https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets

The more HFCE, the less need to know answers to those pointless questions. Those questions are for submerging the other parts of the world in stumbling blocks not their own people overwhelmed by feel-good factors. If they were busy by those questions, wouldn't be able to pull the strings behind the entertainment industry by making the world a big captive market.

 

I agree (broadly) that it's impossible to even tell what really is popular music today, just going by charts. I mean, thanks to streaming, Simon Cowell, piracy, and the extremely low bar set by "official" sales nao, anyone can buy popularity.

 

i had an american friend, who said. you see all those people almost answer rightly ........ well to the point, i would have thought we are bad at hiphop or so... but pop :D really

 

A part of a book published in 2007 but today is so different as you said:

POPULAR MUSIC A BRIEF HISTORY
Unfavourable comparisons between ‘serious’ music and ‘popular’ music are not new. For many years ‘pop’ suffered from an inferiority complex based primarily upon colour and class. Although derided for their musical style at the turn of the last century, the African Americans were exploited as musicians; they were generally felt to be better players than whites and were regularly patronized because of their ‘sense of rhythm’. They were in demand with respectable military bands and got to wear smart uniforms. Pseudo slave music was the main origin of American popular music and white Americans eventually became fascinated by it. Ultimately, they would steal it. Prior to 1900, ‘blacking up’ was widely practised by middle-class white Americans, painting their faces black and singing Negro spirituals, work songs, ‘coon’ ragtime and blues songs. The idea of making a popular show out of the Negro’s plight became quite jolly and acceptable. Major black female performers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith also came out of the minstrel show background. To the white middle classes these entertainers were barely one cut above the slave. Simultaneously, millions of underprivileged black people were singing to themselves and their friends, without contrivance. Scott Joplin (1868–1917), whose father had been born into slavery, introduced African-American popular music and coined it ‘ragtime’. He laboriously transcribed rags into musical notation; his work only ever appeared on piano rolls, meaning nobody else in the history of popular music ever had such a monopoly of one genre. This piano and drum based music became phenomenally popular throughout America at the turn of the last century. Other musicians, especially Joe ‘King’ Oliver and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, further developed it. He spread the word of Dixieland and jazz throughout America and then Europe during World War I, where his New Orleans band entertained the troops. At the same time French-and Spanish-influenced music was prevalent in New Orleans, and it was here that jazz is alleged to have been ‘invented’. Those influences, together with a mixture of two-steps, military march, ragtime and African percussion, evolved quickly into a jazzed up sound. The importance of this popular dance music for the masses was that it broke down social barriers. Jazz and ragtime was not music for the cosy parlour or the concert hall. It was music to stand up to, to gyrate with, to dance, jitterbug and bop. It was music to shake off inhibitions, and it helped the African Americans forget their poverty for a short while. For a few cents and in a few hours anybody could get roaring drunk, laugh, cry and fall in and out of love. It was also music that invited sex. With no coy Victorian pretence, no innuendo and no holds barred, jazz was pure sex, and sooner or later the inhibited ‘whites’ would catch on.

At the end of the 19th century Tin Pan Alley was born in the USA. This was originally on W 28th St, an innocuous block between Broadway and 6th Avenue on Manhattan Island, where dozens of music publishers set up small offices. Tin Pan Alley later became known as the most successful music publishing business of the American popular song. As music halls prospered, vaudeville developed on a large scale and songwriters realized they could make real money, and so the ‘pop music business’ boomed as soon as it was born. Over the next two decades the heart of Tin Pan Alley moved to 42nd St and then filled up the legendary Brill Building. The majority of music that came out of the Alley was white homogenized pop, often brilliant but very clean and lacking in soul. During the 20s, jazz and blues became popularly associated with brothels, alcohol, failure, poverty and illiteracy (in the 40s, drugs would be added to this grim list). On a positive note, it also portrayed immense fun, carefree abandon, joy of living, and unpretentious talent.

The great female blues singers of the time evoked sex and booze. They seemed to be expected to be overweight and have loud or rasping voices. Strangely enough, most of them did. The important female vocalists from this era were Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Ida Cox. The blues boom of the early 20s opened the door for dozens of aspiring female blues singers, as record companies were keen to sign up anybody who sang and was black. This was an uncannily similar situation to that of the 50s skiffle boom in London, when any skinny young white man with a brylcreamed quiff, a tea-chest bass or a washboard was signed. A similar situation also happened in Liverpool in 1963, when every aspiring beat group could obtain a recording contract even if they couldn’t play or sing. Cigar smoking entrepreneurs in smart suits, who had driven up from London in their white Jaguars, quickly invaded the city, eager and desperate. Having already missed out on the Beatles, they had to be content with what was left (not inconsiderable, by any means). Chequebooks were also open in San Francisco in 1967/68, and this time around musical ability was often overlooked. The prerequisite then seemed to be how you looked and if you took the right drugs. I digress. Since the 20s there has been a steady flow of musical mercenaries.

In 1923 Bessie Smith’s ‘Down Hearted Blues’ sold an astonishing 750,000 copies in less than six months. It went on to sell over a million and helped save Columbia Records, which was close to going under at that time. She had already established herself on the TOBA circuit (Theatre Owners Booking Association, aka Tough On Black Asses) but this was her first record. This phenomenal sales success in turn brought black music instantly into the homes of the whites; they were usually the owners of a Phonograph.

The Gramophone and flat disc, invented in 1895 by Emile Berliner was much more user friendly than the cumbersome old Phonograph that Thomas Edison had created 18 years earlier. That somebody like Bessie Smith, who would have been classed as a ‘minor genre’ artist in those days, could go on to sell so many flat discs, showed that the record industry and its growth in popularity around 1920 was a watershed. The 78rpm breakable phonograph record lasted an astonishing 38 years before the neat, compact and (virtually) unbreakable 45rpm 7-inch disc finally edged it out. Unlike the royalty rich artists of today, many of the popular blues and jazz singers would receive a one-off fee after cutting a record. The fee would be the same, $100 or $200 paid to the artist, who would benefit only by increased live performance fees if the record became a hit.

The profits from the records went, of course, to the company owners and the sheet music publishers in Tin Pan Alley, but their bonanza stopped as quickly as it had started. The Wall Street crash in the USA in 1929 killed the black blues market overnight.

The female blues stars overshadowed their male counterparts, but, as is often the case, longevity is the ultimate winner. The names of Charley Patton, Son House and Jimmy Rushing have survived and prospered way beyond the 20s. The remarkable John Lee Hooker, who died in 2001 at the age of 83, had fantastic success in the 90s with newly recorded albums such as The Healer, Mr Lucky and Chill Out. The magnificent B.B. King is still performing, as I write, at the age of 81. The old bluesmen are loved, revered and cosseted by today’s younger musicians. Not only is their music played and imitated, but these mentors are often to be found sharing the stage with them. The democratic nature of blues has always had this tradition. Blues singers, especially the males, had a hard time throughout the Depression, although the period continued to breed new talent. One of the very greatest was Robert Johnson, who managed to blend the Mississippi folk blues with what would become the early urban Chicago school. Johnson’s short career produced only 29 recordings in five sessions, but his massive influence is beyond question.

