Welcome Back to the Middle of the Road

There seems to be a real movement in British pop music over the last couple of years, what I'd class as a return to "classic songwriting." You know the kind - stuff with tunes. Stuff you can sing along to. Much as I like most other forms of music, sometimes you just can't beat a good old pop tune running around your head and refusing to let go. Bands like The Darkness returning to 80s hair metal helped, but there's a number of really strong pure pop acts that are breaking onto the scene now - people like The Magic Numbers, The Pipettes, Gnarls Barkley, Lily Allen, The Feeling, Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, Richard Hawley and others.

And it's great to see. I've been sick to the back teeth of R'n'B warbling with every act sounding the same dominating the UK charts. I LIKE R'n'B, but if the charts are dominated by just one type of music I soon get sick of it. This year the charts seems to have had more variety than for years, with rap, pop, R'n'B, hard rock, rock all running side by side. I'm particularly glad to see pop in its purest form making a resurgance. Suddenly there are sings in the charts and on Radio One I can sing along to. Scary.

Download songs from any of the bands I've mentioned and you'll see what I mean. What prompted this little essay was a song by The Feeling called Never Be Lonely which is getting airplay across the board and is scarily inoffensive soft-rock, 10CC, Supertramp-lite, with a perfect summery chorus and retro harmonies. It's the sort of thing that with my punk sensibilities should stick in my craw, but then I remember that Sid Vicious was a huge ABBA fan and realise that the original punk bands had tunes too and it's only since then the style got usurped for shouty, unlistenable dirge.

I'm not going to be tossing out my Pixies albums any time soon, but for now, pop owns my soul.

I'm clearly getting middle aged. Goddam kids and their rap music.

Jono's Finest Hour!

From the issue where Chamber suddenly went from being the angst, brooding one to being a genuine ass kicker, I present a few choice scans from Generation X issue 11.

The story so far:
At the Massachusetts Academy, M discovers Banshee has been attacked and lies near death. Emma rushes to his side and enters his mind to try and save him. Meanwhile, after the stirring speech below, (ruddy fishheads!)...



...Chamber leads the rest of Gen X after Banshee's attacker - Omega Red who quickly dispatches the rest of the kids, leaving Jono as the only one immune to Omega Red's death spores.

The story picks up there...