Britain has about 0.8% of the world’s population and produces a wholly disproportionate share of its popular music. It is one of only a handful of countries that exports more music than it imports, and it has done so continuously for sixty years.
The eras
The 1960s
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones led what America called the British Invasion, and the pattern was set early: British musicians took American blues and rock and roll, reinterpreted them, and sold them back. The Who, the Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd followed.
The 1970s
Glam, prog and heavy metal — Bowie, Elton John, Queen, Black Sabbath — and then punk, which arrived in 1976 and demolished everything preceding it. The Sex Pistols and the Clash were as much a social event as a musical one, and punk’s insistence that anyone could form a band reshaped British music permanently.
The 1980s
New wave, synth-pop and the Second British Invasion via MTV: Depeche Mode, the Human League, Culture Club, Duran Duran, the Smiths, New Order. Live Aid in 1985, organised by Bob Geldof at Wembley, was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people.
The 1990s
Rave and acid house transformed British youth culture from the late 1980s, prompting the Criminal Justice Act 1994 with its notorious clause defining rave music by reference to “repetitive beats”. Then Britpop — Oasis against Blur, a chart battle covered on the evening news — and the Spice Girls, who sold more records worldwide than either.
Since 2000
Grime emerged from east London in the early 2000s — Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and later Stormzy and Skepta — as a genuinely native British form rather than an adaptation of an American one, built on UK garage and pirate radio. It is arguably the most significant British musical development since punk.
Alongside it: Amy Winehouse, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Dua Lipa and Little Simz.
Why Britain
Several things compound. Art schools produced an extraordinary number of musicians — Lennon, Richards, Townshend, Bowie, Ferry and Jarvis Cocker all attended one. The BBC, and Radio 1 in particular, gave new music national exposure without commercial pressure, and John Peel’s late-night show broke more artists than any other programme in the world.
Pirate radio, small venues, a dense population and a music press that took pop seriously all played their part. The weekly NME and Melody Maker treated bands as subjects for argument rather than promotion.
The live scene now
Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Latitude, Download and dozens more fill the summer. The concern is at the other end: grassroots venues have been closing at a serious rate, squeezed by rents, noise complaints from new housing, and costs — and every major British act started in one.