There was a glorious episode in The Times in 2000 when Milnes – the last single he had bought was one by Gerry and the Pacemakers – accepted the inspired suggestion that he write a critical analysis of Madonna. A weekend was spent exploring her music. Bemused, he concluded that she was an accomplished performer, had better pitch (if far more limited in range) than some opera singers but was labouring with an awful repertoire, most of which she wrote herself.45 Milnes never let his erudition cloud his powers of expression. Alas, in July 2002, after ten years as The Times opera critic, an attack of deep-vein thrombosis forced him to take his own bow, elegantly signing off his last review from a joyful Glyndebourne performance of Carmen.
By then, the reviewers’ craft had been made a lot more difficult by the diversification of serious music. ‘World music’ – which rarely penetrated the ears of an earlier generation of Times critics – opened up new avenues, quickly becoming standard fare on the South Bank and in the arts pages of the Guardian. The Times came to give it due, if not comprehensive, attention. The broadening range of musical options called for ever-stricter discernment on what was covered. The space available, though, continued to expand. The Times that News International bought in 1981 devoted on average only a single page a day to the arts, in which theatre, gallery, film and music reviews jostled for attention around a main feature. By the end of the eighties this had expanded significantly and during the nineties coverage increased again. The notion that ownership by Rupert Murdoch had somehow lowered the tone was demonstrably nonsense. By 2002, The Times devoted far more coverage to reviewing serious classical music than any of its competitors. With the rhythms of world music energizing its soul, the Guardian, indeed, had fallen back to averaging only about two classical reviews a week. To state that The Times remained the foremost daily record of classical music in Britain would smack of the sort of bombastic immodesty that was alien to its reviewers’ nature. Suffice it to say that it had no superior.
All of this, of course, was for the benefit of a select and discerning audience. By the mid-1990s, classical music made up only a little over 7 per cent of album sales in Britain, about half the combined sale of easy listening, country, folk, jazz, blues and reggae. Seventy-eight per cent of sales were accounted for by pop, rock and dance. One estimate put the British music industry’s worth at £2.5 billion a year, which was more than was being contributed to the economy by the country’s shipbuilding yards, electronic components and water supply.46 The Times had long recognized the importance of covering jazz music. Not even the departure of Richard Williams in 1989 could dim the paper’s ongoing interest and, happily, Clive Davis continued to provide readers with weekly direction on which recordings to purchase and concerts to attend. Where a great effort was made to broaden the paper’s coverage was in the realm of pop and rock.
Despite his own preference for Glyndebourne over Glastonbury, John Higgins recognized that the tastes of a younger generation needed attention and in 1985, with Nicholas Shakespeare as his scout, he appointed David Sinclair to review rock music. Sinclair, a session musician who had played drums with London Zoo and the CBS-signed band TV Smith’s Explorers, was at that time writing for Kerrang! (before it became fashionable) and had worked at the BBC on The Rock and Roll Years. In one respect it was a courageous appointment in that Sinclair regarded most of the contemporary music scene as a ‘wasteland’. The perfumed pop of the New Romantics and Duran Duran held little appeal for a Rolling Stones admirer whose affinity with The Times dated from Rees-Mogg’s famous 1967 leading article ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ which defended the band against a possible jail sentence for drugs possession. However, having a prevailing culture to kick against was an energizing motivation for any critic and Sinclair’s wry and perceptive journalism comfortably outlived many of the pop world’s more transitory acts. It was a bonus too for the paper to have a reviewer who could take turns between writing in the house style and beating the Stones’s Ronnie Wood at snooker. Despite this, his first interview with Mick Jagger was not a success. The conversation had produced some amusing copy – Jagger was on cocksure form and full of anecdotes about some irreverent banter he had recently had with Murdoch – but unfortunately, just as the piece was going to press, Higgins noticed that the iconic rocker had also just given an interview with the Independent. Rival newspapers interviewing the same man was an unconscionable solecism. Sinclair’s tête-à-tête was pulled.
