance.

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equality and diversity in classical music 

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equality and diversity in classical music 

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A host of grime's biggest names have declared their support for Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to the snap general election called by prime minister Theresa May for June 8 - and the Labour leader has been returning the love.

Yesterday, Jme combined useful voting registration information and a Corbyn endorsement in a single tweet.

If you want to vote Corbyn.
Step 1: Register https://t.co/OOXc9Uih0P
Step 2: vote Corbyn.
Step 3: press Up, X, Y, B, A
Step 4: press start

- Jme (@JmeBBK) April 23, 2017

Jme isn't alone. Fourteen years, three Labour leaders and three general elections since Dizzee Rascal famously declared "I'm a problem for Anthony Blair" on Boy In Da Corner's 'Hold Ya Mouf', the grime scene in 2017 feels rather more affinity for a man who was a consistent backbench rebel against Blair's mission to drag Labour to the right - and into overseas wars. Corbyn won the party leadership in 2015 by promising to stand up for disillusioned working-class voters and to defend immigrants, and over the past week AJ Tracey, Novelist - who joined the Labour Party last June - and Akala have all tweeted in support of him.

It's not a 'I don't care who you vote for, just please vote' - it's a 'If you're a real g vote Labour' ting right about now 📣

- Secure The Bag! 🎒 (@ajtracey) April 18, 2017

Seriously, everyone Vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

- Novelist (@Novelist) April 20, 2017

I am not and probably never will be a Labour supporter. However I will be voting for the first time and I'll be voting for @jeremycorbyn

- Akala (@akalamusic) April 21, 2017

Thoughtful as ever, Akala went on to explain: "[F]or the first time in my adult life there is a chance to elect someone I would consider a sane and decent human... He has consistently voted/spoken against UK foreign aggression. This alone makes him the most electable politician we have ever had... [A]nti-austerity, pro-NHS and at least being openly ideologically opposed to UK empire is as good as we are ever likely to get... Homie @jeremycorbyn was anti-apartheid back when the Tories had Mandela down as a terrorist. Safe."

Stormzy also cited Corbyn's anti-apartheid stance as a reason for supporting him last May, telling the Guardian: "My man, Jeremy! Young Jeremy, my guy. I dig what he says. I saw some sick picture of him from back in the day when he was campaigning about anti-apartheid and I thought: yeah, I like your energy... I feel like he gets what the ethnic minorities are going through and the homeless and the working class."

The grime stars' words haven't gone unnoticed. Corbyn, who gave a shout-out to Stormzy in March for his openness about his mental health issues, had responded by yesterday evening to Jme:

Thanks for the support @jmeBBK - if you haven't already please do what he says and register to vote https://t.co/OMn7iamFTx

- Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) April 23, 2017

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A host of grime's biggest names have declared their support for Jeremy Corbyn in the run-up to the snap general election called by prime minister Theresa May for June 8 - and the Labour leader has been returning the love. Yesterday, Jme combined useful voting registration information and a Corbyn endorsement in a single tweet.

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is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?

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is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?

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In terms of musical beefs, last month's spat between privately educated singer James Blunt, and privately educated shadow culture secretary, Chris Bryant, was hardly 2Pac vs. Biggie Smalls.

"I am delighted that Eddie Redmayne won [a Golden Globe for best actor]," Bryant told the Guardian in a wider point about whether people in the arts are too posh, "but we can't just have a culture dominated by Eddie Redmayne and James Blunt and their ilk."

Although he was mentioned only briefly, for Blunt, the implication was clear: his success was the undeserved result of privileges and favours unavailable to those from less socially advantageous positions.

"You classist gimp," he responded, in an open letter to the same newspaper (open letters, as opposed to opening fire, being the retaliation of choice in this particular argument). "I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker."

However, Bryant never suggested that Blunt hadn't worked hard for his career. On the contrary, you don't sell 11 million copies of your debut album without an awful lot of hard work. If anything, he was confronting a more systemic point; one in which a disproportionate number of leading musicians come from the 7% of the population who are lucky enough to receive a private education.

For musicians, the means to pursue the thing that you love for longer without pay, can be make or break, the difference between success and failure. And for Labour's shadow culture secretary to point out that exceptions to this rule have become few and far between is hardly the politics of envy, it's just stating what we know to be true: that music has become increasingly dominated by those free from the pressure of having to work for a living.

And this isn't just affecting music. A report carried out on unpaid internships by Lindsey Macmillan of the Institute of Education found that in 1990, journalists came from families only 6% richer than average. Today, they are from families 42% better off. By excluding those whose parents cannot afford to rent them a house in London as they go from unpaid internship to unpaid internship, we are airbrushing an entire voice out of our media and, with that, dictating the types of stories that are written.

Take the music press's hounding of Tom Clarke, lead singer of Coventry's The Enemy. In September of last year, Clarke announced he was leaving Twitter following a series of increasingly personal attacks over his height and appearance. Not only did the attacks expose a lack of accountability within music journalism, they also demonstrated a fear of the working classes, one that deploys ridicule as a smokescreen for class hatred.

"Clarke has been walking on his hind legs since approximately 1991" taunted the Quietus. A "snivelling Cov street rat" offered the NME. "Like some poet laureate for people with learning difficulties," described Drowned In Sound, which in the same article suggested that Clarke may be making a return to working on a shop floor in the near future.

"These are 'The People' Tom Clarke represents," it continued. "The type who believe that owning a half-inched copy of Moseley Shoals coupled with a Toni & Guy coiffeured Beatles feather-cut gives them the right to purchase guitars, call themselves musicians and form bands."

