RobinCarmody
Active member
Here's a thought.
The last few years before Tony Blair became Labour leader - and, therefore, the Elgarisation of Rock began - saw, if anything, the opposite: the mass market appeal of classical music to a greater extent than at any time since the levelling effects of the Second World War and the Attlee/Arts Council/Third Programme period which followed, before the combined impact of Suez and rock'n'roll. The Three Tenors obviously (infamously misunderstood by Marcello Carlin on the 'Then Play Long' blog, where he thought the most successful sale of the European canon to an Anglosphere pop-cultural audience since that canon began to be questioned seriously in the 1960s represented Brexit and multiple number one albums which were all about the overthrow of that canon - often by acts from massive Brexit heartlands, like Slade or Dr Feelgood - didn't) but also Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons, the launch of Classic FM and specifically the subsequent success of Gorecki ... I have a magazine LWT published for the start of their new licence period at the beginning of 1993 and they talk about Classic FM's launch massively outstripping the audiences they thought they'd get and how "baby boomers are developing a taste for music composed before Please Please Me". Newspaper thinkpieces by the likes of Melvyn Bragg were saying that the post-war dream of "a nation raising its brow" finally was coming true. At the time, there was a widespread sense that pop and rock music were coming to an end, had reached the end of their shelf life ... obviously this was exaggerated by the very low birthrate circa 1975-77 (the fact that the population decreased in that period is all the more striking when you consider how many men who might otherwise have died then never came home from the Great War, that there were fewer old men around to die than in previous eras but the birthrate was *still* below replacement level) which meant a relative dearth of teenagers with the knock-on effects you'd expect, and clearly there were racist/classist elements in the othering of the dance music which had swept the charts despite a general lack of national airplay, but that was still very much the mood, heightened by the sense that Radio 1 had fallen behind the times and the feeling that a major change *had* to be on the way but that it might be carved up and privatised, as opposed to the "cultural modernisation of the public sphere" changes to the station (central to the Blairite mood as they were) we actually got. Certainly, the thought that pop and rock music, even in selected forms, would become "establishment music" as we're used to now seemed very remote and hard to conceive of in 1992/93, if anything more so than it had in the late 1980s.
It is true that, even before John Smith died, newspaper thinkpieces were saying this era was already ending (one such based on the hook of Mr Blobby's number one). And it didn't disappear overnight either: I couldn't put the croak moment before 'The Choir' TV soundtrack was a Top 3 album in spring 1995. But it has a clear relevance to John Smith's high seriousness on a personal level - that "classical as pop" moment seemed to fit perfectly with his ties to that older ethos of self-betterment. And its passing in the face of Britpop and the first wave of Elgarisation - those late Major-era honours for Paul McCartney, Elton John &c. feel like the equivalents of the 1973 Tories trying to appease the unions and retreat from Heath's initial proto-Thatcherism - obviously fits perfectly with Blair, the first boomer national leader, the resultant lightening/brightening-up of politics, and so on.
So had John Smith survived, would the renewed mass embrace of classical have lasted and become the norm, at the expense of what white pop and rock (with occasional contemporary Black artists, most obviously Stormzy, accepted as honorary beneficiaries) have become today? Would we still be a much more serious country in every sense, with the resultant effects on broadcasting or the form streaming would take? Or was the "boomers taking over" moment inevitable anyway?
The last few years before Tony Blair became Labour leader - and, therefore, the Elgarisation of Rock began - saw, if anything, the opposite: the mass market appeal of classical music to a greater extent than at any time since the levelling effects of the Second World War and the Attlee/Arts Council/Third Programme period which followed, before the combined impact of Suez and rock'n'roll. The Three Tenors obviously (infamously misunderstood by Marcello Carlin on the 'Then Play Long' blog, where he thought the most successful sale of the European canon to an Anglosphere pop-cultural audience since that canon began to be questioned seriously in the 1960s represented Brexit and multiple number one albums which were all about the overthrow of that canon - often by acts from massive Brexit heartlands, like Slade or Dr Feelgood - didn't) but also Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons, the launch of Classic FM and specifically the subsequent success of Gorecki ... I have a magazine LWT published for the start of their new licence period at the beginning of 1993 and they talk about Classic FM's launch massively outstripping the audiences they thought they'd get and how "baby boomers are developing a taste for music composed before Please Please Me". Newspaper thinkpieces by the likes of Melvyn Bragg were saying that the post-war dream of "a nation raising its brow" finally was coming true. At the time, there was a widespread sense that pop and rock music were coming to an end, had reached the end of their shelf life ... obviously this was exaggerated by the very low birthrate circa 1975-77 (the fact that the population decreased in that period is all the more striking when you consider how many men who might otherwise have died then never came home from the Great War, that there were fewer old men around to die than in previous eras but the birthrate was *still* below replacement level) which meant a relative dearth of teenagers with the knock-on effects you'd expect, and clearly there were racist/classist elements in the othering of the dance music which had swept the charts despite a general lack of national airplay, but that was still very much the mood, heightened by the sense that Radio 1 had fallen behind the times and the feeling that a major change *had* to be on the way but that it might be carved up and privatised, as opposed to the "cultural modernisation of the public sphere" changes to the station (central to the Blairite mood as they were) we actually got. Certainly, the thought that pop and rock music, even in selected forms, would become "establishment music" as we're used to now seemed very remote and hard to conceive of in 1992/93, if anything more so than it had in the late 1980s.
It is true that, even before John Smith died, newspaper thinkpieces were saying this era was already ending (one such based on the hook of Mr Blobby's number one). And it didn't disappear overnight either: I couldn't put the croak moment before 'The Choir' TV soundtrack was a Top 3 album in spring 1995. But it has a clear relevance to John Smith's high seriousness on a personal level - that "classical as pop" moment seemed to fit perfectly with his ties to that older ethos of self-betterment. And its passing in the face of Britpop and the first wave of Elgarisation - those late Major-era honours for Paul McCartney, Elton John &c. feel like the equivalents of the 1973 Tories trying to appease the unions and retreat from Heath's initial proto-Thatcherism - obviously fits perfectly with Blair, the first boomer national leader, the resultant lightening/brightening-up of politics, and so on.
So had John Smith survived, would the renewed mass embrace of classical have lasted and become the norm, at the expense of what white pop and rock (with occasional contemporary Black artists, most obviously Stormzy, accepted as honorary beneficiaries) have become today? Would we still be a much more serious country in every sense, with the resultant effects on broadcasting or the form streaming would take? Or was the "boomers taking over" moment inevitable anyway?