The way we listen now

There was a time when British bands led the world. Now, for the second week running, the American top 100 singles chart doesn't contain a British artist. Have the big corporations manufactured our music into an early grave? Or can the UK still claim the most vibrant pop culture on the planet? Alexis Petridis kicks off a special report by touring the country's musical strongholds in search of the underground scenes of the moment
New Liverpool bands outside the Walker Art Gallery
New Liverpool bands including the Bandits, the Coral, the Stans, the Zutons and the Hokum Clones. Photo: Don McPhee Guardian

It's a Friday night, the pubs have closed in Liverpool and a peculiar racket is emanating from the living room of a flat overlooking the Mersey. If you squint through the choking fog of marijuana smoke, it's possible to make out those responsible for the racket. Two men in their early 20s, dressed in tracksuits and football shirts, are bashing out a ramshackle cover of Leadbelly's Rock Island Line on acoustic guitars. All around them, their friends are joining in: singing along, clapping, clanking coffee cups and glasses and, in one notable case, keeping time by hitting a radiator with a banana. On the floor, someone is playing a washboard. This, I am reliably informed by people who ought to know, is the future of music in Liverpool.

The Merseyside flat is one stop on a week-long tour of Britain's most famous musical cities. The idea is simple enough - send the Guardian's rock and pop critic off around the country in search of new and thrilling music scenes - and the results are often bizarre. In the course of my research, I will see fashionable young Scots dancing to records by unlistenable 70s industrial art project Throbbing Gristle, be introduced to a superstar teen sensation who has a day job as a stockbroker, and be reverentially shown a hole in a pub wall that is reputed to look like George Harrison, yet in fact bears a startling resemblance to a hole in a pub wall.

The point of the journey is to disprove the theory that we live in an era of musical consensus. Lifestyle analysts queue up to inform us that diversity isn't Britain's thing these days. We all watch the same TV shows, gawp at the same handful of celebrities, hanker after the same soft furnishings and hardwood floors. The album charts suggest that the same thing goes for music. A handful of records seem to be in perpetual rotation in the upper reaches of the chart: Dido, David Gray, Travis, the Stereophonics and, invariably, Robbie Williams. Not only does everyone like the same thing in 2002, what they like is rock music as light entertainment: inoffensive, predictable, easily digestible and focus-group friendly.

One particularly pessimistic extrapolation, oft-expressed in handwringing broadsheet think pieces, is that the creative stuffing has been marketed out of rock and pop. Public taste has become so attuned to bland music that artists have given up. The maverick spirit that informed psychedelia, punk and acid house has evaporated in the face of Pop Idol and lowest-common-denominator rock. It is probably fair to say that people who write handwringing broadsheet think pieces claiming that music has lost its maverick spirit did not spend last Friday night watching a Scouser bang a radiator with a banana in the name of rock.

My tour begins in Sheffield. In the past, the south Yorkshire city has produced bands that embody all that is great about British rock and pop: irreverence, intelligence, fun. Sheffield is the home of the Human League, who lit up the early 80s chart with wonderful records like Love Action and Don't You Want Me?, while their clumsy, over-rouged female vocalists brought a touch of the Arndale Centre to the furrowed-brow new romantic scene. And at the height of Britpop, Sheffield spawned Pulp, whose observations of net-twitching suburbia owed more to Alan Bennett than the Beatles and who remain one of the most consistently fascinating bands in British rock. In more recent years, Sheffield provided a home for Gatecrasher, a "superclub" specialising in trance music and packed with "Crasher Kids" - boggle-eyed teenagers dressed in fluorescent clothes, who sucked dummies and waved toys about as they danced.

The Crasher Kid phenomenon proved short-lived. Today, Gatecrasher is cutting back to one night a month, a victim of the clubbing recession, and Sheffield is literally dominated by the Centre of Popular Music, two metallic rotundas that resemble giant curling stones. Built with millions of lottery money, they housed a rock museum which closed within months because so few people went. My hosts in Sheffield, an electronic quartet called Fat Truckers, are vastly unimpressed. "Fifty million quid or summat," glares Ross Orton, sitting in a down-at-heel pub owned by Pulp drummer Nick Banks, "and filled full of bollocks."

The Fat Truckers are lugubrious about both their city and its music scene, like a synthesizer-prodding equivalent of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen. According to them, most things in Sheffield are rubbish, except for a local condiment called Henderson's Relish. Nevertheless, the city appears to have plenty of curious bands working in the field of electronica. Aside from Fat Truckers, who weld pounding sythesizers to songs about "cheap motorbikes, import-export business and multiplex cinemas - we're a social comment on modern living", there's I Monster, who had a huge hit last year with Daydream; the Mu Chan Clan, fronted by a Japanese ex-pat ("sort of shouting and screaming, quite punky"); the splendidly named Kid Acne and the equally splendidly named Kings Have Long Arms. All fit into the Sheffield blueprint, which matches futuristic electronica influenced by the city's industrial past with a bizarre sense of humour.