The Chicago school produced a number of further outstanding bluesmen. Names that immediately spring to mind are John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson and the great harmonica player Little Walter. After World War II Chicago became a mecca for the blues. Many of the elder statesmen were working there and this gave rise to a wealth of younger talent, including Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Buddy Guy and Jimmy Reed.

The huge importance of jazz and blues must not be underestimated by anyone interested in the development and the study of popular music. They are often overlooked in favour of the great American popular songwriters who produced the ‘songbook’ material. Jazz and blues effectively created what we now accept as rock music. The roots of the music are African but the style is cosmopolitan American, played in a black culture. In essence the perpetrators were as African as they were American.

The Black American combined ethnic folk music from two cultures. From this grew the work song, out of which came numerous popular musical forms that have evolved since the middle of the nineteenth century. Music from the heart, untrained and spontaneous. Blues and jazz had these stigmas attached to them. Once again we return to ‘class’. The impoverished singing cotton-picker could never conceive of being in a position of having a formal musical education, but he/she could sing from the heart. His/her instinct was to survive, not prosper. In any case, the finest music academy in the world could not have taught this person how to feel blue (sad), and therefore to sing blue (depressed and without emotion). It could never have taught a drunken prostitute how to accompany an equally inebriated pianist in the classiest New Orleans brothel.

Over fifty years later a leather-clad Gene Vincent crooned an unrehearsed ‘weehlllll, a be bop a lula a shays a mahah boibeh’, Joe Cocker spontaneously screamed a devastating ‘wooooaaaaaaaahhhhhhh-hhhhh’ and the Sex Pistols angrily spat ‘ann-arrr-keyy’. These acts were of course further alienating pop’s harshest critics. Rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and blues have never set out to win respectable friends. For every early, uncultured Gene Vincent we have an effortless and composed Nat ‘King’ Cole. For every primal, stoned Joe Cocker we have a pitch-perfect Art Garfunkel; and for every quasi-militant Johnny Rotten there is a law-abiding Andy Williams. In the 60s Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin could share a stage together, singing to the same audience. There would be no qualms about experiencing, at the same gig, some exquisitely delicate folk song about ‘ice-cream castles in the air’ and some tonsil-tearing ball and chain sex music.

Popular music is not entirely about having a good time and carnal pleasure. The steady, calming presence of gospel music has always been around. Gospel took the work song out of the fields and into the church. It came out refined, dignified and spiritual. The Negro spiritual was closely bound to jazz and blues, and the legendary Mahalia Jackson was able to popularize the form for a mass market. A cappella vocal groups singing gospel gave great pleasure to audiences, in addition to spreading the word. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, during her career, sang her brand of non-secular music with some of the great swing bands, including Count Basie’s and Benny Goodman’s. Jazz could pretend to be respectable. Later on Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the stunning Aretha Franklin would continue to respectfully sing gospel. The roots of doo-wop music, which became enormously popular in the 50s, go back to the gospel quartets. Sweet-sounding groups such as the Gospelaires were to have a lasting influence on doo-wop outfits such as the Platters, the Hi-Lo’s, the 5 Royales, the Flamingos and the Four Freshmen, who in turn would greatly influence the vocal harmony style of 60s groups such as the Beach Boys, the Hollies, the Mamas And The Papas and Crosby, Stills And Nash. The combination of three to five voices working well together remains a spine-tingling experience.

Country music, as we now know it, came out of the west, and today is firmly rooted in both Nashville, Tennessee, and more recently Austin, Texas. It was country music (or hillbilly, as it was known) that became the first music to be regularly broadcast on American radio. Up until the middle of the 20s record companies went to great lengths to stop music being broadcast over the air. Their bone of contention was that it would kill the potential sales of phonograph records and sheet music. This mistaken view seems particularly bizarre in the modern age when radio or television exposure can make or break an artist’s entire career. Record companies have vast promotional giveaways to entice the disc jockey to sample their wares. Even as early as the 50s this was common practice, as demonstrated when the American disc jockey Alan Freed had his career ruined by a payola scandal.

The famous Grand Ole Opry, founded by George D. Hay, has for over 75 years showcased country music from its base in Nashville. Country music had a rough ride in the early stages as once again, class reared its ugly head. Fortunately, the white cowboy had an independent nature and was more self-sufficient than the poverty-stricken delta bluesman, and was able to both survive and prosper. Bill Monroe became the giant of ‘blue-grass’ and Hank Williams became the first icon of country & western music. Williams also became a pivot for all that was good but mostly all that was bad. His sweet talking songs were at odds with the reality of a legendarily flamboyant gun-toting, amphetamine-fuelled drunkard. This great paradox was an eye-opener because, although he could be obnoxious, few could deny that Williams was a musical genius.

On the east coast Paul Whiteman flourished as the inventor of sweet, accessible jazzy music, which was the closest thing to straight pop and was loosely termed ‘western swing’. This was a beautiful combination of country song, violin and string bass. Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys became its greatest exponent in the 40s. On the west coast of America, also during the 40s, came jive music, often known as rhythm and blues (R&B). The greatest exponent of this irreverent, comical but bitingly sharp and lyrical music was Louis Jordan. There is no doubt that Jordan would have been as big as Elvis if record charts based on actual sales had been around in the 40s. ‘T-Bone’ Walker represented the blues guitar. Though he was born in Texas, he spent a great deal of his career on the west coast. Walker played blues but also used melodic jazz chords. He could play dirty but he chose to play sweet.

Throughout the fast-developing years 1920–1940, the age of the great soloist arrived in the shape of Louis Armstrong (trumpet), Coleman Hawkins (saxophone) and Earl Hines (piano). Their work in the 20s was particularly inspirational. Sidney Bechet took the clarinet and soprano saxophone to the outer limits. Jelly Roll Morton stretched both his plump fingers and the boundaries of jazz piano, while Armstrong, with his cornet and gritty voice became the first superstar of the century. Louis Armstrong will be remembered not only as an outstanding musician and one of the greatest figures in popular music, but as a seminal bridge-builder of different cultures. He, more than any other black musician, took this so-called raw, nasty, cheap, hot, disgusting music into the parlours of middle-class homes, and in so doing, made it comparatively respectable.

Duke Ellington’s Orchestra became the factory for many aspiring musicians. Arguably, Ellington needed a band around him to develop his musical ideas in the way that Miles Davis and John Mayall did in the 50s and 60s respectively. What cannot be disputed, however, is Ellington’s excellence as a composer. His music played a major part in the development of early jazz into the orchestral jazz that became known as big band music. His Blanton-Webster band is probably the finest-ever sounding group of musicians playing together as a unit. The bands of Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Cab Calloway also spring immediately to mind. Featured female vocalists with the big bands were much in demand too: Ivie Anderson, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day and, the two greatest of all-time, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Back in the 30s the term ‘big band’ took on different meanings for different people. While the outside world assumed a big band was an orchestra with more than a dozen members, to followers of popular music the matter became rather more complicated. There were exceptions, however: Andy Kirk And His Clouds Of Joy just sneaked in as a big band; John Kirby’s Sextet, despite its billing as ‘the Biggest Little Band In The World’, did not.

