We reported yesterday on the British plan to create an office to foster another British Invasion. Simon Warner thinks mightily on the matter:

the British Invasion effect, which kept UK music in the
fast lane from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, has pretty well run
out of juice. In fact, the hurricane that gusted the Beatles to
global domination in 1964 has become, today, a wheezy and asthmatic
huff.

Okay, so Radiohead and Gorillaz, Dido and even Bush still whistle a
passable transatlantic ditty and some of America pays attention. But
the facts are horribly stark. In 1999, British acts enjoyed just
two-percent of the US bounty, a market worth $14 billion and by far
the world's largest focus for music sales.

....Yet there is a paradox to this tale of gloom: the UK continues to see
its home sales edge upwards (bucking trends in an era of piracy and
internet duplication) and in the last two years has regained its
place as the third biggest market behind the US and Japan. So Britpop
is not dead, it's just incapable of attaining a secure foothold on
the American musical mountain. Once our groups struck the Union Jack
at the summit; now they stumble among the loose scree of the lower
slopes.

Not that we are lying down and taking this. In June, the British
Council, an institution which promotes our art, craft and design to
overseas markets, placed new emphasis on the importance of popular
music. More used to selling ballet and opera, orchestras and fashion,
the organisation has generally left rock to its own devices. But the
once-buoyant sector badly needs a tonic and a new report suggests the
cavalry - or more likely, perhaps, the Royal Marines - are on their
way.

....the elastic band of eternal US optimism was savagely snapped
in late 1963. Kennedy's death, Lester Bangs once claimed, was the
catalyst for the British Invasion which followed shortly afterwards.
His opinion, as usual, was based on gut instinct, but maybe he had
something. Young America, after JFK's slaying, needed "a shot of
cultural speed," said Bangs in one Rolling Stone history, "something
high, fast, loud and superficial to fill the gap; we needed a fling
after the wake". The invasion accomplished this, he believed, by
"resurrecting something we had ignored, forgotten or discarded,
recycling it in a shinier, more feckless and yet more raucous form".

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