"There's definitely a Sheffield sense of humour, a thing about not taking yourself too seriously," nods Truckers member Ben Rhymer. "It probably comes about because life here is such a pile of shit. Have you seen the hole in the wall over there? It looks right like George Harrison. It was in the local paper: Miracle of George Harrison's Head in Pulp Pub. I think they thought it would bring in the tourists."

Pausing only to witness this supernatural phenomenon, I plough further north, to Glasgow, currently famed as the home of whey-faced bedsit troubadours Belle and Sebastian. Over the years, Glasgow has produced more than its fair share of Britain's best indie bands: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Orange Juice, Mogwai. It was here that Alan McGee discovered Oasis, playing a club called King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. Those Glaswegians not obsessed with jangling guitars and floppy fringes have shown a predilection for banging techno - the city is home to Soma, the label that discovered Daft Punk.

Currently, the biggest waves in town are being created by DJs Keith McIvor and Johnny Wilkes, who run a Sunday night club called Optimo. It may not warrant a mention in dance magazine Mixmag's listings, but its legend has reached the ears of the middle-aged cab driver outside Glasgow Central Station. "It's the club they can't kill," he chuckles. "Been going for five years. First club they were in burnt down, but Optimo kept on going. You'll enjoy it."

The club has a huge following, which is curious when you note the sort of music it plays. Wilfully uncommercial, its playlist includes everything from northern soul and disco to screeching New York post-punk and late 70s industrial music. While McIvor DJs, Wilkes diligently taps at a laptop computer by his side, sampling and remixing records as they play. On one occasion, the duo hung microphones over the dancefloor, sampled Optimo's crowd singing along to Technotronic's old rave hit Pump Up the Jam, and played it back to them: the crowd ended up dancing to themselves.

This combination of high-minded artiness and "difficult" music should, by rights, attract a crowd of bearded, chin-stroking Wire magazine subscribers. Instead, by 1am, Optimo's dancefloor is rammed with beautiful girls in stiletto heels and short skirts, floppy-fringed indie kids, trendies apparently decked out from an 1983 edition of the Freeman's catalogue and boozy young lads on the pull. It is, as club vernacular would have it, going right off, and what's more it's going right off on the least sociable night of the week, to the sort of music most people would consider unlistenable. Shouldn't they all be in bed?

"I don't think there's a Glasgow sound, but there's definitely a Glasgow attitude," explains McIvor.

Which is?

"This," he grins, raising his middle finger.

You can see that attitude all over Optimo, from its ridiculous opening hours to its deranged music policy, its refusal to accept corporate sponsorship and even its decor. People have tried to co-opt the club into the profoundly hip electroclash movement: a sort of new romantic revival involving synthesizers, make-up and pouting songs about how boring clubs are. The Optimo response is a large projection over the dancefloor which reads "Fuck Electroclash". These people are so independent they're even independent of independent music.

The next day, I head back south, to Manchester, an obvious destination on a tour of Britain's most musically influential cities. Virtually every major band, every important scene, every musical development of the past 20 years has its roots somewhere among these streets. In 2002, though, Manchester seems devoid of a prevalent musical trend. In a Piccadilly bar called Cord, frequented by players on Manchester's music scene, everyone seems to have a different opinion as to what will break through next. One person suggests it could be electronic music, citing bands called Nylon Pylon and My Computer as examples. Someone else suggests breakbeat DJ Mr Scruff. Another thinks wistful acoustic trouba dours Alfie are in with a shot in the wake of Badly Drawn Boy's success - they were once signed to the same Manchester label, Twisted Nerve.

Manchester clearly has no shortage of bands, but it seems to have a lack of focus. There is no major club, no defintive sound, no band-most-likely-to. There's a sense that this is the result of the city's past successes. Since the Haçienda closed in a blaze of guns and attendant bad publicity, no one has dared open a club on a similar scale. No one wants their record label to end up like Tony Wilson's Factory. No one seems sure which band can dispel the cartoonish take on swaggering Manc attitude that informed Oasis's success.

In the absence of a motivating local groundswell, Manchester's teenagers have looked to America. The city has become the unofficial UK capital of nu metal, home to the moshers, perhaps Britain's only clearly-defined musical youth cult. These are the teenagers who have made oft-derided metal magazine Kerrang! the biggest-selling music weekly in the country, who sent Slipknot's last album Iowa straight to no 1 last summer.

