Reverend & The Makers: 'Poshification' of Pop Music

I recently had the opportunity to interview the ‘Reverend’ Jon McClure, eponymous front-man of ‘Reverend & The Makers’.

Slightly nauseous with the usual pre-interview jitters, myself and a colleague were gratefully presented to our willing subject in the shabby dressing room of Liverpool’s O2 Academy. It was four in the afternoon but McClure proffered us a beer, which we gladly accepted. He sat down to roll a joint as we took in our surroundings and went over the questions we had prepared. It was not my first interview by any means, but it was certainly the first that had any semblance of an authentic rock’n’roll experience. I had seen the insides of tour vans and dressing rooms before but there was something electric in the air around ‘Rev’’ and his entourage of band members (including wife, keyboardist and tour manager, Laura McClure) which nullified the stagnancy of sleep deprivation and hangovers that accompanies a busy touring schedule. The fridge was stacked with booze and some bright-eyed mod-coiffed members of a young supporting band were hovering around, along with ‘The Subways’ bassist Charlotte Cooper (married to drummer Ryan Jenkinson).

We had expected the standard exercise in P.R. that accompanies an album tour: a glib 5-minute assessment of the album’s critical and commercial reception, then some brief discussion of the band’s history (in this case, a particularly interesting relationship with the genesis of the Arctic Monkeys). We were naïve, however, and should certainly have expected more from the ‘reverend’, whose justification for such an audacious self-assigned nickname is that he’s “a big mouth and always running on at people”.  That description doesn't quite do the man justice.  Jon McClure’s mouth is a black hole from which all hell breaks loose, a cosmic singularity of brutally insightful opinions, contrived with a brand of romantic whimsy and poetry that has become sadly alienated from the new generation of indie musicians.

I invite you to listen to the interview in its entirety, but I must admit that at 35 minutes long (the shortest cut I could make) it could do with a summary. One particular observation struck me the most, reflecting an idea in my own head which I had cultivated but couldn’t put into words or colour with any specific facts or statistics. McClure claims that chart music has become dominated by the upper classes, with far more modern acts coming from British private schools than 20 years ago. He argues that this is both responsible for, and at least partially caused by, a culture of alienation regarding pop music, with large sections of society having their tastes ignored by the mainstream media. Acts like Oasis, The Stone Roses and The Beatles were working class and talked about it, but they might never have reached the heights of their success if they were going today. He complains about the way in which Radio 1 tried to lower its age demographic by introducing more youthful and commercial music, but succeeded only in providing that music with an exclusive outlet to the same demographic they began with.

Is he right? If you compare today’s top 40 with the top 40 of this week 20 years ago, at my estimate 6 of today’s top 40 singles are attributed to artists who attended state school in Britain, compared to 8 that are attributed to artists who attended private schools. The remaining 26 singles are attributed to foreign artists (the bulk of which are American). For this week in 1994, 13 of the songs in the top 40 are attributed to artists who attended state school in Britain, with another 8 British artists whose education can’t be reliably assessed. None of the British acts in the top 40 can be reliably determined as private schooled. This approach is time-consuming and even with more analysis couldn’t really be used as reliable data for determining whether McClure is right in his assessment, but it seems to give a pretty clear picture that the background of pop musicians has changed significantly over the past 20 years.

Why might this be? One answer is that the opportunity to become an artist in today’s popular medium - electronic music - requires access to expensive professional producing equipment and software. McClure also makes the point that bands who come from affluent backgrounds can afford to tour, making the amusing point that he couldn’t achieve the success that (privately educated) Mumford & Sons have enjoyed in America because if he committed the time and money required to crack a new country then his ‘gas bill won’t get paid.’

Mumford & Sons: Nice Middle-Class Boys in Waistcoats

You might respond with the idea that if a band is good enough, or if they achieve a sufficient degree of commercial success, then the content of their songs or the background of the members wouldn't matter to the mainstream media. After all, commercial music is all about sales isn't it? You’d be wrong, and this is where the injustice becomes personal for McClure, his band’s past two albums both reached the album chart top 20 (with their latest album ‘Thirty Two’ reaching no.9) yet received no airplay from any of the major radio stations. You may dislike the music that they make, but shouldn't the popularity of Reverend & The Makers justify their music being on the radio? McClure feels that the hard-core group of fans who pack out their gigs up and down the country (to which I can testify, having observed first-hand the teeming crowds which flocked to the O2) are ignored and alienated by a mainstream culture that no longer reflects British culture, instead attempting to dictate it. When a public service broadcaster like the BBC fails in its duty to reflect the public’s taste you can’t help but sympathise with those, like Jon McClure, who see it as a class bias.

The Reverend might be brash with his opinions to some, but I don’t think anyone could categorically state that he’s wrong.  His point isn’t to prove there is something wrong with the music created by privately-schooled artists; rather, he wants to show that the market has become saturated with a brand of music typically created by these artists. A particular type of music, working-class music, has become unfashionable to the powers that preside over mainstream radio and major labels. The environment for artists creating such music has become much less hospitable and I, for one, am worried that we might be smothering the next generation of British bands without even realising it.