Sunday, October 25, 2026
British music only!
According to its promotional blurb, it will be “dedicated exclusively to artists from Great Britain and Northern Ireland”, with tagline “all British, all day”. By way of further explanation, one of its presenters, the black GB News host Nana Akua, says that “It’s easy to forget how this country has shaped the global music landscape” – a strange point instantly disproved by a mention of any number of artists (such as those four fairly successful fellas from Liverpool). But here, perhaps, is the strangest thing of all: according to GB Media, every track on the station’s playlist will be an “artist from Great Britain or Northern Ireland, or where the main proportion of the band is British.”
This sparks no end of questions. Does anyone in the ordinary world actually perceive music like this? Will someone frantically be employed to sift through Wikipedia, finding out whether this or that band fits the “main proportion” criterion? What will happen in the case of, say, the Gallagher brothers, who self-identify as Irish – and should, therefore, be excluded for the same reasons as U2, CMAT and Fontaines DC? Should the Jimi Hendrix Experience be ruled in or out, given that the two supporting members of the trio were respectively from Ealing and Folkestone? And to get into the real nitty-gritty, how exactly are the programmers defining “British”?
We all know the jaw-dropping conversations taking place in GB News-adjacent circles about national identity. The Tory-to-Reform defectors Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman see Englishness as an ethnic identity. If this definition wins out, which is quite conceivable, what will happen then? A playlist cull that will leave little apart from the musical equivalent of sliced white bread?
There are more fascinating questions to ask. There has been an on-off debate about whether Britpop was partly responsible for Brexit. As the writer of a book about that cultural wave, I have always clung on to the idea that because its nationalistic(ish) animus was focused on the US, and the demographics of Leave voters do not map on to the Britpop generation, no one had any case to answer. But this latest development brings on a slight pang of unease. In retrospect, the large-scale whiteness of Britpop was, as we say these days, rather problematic. On a musical level, it accounts for its chronically limited range of influences and inputs, which led to it burning out pretty quickly. But it also left it open to what might turn out to be a belated act of appropriation: whatever music the new station plays, I would imagine that Oasis, Blur, Pulp et al will be an integral part of its output. Put another way, the Farage-ist tanks are now surely heading for Britpop’s metaphorical lawn.
Inquiries to a couple of music lawyers established that musicians cannot stop radio stations that possess the relevant licences and pay the required royalties from playing their material. Self-evidently, however, they could quite easily express their displeasure at the prospect of being part of a constant Farage-ist soundtrack. In the excellent new Oasis documentary, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Noel Gallagher rightly says that his band was never “a rightwing thing … All are welcome. It’s we and us.” In the context of GB Music Radio, he should translate that into something slightly more specific. So should the already embattled Ed Sheeran, Adele, what remains of the Rolling Stones, the former members of Dire Straits and everyone else who is – and isn’t – mentioned in the station’s launch statement. The music all of them make, after all, is founded on precisely the kind of cultural mixing that so many voices associated with GB News take against.
I don't think I will be listening.