Outraged because a guy from a working class background had the audacity to do something other thean work on a shop floor, Clarke was routinely presented as either grotesque or cruelly caricatured. He could never simply walk into a room, he had to 'swagger'. He didn't sing, he 'snarled'. And while these preconceptions were all too often unchallenged by Clarke - he admits himself that he wishes he had been "just a bit more mature or just a bit more savvy and seen it for what it was" - the fact remains that a middle-class band would have suffered no where near the level of opprobrium (compare, for example, the media's response to the publicly educated Jamie T; a musician whose lyrics dealt with the same gritty depictions of urban life).

When you struggle to find anyone in music journalism from a background even remotely like Clarke's, then you inevitably place a marker on the sort of coverage that less privileged artists will receive. And with a marker on working class artists, who are we left with? Alt-J? The Vaccines? Mumford and Sons? All fine bands but none that exactly scream all-or-nothing, now-or-never hunger.

Bryant's point was not that he wants to take anything away from the wealthy. Instead, he wants to open up more opportunities for the rest, ensuring that pop music retains a wealth of voices, accents and reference points for years to come. That may sound like a cultural revolution too far for Blunt, but for the many musicians who are struggling to make their voices heard, it is one that is very much needed.

Credits

Text Matthew Whitehouse
Photography Elaine Constantine
[The i-Disco Issue, No. 294, December 2008]

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is the music industry becoming a hobby for the upper classes?

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In terms of musical beefs, last month's spat between privately educated singer James Blunt, and privately educated shadow culture secretary, Chris Bryant, was hardly 2Pac vs. Biggie Smalls.

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Pulp matter more than ever in today's cowed popcultural landscape

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Pulp matter more than ever in today's cowed popcultural landscape

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Pulp, who played their first concert in the UK for nearly a decade at the Isle of Wight last Saturday, were the last art school band. That doesn't mean that groups won't still borrow Rodchenko designs for record sleeves or publish tortured poetry, but it means that something quite specific has ended, and shows no signs of springing back into life.

From the early 1970s until the 1990s, hundreds of musicians from working or lower-middle class backgrounds, many educated at art schools, claiming state benefits and living in bedsits or council flats weeks before they found themselves staying at five-star hotels, were thrown up in the UK. From Roxy Music to the Smiths, from the Associates to the Pet Shop Boys, all balanced sexuality and literacy, ostentatious performance and austere rectitude, raging ambition and class resentment, translating it into records balancing experimentation with populist cohesion; it was possible to read the lyric sheets without embarrassment. You could dance to it.

At some point in the 1990s this literary-experimental pop tradition disappeared. Some reasons are structural - workfare schemes meant that claiming the dole as a "musicians' grant" was less and less practicable, art schools were absorbed by universities, council flats were unobtainable for any but the desperate, and squats became rarer, so the unstable alliance between bohemia and estate was broken. The result was a striking homogeneity of class as much as of sound. In October 2010, according to an oft-cited statistic, 60% of artists in the UK top 10 had been to public school, compared with 1% in 1990.

Though their brief fame dates from the mid-90s, Pulp formed in 1978 and were wholly a product of that earlier tradition. The sort of group routinely described as "pretentious" by the gatekeepers of proper rock music, they looked weird and dressed according to a fetish for 1970s artificial fabrics - their lyrics a litany of pencil skirts, acrylic afternoons, "sprouting black hair under bri-nylon underwear" and pink quilted eiderdowns. Their videos were inspired by structuralist films like John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum (1976), where a "director" pretends to direct an ordinary street scene; their Peter Saville and Designers Republic sleeves were carefully crafted works of art in themselves.

Only seemingly conversely, Jarvis Cocker's lyrics alternated between mundane minutiae - the frustrations and traps of poverty - and observations, with an eye both critical and self-implicating, of working class loitering and leisure. These weren't mutually exclusive. In one of their finest moments, 1992's Sheffield: Sex City, the group's hometown is transfigured."Old women clacking their tongues in the shade of crumbling concrete bus shelters" and endless waits in the housing benefit waiting room explode into a carnal metropolis, collective orgasms collapsing the city's tower blocks. Similarly, Pulp's sound corralled antiquated, obsolete synthesisers into an extraordinarily low-budget version of disco, their ungainly frontman reinventing himself as a self-created sex object, Pulpall lascivious hand movements and unhealthy gasps and yelps; yet they made catchy pop music, of a sort.

It's their relentless, uncomfortable attention to class that really marked them out, in the decade when John Prescott proclaimed that "we are all middle class now". Pulp were not, although they weren't exactly the usual idea of what the working class was, either. The scene into which Pulp were accidentally subsumed, Britpop, was divided by class. Groups from the London commuter belt wrote 'social observation' about suburban life, Club 18-30 and wife-swapping. Groups from Greater Manchester swaggered about in tracksuits, and the singer of one especially prominent act proudly claimed to have never read a book. In the Blur v Oasis chart battle, these two equally uninteresting antipodes confronted each other. Pulp's most famous record was an implicit riposte to both.

Common People is the now-familiar story of the student blessed with inherited wealth who declares her intention to slum it, and the response this elicits. But it's a far stranger, angrier record than familiarity has dulled it into becoming, a raging monologue over a building electronic drone. It might begin in dry, droll fashion, but by its end Common People has become a ferocious denunciation of a ruling class that, having waged successful class war, now adopts a parodic version of the uniforms, accents and lifestyles of those it defeated.

