How Is It That The UK Produced So Many Rock Groups?

Cafe Society
1

Can anyone explain how such a small place like Britain with a relatively small population produced most of the biggest early rock groups?

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Manfred Mann, The Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman’s Hermits to name a few all started around London.

Here’s an even a longer list:

The Animals
The Bee Gees
Cat Stevens
The Byrds
Cream
Donovan
Freddie and the Dreamers
Gerry & the Pacemakers
Herman’s Hermits
Marianne Faithfull
The Moody Blues
Pink Floyd
Procol Harum
The Searchers
The Small Faces
The Spencer Davis Group
Traffic
The Troggs
The Who
The Zombies

And later Britain an produced my all time favorite, Led Zeppelin as well as Elton John, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, U2 and others.

I know Britain is an English speaking country , but the USA and Canada with much larger populations produced a much smaller number of name rock groups like the Allman Brothers, CSNY (Nash is a Brit), Beach Boys, Dylan, Doors, Eagles, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top and a few others.

What gives?

2

One reason is that in America, you have lots of musicians going into country music which competed with rock n roll. In Britain, country music probably wasn’t anywhere near as big as rock.

3

You forgot Queen.

4

I’ll give a woefully uninformed opinion.

It seems to me that the UK music scene has a couple of things that explains their prominence in popular music. First, the fact that there are large and influential record companies in the country. Decca, EMI, Parlophone, etc. I imagine these companies had the ability to market and distribute music worldwide much better than companies in Germany and France, for instance.

I think there is something about a lot of Brits that makes the absorption of aspects of other cultures acceptable and positive. Movements like Northern Soul and ska/reggae after the Windrush arrived in Britain are examples of this. More recently, bhagra and hip-hop are becoming part of popular music. Over here in the US, I think we’re much less adventurous, and even more so since the emergence of the Sony/BMG/Universal behemoth companies and Clear Channel buying out damn near every station in America. We used to watch Top of the Pops and notice how many bands would never be popular in the States because they couldn’t be easily categorized. An artist like Robbie Williams is huge, but he hasn’t cracked the States, mainly because he doesn’t fit a defined category here.

Colonel Parker famously said that if he could find a White artist with the sound of a Black artist, he’d make him a star. Groups like The Beatles and The Stones followed their musical inspiration, American R&B, and proved this to be true for one of the British invasions. There’s also a history of bands stealing/borrowing members and being part of a close-knit scene. I think that’s been true in some epochs in American popular music, but the British Invasion, New Wave, and Britpop all shared the feature of bands evolving in close proximity, sharing the same managers, producers, record labels, and so on. So you have waves of bands from Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, London, and so forth… That’s true in the States, but a band breaking in Austin or in Atlanta might not get the needed exposure to go national without a lot of time in NYC or LA. And we never had a John Peel-type national figure known for breaking new acts.

Oh, and slight nitpick: U2 are Irish, not British. Though half the band are British: The Edge was born in London and Adam Clayton was born in Oxfordshire.

5

I’ve wondered about this myself, but I think that the answer lies in the fact that the U.K. is so much smaller and more homogeneous. Rock music has been the major music form there for decades, with other forms finding it harder to compete. (Not impossible, but harder.)

In the U.S., rock music has always been just one thrust of the music business. Even back in the 60s, Motown rivaled the Brits for the number of groups on the charts. You can’t say that the backing musicians at Motown weren’t great; it’s just that the form of the music put vocalists rather than bands into the forefront.

Folk singers, singer/songwriters, blues musicians, r&b and soul, disco, heavy metal, country & western, jazz fusion, hip hop & rap - the total amount of pop music from the U.S. has always, even in the heyday of the British invasion, swamped the amount of British music coming into the country. It’s just spread out over a great many genres, rather than concentrating itself into rock groups.

Even so, if you really want to play the game you have dozens more 60s groups to add your list - Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Buffalo Springfield, the Turtles, the Byrds [on your list but Americans], the Band, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Velvet Underground, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Chicago, Steppenwolf, Lovin’ Spoonful, Moby Grape, Tommy James and the Shondells, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Young Rascals, the James Gang, Iron Butterfly, Mountain, Doobie Brothers, Association, Big Brother, Monkees.

And then the 70s really get crowded.

If I wanted to match Marianne Faithfull I’d have dozens more female singers to add.

So the domination of rock by the Brits is more apparent than real, IMO. The list of great British groups is certainly awesome, but it’s a stream compared to the river of American pop.

6

They’re mostly Canadian, CCR?

Is there also stronger pressure in the US for solo acts? Would the labels actively push for those members they think can make it on their own to go ahead and try it? Perhaps because a single person is easier to market and manipulate? Just an idle thought I’ve been having.

7

Britain has 3 times the population of Canada.

8

Size matters. England is so small, it’s relatively easy to get a tour going and build up an audience. A new band, in the 60’s, could get a smallish tour going with a delivery van and get booked at small clubs and maybe pubs, playing for peanuts, but gaining an audience. It wouldn’t cost a lot of money. A band from a smaller town could get attention in the bigger cities. The U.S. with its distances is much tougher to do a tour in, costing a hell of a lot of money. So gaining popularity is down to media, and there really wasn’t nationwide media in the U.S. in the sense England had with the Beeb. Also, I suspect that the payola scandals played a part in this.
And “The day the music died” left a void in the U.S. that could be exploited by the brit bands. Rock music in the U.S. sucked during the first few years of the 60’s.

