The problem with modern rock

Over the New Year Period I found myself watching the Isle of Wight Festival Highlights on E4. Maybe I’m getting old, but they just don’t make bands like they used to. Okay, so there were the Foo Fighters (Grohl continuing to be a’face for hire’ on our screens), and Primal Scream’s Frontman Bobby Gillespie certainly has form from his Jesus and Mary Chain days, there was Lou Reed and Procul Harum, but otherwise it was all off-the-peg pop.

The Festival still holds the World Record for the largest festival from 1970, where 600,000 attended. In 1970 you had The Who performing Tommy in its entirity, Free, Hendrix, Hawkwind, Miles Davis (!), Kris Kristofferson, Ralph McTell, Pentangle, Dylan, The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Emerson Lake & Palmer and The Moody Blues. Today you get Richard Ashcroft and Chris Martin.

Chris Martin pretty much embodies what’s wrong with modern music for me. It was classical composer Richard Wagner who both embodied and championed the ‘Romantic Hero’ – an artist must struggle for recognition. With Dylan, the Stones and any number of 70’s icons you know they’ve worked and struggled. Some are self-induced, drug and drink addictions for example, but you know they’ve done a real job at some point in their lives, and worked hard to move beyond it, mixed in with a bit of luck. Somehow, just somehow, I can’t help thinking Martin, with his Sherborne Schooling complimented by his First in Ancient World Studies from UCL, didn’t have to endure that. While we may smile warmly that after everything in his life it was a coconut tree that nearly finished Keith Richards off, it’s hard to feel anything for Martin, whose stage-routine is more like a Yoga video and whose accolades include being voted one of the ‘sexiest vegitarians’ by PETA.

So that’s it then, the rockstar is finished. It appears The Buggles were wrong, it wasn’t video that killed the radio star, it was redbrick university educations that killed the rockstar to some extent. Sure we’ve got Pete Doherty, but in the 70’s stars managed to work whilst in that state rather than looking like a startled puppy. Even music industry figures are watered down – Louis Walsh is just a mild-mannered Sir Jimmy Savile, except whereas Savile brought us The Stones and Manfred Mann, Walsh has unleashed Girls Aloud and Westlife. Whilst I’m sure Martin will continue to wow women ‘rock-pop’ fans and men in closets, where’s the working-class underdog?