During the early 30s big bands became increasingly popular with audiences. Promoters fought with each other to increase the size and spectacle on offer. Bandleaders did as they were ‘requested’ and added more sidemen until, at the dawn of the swing era there were hundreds of ‘big bands’ all over the USA, and pockets of Europe. For all practical purposes the swing era, as a cultural phenomenon, began on the night of 21 August 1935. At least, that was the night the non-jazz media took notice. The occasion was a gig in California played by the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The band played popular songs of the day, as well as jazz numbers. The ‘sweet’ numbers were played straight with simple arrangements for dancing. The hot or swing numbers were for the jazzers. Once Goodman had targeted his audience he carried on with his hot stuff. The Dorsey brothers and Artie Shaw followed this policy, in time. On the other side of the road, Guy Lombardo and Glenn Miller followed a path of ‘sweeter’ pop. Meanwhile, the bands of Basie, Ellington and Woody Herman played furious out-and-out jazz. They were all big bands with different styles. During their heyday in the early 40s, big bands were earning phenomenal amounts; annual grosses were $600,000 for Duke Ellington and Cootie Williams, and $750,000 for Cab Calloway.

In the late 40s, in Britain, a similar pattern was evolving on a much smaller scale. Although the music was essentially American, a number of great band leaders did come to prominence, the finest being Te d Heath, who played with no less energy than the Americans. The post-war dance hall boom lasted well into the 50s. This was the longest end-of-war celebration the world had ever known.

The growth of jazz and swing in the big band era was generative of the great soloists of bebop. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were among the leaders of the style. The ‘cool school’ of the 50s came through a honing down of large orchestras to the more manageable quintet or sextet format, and Miles Davis’ legendary nonet gave birth to the cool. Simplistic and underplayed but oozing with style and emotion, this form of jazz has lasted to the present day. His 1959 post-cool modal album Kind Of Blue is, for many, the finest jazz album ever released, and indispensable for any student of music. The great orchestral works of Gil Evans, who, in collaboration with Davis, made a series of classic albums in the 50s, must also be singled out. Evans was a gigantic figure, although ironically small in stature and painfully modest. In addition to the success of Davis, jazz in the 50s and early 60s was going through a particularly fruitful period. Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus and the closest threat to Miles Davis’ crown—the mercurial John Coltrane—all appeared as major stars in between Elvis and the Beatles. Coltrane had absolute mastery of his instrument, although in his featured solos he was prone to playing too much, too soon, too long. One story that is often repeated with only moderate embellishment, and which therefore must have some credence, occurred towards the end of Coltrane’s stint with Davis. The latter had been concerned for some time about the way Coltrane’s solos were beginning to take over. At the end of one particularly difficult gig, Miles confronted him about his domination of the proceedings. Coltrane explained that as much as he tried to shorten his solos he was just getting carried away and simply could not stop playing his saxophone. Miles laconically replied, ‘you could try taking the motherfucker out of yo’ mouth’. After Coltrane left Davis, his solos became even longer and freer.

Avant garde or free-form jazz developed in the early 60s through giants such as Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Many of these artists were later accepted into the rock world (notably Miles Davis and Roland Kirk), as were lesser-known names like the sadly neglected Don Ellis. The Indian-tinged big band jazz/rock that Ellis played was promoted alongside rock bands in the late 60s, and this no doubt had a lot to do with his misplaced identity in the music world. Further experiments in new jazz were undertaken by Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler.

In 1969, a great British band of varied style and humour, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (featuring the late Vivian Stanshall), recorded their own composition and posed a musical question, ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’ During the white blues boom in Britain in the late 60s countless arguments arose. How can a white, well-fed middle-class suburbanite sing the blues? The litmus test must be: if he or she is listened to, and tolerated, by the black community.

Jimmie Rodgers, the American singing brakeman, had shown this was possible almost 50 years before with his blend of country blues. He was the first to succeed nationally, although black musicians accompanied him in the main.

Other blues men ‘singing the whites’ to high regard have included Woody Guthrie (Bob Dylan’s greatest early influence), guitarist Eddie Lang and Elvis Presley. It was, however, in Britain during the early 60s that this reverential plagiarism really spread. Pivotal names such as Chris Barber and Lonnie Donegan set the stage with skiffle, while Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner did much to recreate white R&B as we now know it. Close on their heels were Graham Bond and John Mayall. Their pioneering paved the way for the commercial success of blues/R&B groups all based in London, including Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, the Pretty Things and Manfred Mann. These bands’ places would be taken (except for the Rolling Stones, who are still very much with us) by outfits such as Cream, the early Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, Savoy Brown, Ten Years After, Keef Hartley and Taste.

In America, unconsciously working in parallel, were, among others, Canned Heat, the Blues Project (featuring Al Kooper), the Grateful Dead, the Barry Goldberg Reunion, the Steve Miller Blues Band, and Big Brother And The Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin). However, by far the purist perpetrator of white blues was harmonica player and vocalist Paul Butterfield, who made a name for himself with his legendary band in 1965. It was Butterfield’s boys who shocked the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival that year with their electric backing of the formerly acoustic Bob Dylan. The intolerant folkies were appalled to see the shy but brilliant young Mike Bloomfield covering every fret of his Fender Stratocaster. Renowned pacifist Pete Seeger allegedly wanted to take an axe and cut the cables to the amplifiers, such was his disdain for electric music. Before the audience’s eyes an amazing thing was happening, a major fusion was taking place completely unplanned: blues, folk and rock were sharing a bed, together, with no fear of the dark.

Meanwhile straight pop had been fermenting for a long time. In the 30s, Rudy Vallee became the first singer to induce mass hysteria (renamed Beatlemania in the 60s). Vallee did not last the course, but two crooners who later received a greater reception in the 40s and 50s and did last were Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Singers of their ilk during the crooner’s heyday were totally dependent on being supplied with strong songs; for it was then that the golden age of Tin Pan Alley really arrived and the great American songwriter was born. During the 30s and 40s these writers were at their peak and popular song (as it was then called) succeeded mostly through the cinema and the stage musical, the main vehicles for their talents. Outstanding composers and writers such as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers, Sammy Cahn, Lorenz Hart and the prolific Johnny Mercer were lyrically brilliant, although occasionally trite. However their perceptive observations of love and relationships have never been matched. Ordinary situations and true feelings were poured into hundreds of magnificent songs. Obvious statements and words of simple honesty were put into song, and the ordinary public could relate to it like nothing else on earth. For example, ‘the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no, no, they can’t take that away from me’. Rarely can you profess undying love through a song in such a simple and subtle way. In my opinion, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’ is still the best popular song ever written. The Gershwin brothers, probably the greatest writers of the American popular song, are the esteemed composers of this classic. Such hopeless romanticism was taken to the highest level by Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, the undisputed Queen and King of interpreting the great American songbook. The sweet pop crooners by default had a tendency to put corny humour into the songs, with subtle but acceptable sexual innuendo. (However, it was left to the black R&B performers and early soul singers to actually spell it out.)