Nonetheless, the rivalry with the Independent was to prove helpful for The Times in broadening its survey of contemporary culture. When Sinclair arrived, the paper’s rock journalism consisted, at most, of two short live concert reviews a week. Yet, faced with the Independent’s challenge the following year, this quickly increased to include album releases, interviews and broader features. Lining up behind Labour’s boycott of the Wapping titles, a few rock artists who, like Paul Weller, were active in the ‘Red Wedge’ movement, refused to have anything to do with The Times. Generally, though, Sinclair was able to make the most of the increasing amount of space being made available in the paper. He did not encounter the subversive demands that band and record company publicists tried to enforce upon the eager young freelancers of the youth press. Even in the irreverent priorities of rock, The Times was accorded a surprising degree of respect.
Spawning acts like the Smiths and New Order, Manchester mounted a claim to being the capital of Britain’s music scene during the 1980s. Tony Wilson offered himself as the city’s impresario, setting up Factory Records. His Hacienda nightclub became the headquarters of the Rave culture and its hedonistic excesses. Briefly a new generation of bands like the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses promised to take popular music in new directions before fizzling out in self-destruction and diminishing inspiration. Certainly, the hypnotic beats of Acid House and Rave were facilitated by the easy availability of drugs, in particular Ecstasy, that gave partygoers the ability to dance for several hours without tiring, although the side effects became a contentious issue and a source of minor moral panic. The loudness of the music and its pill-popping followers fuelled the phenomenon of illegal raves in which an underground network of promoters could, at short notice, seek to evade the attentions of the police and the rights of private property by organizing all-night events in fields. That thousands of young people could find their way to these illicit sites, despite there being little official publicity before the forces of law and order got wind of them, was certainly an indication of the movement’s scale and organizational élan.
While rave culture took hold in Britain, from America came Rap and Hip-Hop – the music of the Afro-American inner city. For Sinclair, though, the most exciting movement emerging from the United States was the proliferation of guitar bands from Seattle in the early 1990s. Appealing to the so-called slacker generation, the foremost exponents of this nihilistic ‘grunge rock’ was the band Nirvana until its acclaimed and tortured lead singer, Kurt Cobain, put himself out of his misery in 1994. ‘Let no one underestimate Cobain’s importance,’ wrote Sinclair in his lament, adding that there was ‘an eternity now left to consider the songs on Nirvana’s four albums’. It was the disaffected attitude of a younger generation that those too old to jump around to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ regarded with something approaching distaste. Bernard Levin – whose musical ear was not well adjusted to grunge – was incredulous at Sinclair’s obsequies, concluding of them that, ‘The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.’47
Cobain’s death closed one musical chapter yet within weeks a new one had opened. It was British and possessed what grunge had lacked – a decent dose of irony. ‘Britpop’ burst upon the scene with the releases of Blur’s third album Parklife and Oasis’s debut Definitely Maybe. The media was encouraged to pitch this as a rivalry between the rough Mancunians of Oasis versus the southern art school graduates in Blur. Enjoying the occasion and the music, Sinclair nonetheless felt that Blur were not quite equal to the adulation. In reviewing Parklife he
noted that it reminded him of London bands of the sixties like the Kinks and the Small Faces, although sourer and combining ‘occasionally grating cockneyisms with a ton of disaffected attitude’.48 As for Definitely Maybe, it might have little depth but, nonetheless, ‘as an uncomplicated celebration of youthful brio this is an album that takes some beating’.49 The hype surrounding the manufactured battle between Blur and Oasis certainly appeared at odds with their claims to stand apart from the conformities of the music industry. It worked all the same. Oasis’s second album, What’s The Story (Morning Glory), became the biggest selling album in British history. ‘Britpop has succeeded where punk failed,’ suggested Sinclair, ‘essentially by stealing the clothes of the old guard. Rather like new Labour portraying itself as the party of low taxation and sound economic management, the new bands have, generally speaking, got where they are by abandoning any notion of being a “radical alternative”.’50 Indeed, it was not long before Tony Blair and his circle began to laud such bands, as if there was a link between Britpop and its other artistic bedfellows – what American magazines like Newsweek and Vanity Fair had latched onto as ‘Cool Britannia’ – and the modernizing agenda of New Labour. The irony was that the British music scene had been at its peak during the years of the Major Government and wilted almost as soon as Tony Blair had formally embraced it at a Downing Street party he hosted for its luminaries, including Oasis’s Noel Gallagher and Creation Records’ Alan McGee in July 1997. Shortly thereafter, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, overshadowed the launch of Oasis’s third album. The interment of Britpop was announced. Indeed, the immediate effect of the Princess’s death was to ensure that an updated version of Elton John’s ‘Candle In The Wind’, a song originally written about Marilyn Monroe in 1973, became history’s biggest selling recording.