The girls wear thick make-up and studs. They are big on lip-piercings. The boys have dyed hair, keychains dangling from their back pockets and black nail polish. Both sexes are plastered with band logos on bags, T-shirts, patches - Slipknot, Korn, The Deftones. Their outsized, flared jeans and hooded tops make them look like distant gothic relations of Madchester-era ravers, baggies in mourning.

The moshers lounge outside the Arndale Centre, perfecting alienated stares. In Manchester, at least, the usual teenage miseries are abetted by the violent attentions of sportswear-bedecked "scallies", with whom the moshers are engaged in a spectacularly one-sided feud. The scallies thump the moshers, the moshers refuse to fight back, so the scallies thump the moshers some more. Some observers have suggested the mosher-scally war is a millennial equivalent of mods and rockers, a sign that musical allegiances have once more become so important and lifestyle-defining they have spilled into daft youthful violence. The reality is less romantic. No one you speak to in Manchester thinks the scallies have any noteable musical allegiances. It's just people getting punched because they look different.

From metal's current capital to the place the whole genre was born: in the late 60s, Birmingham was the home of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, whose crushingly reductive take on the blues seemed to embody the very landscape of the city. Black Sabbath, in particular, sounded the way the Bullring looked: monolithic, depressing, relentless, grey. Ever since, Birmingham has produced unglamorous music of one hue or another. It was the birthplace of the unlamented, long-haired "grebo" scene of the late 80s, whose bands sported long hair and baggy shorts onstage and whose biggest stars were The Wonderstuff and the appalling Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Two tone, with its combination of bleak social realism and jaunty ska, came from just down the road in Coventry. The one attempt at Brummie glamour was a 90s house club called Miss Moneypenny's, which allegedly operated the strictest dress code in England, and whose greatest contribution to popular culture involved sponsoring a transvestite to stand against disgraced Tory Neil Hamilton in the 1997 general election.

For 20 years, Birmingham has been the centre of an ignored musical genre that sells in vast quantities worldwide. It's estimated that 90% of bhangra music emanates not just from Birmingham, but from one area of the city, Handsworth. Ibraar Rashid of Movie Box, a label that specialises in the Punjabi genre, claims a big bhangra album can sell 100,000 copies, more if you take into account piracy. It doesn't make the national charts because sales from Asian music shops are not counted, and stores like HMV and Virgin do not stock it. It may be Britain's ultimate underground music scene.

In fact, bhangra is less a scene than a parallel musical universe that overturns virtually every rule and preconception. Instead of gangsta rap, its most hardcore lyrics discuss how Sikhs are proud people and not to be messed with. Its most recent superstars were B21, a boyband named after Handsworth's postal district. B21 recently split up, yet feature heavily on the soundtrack of current film Bend It Like Beckham. Unlike other boybands, B21 were critically acclaimed for pushing music forward. "They weren't just seen as good-looking lads, but talented," says Rashid. "They had a fresh sound, they turned bhangra into something people can relate to in this day and age."

Despite B21's demise, Birmingham is undergoing something of a renaissance. One of B21's members, Bally Jagpal has embarked on a successful solo career, his standing as a Bhangra sex symbol apparently unaffected by the fact that he works as a stockbroker by day. Bhangra clubs, banned in Birmingham for several years following violence between Muslims and Sikhs in the crowd, have recently started up in the city again: a good night can attract 2,000 clubbers. Female artists, fighting parental disapproval, have started to emerge on the scene after the success of a singer called Mona.

The music has shifted its focus dramatically, taking on board hip hop, garage and R&B. "It's not unusual to hear bhangra tracks that sample Craig David or Lucy Pearl," says Adil Ray, who presents a bhangra show on the BBC Asian Network. "You get songs with two step beats and R&B vocals, albums called things like Asian Garage."

You can hear bhangra's influence in hip hop and R&B, in the rhythms of Missy Elliot's Get Ur Freak On. Meanwhile, the British media has begun turning its attentions to Asian culture once more, influenced by Andrew Lloyd Webber's forthcoming musical Bombay Dreams. Ray displays a healthy cynicism of it. "We've been down this road before, brown is the new black," he says. "It would be nice if the mainstream press gave it a bit more respect than just going oh, it's cool to wear a bindi on your head. Only recently have the media started treating drum'n' bass as something more than a musical fad. It boils down to a lack of understanding."

'It's not only Asian people who want our products," says Rashid. "There are people in the white community as well. Since the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack came out, we've seen an increase in people going online to search out records by B21, and they're not all Asians. They do want it, they just find it difficult to get hold of."

My head spinning with sex-symbol stockbrokers and Sikhs up for a rumble, I head to Liverpool. As in Manchester, the city's musical past hangs heavy. "Welcome to Liverpool, Home of the Beatles", reads the road sign, presumably in case any visitors arriving via the John Lennon airport, walking past the sculpture of the Yellow Submarine and dining at the All You Need Is Love café have failed to notice the connection. As the ferry crosses the Mersey river, speakers prosaically boom out Ferry Cross the Mersey by Gerry and the Pacemakers.