These lush songs were packaged with the best bands, vocalists and arrangers of the day. Here, in almost clandestine fashion, serious orchestrations were made, with many of the musical arrangers having had a formal classical background. These included Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Neal Hefti, Gordon Jenkins and, probably the greatest of all, Nelson Riddle. The popularity of the cinema and its enormous captive audience helped to maintain the careers of many songwriters throughout the best part of two decades, and in turn, the celluloid gave them immortality. The pristine monochrome images of dance, song and melody have endeared and ultimately endured. It was hard to imagine that Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly or Bing Crosby ever swore or went to the toilet, let alone had sex.

The only other main branch of white-based popular music competing with this white romanticism was western or country & western. Tex Ritter and Tennessee Ernie Ford were two of the leading vocalists, and the previously mentioned Bob Wills’ western swing band was the top attraction. This was orchestral country music for the white American. Meanwhile, Hank Williams got drunker, carried on screwing, swearing and shooting and became the first dead honky-tonk hero.

Fundamentally, however, musical taste still revolved around class. The privileged homogenous whites in America and Europe (as seen by the less fortunate) would be enjoying ‘serious’ music played in formal parlours and concert halls. The less fortunate (as perceived by the fortunate) would be jitterbugging, jiving, twisting, drinking, and generally having an informal whale of a time. No ‘decent’ girl should have been seen hanging around speakeasies or joining in rent parties. Likewise the Harlem tough guy could not and would not be seen going to the opera, or taking in a little Vivaldi. By the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and rockabilly in the early 50s, the gap had widened to its commodious extreme. We now had the uncomfortable experience of the lower middle-class and middle-class joining forces with the privileged upper classes in an unparalleled attempt at rejecting this unchristian, obscene and immoral music.

In fairness to middle America, it was only decent and respectable parents protecting their offspring against a style of music they were unable to understand. Additionally, as this genre was outlawed it made ‘serious’music seem all the more palatable to the middle class. (In reality, as much as they would have liked us to believe otherwise, classical composers such as Mahler, Shostakovich or Puccini were still not on their narrow playlists.) The failure of this attempted alienation could have been prevented if popular music had gained enough credibility to have been intelligently discussed in the media of the day.

The younger generation took to popular music like a bee to a hive, and rightly gorged themselves with their insatiable appetite for its sexual honey. In the wake of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, doo-wop and rockabilly, even jazz, blues and country music appeared respectable. Popular music, as people then knew it, suddenly became associated with only dance bands and the movies. Popular (not pop) music was for romantics, squares and parents. Ever since Elvis Presley provocatively thrust his crotch towards millions of television viewers on the Dorsey Brothers-hosted Stage Show, a dangerous polarization had taken place. All the more remarkably, it had happened overnight.

And then came rock ‘n’ roll…

On his radio show in Akron, Ohio, USA, in the early 50s, the disc jockey Alan Freed became tired of playing jazz, which had become far too intellectual for his taste. Similarly, pop had gone corny, soft and stale. What was needed was something loud, dirty, suggestive and exciting. Bill Haley plugged the gap for a short while with the groundbreaking ‘Rock The Joint’. It sold a healthy 750,000 copies. Haley’s music however was more swing than rock, and his slight dumpiness and receding hairline covered by a greasy kiss curl hardly fitted the bill as a pin-up for girls to swoon over or boys to model themselves on.

In the 40s and early 50s, blues players such as Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters played a non-traditionalist style of boogie blues that was to eventually form what is now known as the biggest single development in popular music: rock ‘n’ roll. Sam Phillips, the owner of the small record label Sun, made a statement that was to have lasting importance over the next five decades: ‘If I could find a white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ This remark to his secretary, pandering to the perception of racism, gave birth to the career of Elvis Presley, the single most important figure in rock music. Phillips, in one statement, had perpetrated theft on a grand scale. The soul, rhythm, suffering, energy and sexuality of 50 years of black American music was transformed overnight. The perfect synthesis of gospel, work song, spirituals, ragtime, jazz, folk, swing, country and blues was distilled into a tailor-made and palatable blend for the teenager on the street. The European settlers in Appalachia had brought with them their own various musical roots of folk, jigs, reels and, to a degree, chamber music. This had, in turn, percolated through to the African slaves who had taken their music and mixed it with their own. The French Creoles then added their primitive zydeco. It was a perfect concoction, now having travelled full circle: rock ‘n’ roll. After establishing itself, this musical cocktail, like its previous forms, has divided and subdivided. Its popularity with the under-25s was as intense as the venom administered against it by the older generation. A major task of bridge building was inadvertently created. Let us not be coy, rock ‘n’ roll was about fun, freedom and dancing-but mostly it was about sex.

The period between Elvis’ peak and the arrival of the Beatles on record in 1962 was for most part outlawed as being a barren time for this ‘awful music’. Even the respectable Buddy Holly had failed in calming the dissenters, and his tragic early death put paid to his contribution. It was a time when even white rock and pop singers were seen as layabouts, boneheads and talentless morons (in the USA they were derided as delinquents, losers or punks). These second-rate singers had at least succeeded in becoming as second-class as their black contemporaries. This more or less justified their affinity, especially as they had stolen the music. If ever the music élitists had strength to their cause it was then. In the late 50s and early 60s there was a calm before the next storm. Elvis imitators became so watered down they almost sounded like the lounge singers they aspired to hate. While soul and Motown were gestating there was not a lot going on. Only artists such as Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers demonstrated any real talent during this barren period in America and Britain.

The Beatles, once they had been smartened up by Brian Epstein, were the subtle in-betweens. They helped enormously and became the greatest levellers of all-time. They were the secret police infiltrators who came along and washed our brains of bad pop music. They were out-and-out rockers who were able to discover R&B and soul before the world caught up with them. Not only did they make music that was accepted by the elders, but (for a while) they appeared respectably dressed in suits and ties. And whatever their minor failings were, they, and possibly Louis Armstrong, remain the finest ambassadors of all popular music. That is without laying the additional claim that Lennon/McCartney are the greatest pop songwriters of all time. The real route to final acceptance, however, was not through the average teenager in their home, but through the generation that the swinging 60s created. The foundation was already there. Lionel Bart, the late great songwriter, once said to me that the swinging 60s started in 1956. The media were and still are the controllers of style, fashion, language and opinion. The swing to left-of-centre politics in Britain and America was not just coincidental. For example, the British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson owed a huge debt of thanks to the popular music generation, as shown by his recommending the Beatles for the MBE. In America it was much more confrontational. Once the ultra conservatives had come to terms with the evil of rock ‘n’ roll (in Little Richard they had a homosexual, make-up wearing, black man), they were further confronted a few years later with even worse nightmares: commie folk singers, ban the bomb loonies and the first wave of drug-crazed hippies. The ridiculous wasteful war in Vietnam was able to polarize music on left and right. Politics are linked inextricably to popular music. The cozy conservatism of the immediate post-war years under Eisenhower in the USA and Eden and Macmillan (‘You’ve never had it so good’) in the UK was echoed in the mainstream pop music of that time. It was warm, smiling, safe, danceband and country music that sounded good, clean, relaxed and happy.

