Welcome to Based on a True Story, where I am deciding how to vote in the general election based on which party is willing to enact wide-ranging reforms to fund better popstars.
This week, the UK chart has gone 23 weeks without a British number one single, the longest in the chart’s history. With everything going on in the world, does this really matter? Of course this matters! Why bother having a country if we can’t generate popstars? All we have is our increasingly polluted green rolling hills, the BBC and popstars. I’m very proud that we have Harry Styles and Charli XCX keeping our profile less embarrassing overseas. But on the other hand, British music is losing traction even on our own charts. I think about the popstar world we could have, if we achieved a perfect meritocracy. There’s no question our arts industries are steadily reverting to type; in 2018 the famous film casting director Nina Gold complained that every year “the crop from drama school becomes ever more homogenous, an endless supply of nice-looking middle-class kids who blend into one.” The movies are someone else’s problem, but I hear the same thing about music from those who work in the record industry. Other than the big hitters, the middle ground of UK music is still prioritising middle-class boys with guitars, who make the worst music in the history of human civilisation. There are even popstars I would say have the Tim Henman problem: do they want it enough? The problem of the popstar pipeline is closely tied up with how we treat performance skills, this country’s class issues, and our place on the international stage.
Step one: be born. Step two: become popstar?
One of my fascinations is the way in which singers make the leap from being an ordinary kid to a star. In the UK, this has changed over the years. Some methods:
Performing live everywhere that will have you until you get discovered. A singer like Lulu played “the clubs”, a network of small dance venues which put on live music. She eventually got lucky when she was discovered by a talent manager.
Participating in a TV talent show.
Attending the fee-paying Sylvia Young Theatre School. Rita Ora and Dua Lipa as well as numerous girl- and boy-band members attended a specialised performing arts school.
Relatedly to being able to afford a £15,000-a-year school, the most reliable method is to know someone. Artists from Kate Bush to Fred Again had family connections who helped them start a career in music.
Attending the government-funded Brit School, like Adele, Amy Winehouse, Raye and FKA Twigs.
Go to auditions for new bands. The Spice Girls were put together through open auditions. Recently, Backstage.com advertised an audition for a “major new girl band” so I’ll be on tenterhooks to see how that pans out.
Posting on social media. Pink Pantheress made her own songs and posted them online “until someone notices”, eventually leading to viral hits and a record deal.
This is certainly an array of artists, and they all made their way to fame in some way or other. What does it matter how they get there? Because things have changed in Britain.
It’s TIME. To FACE. The MUSIC.
Comrade Cowell’s X Factor was a path to stardom for ordinary kids. The X Factor tsunami-ed the charts with terrible music, publicly humiliated a lot of people, and trapped some popstars in exploitative contracts. But it was a democratic process unlike any we had seen before, with winners from underrepresented backgrounds, like season 2 winner Shane Ward whose parents are from the traveller community. Auditions were held in cities all over the country, rather than just London, and in theory anyone could enter and do well. Young hopefuls without access to stage schools were thrown in the deep end, receiving vocal and dance training for as long as they survived on the show. Likeability, the true central quality of a popstar, was stress-tested through a weekly public vote. The most famous X Factor success story, One Direction, was made up of five boys whose talents were mostly on the flimsy side – maybe three of them could sing let alone dance. Popstars of previous eras tended to have obvious talent and an intense desire to succeed. The X Factor created a kind of incubator for people who weren’t born ready in the way an Alesha Dixon or George Michael is. In terms of successful British pop exports, Harry Styles is a major popstar; for all his faults, Zayn does have a simply celestial singing voice. These aren’t talents we would have ever gotten to see without the X Factor. There are worse popstars in the world including ones who benefited from years of development in private. When everything is taken into account, I am pro-X Factor. But its negative consequences were myriad: a bland chart, and complacency over what kind of artists we find there.