There's a sense that producing the most famous rock band in history has benefited Liverpool's tourist industry more than its music scene. Plenty of Scouse artists have emerged since the beat explosion, but only a fraction have had any national impact. It's as if the world overdosed on the Mersey sound in the early 60s and vowed never to touch anything like it again.

For 20 years, the city has been in the shadow of Manchester, producing bands like the La's and Shack, more interested in taking heroin than living up to their considerable potential. So great was Liverpool's envy of its cooler neighbour that, in the wake of Madchester, the city feebly rebranded itself Loonypool. More recently, Liverpool has been best known as home to superclub Cream. But, like Gatecrasher, Cream is floundering, its attendances falling.

In a small club called Zanzibar, down Seel Street, however, something appears to be stirring. It's the home of The Bandwagon, a night that has become a focal point for a new wave of Liverpool groups. One, the Coral, has been acclaimed as the best new band in the country. They recently signed to Sony for what are rumoured to be vast sums, particularly when you consider the band's ferociously uncommercial brand of warped, lysergic rhythm and blues and penchant for singing about sailing on the Spanish Main.

I meet The Bandwagon's promoters and the bands who play there in a local bar. With their tracksuit tops, lank hair and implausibly fresh faces, they look more like teenage scallies than harbingers of a musical revolution, but their enthusiasm is infectious. "Nobody's been given a chance to come through in Liverpool for ages," says Gary Murphy, who, with John Robertson, divides his time between running The Bandwagon and performing in a brooding psychedelic band called The Bandits. "I think it might well have been to do with the stigma of Liverpool itself. People think you're untrustworthy if you're from here."

"I think a lot of us are sick of the way that music gets treated like a branch of the fashion industry," says Howie Payne, who performs a Scouse take on west coast pop in a band called The Stans. "It's not about what you look like. If you play good music, you'll look good anyway. You get them old blues fellas with one eye or no ears or something: they still look great in a rock star way, but they wouldn't get through the first round of Pop Idol, would they? It's gone so far that the youth aren't going to have it that way any more."

Certainly the music of the new Liverpool bands bears little relation to what's happening at the top of the album charts. Aside from the Bandits and the Stans, the Zutons perform a brooding bluesy rock and the Hokum Clones thrash out a sort of psychedelic-ragtime-country hybrid on acoustic guitars.

"We'll play anywhere," nods singer Rob Stevenson. "On station platforms, on trains, in art galleries." As if to prove his point, the bands suggest an impromptu gig in a friend's flat. As each band takes a turn to play their songs, the others join in, first with backing vocals. As the marijuana fog enveloping the room becomes more dense, the washboard comes out, glasses are tapped, the Scouse accents become more impenetrable. Somebody asks for a "gob iron". It turns out they want a harmonica.

As the communal version of Rock Island Line clatters to a close, Payne says: "There's probably thousands of people like us doing the same thing in bedrooms up and down the country." On one level he couldn't be more wrong: I doubt that anyone else has picked up on the percussive possibilities of a banana and a radiator. On another level, he's right. Whether singing Punjabi stockbrokers or wilfully chaotic Glaswegian DJs, the deranged maverick spirit in the room can be found just about anywhere in Britain. You just have to look under the surface.

Sound stats

A nation of music-lovers

· At four units (CDs, cassettes etc) per person per year, we buy more music than the people of any other country.

· We spend £2.1bn a year on recorded music.

· Annual album sales reached an all-time high of 226m last year and single sales were at 60m.

· In 2000, 19,000 new albums were released.

· Overseas earnings from the UK music industry are worth £1.3bn.

Who's spending - and when

· Men buy almost twice as many albums as women (9.2 a year on average, compared to 5.9).

· Almost half of all money spent on singles (45%) is spent by people under 20.

· Almost half of all money spent on albums (45%) is spent by people between the ages of 20 and 40.

· Buyers aged 12-14 spend more money per year (£94) on albums than buyers aged 30-39 (£85).

· We buy 25% of our albums on Saturday.

What we are spending it on

· Eighty per cent of all albums sold in the UK are either pop (32.4%), rock (25.9%), dance music (13.3%) or R&B (8.5%). Classical music accounts for 4%, folk 1.1% and jazz 1%.

· In 2000, Eminem accounted for 39% of all albums categorised as hip-hop/rap. UB40 accounted for 41% of all reggae albums sold.

· The bestselling single in 2001 was Shaggy's It Wasn't Me, selling 1.15m copies, and the bestselling album was Dido's No Angel, which sold 1.9m. The bestselling single in 2000 was Bob the Builder's Can We Fix It?