What now existed was a three party system of rock ‘n’ roll, classical and pop. It would take until the death of punk music during the early 80s before they would again sit comfortably with each other. Mercifully, this appalling gap has narrowed in the 21st century.

When ‘Big’ Joe Turner recorded ‘Shake Rattle And Roll’ in early 1954, he had no idea that white Americans would ultimately steal his song and turn it into rock ‘n’ roll; no idea that post-war conservatism would be shaken to its foundations. Both the American and British parents can be forgiven for this. It is understandable that they were bewildered and outraged (they were probably scared too). It is understandable that Elvis shocked, with his fantastic sexual sneer and thrusting crotch; that Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard jolted, jerked, shook, screamed, rattled and rolled the public with their (not so) thinly disguised lyrics about sex. That they were able to do it in front of millions of people with the advent of television was deemed outrageous. In reality all they had done, with the aid of shrewd businessmen, was merely to popularize what early jazz, rhythm and blues and ragtime musicians had been doing for years with their limited audiences. The booze and sex-laden songs of the 20s and 30s, which were previously confined to brothels, bars and clubs, were now being blatantly re-cast to a mass audience. Half of the spectators loved it, and the other repressed half who hated it knew in their hearts that they would have loved it had their own childhood been different. The 50s rock ‘n’ rollers were the first to come out of the closets and flaunt their sexuality in the faces of the massed record buying public who were easily swayed. A Rosemary Clooney gave way to an Etta James. A Pat Boone to a Larry Williams.

The 60s will remain, probably forever, the single most important decade for popular music. It was the first vintage decade. Pop, rock, blues, soul, jazz, country, reggae and folk developed both individually and, in the spirit of the 60s, collectively became one. Together with the Beatles and their ilk, Bob Dylan was a musical icon of that decade. He injected concern, irony and malarky into lyrics that are still being pored over to this day. Without listening to a single note of his music, Dylan’s lyrics stand to make him the single greatest musical poet of all time. He sensed the thirst and potential for his kind of musical literacy in the early 60s, seizing the moment and making it his own, simply by being better than anybody else. A world simultaneously experiencing the creative juices of the Beatles and Dylan at their peaks made for a remarkable time in history. The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane fused folk with rock, the Animals and the Spencer Davis Group blended blues with pop, Buffalo Springfield performed highly original country/rock, the Grateful Dead played every style from folk to acid-rock and Stevie Wonder mixed soul with pop and introduced electronics into the mix. Although the music stayed, the karma did not. Towards the end of the 60s, right through to the late 70s, an objectionable ‘holier than thou’ attitude began to prevail. Musical snobbery was with us again and, almost unthinkably, it was happening in the post-Beatles era.

Ironically, it was the badly labelled love generation flower-power hippie/underground movement that caused the division. Tastes polarized to an alarming degree: soul music became un-hip and folk music was suddenly hip. Pop became square, and rock (not rock ‘n’ roll) became the voice of popular music. Record companies can be partly blamed, by dropping major artists from their catalogues in favour of a more ‘progressive’ image. CBS, in particular, created a huge share of this new ‘progressive’ market in the late 60s via an aggressive advertising campaign, which made the buyer feel inadequate unless they were purchasing the music of the ‘now generation’, the ‘underground’. Yo u too can be ‘cool’ and far-out’. Along with Dylan, the Byrds and Simon And Garfunkel (who were surprisingly deemed OK), they had a host of newer bands, some lasting for two or three albums only. The names were weirdly evocative; Spirit, Moby Grape, It’s A Beautiful Day, Electric Flag and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy. So good was the campaign and the cover art that the customer was almost persuaded into buying them unheard. The buyer was pushed into not being left behind by the massive change that was taking place. Discarded to the back catalogue were such major selling CBS stalwarts as Ray Conniff, Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. Warners, RCA and Capitol joined in the momentum. In keeping with this trend, larger record companies started their own progressive labels, such as Harvest, Vertigo, Dawn and Deram in the UK. Homegrown independents were born, the finest being Island Records, founded by reggae-loving Chris Blackwell. His roster of talent was on a par with the great USA independents of an earlier age, Chess Records, Stax, Atlantic and Tamla-Motown. The canny Blackwell had blind faith in Fairport Convention, John Martyn, Spooky Tooth, Traffic, Cat Stevens and Free.

The music press, which in those days could make or break an artist, was particularly guilty of this polarization of taste.

Virtually all of the cognoscenti magazines went ‘underground’, and those that did not, folded. A whole style of journalism arose from the progressive revolution. It was better to be scathing than complimentary. They turned on themselves, leaving very little to be approving about. Many popular artists were quite simply ignored. During the worst of these barren years (1967-1970) it is remarkable that artists such as Cliff Richard, Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones and Johnny Mathis survived the onslaught and came out of it comparatively unharmed. In the late 60s and early 70s, the US magazine Rolling Stone prospered as being the clear leader of the pack, with undoubtedly the best writers. Today the same magazine is part of the establishment, with a mammoth circulation. The specialist jazz, blues, country and folk journals kept their heads down for fear of being caught in this horrible rock vs. pop crossfire. Their small yet stable circulations enabled them to shelter while this conflict took place.

In Britain the polarization was gradual. They had not experienced a Monterey Pop Festival or a Woodstock until the beginning of the next decade. Isle Of Wight, Bath and the Hyde Park festivals were really small fry. For the first half of the 70s, the dichotomy of musical trend was entrenched. Younger listeners turned increasingly towards teenybop idols and glam rock stars (T. Rex and David Bowie), while their elders embraced hard rock (Bad Company), progressive sounds (ELP and Yes) or the poetic musings of introspective singer-songwriters such as James Taylor and Jackson Browne. The onslaught of punk during 1976-77 shook the music industry in the UK and to a lesser degree in the USA, while simultaneously reinforcing old divisions between the establishment and the new dissidents. The circle was almost complete by the early 80s. The so-called dinosaur artists like the Eagles, Led Zeppelin and the Moody Blues could be heard once again on the same radio stations as late 70s punks such as the Clash and the Damned, and 80s pop groups such as the Human League, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode. The introduction of MTV in America fuelled the image of the rock and pop star, while allowing exposure to new (and well-publicized) artists in the country, folk and jazz world, without hierarchy.

Venues became bigger as artists outgrew theatres and concert halls. Promoters sought out sports arenas and easily filled them, selling tickets and grossing sums of money that was hard to contemplate. Stadium rock was born, and already huge selling artists such as U2, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones undertook mammoth tours with further massive financial rewards.