Bands won’t play no more/Can’t afford lighting for the dancefloor
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff2d821ee-8fa8-4462-9038-5d75007f60c2_1024x683.jpeg)
What clubs? The alternative to TV talent shows was until recently the traditional method. Before social media, this meant getting onstage in the pubs and clubs, you know, like Elton John and Lulu. The greed of property developers, whining urban NIMBYs who don’t want to live next to a venue, and the cost of living means that the clubs have shut down. From the BBC: “The Music Venues Trust (MVT) said financial stresses led 125 UK venues to abandon live music in 2023, with over half of these shutting entirely. Soaring utility bills and an average 37.5% rent hike put the surviving 835 venues at risk, which typically secured profits of just 0.5%.” Although big stars can charge 50,000 people per show £100 per ticket, what I’m interested in is the minor stars. The UK chart should be filled with the bread and butter pop singers like an Ella Henderson (X Factor) or a Gracey (Brit School), whose tickets cost in the region of £40. Below them in the hierarchy is a missing tier of small places where a band or a singer can get started and polish up some live skills.
The One Direction series of the X Factor began in August 2010, three months after the Conservative Party won the general election. Within a year of gaining office, they had frozen the budget for teaching music in schools. This was just the start of the Tory programme to defund the arts as much as humanly possible, from schools to the fanciest opera houses. Kids born in the year of our One Direction X Factor are now 14, well into the part of their lives where they sing into their hairbrushes and think about auditioning to be in a hot new girlband. Fame seems easier than ever due to social media but the reality is that to be a successful musician you still need performance and interpersonal skills that can’t be learned from a screen.
Since 2010, arts enrolment has dropped by 47% at GCSE and 29% at A-level. - Campaign for the Arts
In 2010/11, local authorities around the country spent £1.48 billion on youth services; by 2022 this had fallen to £341 million (source). They have also cut their arts funding (this includes heritage such as museums and libraries) by 30% overall, with some councils such as Birmingham planning 100% cuts. Campaign for the Arts points out a few ways that this impacts the popstar pipeline: “If you’ve been to a free festival or a big outdoor event, it’s likely that much of the cost will have been met by public funding of the arts. Without that, it probably wouldn’t happen. When a performance company comes to do a workshop at your local school, their time and the resources may well have been supported by public funding.”
![Man and childen around a piano Man and childen around a piano](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F88b676a1-f585-4a2d-89da-955aac2e30db_5477x3651.jpeg)
Music education in schools has tailed off dramatically with increased pressure to turn kids into productive future workers and the repercussions of the pandemic. Ofsted says music learning at school is “patchy” and declines quickly at secondary school, with not enough music teachers or funding. The biggest decider of whether children continue musical training is the parents’ ability to pay for lessons, creating a two-tier system that plays out across our popstar economy. Rich people are good at loads of things, for example I love their country-style kitchens. But the British music industry is overloaded with well-off people forging medium careers out of music that sounds fine in adverts. Our charts are full of country music men – this is an emergency. I spoke to several school teachers for this piece and they were practically vibrating with anger over art of all kinds vanishing from schools. They told me that dance is “tacked on to P.E. so they get maybe 6 weeks once a year. Meanwhile, “the curriculum they made for music is laughable”. One teacher said, “Creativity has to be stifled beyond belief and it’s so sad the children cannot explore that side of themselves. In secondary, drama is often taught by unqualified teachers. There is no joy in education anymore.” Another believes the existence of specialist schools like the Brit School contributes to the problem by silo-ing off a small number of “special/talented” kids, as if art, music, drama and singing are for the few.