Class in Common People isn't a matter of cultural signifiers, of "smoking fags and playing pool", but something much more fundamental - the knowledge that you're condemned to be little more than a surplus, that there is no way out, no way that you could "call your dad and he'd stop it". No exit. But this is no celebration of good, simple earthy proletarian life. Pulp and those they spoke for were not "common" by choice. Class-consciousness is often sharpest at its margins, where it meets other classes, where it's aware of other options - where it is in some proximity to the enemy. In an environment where one class is all you know, it isn't so acute, and you can't maintain so much anger against a vaguely defined "them" - as was amply demonstrated by Oasis's post-1995 embrace of the most hoary aspirational cliches.

For Pulp's constituency, you can tell that to "pretend you never went to school" was as much a strain as it might have been to those who were slumming it - more so, because it was forced upon them. As for New Labour's attempt to redress the class divide via consumption and grinning vacuity, Pulp responded with Cocaine Socialism, a deliberately self-parodic Common People rewrite sung in the persona of a Blairite apparatchik - "Well you sing about common people, and the mis-shapes and the misfits - so can you bring them to my party, and get them all to sniff this?"

While Common People itself might have been a hit single, it was followed by a generation of groups alternately trilling in dulcet Bullingdon tones or simulating glottal stops. The London-centred Grime scene aside, even inarticulate working class voices have disappeared from the British charts.

Of course, Pulp ended their set at the Isle of Wight festival with the song. When it was released in 1995, they briefly became pop celebrities, tabloid and telly regulars. Their 2011 reformation entails a series of festival appearances, and to get some sense of how far their stock has fallen, they're seldom even the headliners on the days they appear, often supporting instead long-running, traditionalist American rock bands - at the IoW below the Foo Fighters, at Reading they will precede the Strokes. This didn't seem to deter them on Saturday, where their set was charged with a giddy, surprised enthusiasm, as if they themselves had forgotten how good they were - but when they ventured away from the hits, into the vengeful sex-as-class revenge fantasy I Spy, the audience was silent and baffled.

Pulp's upending of class stereotypes, their anger and their experimentation matter now more than ever, as a government waging naked class war elicits no response at all from our cowed, moribund pop music. But with the decimation of the infrastructure that produced them, from access to education to arts council grants to the dole itself, has the British political and popcultural landscape changed so much that a group like Pulp is now impossible?

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Pulp matter more than ever in today's cowed popcultural landscape | Owen Hatherley

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Pulp, who played their first concert in the UK for nearly a decade at the Isle of Wight last Saturday, were the last art school band. That doesn't mean that groups won't still borrow Rodchenko designs for record sleeves or publish tortured poetry, but it means that something quite specific has ended, and shows no signs of springing back into life.

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Tracey Thorn: The Unbearable Whiteness of Britpop

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Tracey Thorn: The Unbearable Whiteness of Britpop

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At the 1998 Brit Awards, New Labour's love affair with Cool Britannia got a drenching when Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawamba tipped a bucket of ice- cold water over the head of John Prescott, the then deputy prime minister. It was such a comedown. Less than a year earlier, in July 1997, shortly after Labour's general election victory, Tony Blair had triumphantly hosted a glittering music biz reception at No 10, cementing the link between the new government and all things groovy. Although, according to Alastair Campbell's diaries, Blair was worried even then about rock'n'roll behaviour, and felt that Noel Gallagher "was bound to do something crazy", the Creation Records boss Alan McGee assured him Noel would behave, saying only that "if we had invited Liam, it might have been different".

Poor Tony, though, trying so hard to be down with the cool kids and yet so scared of what the cool kids might do. I was at the 1996 Brits, where he gave a speech, and the room had filled with a frisson of both approval and the opposite. The party on the table behind us were heckling and I remember turning to shout at them, "Well, who would you prefer?" feeling some sense of loyalty and gratitude towards Blair for the unexpected optimism he'd introduced into the Labour voter's life. A row broke out, drunken and par for the course at the Brits, but it was telling that it was about politics rather than drugs or rock'n'roll.

In his ill-fitting Nineties suit and spotted tie, Blair made a speech that was a celebration of the renewed chart dominance of British bands, putting their success down to the inspiration they'd drawn from the past - "from bands like the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks . . . or the later generations, the Clash, the Smiths, the Stone Roses . . ." Well. You don't need me to tell you the kind of people who are missing from that list. It's a version of music history that sums up precisely what went wrong during the Britpop years.

I'd attended the Brits in 1995, too, and wrote later in Bedsit Disco Queen about how proud I was to be sitting with Massive Attack: " Protection was up for a couple of awards, and though it was the height of the Britpop Oasis v Blur battle, I felt that ours was the table to be on, with Massive and Tricky and Björk. The rock kids seemed to be trapped in a dreary rehash of the past, still repetitively harking back to the yawn-inducing Sixties, while we were with a group of people who were looking forwards."

By 1996, the two strands of the music scene were in direct competition. Our song "Missing" was up for Best Single and "Protection" the single for Best Video. Massive Attack won Best British Dance Act, while Batman Forever, featuring Massive and me singing a Smokey Robinson cover, won Best Soundtrack. But Oasis won Best Album and Video and Group, beating Blur and Pulp and Radiohead in those categories, and when Massive went up to collect their award, 3D made a sardonic comment, saying, "It's quite ironic, 'cos none of us can dance." It was a joke but he wasn't laughing, and I think he was making a point. He might have said, especially given the most recent album that they'd made: "Why are we in a different category from Blur and Radiohead? Why is Protection a 'dance' album? What is 'dance' code for?"