The variety of popular music genres is now broader than it has ever been and probably there are too many sub-genres. If we can regard this ‘sapling’ as having been planted around 1900, it has now reached the size of a mature tree, with all its branches fully developed. Various offshoots bore fruit, and then died. Others flourished with enormous strength. Spring will always arrive.

The biggest technology revolution that has taken place over the past 20 years has been the advent of digital music, firstly through the compact disc in 1982 and now via the Internet and amazing toys such as the iPod. This has hastened the demise of vinyl, since 1948 the accepted form of listening to recorded music until the rude intervention and marketing of Phillips with the ‘compact cassette’ in 1967. Prior to that, magnetic tape was only used widely within the profession. Sales of pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes never took off, and we all know of somebody left with a box of 8-track cartridges in the attic! Even today in record stores, compact discs are still filed in the same way as vinyl, with folk, blues/jazz, world, country and pop strangely separated. Classical music is segregated even further, almost as if pop and rock is wielding revenge, or as Jerry Garcia sang, ‘the hand is on the shoe that fits’.

There is no intended discrimination in this book. The omission of popular 20th century composers such as Aaron Copland and Charles Ives from this work was decided on the basis that their form of music is based principally upon ‘classical’ structures. The inclusion of the Gershwin brothers and Leonard Bernstein is because their music comes from a more popular foundation. These judgements will always be subjective, but there is nothing sinister in my motives. My mission is to see that popular music is taken seriously and I do not seek a feud with classical and operatic music. It is the pompous élitists who refuse to acknowledge the equal importance of pop and rock that I am on a crusade to silence. Both Pete Townshend (The Who) and Ray Davies (The Kinks) successfully created ‘rock opera’ with Tommy and Arthur, other artists such as Joe Jackson, Frank Zappa and Elvis Costello have stepped outside their familiar territory and have flirted with classical music. Some of Keith Jarrett’s classical work is hardly ‘popular’. The problem is further illustrated, compounded and confused by the inclusion of contemporary musicians such as Brian Eno or John Cage. Where do we draw the line? If we were to present this music to a completely neutral audience, the decision as to which genre it falls into would be split. While it is clear that Eno’s music is not rock ‘n’ roll, neither is it classical. The democracy of popular music genres now allows them to be comfortably filed in the record store next to T for Tatum, Art and G for Gillespie, Dizzy. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis have, from a jazz-based background, shaped much of what we now know as popular music. As a further twist, in his final years Miles Davis recorded songs by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson. The ‘filing’ categories are for the marketing people and people like me, who, in preparing this work must attempt to present the reader with a list of genres. It is a great pity that this compartmentalization exists because it will surely deprive many people of hearing some wonderful music. I have been confronted from time to time with people who say they ‘hate jazz’ or ‘cannot stand folk music’. The generalization is as unfair as it is wrong. By all means dismiss folk music, but before you do, please give Bert Jansch or Dick Gaughan a listen and maybe you will change your mind. Be similarly open with jazz, or indeed any other genre of music and you will find something to like and probably love.

My aim is to document popular music from 1900 to the present day. The further into the last century we ventured, the more extensive the coverage became. More information is uncovered from the recent past and more detail can be given to artists of the present. Well-researched and original biographies will continue to be written on historic stars. A determined attempt has been made in this Concise edition to include in 3,000 entries, everyone who has made a worthy contribution to popular music, if not by separate entry then at least by name.

The ultimate intention of this work is once and for all to place popular music shoulder to shoulder with classical and operatic music. It is a legitimate plea for acceptance and tolerance. Popular music is now not only worthy of serious documentation, it is worthy of the acceptance of serious documentation. Pop, rock and jazz have been brilliantly written about, with passion, knowledge and insight. Popular music shapes, and is shaped by, each decade, in its very style and fashion: the speakeasies of the 20s, dance halls of the 30s, radio of the 40s, television of the 50s, festivals of the 60s, concerts of the 70s, video of the 80s and digital and computer language of the 90s and beyond, all contribute to the evoloution process.

There are now many hundreds of important published books covering popular music from 1900 to the present day; almost 12,000 titles are listed on our database. They are worthy of being as respected as the Grove Dictionary Of Music or A.W. Thayer’s book on Beethoven and H.C. Robbins Landon’s books on Mozart. The vast amount of music books published in the past two decades have already put this issue beyond doubt. The quality daily and Sunday newspapers now have regular rock journalists to contribute erudite and topical articles on new or established acts, and all carry solid reviews of contemporary pop and rock, in addition to jazz and classical coverage. Newspaper obituaries will now often include extensive coverage on popular music personalities. Look what happened when Jerry Garcia and Kurt Cobain died; this would have been unheard of 30 years previously.

The good will usually prevail over bad, but in pop music terms what is bad? Analyzing objectively is still going to result in an opinion. It would be all too easy for me to dismiss the present singles charts in America and Britain; I would be perpetuating the élitism I so despise. I think that most people who first cultivate an interest in the pop music single will progress to an album; and anyway, I believe that in 2007 the pop single is effectively dead and buried. The good ones merely serve as a trailer for the album, and the bad will not get beyond two or three singles anyway. Digital downloading has completely changed our perception of a tangible record, be it a CD or a 45. Most people with more than a passing musical interest will remember the first record they bought. I do not mean the ones that parents paid for or those purchased with a gift token. I specifically refer to the painful saving of pennies that culminates in having enough money to buy the first single that is truly coveted. That record, good or bad, will live on, even though you rarely get it right first time. For me it was a 78rpm of Connie Francis’ ‘Stupid Cupid’ b/w ‘Carolina Moon’. I treasured it until it broke in half a year or so later.

The Scottish novelist William McIlvanney wrote in ‘Disco Kids’ (from Surviving The Shipwreck) that ‘… nobody should be patronising about pop music. It is a cultural giant. Beside it, modern poetry looks like a seven-stone weakling.’ I support that view with three recommendations in book form: Complete Lyrics: Bob Dylan, Robert Hunter’s A Box Of Rain and Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems And Lyrics. I rest my case together with Mr McIlvanney.

Popular music is never going away, that is obvious, but as it ages, like a bottle of fine wine, its strength becomes greater. Live Aid, Farm Aid and Live 8 are merely the Monterey Pop and Woodstock generation ‘grown up’. These recent musical events now have a real humanitarian focus, even though the spirit and message is much the same. ‘Music Is Love’ sang David Crosby in 1970, and it still has relevance in today’s unequal world. The organizers have the creative power through popular music, unlike anything else, to grab the attention of the world and ultimately to get the ears and eyes of the leaders who attempt to run it. All that ‘we can change the world’ malarky that Graham Nash sang about in 1971 was not so trite after all. ‘Music Is Power’ as Richard Ashcroft sings assertively today.