So you think you can dance
The funding crisis is also impacting the key popstar skill of dance. Laura Nicholson of One Dance UK decries “A rhetoric around dance and other arts subjects being ‘non-priority’, ‘low value’ and ‘Mickey Mouse subjects’” that has led to “a catastrophic decline in entries to GCSE and A Level dance – 48% and 47% respectively.” (Source) Dance is not just eternally popular, it’s a fundamental human need. This week I watched a ballet on the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pré, who got her career through attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a sort of posh Brit School known for producing classical musicians. I also watched some people dance to the Tommy Richman song ‘Million Dollar Baby’ on TikTok. I also danced around my living room to ‘Dance Before We Walk’ by August Moon. Most popstars incorporate dance into their performance because it’s magnetic to watch. With the rise of TikTok, where some of the biggest trends involve dancing, it’s almost as relevant as when tea dances were a thing. Dancing, it’s everywhere!
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a1515a9-8635-4d67-bfb6-f8c20a6403b4_1024x1534.jpeg)
The pipeline is always full, but people who themselves couldn’t popstar if their lives depended on it are choosing who gets through the sluice. If you’re thinking, well what about YOU Satu, where is YOUR popstar contribution, I will tell you about my various ill-conceived attempts to start a girlband and you will believe that at least I tried. The UK is not experiencing a shortage of people who would love to be the next big thing. It’s just that if there’s no arts or youth services funding, there’s a million little ways that kids don’t get to participate in things outside the home/the screen that build their confidence and help them hone creative skills. Every time we take an opportunity away from someone, that’s another chance for a talented kid to fall out of the pipeline, and then we’ll never know their name. That’s what bothers me about the lack of meritocracy. The nepo baby who makes it might be fine, but I don’t want fine, I want celestial joy. Government funding makes all the difference. DJ and producer Jax Jones, who has had eight UK top ten hits, benefited from council-run classical guitar lessons as a child. There are charities that provide a chance to play music, and projects by cultural centres like the London Symphony Orchestra. These projects are excellent and I hope they lead to careers for the most talented musicians who come through. When I went to see the LSO’s youth orchestra, Next Generation, play last week I noticed that the youth orchestra was the mix of races you would expect from a London-based group, while the adult LSO seated behind them appeared to be 100% white.
Regarding my specific beef with the Conservatives, The Campaign for the Arts reports that the Tory manifesto for this general election “offers no new policy to address plummeting arts enrolment in secondary schools. The Conservatives have committed to “a broad and enriched education during and after-school”, but have dropped their 2019 pledge to deliver ‘Arts Premium’ funding for this purpose. There is no mention of the Cultural Education Plan announced in March 2022 – it was due before the end of 2023, but has still not been published.” They do not care. I hate the Tories and can’t understand how people who vote to defund incubators for little babies and fire immigrants to the planet Jupiter sleep at night, but I have no party loyalty. I’ve checked the other parties’ popstar-relevant policy promises and found that only the Green Party has put a pounds sterling number on their commitment to the arts, with a £1 billion for the councils that have lost the most arts funding. Until I receive word that the Labour Party is taking my demands seriously I’m voting Green.
Without the best, or at least the ones with drive and ambition, we can’t expect our popstars to thrive in the streaming era. It sometimes feels like Britain is running on fumes, expecting to travel just as far, just as fast but with no fuel in the tank. Are we entering an era without British artists in the top ten because our popstars don’t have what it takes, or are we stitching up the music industry for the privileged more than ever before? Will we end up with a New Music Friday UK playlist full of people who look and sound pretty enough but who never really truly sparkle?
The Based on a True Story Manifesto to Improve the British Popstar Pipeline:
Music and dance will be given a whole afternoon in school once a week with specialist teachers and every student also gets a free sparkly costume.
Schools will have libraries of both books and musical instruments.
Youth services will be restored to 2010 levels so that young people have places to go and support for their mental health problems so they don’t have to make any more boring lower-case bedroom pop albums called things like my mental health problems.
Music venues of all sizes will receive funding and fast track licensing applications so that I never have to travel to Alexandra Palace again to see a minor popstar, and eventually young musicians will be able to write more songs about walking into the club.
Every nurse and care worker in the UK will have their pay doubled.
Yours sincerely,
Minister for the Arts, Satu
Can I vote for Satu