It was a classic piece of Othering. The implication of the awards, and of Blair's speech, was that the white boys with guitars were the Norm, and deviations from that were the Other, and certainly not the main story. How great it would have been if, for instance, in celebrating the successes of British music, Blair had cited the Stones, Dusty Springfield, Sandy Denny, the Sex Pistols, the Smiths, Soul II Soul, the Specials and Sade. That's a list that reflects the diversity of UK pop brilliance, and it's just artists beginning with the letter S.

The other event of the 1996 Brits was the Jarvis Cocker/Michael Jackson incident. It was over so quickly that no one knew quite what was going on, and a huge "what just happened?" rumbled round the room. But by next morning it had gone down in pop rebel history - punky Brit sticks two fingers up at superstar narcissist. Looking back now, I'm less comfortable, and can't help wincing at the thought that in fact Cocker had insulted the only black artist performing on stage that night, winner of the Artist of a Generation Award. In retrospect, it has a whiff of archetypal lad-culture boorishness, another of the worst aspects of the time.

Britpop may have started as a reassertion of home-grown indie over American grunge but it gave comfort to those who wanted to reassert "traditional" songwriting styles and band structures in the face of the recent success of rave and dance culture. The industry, alarmed by collectives and DJs and "anonymous" guest vocalists, leapt to the defence of the new bands that looked just like the bands of yore. They recognised this genre as a type that would sell albums, where the money was. Hooray for Britpop! It presumably came as a relief after the 1994 Brits, where awards had been won by Dina Carroll, Stereo MCs, Gabrielle and M People, and where two women, Björk and P J Harvey, had performed a radically deconstructed version of the Stones' rock classic "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction".

There was so much happening. Spectacular releases by Portishead, and Tricky, and the forming of Goldie's Metalheadz label, and the birth of drum'n'bass. It was a progressive scene, and reminded me of the Eighties, when in the wake of punk the charts filled up with boy/girl duos, multiracial groups, androgynous singers and gay electronic cabaret performers. For some reason, though, in the mid-Nineties a form of nostalgia began to hold sway, and we let it. In 2017, with the arguments about grime at the Brit Awards, I realise that we're still having the same conversations about how to reflect and respect successful underground scenes, and we're not much further on. Maybe the rot set in when we let the news lead with an item about two rock bands releasing singles on the same day and pretended that it was a groundbreaking story.

So I kick against the official version of what was important, the reducing of those years to The Story of Britpop. It was a strand of what was happening, not the whole picture. The legacy of mid-Nineties music is apparent in current artists from James Blake and FKA Twigs, through Skepta and Disclosure, to Stormzy and The xx. Who, on the other hand, is claiming to have been inspired by Oasis? And it makes me think that whenever the rock-group stereotype reasserts itself, you need to look elsewhere to find what's really interesting.

Tracey Thorn is a musician and writer, best known as one half of Everything but the Girl. She writes the fortnightly "Off the Record" column for the New Statesman. Her latest book is Naked at the Albert Hall.

I have a confession. I am a huge Tolkien fan, but when news of Amazon's big-budget Lord of the Rings TV franchise hit social media, I furrowed my brow and scratched my head in puzzlement. With six super-sized films, I thought, did we really need a TV adaption as well?

Judging by the reaction of friends and fellow fans, I wasn't alone - even the actor John Rhys-Davies (AKA Gimli) argued that Tolkien would be "spinning in his grave". As The Guardian's Stuart Heritage put it: "The initial reaction to the Lord of the Rings show was a heavy, sustained groan that could be heard the world over."

But then I changed my mind.

JRR Tolkien is one of the most significant authors in modern times and when well-made, fantasy is a genre that has proven to dominate - from Game of Thrones and Walking Dead to Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials and Harry Potter. While Tolkien's most famous works have already been adapted for the screen, much of the mythology of Middle Earth and its historical world of elves, men, dwarves and hobbits remains untapped.

Announcing the venture, Amazon promised it would be telling "previously unexplored stories based on Tolkien's original writings". This could mean many things: the adventures of Bilbo Baggins's "Tookish" ancestors; the stories within LOTR appendixes; adapting part of the Unfinished Tales; or, most excitingly, it could even mean drawing from material within The Silmarillion.

With reports that more than $250m is to be pumped into the project, it has been criticised as a calculated ploy to win over the soon to be bereft Game of Thrones audience and rake in a tidy profit. But does that matter? Is it not rather naive to suggest Amazon is anything other than a business?

Sure, there are plenty of duds and fillers on Amazon Prime and indeed Netflix. But where it matters, where these companies chose to flex their financial muscle, the quality can often be miles ahead of anything comparable elsewhere. The money pumped into The Crown, for example, oozes out of every single shot. It is beautifully crafted, acted and directed, and a huge success for Netflix.

There is no reason to suppose Amazon's LOTR venture will be any different. The stakes will be incredibly high, but New Line Cinema has precedent in adapting Tolkien's work with a reasonable amount of integrity, and every effort will be made to make a first-rate production. Plus, such a huge show will doubtless have its pick of the best writers, directors and actors, and regardless of the naysayers, we will all be watching.

It should be said, though, for 21st century readers and viewers, Middle Earth certainly comes with its problems - from its implicit racial prejudices to its explicit patriarchal society. Reading The Hobbit again recently I was struck afresh by how very few female characters feature in the narrative - and those who do get the Angel Clare from Tess of the D'Urbervilles treatment: they are idealised, saintly, "pure".

Peter Jackson went some way to address this in the films with the introduction of Tauriel (played by Evangeline Lily) and the expanding of the character of Arwen (played by Liv Tyler). Changes to the source material always come with risks, which may well irk die-hard fans, but I suspect a TV series would need to do even more.