By then, Britpop was, in any case, eclipsed by a new phenomenon spilling beyond the arts pages and onto the news section – the Spice Girls. They were a chirpy all-female band propelled by a male manager called Simon Fuller and a cry for ‘girl power’ which, although lacking a coherent philosophy, nonetheless resonated with the sort of impressionable teenagers (and pre-teens) who were still buying singles. By March 1997 they had become the first band to reach number one in the charts with their first four releases. ‘Wanabee’, their debut single, reached number one in more than thirty countries including the United States. Spending time with them in Dublin, Sinclair found interviewing them ‘one of the most enjoyable afternoons’ of his professional career. It had been his experience that, on closer inspection, many rock superstars appeared socially awkward and unforthcoming. An interview he had conducted with the singer Prince in New York had been like getting blood out of a stone while George Harrison had appeared to be a shy, introverted man with frightened eyes and – given John Lennon’s fate – an understandably intense interest in his security. The Spice Girls, however, were different. They were friendly, flirtatious and seemingly normal and went out of their way to make the gentleman from The Times laugh.51 Briefly laying claim to a form of global domination, Geri Halliwell’s assertion (in, of all places, the Spectator) that the group were children of the Thatcher revolution even made the more serious newspapers toy with the notion that they had some cultural significance. ‘In the wacky world of pop,’ Sinclair mused, ‘expressing support for the Tories remains the ultimate taboo. If the Spice Girls can carry that off, they can get away with anything.’52
The extraordinary – if brief – appeal of the Spice Girls masked the descent of mainstream pop in the last years of the decade towards no less manufactured but far less impressive ‘boy bands’ and female artists of dehumanized plasticity. That their looks and dance routines had more substance than their music was emblematic of the general level of inanity. Their appeal appeared to be strongest towards the pre-teen age group. Music for a more streetwise generation came instead from those like the Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim who used ‘sampling’ technology to mix pre-recorded sounds and music extracts into a new blend. The intention was not to record songs to be learned, sung and remembered but to produce spontaneous rhythm sounds for dancers packed into clubs like London’s Ministry of Sound. Sinclair viewed this disinterest in posterity as a return to ‘the original virtues of pop: disposable, ephemeral, effortlessly of the moment’. Popular music’s heroic age – of Dylan, protest and social change – had related to a particular moment in history that had passed for good. As a consequence, ‘Pop is now in the process of reverting to its pre-rock’n’roll function as entertainment with no revolutionary or ideological symbolic strings attached. Thus, while pop in 2000 will continue to be everywhere in evidence it will be nowhere in substance.’53
Indeed by the arrival of the twenty-first century, the pop industry’s finances were being undercut by technology that allowed millions of would-be customers to download (usually illegally) music onto their computers or walk around with a pocket Ipod programmed with several thousand tunes. The sheer omnipresence of the music helped to undermine its distinctive qualities. With younger listeners getting out of the habit of buying recordings in shops there was much for the music industry to worry about. Yet the fall in compact disc sales was matched by a trend back towards live performances and an experience distinct from the ease of access that technology provided. With this increase in demand, rock concert ticket prices were able to rise to a level that made the cheaper seats at the Royal Opera House a competitive alternative. The same could be said for season tickets to the Premier League football clubs. Between highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment, market forces had become the great leveller.
