Editorial: February 2006
By Richard G Elen
February 2006
With all this kerfuffle about Radio 4's UK Theme, has anyone noticed that 'light music' is disappearing from radio and television?
No sooner has BBC Four televised a (rather good) documentary on “Music for Everyone” than it’s suddenly Music for Nobody Because You Can’t Find It Anywhere.
Not that I’m against the music I grew up with and later went on to record - namely rock music (pop music is a different matter: I don’t think anyone over the age of 14 is supposed to be into that particularly unless they make a lot of money from it). But the world of light music, familiar to fans of startup and test-card music everywhere, is missing in action - replaced by melodic, tuneful, accessible, and regrettably rather banal material from people who were once rockers but have now grown up, from the likes of Mike Batt and Karl Jenkins. Actually, I salute Batt for bringing supremely attractive female neo-classical musicians to our screens, and I do enjoy the odd bit of Adiemus, but I hardly think Jenkins is “the best British composer since Elgar”, as someone put it recently. Come on, really.
The fact is that today we have enough channels, on radio and on television, that there can be a place for some of Britain’s great composers of the last century - apart from Elgar - such as Wilkinson, Coates, Tomlinson, Lewis, Mann, Stott, Morley et al. If, as Gordon Brown suggests, we want to be more conscious of our Britishness, how about celebrating the Best of British Light Music? Look at all those White Line CDs out there, for example: how about playing some of them on the radio?
Something of a milestone this month, as this is the first update ever in which all four new features were uploaded, edited and designed in the Content Management System. Thanks to Andrew Bowden for yet more of his hard work: there are now almost 500 articles in the system, and updates are already considerably less of a drag than they used to be.