And what is there with regards to source material? Well, in actual fact, quite a lot. The Silmarillion was first sketched out by Tolkien in the 1920s - way before the publication of The Hobbit - and grew to become a kind of anthology of the myths and legends of the world that would become Middle Earth.

Like the LOTR appendixes and Unfinished Tales, The Silmarillion has little of the depth and detail found in LOTR or The Hobbit, but all three contain material with marvellous potential. There is the tragic tale of Beren and Luthien, whose romance is set against the backdrop of the quest for the Silmarils; there is the epic story of Elendil and Isildur; and the rise of Sauron and the forging of the nine rings. These stories may be slender in print, but they are surely rich in televisual potential.

There are arguments to be had that TV companies should, perhaps, widen their net when it comes to commissions. But if we are to have a screen adaption of every single J K Rowling book, endless remakes of Pride and Prejudice and Murder on the Orient Express, and film as well as TV Star Wars spin-offs, surely there is room for a TV adaption of JRR Tolkien's untapped work?

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Tracey Thorn: the unbearable whiteness of Britpop

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At the 1998 Brit Awards, New Labour's love affair with Cool Britannia got a drenching when Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawamba tipped a bucket of ice- cold water over the head of John Prescott, the then deputy prime minister. It was such a comedown.

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PRIVATELY-EDUCATED MUSICIANS DOMINATE GLASTONBURY’S BIG LINE UP

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Our Chairman, Sir Peter Lampl, is quoted by Tammy Hughes in the Daily Mail on the over-representation of the privately educated among performers at Glastonbury.
Sir Peter told the Mail it was 'remarkable' so many of this year's musicians were privately educated. He provided the following quote to the Mail: "Our own research has shown that the alumni of private schools continue to dominate the top of all areas of British life. But it is remarkable that so many Glastonbury musicians have been educated at an elite school. By drawing our musicians from such a small social pool, we are inevitably missing out on a lot of talent."

Read the full article here.

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Privately-educated musicians dominate Glastonbury's big line up

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Our Chairman, Sir Peter Lampl, is quoted by Tammy Hughes in the Daily Mail on the over-representation of the privately educated among performers at Glastonbury. Sir Peter told the Mail it was 'remarkable' so many of this year's musicians were privately educated.

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reproducing class through classical music education 

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reproducing class through classical music education 

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Image: The Cello Part for Vaughan Williams' London Symphony Anna Bull (Goldsmiths, University of London)
In recent years there has been a worldwide explosion of music education programmes which bring classical music to children in deprived areas, following the model of El Sistema, a Venezuelan music education project. In the UK these 'In Harmony El Sistema' programmes have been set up in Stirling, Newcastle, Norwich, and Liverpool, and several other cities. However, in the UK more generally classical music is overwhelmingly played and listened to by the middle and upper classes. Does this gap between classical music's usual suspects and its new recruits matter?

To answer this question, we need to examine the links between classical music and class. Prevailing explanations for the dominance of the middle classes in classical music tend to be economic, suggesting that inequalities are simply a question of access. Therefore, if we give all children access to instruments, good quality teaching, and clear progression routes, then class will no longer be an issue.

Clearly, economic barriers are very important. Indeed, a recent report from the ABRSM (who run the grade exams) found that private instrumental lessons - especially on classical music instruments - are much more likely to be undertaken by those in what are called the AB social groups (i.e. middle and upper classes). However, this study also found that the reasons that both children and adults give for choosing not to play a musical instrument is that they were not interested in learning, or that they have lost interest. By contrast, the cost of lessons is only the seventh most important factor for those who have given up playing. The biggest reason why people don't play an instrument, according to this survey, is not because it's too expensive, but because they don't want to.

Given that classical music is mainly a middle-class taste, the reasons to do with not playing an instrument could also be associated with class. This link between the middle classes and classical music becomes clearer when we look at the growth of the middle classes in Britain in the nineteenth century. Classical music as a distinctive practice with the methods of rehearsal, performance, and education which we know today emerged in parallel with the bourgeoisie, and often through their efforts at institution-building. This was distinct from the brass band and choral tradition.

In music education this is particularly visible. The grade exam boards and music conservatoires which shape the musical lives of young musicians today were predominantly established between 1872 and 1893. There is a surprisingly paucity of research into the history of these institutions. However, new research by Erin Johnson-Hill shows that the class divide which was built into these institutions in the late 19th century was around people who read staff notation - what we would call standard notation, who were middle-class; and those who used alternative notation systems, such as the Tonic Sol-fa method, which was widely used for choral singing in the nineteenth century, who were predominantly working-class. The major classical music institutions, the grade exam boards and music conservatoires - used staff notation.

What's really interesting is that this divide between standard staff notation and alternative notations is still with us now, and this still appears to be a class divide. Today, instead of Tonic Sol-fa, alternative notations might be guitar tabs, or music technology software. This idea is borne out by unpublished research by Born, Devine and Taylor (presented at a recent conference on Music, Digitisation and Mediation) into those who study music at university, based on UCAS data. They found that those who do music degrees are drawn more from the middle class, while those who study music production or music technology tend to be working-class boys. Students who do music degrees are likely to have taken A-level music, which requires the ability to read staff notation. This suggests that broadly speaking, there is still today a class divide around different forms of musical literacy.

