British rock music

At the same time, TV shows such as Six-Five Special and Oh Boy!, both produced by Jack Good, promoted the careers of British rock and rollers like Marty Wilde and Adam Faith.

The first American rock and roll artist to hit British stages and appear on television was Charlie Gracie, quickly followed by Gene Vincent in December 1959, soon joined on tour by his friend Eddie Cochran.

In late 1950s Britain 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.

Their popular success in Britain in the early 1960s was matched by their new and highly influential emphases on their own song writing, and on technical production values, some of which were shared by other British beat groups.

On 7 February 1964, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ran a story about the Beatles' United States arrival in which the correspondent said "The British Invasion this time goes by the code name Beatlemania".

[16] Seventy five per cent of Americans watching television that night viewed their appearance thus "launching"[17] the invasion with a massive wave of chart success that would continue until the Beatles broke up in 1970.

[17][18] 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 in the US.

[1] The growth of the British music industry itself, and its increasingly prominent global role in the forefront of changing popular culture, also enabled it to discover and first establish the success of new rock artists from elsewhere in the world, notably Jimi Hendrix and, in the early 1970s, Bob Marley.

[20] Freakbeat is a loosely defined[21] subgenre of rock and roll music developed mainly by harder-driving British groups, often those with a mod following, during the Swinging London period of the mid-to late 1960s.

[25] AllMusic writes that "freakbeat" is loosely defined, but generally describes the more obscure but hard-edged artists of the British Invasion era such as the Creation, the Pretty Things or Denny Laine's early solo work.

[28] Shock rock pioneer Arthur Brown performed his 1968 hit song "Fire" wearing black and white makeup (corpse paint) and a burning headpiece.

The term was applied to the music of bands such as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Soft Machine, Electric Light Orchestra, Procol Harum, Hawkwind, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

[43] 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.

[48] Although NWOBHM inspired many new bands, in the late 1980s much of the creative impetus in the genre shifted towards America and continental Europe (particularly Germany and Scandinavia), which produced most of the major new subgenres of metal, which were then taken up by British acts.

Grindcore, or simply grind, was a hybrid of death metal and hardcore punk, characterized by heavily distorted, down-tuned guitars, high speed tempo, blast beats, songs often lasting no more than two minutes (some are seconds long), and vocals which consist of growls and high-pitched screams.

[51] The term "retro-metal" has been applied to such bands as The Darkness, whose mix of glam rock and heavy riffs earned them a string of singles hits and a quintuple platinum album with One Way Ticket to Hell... and Back (2005), which reached number 11 in the UK charts.

This was taken up in Britain by bands also influenced by the pub rock scene, like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned, particularly in London, who became the vanguard of a new musical and cultural movement, blending simple aggressive sounds and lyrics with clothing styles and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies.

Examples of post-punk outfits in Britain included The Smiths, Orange Juice, The Psychedelic Furs, Television Personalities, The Fall, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Lords of the New Church, Joy Division, Killing Joke, Echo & the Bunnymen, Gang of Four, The Cure, Bauhaus, Magazine, Wire, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Tubeway Army.

Others were soon to follow, including Tubeway Army, a little known outfit from West London, who dropped their punk rock image and jumped on the band wagon, topping the UK charts in the summer of 1979 with the single "Are Friends Electric?".

This prompted the singer, Gary Numan to go solo and in the same year he release the Kraftwerk inspired album, The Pleasure Principle and again topped the charts for the second time with the single "Cars".

[71] Commentators in the mainstream media credited MTV and the British acts with bringing colour and energy back to pop music while rock journalists were generally hostile to the phenomenon because they felt it represented image over content.

Ian Glasper describes the group as "pissed-off hateful noise with its roots somewhere between early Discharge and Disorder, with [vocalists] Dean [Jones] and Phil [Vane] pushing their trademark vocal extremity to its absolute limit.

The Jesus and Mary Chain wrapped their pop melodies in walls of guitar noise, while New Order emerged from the demise of post-punk band Joy Division and experimented with techno and house music, forging the alternative dance style.

Notable early gothic rock bands include Bauhaus (whose "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is often cited as the first goth record), Siouxsie and the Banshees (who may have coined the term), The Cure, The Sisters of Mercy, and Fields of the Nephilim.

[96] Gothic rock gave rise to a broader goth subculture that included clubs, various fashion trends and numerous publications that grew in popularity in the 1980s, gaining notoriety by being associated with several moral panics over suicide and Satanism.

[97] The independent rock scene that had developed in Manchester in the second half of the 1980s, based in The Haçienda nightclub and Factory Records and dubbed Madchester, came to national prominence at the end of the decade, with the Happy Mondays, the Inspiral Carpets, and Stone Roses charting late in 1989.

[98] The period of dominance was relatively short lived with The Stone Roses beginning to retreat from public performance while engaged in contractual disputes, the Happy Mondays having difficulty in producing a second album and Factory Records going bankrupt in 1992.

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, Ride, Chapterhouse, Curve and Levitation.

Like modern American alternative rock, many British indie bands such as Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines and Bloc Party drew influences from post-punk groups such as Joy Division, Wire, and Gang of Four.

Bands in this scene often incorporated elements of grime, hip hop and metal into their sounds and was based around venues such as the Camden Underworld, New Cross Inn and the Dome in Tufnell Park.