Bands have as much chance of making it to No 1 as the Amadeus Quartet! (2024)

In the middle of the 1980s, I was in the pop group The Communards. We were at the height of our success and on an endless tour with a ten-piece line-up fronted by Jimmy Somerville, one of the most spectacularly talented singers of the time.

Like many other spectacularly talented singers, he was occasionally volatile and, after months on the road, this volatility could produce explosions; never more memorably than when we played the Hague in 1987.

It was our only Netherlands date following a big No 1 record and we had sold out the Congresgebouw, a rather striking Dutch functionalist building of the 1960s, and host, more than once, to the Eurovision Song Contest.

It was a big gig, made bigger when we discovered that a member of the Dutch Royal Family was a fan and wanted to come. Their people talked to our people and a backstage VIP visit after the gig was arranged.

Jimmy was not our only volatile member, our saxophonist also could be unpredictable under pressure and, that night, she gave a performance that I might charitably describe as idiosyncratic.

Jimmy, who was seriously wrong-footed on stage, had a less charitable reaction and a furious confrontation followed in the dressing room. Just as that kicked off, our manager arrived to tell us the VIP was on the way, so, closing the door behind me, I went to do the meet and greet in as genial a way as I could, but it was obvious that the VIP really wanted to meet Jimmy. It got more and more awkward until, from behind the door, came the sound of smashing glass and a blood curdling scream. The VIP was whisked away.

Exhausted musicians, unbridled rage, breaking glass, and a junior royal hurried by close protection officers into a waiting car. As you may have surmised, we were not a band for much longer.

The death of our band was nothing unusual, for a crash-and-burn often follows a soaraway success. When one band wanes, another waxes and so it goes on.

But no longer. One of the most striking features of the music scene today is the death not of a band, but of the band. Look at the UK charts. Long gone are the titanic battles between bands like Oasis and Blur for a No 1 single. Wet Wet Wet achieved top spot with Love Is All Around in May 1994 for a seemingly interminable 15 weeks – a feat that would make even Taylor Swift blush.

When we reached No 1 in 1986 so did The Pet Shop Boys, A-ha, Falco, Wham!, Berlin, The Housemartins, and Cliff Richard with the Young Ones. A diverse roster by any measure, but it wasn’t unusual.

In the first half of the 1980s, bands took the No 1 chart position for 146 weeks, as Richard Osman explained recently in his podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment. In the last four years, that has shrunk to three. Today, proper bands — by that I mean bands that came together organically rather than birthed in a music mogul’s boardroom — have about as much chance of making No 1 as the Amadeus Quartet. This year, so far the only ones to have made the Top 40 are The Killers and Fleetwood Mac, with songs that entertained fans who are now parents and grandparents respectively.

So what has happened? For starters, technological change. In 1979, The Buggles, fronted by Trevor Horn who later went on to produce Frankie Goes To Hollywood (three No 1s in 1984 alone), had a chart topper with Video Killed The Radio Star. That was not quite accurate as a prediction but it recognised how technology defines the way we create and consume entertainment. MTV was the main medium then, as Spotify is now, with most of us getting our music streamed via the internet.

What Spotify sends you is selected by algorithms, which tend to give you more of the same. So if you like Ed Sheeran, then more Ed Sheeran you will get, or more things like Ed Sheeran, and very soon the algorithm is not just selecting but compounding and narrowing the range of music it offers to listeners.

Labels notice this, sign more Ed Sheerans, and before you know it, bands have been pushed further and further to the edges. Not only does this make it harder to get heard, it makes it harder to make a living, because of the way streamed content is sold.

Ed Sheeran’s volume of downloads delivers him riches on riches, but bands, even bands with significant followings, get disproportionately less – singles sold as CDs used to cost pounds, whereas a Spotify download is in the order of fractions of pence – and then it must be divided between band members, so there is a strong incentive to go solo. Also, there is the way ‘Talent’ – genius commodified – is selected and managed. The best bands are bottom-up creations, formed by young people, who meet, get on and produce music that reflects their lives and circ*mstances and the places they live, with the energy and freshness of youth and novelty. They play gigs, gather followings, are picked up by record companies, and if sufficiently talented and lucky, break through.

Social media has become a vital portfolio where fledgling bands can post new songs, but the medium is more suited to individual ‘content creators’ who can accumulate vast followings with whom they can easily engage from their bedroom. Record companies see Instagram and TikTok ‘likes’ as market research done for them, and offer contracts to the most ‘likeable’.

Better still, they can tempt them on to heavily triaged television talent shows, where someone such as Simon Cowell cranks the handle and a Christmas No 1 plops out.

Solo artists are also easier to manage than groups – certainly less combustible, as the end of The Communards showed – so more and more of them are picked.

Solo artists are delivered to Spotify and Spotify turns out more of the same. This is not to denigrate their effort and achievement but to lament the narrowness that deprives us of the delight that only group enterprise can provide.

I have always loved making music with other people, as a boy chorister at school, playing in bands, and returning to church music in middle age. I remember someone once asking me what heaven would be like. I said we couldn’t possibly know but maybe singing together anticipates it?

We don’t surrender our individual voices but join them to make something together that is unimaginably richer.

If you get that right there is a wonderful moment when you lose awareness of what you are doing as an individual in order to serve better that greater enterprise.

The Communards happened when I, a public school-educated former chorister, got together with a man from a tough tenement background in Glasgow. We had nothing in common apart from loving music and being gay runaways in London.

We were joined on stage by a band of unlikelies, among them a woman drummer from the East End of London, another woman who grew up in working class Salford and got a scholarship to a specialist music school, and another who was the daughter of the principal clarinet at Covent Garden.

Out of that motley make-up, we made something together that was unique and marvellous, exhilarating and infuriating; not only the music, but the life we lived – the havoc and harmony.

I would not have missed it for the world – if only there were more bands around to agree.