Posh Pop

David Thomas writes:

There was a time when rock stars were working-class heroes. They came rampaging out of the back streets of industrial towns and the council estates of inner-city London. They revelled in drugs and debauchery, seduced groupies by the dozen, threw TVs out of hotel windows and thoroughly outraged the establishment. Public schoolboys, on the other hand, were brought up to run the country, become captains of industry and win Nobel Prizes. They did not have groupies. They had jolly nice girlfriends called Fiona, whom they later married. They certainly did not become rock stars.

How times have changed. For these days, the charts are not so much full of pop music as posh music. Today, fewer than one in ten British schoolchildren attend a fee-paying school. Yet a survey in The Word magazine has calculated that at least 60 per cent of chart pop and rock acts are now former public school pupils, compared with just 1 per cent 20 years ago. In a country with such a strong tradition of working-class pop heroes — including The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones — how can this be?

According to the magazine’s editor Mark Ellen: ‘Once upon a time, the rich weren’t interested in the popular arts. If they dabbled in the performing arts at all, it would be within the highbrow ghettos: opera, ballet, classical theatre. In the past ten years, the well-heeled young have decided it would be a jolly hoot to annex popular culture en masse.’ It’s not hard to see the results. Last week’s nominations for popular music’s Grammy Awards included two for the British folk-rock band Mumford & Sons, of which two members attended the £5,560-a-term King’s College School in Wimbledon, South-West London.

Fellow Grammy nominee Florence Welch attended Alleyn’s School in South London. Radiohead were formed at Abingdon School, where the fee for boarding pupils is now £9,505 a term. Chris Martin of Coldplay attended Sherborne School (£9,355 a term), before studying Ancient Latin and Greek at ¬University College London. But none of those chaps is half as posh as James Hillier Blount, the Old Harrovian former officer in the Life Guards, better known to the world as the singer-songwriter James Blunt.

And it’s not just Hooray Henries who are becoming popstars. The Henriettas are at it, too. Lily Allen — who prefers to affect a Mockney accent for her half-sung, half-rapped hits — actually attended Bedales. Even some X Factor contestants are posher than they pretend. That nice ‘painter and decorator’ Matt Cardle was educated at £5,971-a-term Stoke College in Suffolk. So why are the charts now so posh? And what happened to all those working-class heroes of old?

Of course, there always were a few posh rockers. The original members of Genesis were all boarders at Charterhouse School in Surrey. A smattering of Pink Floyd and Queen members had a private education. By and large, though, decent chaps didn’t join rock bands. This was not because they weren’t interested in rock. When I was at Eton in the early Seventies, most boys’ rooms were covered in posters of David Bowie (who hails from the back streets of Brixton). I spent my summer holidays working as a record company tea-boy. But there was no way I was ever going to become a rock star, however much I might have wanted to. It just wasn’t what was expected of us. I, like my classmates, was just too sensible, too well-spoken, too respectable to rock.

Tony Blair is a classic example of this repressed posh rocker. Having attended Fettes, -Scotland’s smartest public school, he went to Oxford University and sang in the student band Ugly Rumours. Years later, when he finally arrived at No 10, he made a point of taking his Fender Stratocaster guitar with him. But it never occurred to Blair that rock, rather than the law and politics, could be an actual career. If they absolutely had to go into the music industry, public schoolboys tended to do it as managers, executives or record company bosses. They made their fortune from other people’s performances. Simon Cowell (ex-Dover College, £3,995 a term) is perhaps the ultimate example of that particular breed.

But public schools and their pupils are nothing if not adaptable. The whole point of a fee-paying education is that it provides its recipients with an edge over everyone else. Why else would parents pay so much for it? In these supposedly classless, more meritocratic times, public-school pupils have to be able to mingle with the masses. That’s why so many expensively educated young people now affect downmarket accents. It’s why David Cameron so insists on being called Dave. And it’s also why public schoolboys and girls now see no reason why they can’t become pop stars just as easily as lawyers or politicians. They don’t even have to dumb down very much. Pop is now a perfectly respectable profession. And all the old-fashioned professions aren’t half as respectable as they were.

If you want to see corruption, look no further than the House of Commons. If you want spendthrift debauchery, cocaine-addiction and use of call-girls, try the trading desks of any City bank. Meanwhile, rockers such as Chris Martin have a happy family life, eat macrobiotic tofu and want to save the planet. What parent wouldn’t prefer to have a child like that? So the sons and daughters of smart families have entered the music industry and taken with them all the advantages that their education has conferred. These include the wonderful facilities for learning and rehearsing music; the confidence to get up and perform; the unshakable belief that they can succeed, and the well-educated mind that can spot opportunities and seize them ahead of the competition.

And against the power of the posh poppers, the wannabe working-class heroes stand much less of a chance. The reason? The blame lies with a single policy — the abolition of the grammar schools. For that’s where almost all the legends of British rock music — including most of the members of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, Led Zeppelin and countless others — were educated. They were clever, quick-witted lads from very ordinary backgrounds, who were taught to work hard and value excellence, and whose heads were filled with a huge range of creative and cultural influences by teachers determined to expand their horizons. But when the grammar schools were abolished, and education was dumbed down to the lowest common, comprehensive denominator, the working-class rock star became a threatened species.

No longer are these boys and girls told that they, too, could conquer the world. Their aspirations have been dulled. Independent thinking has been replaced with a formulaic curriculum, too focused on getting exam results and not on producing intelligent, thoughtful and confident members of society. And so the blood supply of talent has been constricted. The potential Lennons, McCartneys and Jaggers of this generation simply cannot compete with their private-school counterparts. Forget rock ’n’ roll. This is posh ’n’ roll.