Why might this be? Partly as a result of this history, there is today a congruence or 'fit' between ways of learning classical music and middle-class culture. Education sociologists have spent the last forty years asking why certain groups - the middle classes in particular - do better at school than others. They have demonstrated how mainstream education privileges the middle classes over other groups because it is a system of education which is designed around the same models of interaction and language which the middle classes use at home. It was in effect designed by the middle classes for the middle classes - school simply makes sense to many middle-class people.

Why is this relevant for contemporary music education? Forthcoming research into the In Harmony El Sistema programme in Norwich, Newcastle, and Stoke on Trent demonstrates that this 'fit' between school culture and home culture that the sociology of education has described appears to be reproduced in classical music education. The children who did well in these music education programmes tended to be those who also enjoyed school and did well at it. This mirrors the link between those who do well at school being the middle class children. This means that it is possible that the In Harmony Sistema programmes could be reproducing the same inequalities which mainstream education produces.

There are several similarities between classical music and mainstream education which might lead to both advantaging the same groups of pupils. First, classical music, like mainstream education, is a model of learning where the teacher or adult has more knowledge and skill than the child or learner. While this may be necessary in schools, music education is a space where the adult can be a facilitator rather than an authority, as the many successful programmes run by Youth Music demonstrate. Secondly, this is a mode of practice where there is a clear sense of right and wrong. There is space for interpretation in classical music, but getting it right is a constant preoccupation, so there is less room to play around and experiment than in other genres. This exacerbates the authority of teacher over learner, similarly to mainstream schooling. And finally, the instruments used in classical music are beautiful, but difficult. This means they need a long term investment of time and effort from a learner who is able to have belief in their future self as being able to do something their current self cannot. This requires a way of experiencing time which is long-term and future-oriented - where either the parents or the children can imagine and invest in the future and that it seems worth doing so. For those in less secure class positions, without financial security, housing security or job security, it makes a lot less sense to plan long-term. Furthermore, sociological literature on parenting and class shows that it is middle-class parents who prioritise investing in their child's future. By contrast, working-class parents are less likely to be able to afford the time or money to do this. They tend to be more likely to see the child as a fully-formed person in their own right, rather than investing in the person they are going to be.

These are just some of the similarities between mainstream education, which tends to reward middle-class children, and classical music education. So for working-class or lower-middle-class children playing classical music, there is a particular future-oriented value-system which they need to buy into in order to progress. My current research, looking at young people aged 16-21 who participate in youth orchestras and youth choirs, seeks to explore these links. For the lower-middle-class young people in my study, classical music often was a route towards class mobility, or improving their class position. For some, it was an escape route out of the area they had grown up in, and a way to learn how to be middle class. However, they talked about the correction and improvement required in classical music almost as though it were correcting themselves - practising and working hard at classical music was a way to transform themselves into the ideal middle-class person that they saw as represented by this music. The lower middle-class young people in my research were more likely to recount being bullied by music teachers, and to see this bullying as their own fault because they weren't good enough. They were trying to re-make themselves to fit into this world, but sometimes this took a considerable toll on their mental health and their sense of self.

What does all of this mean for music education programmes such as In Harmony El Sistema which bring classical music to 'deprived' or working-class communities? It suggests that the benefits of classical music may not be evenly shared, but instead may be more easily accessible to those who already fit into a middle-class world. In order to shift these ongoing inequalities, I would suggest that we need to change the musical practice itself by letting the music evolve and change more. While some music conservatoires are still following the same formula they did a hundred years ago, others are changing their practices by getting students to play with musicians from other genres, improvise, and learn how to use music technology. This kind of experimentation will help with opening up this world to a more diverse and representative range of people.
Anna Bull is an ESRC-funded PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her previous career was as a pianist and cellist. This article was presented at a public discussion event at the Arts and Humanities Festival, Kings College London, as part of a panel discussion on inequalities in classical music, called 'What lies beneath? Exploring the hidden currents of the classical music world'. This followed on from an academic conference called 'Classical music, critical challenges' at Kings College London organised by Anna Bull and Dr Christina Scharff.

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Reproducing class? Classical music education and inequality

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Image: The Cello Part for Vaughan Williams' London Symphony Anna Bull (Goldsmiths, University of London) In recent years there has been a worldwide explosion of music education programmes which bring classical music to children in deprived areas, following the model of El Sistema, a Venezuelan music education project.

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James Blunt v Chris Bryant spat over class

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James Blunt v Chris Bryant spat over class

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Dear Chris Bryant MP,

You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker. So alien was it, that people laughed at the idea of me going into the music business, and certainly no one was of any use.

In the army, again, people thought it was a mad idea. None of them knew anyone in the business either.

And when I left the army, going against everyone's advice, EVERYONE I met in the British music industry told me there was no way it would work for me because I was too posh. One record company even asked if I could speak in a different accent. (I told them I could try Russian).

Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business. And when I have managed to break through, I was STILL scoffed at for being too posh for the industry.

And then you come along, looking for votes, telling working class people that posh people like me don't deserve it, and that we must redress the balance. But it is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent.

I got signed in America, where they don't give a stuff about, or even understand what you mean by me and "my ilk", you prejudiced wazzock, and I worked my arse off. What you teach is the politics of jealousy. Rather than celebrating success and figuring out how we can all exploit it further as the Americans do, you instead talk about how we can hobble that success and "level the playing field". Perhaps what you've failed to realise is that the only head-start my school gave me in the music business, where the VAST majority of people are NOT from boarding school, is to tell me that I should aim high. Perhaps it protected me from your kind of narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-'G'-from-'GB' thinking, which is to look at others' success and say, "it's not fair."

