ABSTRACT
We began this book with a commonplace observation and a simple hypothesis. The observation was that a significant number of British pop musicians from the 1960s to the present were educated and first started performing in art schools. The hypothesis was that its art school connections explain the extraordinary international impact of British music since the Beatles. In musicological terms the history of post-war pop remains a history of Afro-American sounds. What British musicians have added is style, image, self-consciousness - an attitude to what commercial music could and should be. This attitude has been influential even when a particular British genre (like punk) didn't actually sell records.
