It was the Grammys that revealed the problem. With just one meagre British winner in more than 80 categories and with no new UK pop acts breaking into the American chart, it’s obvious that British pop has faded as an influence on the global music stage.
So perhaps this explains the feeding frenzy around The Last Dinner Party, a new indie rock group who met as students at freshers’ week in London back in 2020. In the past few months these five young women have seen their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, crash into the charts at No 1 and be heralded as “biblical, ravenous, damned and fantastical” by talent-starved UK critics.
There’s a lot riding on their Brits debut appearance as winners of the Rising Star Award this Saturday night on ITV at 8.30pm. Though not quite the Super Bowl half-time slot, an appearance on the Brits remains a prestige TV moment since last year’s show pulled in four million viewers and an impressive 53 per cent of 16 to 34-year-old viewers across the UK.
But peer behind the gushing hyperbole of the Brit Awards and there are complications with this award. It’s revealing that none of the previous four winners — Flo, Holly Humberstone, Griff and Celeste — have become global stars despite being selected by a panel of industry experts. UK pop no longer captivates young audiences around the world, which is surprising considering the heavyweight Brits — Sir Lucian Grainge (UMG) and Rob Stringer (Sony) — who run the most powerful music labels in the world. One certain winner at the Brit Awards however will be Rachel Keen, better known as Raye. This 26-year-old songwriter and producer from south London has sung beautifully on other people’s records for many years despite being endlessly messed about by her label in London. It’s not yet been explained why Polydor UK refused to release Raye’s debut album but what has happened since tells its own story. Only by dumping her hapless label has Raye racked up a global hit with Escapism with her new distributor and now seven Brit nominations have followed for her LP My 21st Century Blues.
Raye has what a Hollywood producer would call true grit. But her treatment throws up doubt as to whether the men who run the British music industry have what it takes to create a genuine new pop superstar.
It took an age for Warner Music to make Dua Lipa a household name. After signing her as an unknown in 2014, the label had waited patiently as this Sylvia Young Theatre School graduate learned how to write songs, demoed endless tracks with her management until the debut LP was released in 2017 to grumbles from business affairs that it had taken too long. More questions were raised when Lipa’s fifth single Blow Your Mind only peaked at No 30 and so when her sixth single, a duet with American R&B star Miguel, only reached No 86 in the UK charts, things looked grim. Too much money had been spent and there was little international traction. The plan had failed.
But that all changed when the final throw of the dice took Lipa’s seventh single New Rules to No 1 in the UK back in the summer of 2017; this song finally kicked her American career into gear and everything has flowed wonderfully since. This story demonstrates the forces at play. Major labels can get what they want but only if they’re prepared to chuck the kitchen sink at it.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the years of misery that it can take to break any new act in today’s global music market: while this gamble on The Last Dinner Party shows a commendable investment in a young band, a No 1 album with opening week of UK sales of 33,000 is a modest result for a label that needs to shift billions of streams for a major label to see the profits they want. Ed Sheeran’s first LP + was released in 2011 with first week sales of 102,000 before going on to sell 900,000 units within 12 months, while Adele’s first LP 19 clocked up first week sales of 73,000 before her Grammy nominations and strings of hit singles propelled her to worldwide fame.
Perhaps the appearance of The Last Dinner Party at the Brits will be the first flickering signs of something bigger and bolder, the arrival of a new generation of British pop groups with the wit and guile to inject originality and youth into an increasingly risk-averse industry.
Because if the well-oiled machinery of the Island Records team in London and the beautiful post-gothic din of The Last Dinner Party can’t halt the slow decline of British pop on the global stage, then what other choices do we have?