9

If it’s a stream, it certainly isn’t one that flows consistently. Sometimes it floods its banks (e.g., in the mid 60’s and the early 80’s) while other times it’s just a trickle (e.g., the last ten or so years). Which brings me to my next point: compared with the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, there has been a dearth of newer British acts who’ve made it big in the U.S. Granted, Coldplay and Radiohead have had a lot success on both sides of the pond but who else has there been? Oasis and the Spice Girls were ten years ago.

10

Part of this is also that it’s relatively easy for UK (and US) musicians to get worldwide visibility, compared with, say, Germans or Hispanics. Many non-English-language groups sing in English partly to break into “foreign markets” and partly because, according to their songwriters, writing songs in English is easier than in German or Spanish (shorter words, easier to fit onto any music; easy rhymes). I assume that writing songs in English is even easier if English happens to be your native language :slight_smile:

People in many countries are used to listening to songs whose lyrics they don’t understand. How often do our English-language Dopers listen to songs in Spanish, German, Italian? Spain has as many pop, rock, metal groups as the UK; you name the genre, I’ll find you some groups (yes, even country). We’re familiar with Leonard Cohen but you’re not with Joaquín Sabina.

11

I don’t have the time to find a cite right now - being at work and all - but I seem recall reading something by a reasonably well-respected rock critic (Greil Marcus? Robert Palmer?) who stated that in America, the lines of racial division were extremely hard to cross - while you had Elvis taking black r&b and watering it down a small bit into rock, you also had Pat Boone covering Little Richard tunes - and Boone’s versions were the hits. In other words in America, things were kept separate.

The UK wasn’t burdened by the need to understand or accept those racial divisions. They didn’t see any difference between white artists and black artists, so they absorbed their influences equally. Add to that the extremely strong commercial pop sensibility in the UK - where a 3-minute pop song ready for commercial consumption is a highly respected thing - and you get artists who are willing to mine sources more deeply and also marry them to a strong commerical/pop streak.

In effect, the Brit artists carried on the legacy of Sam Phillips’ and Colonel Tom Parker’s observation of getting whites to sing like blacks. By not being immersed in America but loving the music, they took enough of the music to make theirs strongly rooted to the original source, added a strong pop sensibility - and they rocked hard, unlike, say Fabian or other manufactured US artists - who were groomed by US Labels (ugh)…

My $.02

12

I would suggest a simpler explanation - Britain has by far the largest population of native English speakers outside the U.S. Pop and rock music originated largely in the U.S. and so English has been its natural language. Other significant English-speaking populations were either too small or remote (or both) to reach the sort of critical mass needed to have an internationally recognised music industry. Canadian rock music, meanwhile, tends to get lumped in with American.

13

Just rub it in, why don’t you. :frowning:

:wink:

14

Could it have had anything to do with the miners’ strikes in the Northeast? Rock at that time lent itself to rebellion and general disgruntlement.

15

The thing that’s always really puzzled me is that the Brits, being as reserved and hidebound as they tend to be, managed to produce the most balls-out rock ever. The only American rock musician who was as unrestrained as the Beatles was Little Richard. Still waters, I guess.

16

The Byrds?

17

Mangosteen writes:

> The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, The Kinks, Dusty
> Springfield, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Manfred
> Mann, The Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman’s Hermits to name a
> few all started around London.
>
> Here’s an even a longer list:
>
> The Animals
> The Bee Gees
> Cat Stevens
> The Byrds
> Cream
> Donovan
> Freddie and the Dreamers
> Gerry & the Pacemakers
> Herman’s Hermits
> Marianne Faithfull
> The Moody Blues
> Pink Floyd
> Procol Harum
> The Searchers
> The Small Faces
> The Spencer Davis Group
> Traffic
> The Troggs
> The Who
> The Zombies
>
> And later Britain an produced my all time favorite, Led Zeppelin as well as Elton
> John, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, U2 and others.

First, the Byrds were American and the Bee Gees were Australian (at the point that they started performing). Second, the groups you claim “all started around London” did no such thing. Surely you know that the Beatles and many of the other British Invasion groups were from Liverpool. Third, these are hardly all great groups. Some of them are, but others are O.K. bands who are just part of the British invasion of the early to mid-1960’s who became famous mostly because Americans thought their accents were cute.

Even during the British Invasion period, there was a lot of first-rate music being made in the U.S. This was the classic period of the Motown Sound, for instance. For some reason, during that period (approximately 1962 to 1966), there were a lot of cultural influences going from the U.K. to the U.S. It may well have even been harder to make an American band famous in the U.S. than a British band at that time.

Over the history of rock and roll, there have been about as many rock groups and performers from the U.S. and the U.K. as one might expect, given that the U.S. has five times as many people. (In the early 1960’s, it may have been more like four times as many.) I just flipped through my copy of The Rolling Stone Encylopedia of Rock & Roll and the proportions of British and American performers seem to match the relative populations.

18

We make up for it in quality.

19

A nit pick, but I heard that they were ‘performing’ on the deck of the liner on the way to Australia - also that their migration was darn close to transportation :slight_smile:

Blair’s holiday prompted some newspaper articles on the Gibbs brothers.

20

That’s because we’re not nearly as ‘reserved and hidebound’ as you think we are. Maybe it’s a rebelling against the system thing, but we’ve always been pretty outlandish when it comes to the creative industries. Look at our fashion designers, for instance. Compared to the Italians, French and the Calvin Kleins of this world, our designers are nuts.