Up yours,

James Cucking Funt
Full news story: James Blunt attacks 'classist gimp' Chris Bryant over diversity comments

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James Blunt's letter to Chris Bryant - in full

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After the shadow culture minister name-checked Blunt as one of the performers from a 'privileged background' dominating the arts, the singer decided to write backChris Bryant's full reply to James Blunt*Dorian Lynskey: James Blunt's letter to Chris Bryant makes him appear a paranoid wazzock

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Artist Jeremy Deller showing the working class roots of musicians 

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Artist Jeremy Deller showing the working class roots of musicians 

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The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music

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London's Hayward Gallery are publishing a book by British artist Jeremy Deller, looking at the roots of working class music culture from the Industrial Revolution to the glam and heavy rock music of the 1980s. The exhibition the book accompanies, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, opens 12 October at Manchester Art Gallery and will also be on tour, stopping in Nottingham and Laing in 2014.

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Jeremy Deller publishing book on roots of working class music in Britain - The Wire

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London's Hayward Gallery are publishing a book by British artist Jeremy Deller, looking at the roots of working class music culture from the Industrial Revolution to the glam and heavy rock music of the 1980s.

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UK Rapper/Poet/Artist Asks, "How Much Are they Paying You?"

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All photos courtesy of Thomas Gill

Rapper and poet Liv Wynter is a queer, working-class artist based in South London who wants to explore issues of gender, class, and sexuality through activism and art. Her weeklong residency at the Royal Standard in Liverpool, called HOW MUCH ARE THEY PAYING YOU, was organized as a response to the £25 application fee for New Contemporaries, and ran simultaneously with the Liverpool Biennial. Wynter's quick wit and stage presence make her performances poignant, radical, and funny.

Last year, Wynter took on the male-dominated rap battle Don't Flop, calling out sexism and homophobia while challenging a seasoned freestyler. Lately, Wynter has been working with WHEREISANAMENDIETA, an archiving project and group of activists, who stormed the Tate Modern to protest an exhibition of work by artist Ana Mendieta's husband and alleged murderer. The Creators Project talked to Wynter about her residency at the Royal Standard, her Skype-based project HEADFUCK, and how she's learning to experiment with the written word.
The Creators Project: Can you tell us about the first days of your residency?
Liv Wynter: It's been wild! I've drunk more than my own body weight in tequila and done more admin than I could have ever imagined. At the artist talk last night, some institutional heads came along. I was talking about drawing a line between activism and art-I think art is inherently exclusionary, so to separate art and activism is often necessary to keep activism accessible. I was cussing out institutions for being inherently racist, sexist, etc. and they kept coming with 'not all institutions' or more specifically, 'not everyone who works at an institution.' It was kind of funny because in a conversation about people being silenced by institutions' self-obsession, they demonstrated exactly that by trying to defend themselves. It was a totally derailing moment, and kind of ironic they didn't clock their own gestures.
What are you most looking forward to in the next four days?
I'm looking forward to the performance event, hosted by Liverpool's own Kevin Le Grand Bailor, with work from Liv Fontaine, Emily Pope, and Travis Alabanza. I'm looking forward to the intervention at New Contemporaries. We've made so many flyers with lists of things that you could also own for £25: £25 is the equivalent of two days rent and bills all-inclusive in Liverpool, and £25 is 2 days rent or 11.2 days of gas and electric in London. I like to get people talking.
Both your residency and your recent work with WHEREISANAMENDIETA have to do with erasure in the art world. How have you experienced it firsthand?
All women or queer people or working class people or people of color face a sense of erasure. Our histories are not documented well, we are not archived well, and so we have to now create our own histories. I think this is part of the reason I'm interested in plastering myself all over social media, to be overbearing in my documentation as a queer working class woman feels quite 'fuck you.' I want my representation to be in my hands.
How did you construct HEADFUCK and what have you learned from it?
HEADFUCK was a series of 30 one-to-one performances that took place over Skype at 1 AM. I had just left uni and had done a show that was unpaid. So I wanted to do a residency length piece that existed completely outside of an institution and had no support or funding that was autonomous. Each performance needed to be paid for in some way. Some people paid money. Some offered dinner. Some offered skill shares. It was a huge learning curve in how to self-generate, and a serious lesson in admin. I also wanted to return to ephemerality. HEADFUCK has no documentation and the poem doesn't exist anymore. The only people that have ever and will ever hear that piece are the people that participated.
Why the Royal Standard?
I chose The Royal Standard because I wanted to do my first residency in another working class area, which Liverpool is. Us Londoners have a tendency to think we are the be all and end all of culture and art, and we really ain't. The Royal Standard is artist led, which means I didn't have to fight with big institutional bodies, and could make work that was satisfyingly political. The residency also formed out of a retaliation to the application fee (£25) for New Contemporaries, so I'm here during their opening. The Royal Standard is one of the best spaces I've ever had a chance to work with.
What happens to pieces after you've performed them? Do you plan to release or publish them in the future?
It still feels important to me that poems stay attached to my body and my voice. However, now I do write things. I'm commissioned to write for print, and I've been writing a play as well. When you perform a poem, it can reflect your mood. You can move lines around or drop bits out. You can't do that with printed text. It represents an exact moment, and has no space for growth. I find that equal parts frustrating, exposing and uncomfortable.
Finally, what's next for you?
I'm gonna be working with WHEREISANAMENDIETA. We have a night in August to officially launch the archive, and then we have some plans for further direct action. I have some stuff coming out with Laugh Magazine and zine. I guess I'll mainly just be working at my local pub, trying to finish this play.

To learn more about the artist, click here.

