Perhaps the confessional mode will be our undoing. We’ve spent the last few years besieged on all sides by down-to-earth lyrics from Swift proteges like Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo. We hear of their embarrassments, their failures in love and their money troubles, although some are stretching the latter. Twenty-two-year-old singer Bea has an Epic Records contract, a million monthly listeners and recently opened for Katy Perry. In her most popular song, “Rich”, she calls herself a “cheap-ass bitch”. “London price can suck my tits,” she sings, with her instrumentation and intonation plucked from Lorde’s “Royals”. “Sorry, how much for a fancy spritz?”
It is difficult to hear “Rich” as anything but fiction, for Bea is posh. This is not simply a matter of cash reserves, or of private schooling (the Dragon School, Oxford). This is poshness proper, the sort that gets you among the landed gentry and into Ascot and Tatler. Bea’s mother and father made their names as part of a grand conspiracy to spread poshness around the country: they are, respectively, the founders of the White Company and British menswear brand Charles Tyrwhitt.
The conspiracy is working elsewhere. Retro-leaning pop singer Sienna Spiro only started releasing music in 2024, and last month’s debut album Visitor peaked at number two in the UK charts. This is the sort of rise that tends to prompt “industry plant” accusations. High-society cynics will roll their eyes: Spiro attended the Sloane Square branch of London’s exclusive Francis Holland School and her father was once interviewed by luxury magazine the Robb Report. “English jeweller Glenn Spiro on hanging with Jay-Z, his vintage Jaguar, and why he doesn’t set his Rolexes,” read the headline. Her mother once dated the former Prince Andrew. Now she occupies a well connected “smart set”; a Getty search surfaces plenty of images of charity galas and luncheons.
Browsing through Spotify sometimes feels like reading the Sloane Ranger Handbook.
The wildly popular producer and DJ Fred Again attended the £64,000-per-year boarding school Marlborough College and comes from landed gentry; the “early life” section of his Wikipedia page lists a Waughish line of earls, dukes, viscounts and barons. Singer-songwriter-guitarist Paris Paloma – of TikTok feminist anthem “Labour” – went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. The rock musician Yungblud went to private Ackworth School in Yorkshire. Abigail Morris, frontwoman of the Last Dinner Party, attended Bedales; acclaimed indie artist Arlo Parks went to Latymer Upper School. TikTok sensation Mimi Webb went to private Kent College in Canterbury. Rising singer-songwriter Dylan, who has opened for Ed Sheeran, attended Stowe and is the granddaughter of a baron.
There are still working-class pop stars, and they are often our most successful: Olivia Dean has just broken a chart record without coming from any aristocracy, and Adele, Raye and Rachel Chinouriri are our more down-to-earth exports. But all these singers went to the Brit School, the UK’s only state-funded vocational school for the performing arts. Our general situation is a total reversal of the one in the 1960s. Britain’s normal cultural figures now form an exclusive coterie, localised to one area of London, while the posh artists are allowed to disperse themselves around the country.
If you are anything less than mega-posh, you’d better also be exceptionally talented. Gone are the days when you could be both poor and a bit crap, or poor and a late bloomer: the Brit School is now the only avenue for success, and it selects at 14 and 16. The chosen few still have to pull off a series of Herculean labours to get noticed. Olivia Dean had been releasing music for eight years before she won Best New Artist at the Grammys this February. Raye spent seven years in an ill-advised contract with Polydor, which couldn’t see a market for her debut album and offered her own demos to labelmates instead.
It is difficult to imagine the same situation happening to someone of means. With old-money poshness, you get “ins” – record executives and festival bookers will be on your side. Well-connected members of the press will vouch for you, perhaps proving that there is a market for your music after all. If you’re rich enough then you can create a fanbase for yourself, paying for equipment, producers, studio time and photoshoots. You can also fail upwards, trying new artistic directions, trying again if your songs don’t go viral and playing to small venues with little compensation. Only the wealthy can survive on tiny streaming payouts and it’s also only the wealthy who can bet on the success of their own live shows. Venue bookings, transport, catering and marketing are expensive, and these costs have gone up since the Covid pandemic. If you don’t have a major-label deal, the initial outlay of a small tour could put you in personal debt.
