you ought to try reading about australian bands in british mags

I think we'd have to hold our hands up when it comes to Butthole Surfers and, to an extent, Sonic Youth. But without us - British weeklies, Peel and the fans' spirit of adventure - the US would have missed the Pixies and Nirvana.

I know I'm going to generalise about a generalisation but the US media do like to compartmentalise music much more than we do here. If I'm going to pick a record off the shelf (or these days, hard drive), the last thing I think about is the nationality of the artist.
There are sop many artists around that once you come up with a theory, there will always be enough evidence to support it, conversely there will usually be an equally huge amount of evidence to argue against it but when you're writing a book it's easy to ignore it.

have yet to introduce me to the joys of American music magazines. Rolling Stone is a patch of its former self and is more than 50 percent adverts. I personally think British magazines are fawning (I prefer complimentary) of US music for one good reason. On the whole it is much better than ours currently. On the other hand most Americans I speak with think there is nothing better than the Led Zeppelin/Who heyday - witness the Who appearing in this years half time Superbowl even though they looked faintly ridiculous.

there *is* nothing better than the Led Zeppelin/Who heyday and as both bands owed their success to continual Ameican touring, it's no surprise that our transatlantic cousins rate them so highly. Agree about the Superbowl travesty though- they really should have put it to bed when Entwistle died.

....Night Beat by Mikal (brother of Gary) Gilmore, one of the finest collections of rock writing I've read, with un-sniffy chapters on The Beatles, The Stones, UK punk and Sinead O'connor (OK, I know she's Irish) as well as many more on US artists.

Highly, highly recommended.

Briish music should be for British people (OUR music as you call it.) For nothin', and admittedly "back in the day" we slavishly went to see (on their first US tours) U2,The Clash, The Jam, Elvis Costello, Human League, crikey, event the Sex Pistols... practically any old thing (good or bad) because it weren't local. Mah fren, you're just listening to one voice there. As for Rolling Stone? It's a bit closer to Heat than Trouser Press. Maybe someone would like to start the British National Playlist; or BNP for short. There's not us an them, buddy. Rest assured, your nation has contributed mightily to the global sum output of popular music. Punched well above your weight. And the world is very grateful. It's like listening to the late night Shipping Forcast that serves as a reminder of what a really really small little island I'm living on. Now I'll just wait for Underpants to come and take a pop at me.

it seems that if you are an American band playing soft pastoral folky music, have beards and look like extras on The Waltons - then you're going to get loads of coverage in the British music press.

Over the years the press in the UK has, with the odd exception, ignored rock music from Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Continental Europe, Scandinavia etc..."World" music is high profile but certainly not Rock and/or Pop.

It may not be quite what it was, but it still comes up with the goods every once in a while, particulalry on the non music stuff.

don't always calling it right (Sonic Youth's stock in the US is now arguably higher than it is here), but they do offer us an important reality check. Michael Azerrad's main beef seems to be that the British half-inched punk, dressed it up, watered it down, and then quickly kidded themselves into believing that it was their invention, and he has got a point.

UK music began to tail off as important cultural and commercial proposition in the US in the late 1980's at the time when that self-delusion began to seriously eat away at both our critical distance and our musical ability.

The Americans could probably do little but laugh as we declared that Manchester was the musical capital of the world in 1988/89, when all it actually offered was reheated black gay club music from the mid-west, a drug that had been prevalent on the New York club scene for at least nine years, and a self-important Byrds tribute band with a tone-deaf vocalist who thought he was Jesus.

What's worse is that we tried it again with Britpop six years later, when a bunch of coked out mammy's boys genuinely believed that the US was finally ready for 14 mundane, parochial and indistinguishable buzzsaw hack-jobs of the same Beatles B-side.

The whole sorry state was summed up at the MTV US awards in 1996. The room was peppered with Hip-Hop stars at a time when the medium was coming to the middle-to-endish leg of its creative peak and the beginning of its commercial domination of the US music market. For many of those artists, the very notion of "keeping it real" wasn't a lifestyle option, as, for a tidy few, the career choices they faced were: a) sport; b) music; c) drugs; and d) death.

At one point, our friends Oasis wandered onto the stage, introduced by Dennis Miller if my memory serves me right. Riding high in the US album charts at no. 5, I think, they then attempted to give the collected forces of the US music industry a masterclass in the kind of petulance and arrogance that they clearly believed that these industry sharks and playas had never experienced before.

So, what did they do? In a room full of streetfighting moguls on one side and rappers who were on the comfiest of terms with gangbangers, lifers, murderers and dealing kingpins on the other, they decided to push the envelope by spitting their beer from the side of their mouths, and flicking the V's at the audience. Wow; was that really the best we had to offer?