Good Riddance To The Guitar

Those diligent followers of Jarvis Cocker’s exploits to date on the Beeb will probably have had enough savvy to tune into his recent Radio 2 documentary on Krautrock ‘The Man Machine’. Charting the rise of Kraftwerk and their contemporaries with his typically bone-dry narrative skills, Cocker painted the picture of a relentlessly forward thinking 1970s German music scene. One which operated without the reliance upon a certain six-stringed instrument which many British bands have lacked the confidence or persuasion to shed a good forty years later.

Last year’s fluctuations in musical taste, according to the Official Charts Company, were toughest on guitar music with Kasabian and Arctic Monkeys the only two such acts to feature in the top 20 list of the year’s biggest selling albums. Although sales are no yard stick for quality of output, if the big hitters in British alternative music aren’t shifting units the effect further down the food chain is usually to leave others at a loss for direction. Now would seem as pertinent time as any for the UK’s vanguard to, if not reinvent the wheels of their trade then at least change their tyres.

In America, where rock n’ roll was long ago usurped as the genre du jour, the lack of a set musical tradition has afforded artists the creative space needed to foster their various ambitions. Accordingly 2009 in the land of stars and stripes bore witness to records where the guitar was either dropped unceremoniously or its tones were incorporated into a wider mesh of sound. It’s hard to imagine an album like 'Merriweather Post Pavilion' outselling both of the recent efforts by the more puritan Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys in the UK but this is exactly what happened in the US of A.

The problem for such acts back in Blighty is they don’t really fit into the strict lineage to which The Beatles, The Clash and Oasis all belong. Here too often the DIY punk aesthetic of ‘here's three chords, now form a band’ has been bastardised by successive generations of tastemakers to contain the added quotas ‘as long as you’re working class and stick to strumming’. To some extent critical attitudes have changed since the days of 'Kid A' when in Melody Maker magazine the record was branded “the sound of Thom Yorke ramming his head firmly up his own arse”. Nevertheless it is still common practice for magazines to load their covers up with commercially conforming acts whilst saving the precipice of their end of year lists for their true pet projects.

For the moment however, the ubiquity of pop in this year’s round of ‘Big In 2010’ compendiums has afforded a jilted underground the chance to step back and re-evaluate the direction which alternative British music is heading in. The emergence and widespread recognition of those acts such as The XX and These New Puritans is a welcome break from tradition although one suspects a complete shift in tone will occur when a more accessible distillation of such forward thinking emerges.

There’s a vacuum in an independent market with its agenda waiting to be reset by a new bright young hope. Here’s hoping at a bare minimum they pick themselves up a copy of 'Computer World'.