Part of this is our own fault. The cultural mechanisms that created Britpop and Merseybeat have disappeared; we’re too fixated on algorithmic streaming services to worry about local talent. There is no grand curatorial figure like John Peel, whose opinion could make or break a career. Our old TV talent shows were mean, misogynistic and manipulative, but they also brought us plenty of acts we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Young people don’t watch TV anymore, so there is no X Factor, and thus no new One Direction or Little Mix commanding national attention. The BBC’s Introducing brand could be great, but it’s hardly at the centre of our cultural conversation.
Last week, Private Eye reported that Introducing’s collaborations with Reading and Leeds festivals have been canned; its dedicated festival slots will now contain music from a “more diverse range of up-and-coming artists” including Liam Gallagher’s son and Dave Grohl’s daughter. Karl Marx might have called this a sonic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Nobody ever asked for these musicians to go big; plenty have asked for the opposite. They aren’t necessarily the most talented, or the most resonant or the most original. Yet they’re on stage, on radios and in the charts in perpetuum, because our cultural machine can’t come up with anything else. We can’t even know what we’ve lost.
[Further reading: Is Kim Gordon still a Kool Thing?]
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Subscribe here to commentthe thought that pop/rock music peaked in the late sixties/early seventies of the last century is hard for us to swallow. Most prog. musicians of the time were connected to some Art College somewhere in the UK and the venues and free festivals were maybe shabby….but still available….since then algorithms and marketing have killed off most of the cultural enrichment that we once had…..it seems inevitable that capitalism will destroy authenticity….it is just what it does….
Okay, but I don’t think anyone thought of prog rock as working-class. It was pretentious and out of touch from the start, which made it easy for punk to sweep it aside. (Although punk obviously had a lot of posh people cosplaying amongst its leaders.) Perhaps the closest we’ve come to a working-class movement is Madchester (which had no interest in proving it).
Innit though!
I’ve been a fan of PC Music since I first heard Hey QT all those years ago. But I’ve always been aware that most of the people involved are posh enough to run me down with a horse carriage, and that’s always felt a little sad. How many A G Cooks are toiling away in warehouses, unheard, because their musical education was one overworked teacher who also had to do drama, and spend their free periods of the day covering for “more important” subjects? Or they got the education, but no one bothered to tell them all they could do with it?
While I’m generally glad to have a revamped Labour government, Burnham’s plan for education does occasionally sound like it’s about directing teenagers out of the school gates and into the nearest “fulfilment centre”. Meaning the current cultural status quo probably isn’t going away for a long while. In the meant, hopefully they’ll do everyone a favour and not release any more songs where they are cluelessly inhabiting the role of the woman from “Common People”.
Middle class art college prog rock isn’t posh though and not nepo baby status is it? The trend towards careers in performing arts started awhile ago hence the Old Etonian actor cluster in Hollywood buttressed by a very fine drama department at that far sighted school.Reading the runes is what helps the British elite stay on top and too much competition for the best universities and professions means fewer openings due to plebs like me and you (or the 93% attending state schools) entering their preserves.With money from online commerce or other new sources of wealth previously posh landed parents can indulge at least one child with a “creative” career.It ain’t rock ‘n roll but they like it,like it (repeat)..
It’s not just the pop stars who have become posher, or at least more educated, it’s musicians in general I think. I have friends who are session musicians and have played on early records by Lily Allen, Corrine Bailey Rae and Craig David records back in the day among others and they are all working class mancs, self taught. I was talking to a younger bloke who is one of the new generation of session players and by way of contrast he said that he doesn’t know anyone of his age and profession who doesn’t have a degree in music, studio tech or similar. It’s Blairs vision of the swotocracy come to life in the strangest of places. I do wonder if this contributes to the relative homogeny if modern pop music.
The wealthy and connected already have a huge role in theatre and cinema and…television including the BBC. Also , the art world as gallerists .