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Topic: The State of British Pop Return to archive
03-27-04 09:31 PM
Hannalee (as assessed by the Sunday Times)


March 28, 2004

Focus: Toff of the pops
They are more elite than street but public school kids are taking over the charts. Maurice Chittenden and John Harlow report on the rise of the rocking Ruperts



When Charlie Simpson bounces onto the stage at Wembley Arena tonight, he will have the perfect technique to quell the 11,000 prepubescent girls screaming for a lock of his blond coiffure. If necessary, he will unleash his accent, a loud and cut-glass affair which, at his public school, used to stop younger boys in their tracks at 100 paces.
Simpson, 18, is part of the new vanguard of British pop music. Traditionally the genre, like football, has been an escape route out of the back streets for the poor but talented, from Elvis to McCartney. But the lead singer with the boy-band Busted is pure toff.



So are many of Simpson�s well-heeled musical chums, who are trading in their silver spoons for electric guitars as they seek to dominate the pop charts in the way their parents once ran the banking and diplomatic services.

Charlie�s great-grandfather, head of the Royal College of Music in the Victorian era, is buried alongside kings in Westminster Abbey: he was educated at Uppingham, a public school in Rutland that also honed the self-confident talents of Stephen Fry and Johnny Vaughan.

However, like many of today�s young and privileged, from Jade Jagger to Paris Hilton, Simpson spends a lot of time protesting in commanding tones (thought extinct since the Sloane Ranger Handbook fell out of fashion) that he is �just, like, normal, man�.

His bandmates disagree: �To be honest, I�d never met anyone that posh. I was like, �are you for real, dude?� I thought only the Queen talked that way,� said Matt Jay, Busted�s guitarist who was born in Tooting, south London.

A Prince William lookalike, Simpson says he wants to be a rock�n�roll rebel, but his breeding seems to be holding him back. The band recently admitted aping idols such as Keith Moon of The Who, who threw beds and television sets out of hotel windows across America. At the Birmingham Marriott somebody from Busted threw a toaster out of the window but later, in a very un-rock�n�roll gesture, apologised, claiming that the errant device just �slipped�.

This rock�n�roll Rupert is far from alone: on its current tour Busted is supported by another saccharine pop group, McFly, named after the Michael J Fox character in the Back to the Future movies. Harry Judd, 17, the band�s drummer, also went to Uppingham.

Keane, another up-and- coming pop group which got to No 3 in the charts last month, has three public school boys. Tom, Richard and Tim all met at the 16th-century Tonbridge boarding school in Kent, whose alumni include E M Forster, the academic and repressed homosexual writer, and Colin Cowdrey, the sublime cricketer. Their fans, apparently unaware of their pedigree, describe them as a �real hard-core crew�.

The bluestockings are also getting in on the act: the biggest-selling album artist in Britain last year was Dido, a moniker that conceals her real name: Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong. The daughter of a publisher and a poet, she studied Latin and Greek at the prestigious Westminster school.

Among her contemporaries is the pop singer Sophie Ellis Bextor, who once edited the school magazine at Godolphin and Latymer, in west London, where term fees are �4,000.

It is all a long way from Mississippi, where Elvis Presley survived his impoverished childhood on a diet of squirrel stew.


SOCIAL commentators say that the toffs� takeover of pop music has been creeping up on us for some time but believe that the �tipping point� occurred in May 1997 when, at a concert for the Prince�s Trust, Geri Halliwell, then a buxom Spice Girl, pinched the royal bottom. Instead of sending her to the Tower, the Prince of Wales simply grinned.

Only five years later Brian May of Queen performed a guitar solo of God Save the Queen from the roof of Buckingham Palace as part of the golden jubilee celebrations.

�The doors of the Establishment, previously only interested in the social opportunism of nights at the opera, swung open to an already half-century-old art form,� said Dan Cairns, a Sunday Times rock critic, last week. �The toffs got the message: they could join in the Britpop gold rush without losing their place in the British caste system.�

Of course there have been nice middle-class boys playing popular music before. Genesis was born at Charterhouse and the late Nick Drake picked up his folk guitar at Marlborough, but these were serious �musos�, a tradition carried on by Abingdon- educated Radiohead today. Until now, pure pop had been left almost exclusively to the lower orders.

The social changes of the past two decades have swept away a lot of self-consciousness. Much of the old boy network has broken down, causing the upper middle classes to look for real work. No longer can the average public schoolboy count on a job at his father�s City brokerage, and few have the street cunning to compete with the wide boys who now run the stock exchange.

Peter York, the social commentator and management consultant, said: �It used to be that public school kids went in for the fancy stuff, but people come out of public schools now wanting to make money. Every bit of pop culture is available in public schools, whereas a previous generation of staff used to filter it and the pupils were sheltered from it.

�Now if they come out looking like Charlie from Uppingham, rather good-looking and tolerably charming, they get column inches as a result so that is all to the good.

