Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone!
Teachers are arguably the most valuable members of any civilised society. Today's teachers nurture, encourage and inspire the engineers, entrepreneurs and artists who shape tomorrow.
So what went wrong with Britain's music academies?
There's a list as long as a prog rock drum solo of former students of these much-trumpeted institutions who have found fame in the music biz. What's harder to find, though, is one single graduate of the system who has contributed anything new.
I'd like nothing better than to be proved wrong, but the facts are damning.
Croydon's Britschool, considered the leader of the pack, was founded in 1991. In that decade and a half it has scored big time with the catchy retro-pop of the Feeling, the jazz/blues-rooted stylings of Amy Winehouse and the pleasantly MOR jazz-folk-pop of Katie Melua. This is no mean achievement and I'd be the last to belittle it, but none of these artists seem even vaguely interested in pushing the envelope. It's as if they've been taught how to fit in rather than how to shake things up.
"Europe's Leading School For Rock And Pop Musicians", the Academy Of Contemporary Music in Guildford was founded 12 years ago. Its proudest achievement appears to be that Newton Faulkner, hailed as "the British Jack Johnson," got to Number 1 with his debut album, Hand Built By Robots. Does the world really need another Jack Johnson?
Hell, we don't even need a new Bob Dylan, a new Kraftwerk or a new Miles Davis. What we are desperate for is fresh young creative spirits driven by the same unshakeable vision that those great artists had. We need the architects of the new but where are they?
Evidently not at the Brighton Institute Of Modern Music. Their success stories include workmanlike blues rocker Dani Wilde and those likeable lads the Kooks, neatly pegged by one internet critic as a band that "could have been put together by a focus group."
Universities, colleges and art schools have a proud record of producing genuinely innovative rock artists, from Talking Heads to Ian Dury to Brian Eno but were any of them on music courses? Daft question.
None of the movements that dictated the major changes in popular music over the past 50 years, from rock 'n' roll to punk and rap, were founded on anything other than a fierce determination not to walk down the same road as the generation before them. Education, although invaluable in almost every other context, inevitably imprints music's future with the lessons of its past.
Of course you can teach playing skills, arrangement, business sense and a dozen other useful disciplines but, time and again, in bands as diverse as R.E.M., the Velvet Underground or Pink Floyd, their unique creative signature was supplied by the least musically-schooled member of the group. Why? Because they didn't know what they were supposed to do, so they had to invent their own rules as they went along.
That is the essence of creativity. I suspect it simply can't be taught.
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