Daily Telegraph, April 13, 2012
You only had to see the audience, predominantly female, swaying and singing together in their massed legions at Adele’s televised Royal Albert Hall concert last week, to know where the big money is in young British pop music these days. It’s in the bank accounts of the top half dozen girl singers in the country.
And why? Because more than at any time in the history of popular music the various factors which govern pop fame, and therefore wealth, are coming together to create glamorous, seemingly strong female stars with whom a generation nor two of confident, independent girls and young women can identify.
When Adele sings Rolling In The Deep, yet another song of hers about a relationship that went wrong, she’s touching a worldwide nerve – not the traditional one of the pleading, girl supplicant, but that of the tough, young survivor who’s knocked around a bit, and, sadder but wiser, knows the score.
An awful lot of girls recognise that feeling, and there’s Adele, up there on stage and screen, the friend, who, unlike a fella, won’t let them down.
Adele has, of course, a fantastic voice, which explains why, at 23, she’s already worth around twenty million pounds – making her far and away a wealthier lady than the five runners up in the latest Sunday Times Rich List of music stars under thirty.
But, with Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis and Katie Melua each sitting on around twelve million, and with eleven of the top fifteen young earners in music being women, something as well as music must be happening.
A large part of that something, it seems to me, is television. Yes, I know that Adele, Jessie J and Leona Lewis are all alumnae of the BRIT School in Croydon that educates and brings on young artists. So, full marks to that establishment in spotting the talent and then shaping it.
But these days, more than at any other time, new talent has to be seen on television to take off – and it was on those Saturday evening Simon Cowell-type television shows, with, I suspect, their largely female viewers, that we all first got to know Jessie J and Leona Lewis; and where Cheryl Cole, formerly of Girls Aloud, continues to financially flourish.
Once upon a time people listened to music with their ears pressed to the radio or record player. Now, in this post-MTV age of the image, it would appear they listen equally with their eyes, and it can’t escape anyone’s notice that Jessie J, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and Duffy are all lookers, packaged for their glamour as well as their singing.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Elvis, Cliff Richard and Paul McCartney weren’t exactly ugly, but back in pre-history girl pop fans saw male rock stars in terms of fantasy boy friends. Young Western women’s attitudes to life and its possibilities, have happily changed massively since then.
The Spice Girls tapped into this fifteen years ago with what they called “girl power”. But the Spice Girls were dressing up as, and behaving like, little girls who were pretending to be big girls. Today’s generation of performers suggest a sexual maturity, and perhaps a certain world weariness and self knowledge, that the Spice Girls never showed.
But, you may be wondering, what’s happened to all the young male stars who used to command such devotion? Where are the Mick Jaggers and David Bowies of today? The truth is, in an industry that is endlessly self replicating, it’s more difficult for them than at any time.
After the Sixties, male guitar groups, like gangs of outlaws, were dominant for decades, and you had thousands upon thousands of bands fighting it out with each another – here and in America, and nothing like so many girl singers.
Eventually solo singers like James Blunt emerged and for the next few years the charts were filled with blokes with distinctive voices, right up to Craig David and Paulo Nutini, who, though today’s top male earners, are relative paupers worth only eight million apiece.
But the impetus in the modern world was with the girls. Along came Beyonce in America, and Amy Winehouse and Adele in the UK, music fashions changed, and the scramble was on in the record business to find more retro-inspired female solo acts, in the tradition of Dusty Springfield. You only have to turn on television to see how successful that formula has been.
Will it continue? Will our musical boys continue to be eclipsed and pushed out of the spotlight by these talented young women, having to content themselves in the back room by being merely producers and co-writers for stars like Adele?
It depends. The locomotive of a new male sensation could change a lot. But for the time being the demographics are with the girls. They’ve changed. Their audience has changed. And it’s their time.