�Public school kids are really money-conscious and are encouraged to be entrepreneurial. They see that they can do pop music as if it was a gap year, have some fun, make some money and go back to the life they would have led.�

The young public school generation have to use their skills rather than their connections to get a job. Many are cashing in on their music lessons, which mean a lot more these days than piano drills. Eton, for instance, boasts both a recording studio and an electric guitar practice space, Uppingham has a bar for its upper sixth form and stages regular �bops� for school bands to hone their live skills.

Dr Stephen Winkley, Uppingham�s head, is proud of both Simpson in Busted and Judd in McFly. �If I was a 17-year-old and someone said to me you can either be in a famous band or you can do your A-levels, there wouldn�t be much choice,� he said.

This generation�s parents, too, are very different from their stuffy forebears. They were raised during the heyday of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Duran Duran, and understand the power of rock: many are willing to pay for a touring van or amplifiers rather than riding or deportment lessons.

A number of teenagers at Britain�s leading public schools are the offspring of rock aristocracy. A former pupil at Shiplake college near Henley remembered Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison, and James Paice, son of Deep Purple�s drummer Ian Paice, in the same class: �They would rehearse together in their rooms. They weren�t particularly good, but it made many of us think for the first time that pop music was so cool that we would like a piece of it when we left.�

By comparison, today�s working-class wannabe will find that music classes have been cut at his comprehensive, garages that were first home to older bands such as The Clash are closed down by noise inspectors and urban escapees such as Liam Gallagher have proved too troublesome for many rock managers to bother with. They prefer the self-disciplined, nicely spoken and often media-trained posh kids who remind them of their younger selves. Greed is easier to deal with than chip-on-the-shoulder anger.

British pop music has matured into an attractive, and often state-subsidised, middle-class career path. Earlier this month, intent on driving up exports, the Scottish Arts Council paid for 15 young bands to appear at the Austin music festival in Texas, an industry showcase for up-and-coming young talent. �They impressed everyone with their professionalism and they were all very well behaved,� said an Arts Council official. Moon must be gagging somewhere in his grave.


WILL today�s pop stars enjoy the longevity of the Rolling Stones? Probably not � because they do not want to. Simpson, who returned to Uppingham to sing Eric Clapton�s Tears in Heaven at a memorial for a school friend, is already talking about breaking up the band for a career with �more credibility�.

The ephemeral nature of today�s alcopop-styled music, where a different flavour is promoted every week, mean that few public schoolboys are in it for the long term, but regard it almost as an alternative to a gap year backpacking across Asia. They are taking the money and, in Busted�s case, investing it in sensible savings accounts.

They support the campaign of the Musicians Union to set up an industy-wide pension plan and, unlike the 1960s generation of damaged stars from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin, intend to live long enough to collect it.

Cairns said he was amazed by some of the young, well-groomed stars who appear on Top of the Pops: �Once, becoming a rocker meant you had some pretty urgent reason to escape your environment, but not these days.

�Older music fans bemoan the lack of energy and attitude in today�s music and wonder when the next punk movement will come along and sweep the rubbish away. Perhaps the revolution is already happening, only it�s so polite and well-spoken that we have not noticed.�

Or maybe it will take another genre, such as the furious and offensively foul-mouthed rap erupting from America�s ghettos, to regenerate its pop energy.

If the toffs are here to stay, Judd of McFly, a noted school cricketer, is a perfect spokesman for the nicely behaved pop stars. The other day a girl ran up to him in the street and screamed hysterically at recognising one of her pop idols. Did he take advantage of the situation like any self-respecting rocker of old would have done? �No,� he said, �I offered her a Werthers Original.�

TOFF'S RAP

I don�t look like other rappers, or sound like dem
I�m the Old Etonian Eminem
My people have a country estate in Bermuda
I can trace my family back to Henry Tudor
Hackett made my jacket, Aspreys made my bling
And I live in a village near Godalming

Hip hop, tip top, don�t mess with me
I�m from the ar-is-to-cra-cy

I�m headed for the top
(I was president of Pop)
No one�s cleverer than me (I got a first in PPE)
I�m the poshest pop star yet (I�ve got my own page in Debrett)
Be my ho, be my bitch
You can�t go wrong I�m stinking rich I�m all alone in my big house
(I hope you don�t mind plucking grouse)
I�ll shower you with jewels and more
(But I�ll actually prefer the labrador)



To tell the truth, this accent is a worry
It�s difficult to rap when you come from Surrey
I don�t look tough, I don�t sound cool
I�m even posher than Brian Sewell
I�m not even street wise, I haven�t got a clue
I�m never gonna be like So Solid Crew

Roland �Chavster� White






03-28-04 04:28 AM
corgi37 Holy shit, bad things indeed. Oasis have died in the ass, eh? It seems the only real flag flyers for good, honest, dirty, get-down, blistering rock and roll, are us glorious, tanned, well hung, balding-but-still-cute Aussies.

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