The Times chose to engage with this process. Writing from her parent’s council house in Wolverhampton, Caitlin Moran became, at seventeen, the paper’s youngest regular journalist when she was given a brief to pick over the lighter end of popular culture. Aged thirteen, she had won the Dillons’ Young Reader/Writer of the Year Award and three years later she not only became the Observer Young Reporter of the Year but also had her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo (an anagram of Moran), published. Anxious to attract a fresh voice that could appeal to adolescents and young people, both Simon Jenkins (contrary to his usual instincts) and Richard Morrison encouraged her to write in her own way even though this meant almost physically restraining several subeditors from imposing the house style upon her idiosyncratic expression. One truth was evident: the paper had come a long way since a subeditor corrected – and destroyed the credibility of – an insightful Richard Williams’s review of punk rock by unhelpfully changing the album title in the article to Anarchy In The United Kingdom. In truth, Moran’s accessible manner would not have found favour in The Times of an earlier generation – not that the old journal might have been the worse for the occasional dash of such individuality. Ignoring the increased space made available for reviewing classical music, traditional readers doubtless found the space given to the musings of the precocious teenager from Wolverhampton as evidence that the paper was indeed adopting a dumbing down attitude. Popular culture in the paper might be tolerated when it was judiciously dissected from the traditional lofty artistic standpoint of the reviewer. Moran’s charm was that she discussed the modern world of pop, celebrity and weekend television with indulgent familiarity rather than intellectual analysis. The question of whether it could be justified as art appeared irrelevant. Moran was celebrating what for many millions of people was the essence of modern life.
The diverse choices opened up by the unbridled consumerism also confronted the visual art world. The spread of a technologically advanced media age in which even the least receptive inhabitants were bombarded by images – in newspapers, on television, on cinema screens, on advertising hoardings – was perhaps the greatest challenge facing art since the birth of photography. Paint on canvas would remain a principal medium of expression but a new generation of artists was turning to a wider range of visual resources that included video, film installation and computer-based image manipulation.
Well placed to comment on these developments was Richard Cork who Simon Jenkins personally appointed The Times’s chief art critic in 1991. Cork had previously been the Listener’s critic and was the 1989–90 Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, his alma mater, where he had lectured on the avant-garde art of the Great War. He had already gained a considerable reputation as an author, with books that ranged from the two-volume Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age to the Social Role of Art and a study of David Bomberg. Other works, including books on Jacob Epstein and his collected journalism, would follow.
While newspapers like The Times always endeavoured to cover major exhibitions around the world, the day-to-day emphasis was, appropriately, on what most readers would have a reasonable chance to view in Britain. Happily for Cork and his audience, the nineties proved to be a decade in which some of the most important art was being made in London. In some respects this was surprising. After the boom of the mid-eighties, art prices had dived and the beginning of the new decade appeared to be a time of great uncertainty for emerging talent. Adversity, however, failed to dampen creativity and a new generation elbowed its way to the fore. There was no guiding principle unifying what was dubbed ‘BritArt’. Some of its exponents had been at Goldsmiths College together, although the majority had not. What they tended to have in common was a lack of youthful idealism and a fascination with decay and death (in this respect, the work of Francis Bacon was a major influence). As one of the selectors for the 1995 British Art Show, Cork played his part in bringing them to public attention. The exhibition proved immensely popular. The great breakthrough proceeded two years later. After successive summers in which the Royal Academy’s exhibitions had failed to engage with a wider public, its decision to open Sensation in the autumn of 1997 put the old institution back at the centre of British art. Sensation displayed works by young British artists (yBas) collected by their greatest patron, Charles Saatchi. The most controversial work was that by Marcus Harvey whose giant painting of Myra Hindley composed from hundreds of children’s handprints, radiated menace. Damien Hirst, the supposed enfant terrible of the generation, was also represented. His 1991 work, a tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, became perhaps the yBas’ most widely recognized work. Cork believed it shared a ‘kinship with the work of George Stubbs’. Hirst’s other works, including sliced pigs and cows’ heads swarmed over by flies, expressed his interest in mortality. Also on display was a tent inscribed with the names of everyone its creator, the self-reverential Tracey Emin, had ever slept with. Visitors were invited to crawl inside. Meanwhile, Sarah Lucas’s Sod You Gits expressed contempt for tabloid images of female sexuality.
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