It's Only Rock and Roll... But We Like It

I know that pop music and pop stars are disposable icons, but now they're being chucked away at the speed of express trains. Back in the days when Alan Freed gave rock and roll to the world, music for the kids as they called it was, live, pretty rough and exciting. Once the money men took control, and the manufactured bands took over, the charts got a sedative.

Think first of the Supremes, The Beatles, Springsteen, U2 and all the rest. Then think of Westlife, The Spice Girls, Boyz 2 Men. Makes you shudder, doesn't it? But it could get worse and it did. British TV invented a show called “Popstars,” and the result was that we found ourselves with the ultimate manufactured band, Hearsay. Their first single was the fastest selling in British History, but now less than two years after the television show created them, Hearsay have become a national joke. They can't appear on stage without being booed and having the furniture thrown at them, so they've done the decent thing and announced that they're quitting.

Meantime, there is still real talent out there. Robbie Williams, who you might remember back in the early nineties as a member of Take That, and who's become a big solo star just about everywhere but in the States, has signed a contract with his record company for a hundred and twenty five million dollars, on the strict condition that he's given a chance to make it big in the US. Don't forget Robbie Williams' name, he just might make it and don't forget the name of a talented girl from North London. She was born Niomi Daley, though she calls herself Ms Dynamite for perfectly good reasons. She's just won a series of major music awards here in London, and her soulful voice is the antithesis of manufactured.

Oh, and before we get off the subject of rock icons... Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, undoubtedly one of the greatest guitarists in the world, has had enough of the public. He's just managed to get the local council to move a public footpath a few yards away from his Sussex mansion, so that us mere mortals can't peer over his hedge.

God bless rock and roll.