While we slowly move towards a tolerant and multiracial society, we should have ever-changing and multi-faceted music. If we can progress towards banishing racism from the world then we can work to remove élitism in music. The long overdue mainstream acceptance of Latin, bhangra, reggae, rap and African pop, and their strong influence on the relatively simple structures of today’s western pop music, are major steps towards getting the balance right and just. And, most importantly, that Little Richard’s supreme ‘awop-bopaloobopawopbamboom’ sits comfortably side by side with them all as absolute and classless equals.

Colin Larkin
Revised March 2007

 

As there was never any mention of racial difference in the post, and Europe is full of many different people from all over the globe, I think you have mistaken an obvious bigoted Continent-istic ignorance for racism.

 

It's good to know bigotry and ignorance is alive and well in today's modern world.

 

Last edited: Aug 13, 2018

Look, people who have not been to the states

( as in living, and really living in the united states )

Can not possibly comprehend what you are saying

They do not have any point of reference and their national pride kicks in

because in truth we are all equal and they think you are trying to convince otherwise

If someone has not lived in the United States, they do not have a clue how music in TV Commercials can sound 10 times better than any pop hits in the European radio stations ~ starting from the mix quality, it is just decades ahead

Many of us do recognize there is a great difference in the quality even from the outside

But honestly this is like telling people what it s like on 4th of July who never got to experience it

You may explain it like " It is a Combination of Christmas, New Years and your all Favorite Holidays combined ~ and you may still not get close " But people still have to have a point of reference from which they can comprehend

I am in full agreement with what you say

I am just saying most people ( outside of united states ) do not know what they do not know

And your Post is True and Good
and it should not have been flagged by people

 

Last edited: Aug 18, 2018

God i love this post, i've read the most brilliant crap, but you do take the cake @Zealious

I had to stop reading when you mentioned americans being decades ahead in term of mixing and quality.

Decades, must have been a tough equation to reach this result. I'm glad to learn that these things can be measured.
Also glad to learn there is some top of the line knowledge and gear that only muricans must have access to to stay ahead of the competition (getting strong space program race vibes right now).

Thank you for dropping this gem upon us, I hope you don't take much of a risk divulging these secrets, in which case i'd be glad to welcome you in my humble french home if you get kicked out of fairyland. I reckon you might have to suffer through our barbaric pop music but we are simple and kind people, you'll feel welcome in our tribe.

 

You are so true, all of you post is, and we all know that U.S. citizens have never ever been or ever will be driven by national pride, as they are the only people on planet who could be objective (so to say by design) since they live in U.S.!




BTW.: I declared my last post to be the last, but this one was so great I couldn't help, I must applaud. Sigh. Sorry

 

Last edited: Aug 18, 2018

Wow!

 

Having been motivated by this thread I created a Pop band. Having lived in both Europe and the United States of America I have come to be educated to the idea through this thread that I now posess the knowledge and innate talent to have created a bridge to stardom for myself. All the ingredients were laid out for me like a bread recipe, all I did was put the info gleaned to a few short minutes with pen to paper and had my first hit. I chose to work with these girls in Korea because they were all willing to trade sex for stardom.

It was much fun working with those cute girls that the next stop in my never ending hit parade will be in Ukraine with my newest project. These woman are multi-talented, one of them can even sing!

 

Senator Alexander, who served as Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush and as president of the University of Tennessee, gave a speech on the Senate floor regarding the need for scholars at the university level to consider song lyrics as a genre worthy of literary criticism. A portion of his talk as reprinted from the Congressional Record of the second session of the 108th Congress is as follows: “When Johnny Cash died, The New York Times streamed the headline: ‘Poet of the Working Poor.’ Bob Dylan once said Hank Williams was America’s greatest poet. . . . If that is true, why don’t we have English professors somewhere criticizing their poetry?”

Some POP, Rock, Rap, ... lyrics are being coddled as fine pieces of scholarship there and they're clearing the way for future advancements. In which language other than English, the same has happened?

 

THIS THREAD WAS MADE BY THE HOUSE TROLL, PLEASE DON'T FEED !

 

Last edited: Aug 19, 2018

For crying out loud, when Bob Dylan's lyrics were critically analyzed he won a Noble Prize for literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

Bob Dylan's songs are rooted in the rich tradition of American folk music and are influenced by the poets of modernism and the beatnik movement. Early on, his lyrics incorporated social struggles and political protest. Love and religion are other important themes in his songs. His writing is often characterized by refined rhymes and it paints surprising, sometimes surreal imagery. Since his debut in 1962, he has repeatedly reinvented his songs and music. Bob Dylan has also written prose, including his memoirs 'Chronicles'.

Please just stop.

 

Short answer is, in every other European language that you -obviously- don't speak.
Let's start with the Greek with poetry combined with singing rhyming, 15 syllable Greek iambic poetry should officially be the first rap ever, that was also performed in front of a live audience and submitted to both public and scholar appraisal as well, for approximately 2.500-3000 years now, Latin did about the same for 2000 years now, and move to Italian, French, Spanish, German etc etc. All European cultures that succeeded one another, have typically built upon their predecessors.
Now excuse me, but who the heck are you Mr. Clueless coming here telling us what a senator said some yrs ago, like that is of any importance lol, when the history of European poetry and singing has roots so far back that they are pre-historic. And fyi the Greek invented/English adopted iambus and the Iambic Pentameter is "the most common meter in English poetry".
Friendly suggestion: For your own sake, you should not start conversations about poetry when you don't know one bit of -presumably- your own civilization roots.
I wonder what newcomers will say when they see your threads, it will probably be: "Ahhh they have a cave troll "

 

A related question came up in person not on a forum (AMAZING!!! lol)

"Can a great arrangement or a great musician make a crap composition or song sound good?"

- NO,NO,NO.

A bad song or composition whether Pop or anything no matter where it is written or who wrote it, is STILL a bad composition or song no matter how well it is played or arranged.
To say that one country cannot do something will never be anything but a personal opinion that is as far from the truth as the north pole is from the south pole.

 

Now try posting this video with European Invented Computer with European Invented Operating System with European Google and Youtube with an European Invented Internet

Then try watching it on a flat screen or a smartphone with a touch screen invented by a european

Oh wait, you cant bc all of that was already invented by people in the US

Stupid US people, can t even count ~ they just fly with their rocket ships and calculate things on their US invented iPhones

 

What Country Were The Following Invented In >

Rock N Roll,
Jazz,
Hip Hop,
Space Rockets,
Computers ( Apple & Microsoft ),
Telephone,
Microphone,
Vinyl / Turntables,
( internet ) WiFi,
SoundSystems & Speakers ?

You don’t want to compete with that

 

Last edited: Aug 19, 2018

Are you sure?
15 best British tech inventions ever
https://www.techradar.com/au/news/world-of-tech/15-best-british-tech-inventions-ever-548346

The industrial revolution
Every school kid knows that it was the British that kick-started the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th Century, without which few of the breakthroughs above would have been possible. The Industrial Revolution effectively turned manufacturing from a labour-intensive process carried out by skilled artisans to a machine-centred process driven by the power of steam. The British, of course, invented the steam engine too.

