British pop music
Like American pop music it has a focus on commercial recording, often orientated towards a youth market, as well as that of the Singles Chart usually through the medium of relatively short and simple love songs.
In the first full year of the charts in 1953 major artists were Perry Como, Guy Mitchell and Frankie Laine largely with orchestrated sentimental ballads, beside novelty records like "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?"
A notable British musical genre of the mid-1950s was skiffle, which was developed primarily by jazz musicians copying American folk and country blues songs such as those of Lead Belly in a deliberately rough and lively style emulating jug bands.
The success of the skiffle craze, and the lack of a need for expensive instruments or high levels of musicianship, encouraged many working class British males to start their own groups.
[3] Sales of guitars grew rapidly and other musicians were able to perform on improvised bass and percussion in venues such as church halls and cafes, without having to aspire to musical perfection or virtuosity.
[4] In the late 1950s, a flourishing culture of groups began to emerge, often out of the declining skiffle scene, in major urban centres in the UK like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London.
[6] After the national success of the Beatles in Britain from 1962, a number of Liverpool performers were able to follow them into the singles charts, including Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Searchers, and Cilla Black.
[7] The British Invasion of America led by the Beatles from their arrival in February 1964 saw them, uniquely, hold the top 5 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart simultaneously.
[8][9] During the next two years, Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Herman’s Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Troggs, and Donovan would have one or more number one singles.
[11] Although some bands occupied territory that crossed the emerging rock/pop divide and were able to produce successes in both camps, including the Beatles and Rolling Stones, the British pop genre in the late 1960s would be dominated by individual singers like Sandie Shaw.
[13] British soul and disco enjoyed mainstream popularity during this era, with artists such as the Bee Gees, Biddu, Carl Douglas, Tina Charles, and Jimmy James.
[27] The flamboyant lyrics, costumes, and visual styles of glam performers were a campy playing with categories of sexuality in a theatrical blend of nostalgic references to science fiction and old movies, all over a guitar-driven hard rock sound.
[28] Pioneers of the genre included Marc Bolan with his band T. Rex and Mott the Hoople,[29] while 1960s acts like Shane Fenton and The N'Betweens joined the scene, re-branding themselves as Alvin Stardust and Slade respectively.
[37] Madness managed to sustain a career that could still chart into the second half of the 1980s, but the 2-Tone movement faded early in the decade, and would have a longer-term impact through American bands of the third wave of ska.
[40] Emerging originally in London nightclubs including Billy's and The Blitz Club towards the end of the 1970s and influenced by David Bowie and Roxy Music, it further developed glam rock fashions, gaining its name from the frilly fop shirts of early Romanticism.
[41] Key figures of the New Romantic scene included Boy George, Steve Strange, Marilyn and Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery, all of whom would go on to have music careers over the next two decades in bands like Culture Club, Visage and Minty.
[43] In this period Stock Aitken Waterman would team up with Divine to produce "You Think You're a Man" (written by Modern Romance's Geoff Deane), a Hi-NRG pop record which would be their first UK Top 75 chart hit.
[45] Hi-NRG also entered the mainstream with hits in the UK singles chart, such as Hazell Dean's "Searchin' (I Gotta Find a Man)" and Evelyn Thomas's "High Energy".
New Romantic music often made extensive use of synthesizers, merging into synthpop, which followed European pioneers like Kraftwerk, Jean Michel Jarre, and Tangerine Dream.
", prompting their singer, Gary Numan to go solo and release the album, The Pleasure Principle from which he gained a number one in the single charts with "Cars", and which much to popularise the synthpop sound.
Around the start of the decade, experimental, alternative and avant-garde acts like New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, The Human League, Depeche Mode and Soft Cell would emerge from grim, industrial parts of high-rise Britain.
[48][49][50][51] Even though they were all alternative electronic acts on independent labels (Factory, Fast, Mute and Some Bizzare) in time they would all end up in the pages of Smash Hits as synthpop became playlisted on BBC Radio 1 and on various children's TV shows like the Wide Awake Club.
It would be the success of CD-friendly acts like Phil Collins and Dire Straits that would prompt Mark Ellen and David Hepworth to launch Q magazine in 1986, a publication that was to last for 34 years.
Other songs influenced by soul included Culture Club's "Church of the Poison Mind" (1983), The Style Council's "Speak Like a Child" (1983), Eurythmics' "Missionary Man" (1986), and Steve Winwood's "Roll With It" (1998).
Artists, including Rick Astley and Australian actors from teatime soap opera Neighbours (such as Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan), dominated British pop music and the charts in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[96] A louder, more aggressive strain of dream pop came to be known as shoegazing; key bands of this style were Lush, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse, Curve and Levitation.
[121] While the stars of Britpop could be found around the Good Mixer pub in Camden,[123][124][125][126][127] another London scene was developing around Madame Jojo's cabaret club in Soho and kitsch easy listening music.
[136][137][138] After the decline of Britpop, British indie was kept alive by "post pop" bands including Radiohead, Feeder, Stereophonics and Travis, who largely abandoned the elements of national and retro-60s culture.
[143] In the early 21st century, ITV talent shows such as The X Factor discovered artists including Cher Lloyd, Will Young and Leona Lewis, all who went on to have number one hits either in the UK or abroad.
Where once country music would be seen either as 'naff' or 'niche'[167] in the UK, usually only found in a specialist music slots such as Bob Harris' The Country Show on BBC Radio 2, British acts including the Shires[168] and Ward Thomas[169] achieved a number of top 10 albums in the main UK chart after being playlisted on daytime radio, with Ward Thomas topping the chart in 2016 with their album Cartwheels.