Related:
When Artists Kill NYC Art Activists Tackle Guns & The Guggenheim: Last Week in Art A New Exhibition Pushes Artists to Return to Social Activism

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UK Rapper/Poet/Artist Asks, "How Much Are they Paying You?"

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All photos courtesy of Thomas Gill Rapper and poet Liv Wynter is a queer, working-class artist based in South London who wants to explore issues of gender, class, and sexuality through activism and art.

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This article is about the infamous statistic about the class make up of the UK charts

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Once upon a time, it was all so straightforward. Pop music, along with sport and certain other strands of the entertainment industry, was one of the few avenues through which a bright spark from the working classes might escape their background and attain success. The upper classes, meanwhile, were content to keep themselves to themselves, sending their blessed offspring into politics, academia, the diplomatic service, the highbrow arts or, if they were too dim for any of the above, the church. By and large, with scattered exceptions, they left the rest of us alone.

In recent years, that's changed. The high-born have descended in their droves upon what would once have been viewed as "low" culture. Since the millennium, wave after wave of privately educated rock and pop acts have come through, Coldplay, Lily Allen, Jamie T, Jack Peñate, Florence Welch, the Maccabees, Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons being just a few prominent examples.

Maybe I'm unusually sensitive to such developments, as a music journalist from a perpetually skint South Wales family, but sly digs at this upper-class takeover began to proliferate in my writing (and my online ranting). This gave Andrew Harrison, editor-at-large of now-defunct music monthly the , the mischievous idea of commissioning me to write a column about it for the magazine's December 2010 issue, pegged to the fact that Eliza Doolittle, who had attended Bedales and was the granddaughter of talent school matriarch Sylvia Young, represented something of a perfect storm of poshness and privilege in pop.

I knew my argument needed more than anecdotal evidence, so I began painstakingly researching the educational backgrounds of as many artists as I could from that week's top 40 and the corresponding top 40 in 1990. "Forensic Googling", I called it, which basically meant trawling any source I could find - Friends Reunited, Facebook, Wikipedia, local newspaper interviews, actual print-and-paper rock biographies - for the facts. Of the 17 British acts in the 1990 chart whose education could be verified, 16 and a half went to state school, with just one member of one act having attended private school. Of the 16 British acts in the 2010 chart whose education could be verified, three attended private schools and a further two were bands containing members who had. My little experiment had thrown up enough of a discrepancy to at least hint at a cultural shift.

However, like a rookie cop in a police procedural, I almost blew the whole case by adding a couple of Brit school alumni to the tally, erroneously describing it as a fee-paying school (a mistake that came back to bite my behind when the school's principal wrote a correcting letter to the Word, resulting in an understandably frosty reception when I next ran into editor Mark Ellen). Selective it may be, but Brit doesn't charge fees.

Another error, however, was not my own doing. A pull-quote, in bold black type, screamed: "At the end of October 1990, less than 1% of the UK acts in the top 40 were privately educated. By October 2010, it was just under 60%." Not only had I not written those words anywhere in the piece (as anyone who bothered to read it would have realised), but those numbers cannot be reached from my stats. Someone at the Word needed to go back to school (private or state) and resit their maths exams.

The piece itself had been somewhat "buried" in a backwater of the mag, split over two non-facing pages with an obscure Traffic pun for a headline ("The Low Spark of Well-Heeled Boys"), but this baffling 1%/60% canard was eye-catching enough to be repeated by the Today programme, the Sunday Times and that bastion of meritocracy and social mobility, the Daily Mail.

My column had taken on a life of its own. I even had the strange experience of being effectively "heckled", a few issues later, by the Word' s David Hepworth, who appeared to misunderstand my intent as an attack on aspiration. (On the contrary, I love nothing better than seeing a talented working-class kid done good. My problem was with those born to wealth blocking their path.)

Over the following years, that mysteriously exaggerated stat continued to cause ripples. It was repeated twice in the Guardian, in articles by Decca Aitkenhead and Emine Saner. More recently, an article by Sean O'Hagan in this paper, inspired by remarks from Stephen McGann and Julie Walters about shrinking opportunities for working-class people in acting, mentioned the Mail's report of that incorrect figure.

A recent blog by music journalist Johnny Sharp dissected this Chinese whispers-like phenomenon, correctly debunking the 1%/60% myth. However, Sharp went on to employ some highly questionable methodology of his own, comparing the 40 biggest singles of 1990 with those of 2010 (and finding little difference in the backgrounds of the acts). If Johnny's smart enough for the analysis of my stats, he's smart enough to spot the flaw in his own: namely that focusing on the absolute toppermost-of-the-poppermost for an entire year does not provide a deeper picture of the music scene as a whole.

I remember Johnny as Johnny Cigarettes, when he, like me, was a writer on the weekly music press. He must, I'm sure, have noticed the changes in the social class of the bands covered in his alma mater, the NME. I challenge him - or anyone else - to buy a current copy, and dig out one from two decades ago, for a similar spot of forensic Googling. If he can't find one, I can help. (I have a large, but gradually depleting pile of old NME s: the cat's litter tray ain't gonna line itself.)

The poshification of pop is, I maintain, a reality. And that growing stranglehold is as bad for pop as it is for society. Meanwhile, the repercussions of that Word column have been a salutary lesson, providing a fascinating - and frustrating - case study in the way false "facts" can take hold in the internet age and one incorrect stat can undermine an entire argument.

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How my research into pop's posh takeover was hijacked

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Once upon a time, it was all so straightforward. Pop music, along with sport and certain other strands of the entertainment industry, was one of the few avenues through which a bright spark from the working classes might escape their background and attain success.