The television
The Idiot's Lantern is actually a British invention, dreamed up by Scotsman John Logie Baird in February 1924. The first public demonstration of his semi-mechanical televisor was held at Selfridges a year later, but it wasn't until 1928 that Baird showed off a proper working version. The same year, Baird also began experimenting with colour TV and in 1932 made the first TV broadcast between London and Glasgow.

The telephone
Taking existing telegraph tech as his cue, Brit Alexander Graham Bell used his experience working with mute children to come up with the harmonic telegraph - a system that could transmit different tones across wire using multiple reeds. His 'germ of a great invention' was boosted with help from engineer Thomas A. Watson, the pair finally patenting their ideas in the US and the UK in 1875. Bell's telephone patent beat that of American Elisha Gray, whose own device worked on similar principles.

The World Wide Web
Where would we be without Tim Berners-Lee? The Oxford University graduate is credited with coming up with the notion of the World Wide Web - "a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information". It's largely thanks to Tim that we have protocols like http:// and, of course, all that wonderfully useful content from Facebook to dodgy porn. It should be obvious, of course, that Tim didn't invent the actual internet, which has been variously attributed to Vincent Cerf and, erm, Al Gore.

Stereo
So your iPod has two earpieces you say? Well here's why. British scientist and engineering pioneer Alan Blumenlein invented stereo, because he thought the monophonic music of his day lacked realism, patenting the idea in 1933. A lack of interest from his employer EMI forced to him to work on other ideas, which included pioneering work on HDTV broadcasting (1953). Blumenlein also played a major role of in the development of radar during WWII - ironic given his part-German ancestry.

The jet engine
There's nothing like a good war to stoke the fires of invention and WWII was brilliant at it. Alongside the bouncing bombs, ballistic missiles and corner shot rifles, the jet engine stands tall. Developed independently (for obvious reasons) by both the British and the Germans, it was arguably Coventry-born Frank Whittle who pioneered the idea first - patenting a practical turbojet in 1930. However it was German Hans von Ohain who got the first jet engine working in 1935, with Whittle following two years later. While both Britain and Germany succeeded in putting jets in test aircraft in the early years of the WWII, it wasn't until 1944 that they first entered production - the Germans with the Messerschmitt Me262 and the British with the Gloucester Meteor.

The computer
We know what you're thinking: it has to be American, surely? In fact the idea for the first programmable machine was dreamed up in 1812 by London-born boffin Charles Babbage, who dedicated his life to actually building the thing. Thanks to a unfortunate series of personal and financial problems, Babbage never got around to completing his Difference Engine - a feat finally accomplished in 1991, 120 years after his death. The British are also credited with the invention of Colossus, the first electronic mechanical computer. It saw duty at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes where it helped to crack secret messages sent on Lorenz coding machines used by Nazi high command during WWII.

The iPod
Facing a lawsuit over the origins of the iPod, iTunes and QuickTime in 2006, Apple turned to British inventor Kane Kramer for part of its defence. Kramer, it turns out, had actually come up with the idea for a portable digital music player - dubbed the IXI - in 1979, and even managed to patent it. Unfortunately Kramer was unable to find funding for his idea, and his patent lapsed in 1988. Commenting on Apple's iPod and the end of the court case, Kramer told the Daily Mail: "I can't even bring myself to buy an iPod... Apple did give me one but it broke down after eight months."

The lightbulb
The invention of the lightbulb is normally credited to US inventor Thomas Alva Edison, who patented his discovery in 1879. The problem is he was beaten by a year by British whizz Joseph Swann, who even came up with the idea of a carbon filament bulb some 10 years previously. Swann successfully sued Edison over patent infringement in a British Court; and then in 1883 Edison was stripped of his US patent, because his work was based on that of the prior art of inventor William Sawyer.

Radar
Credited with helping to end The Blitz in 1941, Radar was developed by Scotsman Robert Watson-Watt, who proposed that enemy aircraft could be detected by radio waves. The first successful radar test took place near Daventry in 1935 and later that year Watson-Watt was awarded a patent for his discovery. By 1940, 19 Radio Direction Finder (RDF) stations were in place across the UK, with data fed back to a central mapping room - another Watson-Watt idea. This enabled the RAF to scramble fighters in response to incoming enemy planes at the Battle of Britain.

The electric motor
You can find electric motors in everything from vacuum cleaners (another British invention) to eco-friendly cars these days, but they owe it all to Michael Faraday, who first came up with the idea in 1821. It was Faraday who first proved the principle of electromagnetism by dipping a magnet into a pool of mercury and then feeding it with electrical current, something that led to electromagnetic rotation motors. Capitalising on his ideas, inventors from Hungary to the US then came up with a variety of practical versions, including Nikola Tesla, who first came up with the AC motor in 1888; and Brit William Sturgeon who invented a DC power plant in 1832. None of these would have been possible if it hadn't been for Faraday. Faraday also pioneered several other inventions including the electric dynamo.

The tank
It was British writer H.G. Wells who heralded the invention of the tank, with his story The Land Ironclads, published in 1903: "It might have been from eighty to a hundred feet long... its vertical side was ten feet high or so, smooth for that height, and then with a complex patterning under the eaves of its flattish turtle cover. This patterning was a close interlacing of port-holes, rifle barrels, and telescope tubes... indistinguishable one from the other." The first real tanks appeared on the Somme in 1916 - monsters invented by the Royal Navy at Sir Winston Churchill's behest - and which took their inspiration from the caterpillar tractors then being used by the US.

Photography
The French would have you believe that they invented photography, thank to a certain Louis Daguerre (1834). However British snappers actually predate him with one, Thomas Wedgewood, creating pictures of insect wings using silver nitrate on leather in 1802. Daguerre was also in competition with William Henry Fox Talbot - the man who invented the Calotype, a negative/positive development process that became the basis for modern photography.

The train
"In Italy no-one grows up wanting to be a train driver," says car maker Fiat. Well that's only because the Italians didn't invent it. Arguably as British as tea, cricket and binge drinking, the first steam trains appeared in the early 19th Century, but it wasn't until George Stephenson's Rocket arrived in 1829 that the age of the train truly arrived. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary, the Rocket took various experimental pieces of train technology - the multi-tube boiler, the blast pipe and angled cylinders - and stuck them in a design that really worked. The Rocket won its place in British history by becoming the only steam train to complete a 50-mile round trip as part of the Rainhill trials. The Rocket was also responsible for killing Liverpool MP William Huskisson, who was struck by it at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830.

The cat's eye
This British invention was dreamed up by Halifax resident Percy Shaw in 1933 as a way to mark out lanes and pavements to traffic travelling at night. The original cat's eye works by holding a pair of glass 'eyes' in a white rubber housing that's laid into the fabric of road - the eyes reflecting light coming from a car's headlamps back at the driver so he can see the road ahead. The original cat's eye is famously robust, the housing dipping down into the road when a car runs over it. A built-in rubber wiper then cleans the glass eyes, help them to shine on into the night.