Neil Pickford has an ear for a good tune - or is it just a background hum.
IT was a repeated show on BBC4 about British synthesiser music or 'electro-pop' from the 1980s that started my mind wandering down cul-de-sacs of creativity.
During the programme one of the artists who went on to take the world by storm described how his electronic sound echoed the noises around them: specifically the sound of Sheffield's steelworks.
In an almost poetic moment he described how, even at night, you could clearly hear lump hammers bashing away and the constant background hum of heavy industry and, when they played a bit of this music I could actually hear what he meant.
I began to wonder if subliminal background noises could explain a lot more about the unique evolution of British music through the decades.
You may (or may not) remember back in the 1970s when the 'Bristol Hum' came to international attention. This was an unexplained continuous background noise that about two per cent of the population could hear. It had actually been reported at least 20 years before but didn't become 'news' until 1979.
A few years later artists like Massive Attack and Portishead burst through to worldwide success with a distinctive 'Bristol Sound' also known as 'trip hop'. Is it completely mad to associate this hypnotic sound with the Bristol hum? Perhaps the hum had become an essential piece of the texture of their lives and, consciously or unconsciously, they put it into their music.
I started to think I might be on to something here. A few of my favourite bands from the 60s and 70s like The Move and Black Sabbath came from Birmingham, another centre for heavy industry. Was their pounding and solid base sound inspired or derived from the background noise of the car-making industry all around them – particularly the thumping of car bodywork being bashed into shape by powerful hydraulic presses? And could the excessive use of snares by Brummie drummers reflect the noise of rattling radiator grills on Allegros and Austin Maxis (remember them)?
What about the brash, bouncy Merseybeat sounds of the Beatles and their ilk which stormed America in the early 1960s? I'll put in a tentative theory that it was the rhythm of the spoken word in Liverpool, the quick-fire banter of the typical Scouser, which set the world on fire when Lennon and McCartney got going. Or perhaps it was the rhythm of the railways, especially the Liverpool Overhead, that formed the patterns that created the music, but I'm open to other suggestions.
If my theory is true then I have to ask what kind of native sounds will form the foundations for distinctive British music now we've virtually abandoned heavy industry.
Will British (well, English) music now start becoming pastoral, inspired by birdsong and the distant sounds of random traffic? Is the warp and weave of our subconscious now formed by drunken parties on weekends, the intermittent hooting of burglar alarms and the 'tut-tutting' of UKIP supporters around the suburbs?
Of course, music is everywhere so anyone moderately interested in performing has easy access to any kind of sound which inspires them. Successful British artists now channel Northern Soul, US hip-hop, Thrash Metal and everything else. But it's second-hand.
Where is the new sound?
I'd like to think Hull might have a distinctive background hum that could take the world by storm, but I haven't detected it yet.
But then, I'm not a local.Neil Pickford: by day a mild-mannered virger: by night…he walks the streets and tries to make sense of it all.
You can read more of Neil's various meanderings at his website • ThePickfordPapers
