The recent resignation of Creation Records head Alan McGee provided an apt, slightly pathetic climax to a moribund year in British rock music. The home of Oasis was the U.K.'s quintessential Nineties label. Its decade began confidently, crackling with excitement about possible hybrids of rock and rave -- e.g. Primal Scream's "Screamadelica" -- and ended uncertainly with people asking whether Creation's roster of worthy underachievers (Bernard Butler, Super Furry Animals, Teenage Fanclub) properly represented a force for a new century. Primal Scream's latest, self-titled album is an unfocused, but engaging, collision of all their influences. The year's most successful homegrown bands have been Travis and Sterephonics -- Radiohead-lite and Nirvana -lite -- respectively. It points out exactly what's become of "indie" rock. It hasn't run out of ideas; it's just run out of new ones.

1999 began with a case in point, Gay Dad, who promised to reawaken our faith in rock stardom. Frontman Cliff Jones talked a good fight, paying homage to the splendor of bands like Queen, but his enthusiasm did nothing for a generation raised on hip-hop, Blur and Take That. As the year closed, music weekly NME grudgingly had to admit that Korn and Limp Bizkit exist. Masked nine-piece Iowan new-metalliers Slipknot are booked into London's 4,000-seat Academy theatre and gracing magazine covers. Everyone's cheering the Flaming Lips, their amazing recent tour and album The Soft Bulletin. It seems that our own alternative rock just isn't exciting enough. And what's topping our singles charts? Fifty-nine-year-old Cliff Richard with "The Millennium Prayer" -- nothing more or less than the Lord's Prayer sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne." It's like Britpop never happened.

Speaking of which, Oasis apart, what's become of the Class of '95? Blur released their least-enjoyable album to date and watched sales slump, while the Manic Street Preachers made their mellowest offering, but still couldn't get anyone's attention on the other side of the Atlantic. Lesser lights Sleeper, Echobelly, Shed Seven, Kula Shaker and Gene either split or were dropped by their labels. Tricky parted company with Island, and rascally rockers Terrorvision fell out with EMI just weeks after scoring the No. 2 hit single "Tequila." All of which suggests that this was not the year of job security; the air of uncertainty which pervaded the latter months of 1998 carried on throughout '99 while everyone waited for "something" to happen.

Even the more contemporary, confident British acts -- those who boomed from the dancefloor -- made undemanding records this year. The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, Underworld and Orbital delivered slightly politer versions of their previous records. Only former big beaters Death in Vegas tried something different -- though their broody, gothic Contino Sessions must have confused DJs. Other notable iconoclasts included the Beta Band -- whose all-over-the-shop debut album didn't quite live up to their splendid EPs -- and Add N to X, who used analog synths for some deliciously bombastic fun pitched somewhere between Curved Air and Amon Duul II on their album Avant Hard.

But on the whole, only reliable, manufactured pop artists flourished. Largely thanks to milk-the-database marketing, there were more No. 1 hits in 1999 than in any other year in British chart history. Most of them seemed to come from Irish boyband Boyzone, their young cousins Westlife or sisters B*Witched, or from solo Spice Girls, or from anodyne gang-bands like Steps and S Club 7. And if they weren't homegrown hits, they were by Britney or Ricky or Christina or Backstreet.

Where was there refuge from all this? For the first time in decades, sales of acoustic guitars are reportedly up by over twenty-five percent. And among the most heartwarming music made in the U.K. this year have been Ben Christopher's debut suite of stark songs (My Beautiful Demons) and intimate recordings on tiny, home-based labels by artists like Kathryn Williams and Turin Breaks. They may only be selling hundreds of records at present, but there are enough people making this kind of music again for it to seem significant. This fall, an organization called the New Acoustic Movement recognized this gentle boom and brought together a chain of venues around the country to provide an outlet for budding singer-songwriters.

You can't hear Nick Drake -- or even Led Zeppelin, for that matter -- on mainstream British radio. You can't see anything other than chart-pop on TV. On the one hand, this may be suffocating interest in new music among potential new listeners. (What are British teens spending pocket money on these days? Branded shoes and cellphones.) On the other hand, it's making "real" musicians more resourceful, and means that going to a tiny venue to hear a human voice seems more thrilling today than it has in years. There's something illicit about it again.

And if e-mail and the Internet can be said to have triggered a surprise renaissance of the written word, who's to say that MP3 might not spark an interest in music with emotional merit rather than mere cultural associations? Perhaps people will start to ignore an artist's commercial baggage and download only those "music-files" that move them.
Beautiful songs beautifully sung? Could catch on.
JIM IRVIN
(December 28, 1999)