The Succession finale revelled in the nuanced pleasures of the self-own. Overplay your hand and you’re good as dead; grease the pole too fervently and you’ll find yourself stuck at the top with only one, fateful way down. But as far as the weekend in schadenfreude goes, series creator Jesse Armstrong had strong competition from British rock duo Royal Blood.
As you will have probably seen by now, at the end of their performance at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Dundee, frontman Mike Kerr unloaded on the audience for being insufficiently excited by their histrionic sturm and drang. “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are,” he said. “We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music. Who likes rock music?”
He got more cheers than you would expect given that he’d just slagged off 80,000 people. But it wasn’t enough. “Nine people, brilliant,” he sneered, and introduced drummer Ben Thatcher, swigging tequila straight from the bottle (daredevil!) at the back of the stage. “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic,” he went on. He even got the BBC’s cameraman involved. “What does that say about you?” he asked the crowd, before flipping the bird and storming off.
It was very much the “I AM THE ELDEST BOY!” of pop petulance, and the subsequent memes have been accordingly delicious (as has the fact that the DJ apparently played the Macarena after their set and the crowd lost it). The caption: “We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music” has been appended to images including Sooty and Sweep on guitar and drums, Ernie and Bert and Father Ted and Father Dougal performing My Lovely Horse. Days later, the band are still trending on Twitter. (Maybe they would have been better off playing Connor Roy’s vision of “a real bar – with chicks, and guys who work with their hands and grease, and sweat from their hands, and have blood in their hair.”)
Royal Blood’s entitlement is self-evident, though it stems from an era where making major-label Death from Above 1979 knockoffs was enough to land you on the cover of NME four times – not to mention the small matter of sharing management with Arctic Monkeys, by far the more bankable (yet increasingly hard-to-get) cover stars. As the duo rail against bored pop fans in Dundee, it’s worth remembering that much of what was hawked as rock’n’roll in the past decade were actually very well tended industry plants raised with the expectation of adulation.
I worked at the magazine twice in the 2010s, when the lad-led indie music that had been its bread and butter since the 90s was on the decline. The sharp edges of the early-00s “new rock revolution” had gone blunt, and blandly “anthemic” bands were shifted from the centre of Britain’s pop consciousness by the likes of Skrillex in his big EDM tank, barefoot solo iconoclasts such as Florence + the Machine, and acts that reflected the growing intimacy of the listening experience, whether Burial or the xx. But that didn’t stop an insurgent force of boys giving it their best shot at getting “indie back in the charts”, as the Vaccines proclaimed on their first NME cover.
They were swiftly followed on page one by Brother, a band so awful, with their union jack-festooned videos featuring topless women in the bath, that I used a secret pseudonym to write elsewhere about the galling idea that these sexist dimwits were music’s saviours. More pressingly, the flailing music press was hitching its wagon to these obvious no-hopers with the aim of both parties getting to reassume their former cultural primacy.
The critic Kelefa Sanneh had written his landmark essay, The Rap Against Rockism – the idea that rock is in some way more authentic and valid than pop – way back in 2004. Even four years before Spotify popularised streaming, he concluded: “The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.” (Brother’s debut album, Famous First Words, went in like a bullet at No 36.)
Still, we slogged on in the Real Music trenches, interspersing Noel/Liam Gallagher covers with the likes of Peace, Palma Violets and Jake Bugg – who all just coincidentally happened to have very good connections, whether at management, label or PR level. This dogged hope that rock could muster its strength to knobble the now-prevailing wave of solo artists and dance stars – whether Sia, Sam Smith or Ed Sheeran – reached some sort of peak or nadir in 2014, when Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner collected the award for album of the year with his infamous “that rock’n’roll” speech about the genre’s perpetual ability to resurge from “the swamp”.
Maybe it was arch; maybe it was excruciating rock excess. Either way, Turner was Photoshopped on to the following week’s cover as Lord Kitchener, pointing out over the caption: “Rock’n’Roll Needs You!” (I bet Turner loved it!). Inside, the editor took Turner at face value, described his speech as a “call to arms” and declared that a line in the sand had been drawn, separating the sceptics from those right-minded folk who knew that rock’n’roll is about “spirit and ethos, excitement and unpredictability”. (A line was certainly drawn in the office, which became a very difficult place to be if you were on the wrong side of it.)
Months later, brawny Royal Blood got the first of what would be four covers. It wasn’t that they were bad horses to back. Each of their three albums has reached UK No 1, in part because that’s increasingly easy for a major-label act that knows how to manage a bit of presale wizardry, but also presumably because hard rock fans aren’t exactly awash with choice these days.
As Royal Blood were on the rise, so were the 1975. Their breakout second album, 2016’s I Like It When You Sleep…, modelled a successful evolution for the British indie band. They had the guitars, trademark camaraderie and nice floppy hair, but had clearly looked to boybands for how to establish a fanbase – ie by celebrating teenage girls – and their wide-ranging influences reflected the way most people actually listened to music. Moreover, they toyed with the ideas of authenticity that the likes of Royal Blood had used as both a raft and a cudgel, making the concept of “real music” look silly, especially when you considered the inconvenient truth that many of its heartiest purveyors had telling connections and/or co-wrote their songs with former members of Snow Patrol. Not to mention that the idea that rock music is just better than rap or electronic music whiffed strongly of some increasingly outdated prejudices.
There’s nothing wrong with liking Royal Blood – millions do, as their Spotify stats and recent adoring support slots with Muse show. There’s also nothing wrong with being unmoved by Royal Blood and wishing they would hurry up and finish so that Lewis Capaldi can get going. But Kerr’s outburst reveals the foolhardiness in assuming rock’s automatic right to veneration and coasting on unearned legacy. Now everyone knows who Royal Blood are, but perhaps not for the reasons they’d like.
