by James Mills

The great delta bluesman, Bo Diddley, in response to a plummy-voiced English interviewer who asked him why he, a poor uneducated man, had had the audacity to make his own electric guitar and amp, replied: “the man who invented the wheel didn’t have a PhD in engineering”.

Today, many of the graduates who make the music in our country could probably qualify to do a PHD. Or as a recent survey by Word magazine found, 60 percent of current pop acts went to private schools compared to just one percent 20 years ago. This sometimes becomes unmistakable, for example around half of the 2009 Mercury music prize nominees were privately educated. Something which is very different to the 1990s Brit pop I grew up listening to, or the provincial working class sounds of bands like the Smiths. (more…)