The Guardian’s John Harris thinks that all British rock music is the language of wet Wednesdays.
All of which puts one in mind of a great rule of British rock: that whereas musicians born and bred in the New World need only drop place names and cultural references to suggest an epic reality in which even lives gone wrong take on their own kind of romance, British people are best at the language of wet Wednesdays. There are not even many broken dreams in our music because no one dreamed very much to begin with. To grasp the essential point, go straight to that symbolic lyric in the Arctic Monkeys’ Fake Tales of San Francisco: “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham.”
All of which goes to show how much music journalists actually know about music. Does he listen to anything other than indie? People like him seem to think drab kitchen-sink parochialism (preferably sung in a fake working-class accent) is the only legitimate subject matter for lyrics. You won’t catch the likes of Iron Maiden singing about that sort of thing; bands like them think bigger. Why write songs about fights outside chip shops on a Friday night when you can write “Brighter than a Thousand Suns” about nuclear war?
