ABSTRACT
British popular music from the nineteenth century onwards operated within a wide repertoire, including religious and classical music, operetta, and song and dance music's from both folk and urban traditions. One British source of popular music is the 'musical comedy', which Andrew Lloyd Webber has used to become one of the most successful of post-war musicians. A 'needletime' agreement, negotiated with BBC radio, restricted the amount of recorded material it could broadcast, so guaranteeing employment for British musicians. Playing around with the music of the past the 1960s in particular bands like Blur and Oasis were, it seemed, recreating a triumphant moment of a predominantly white society. Having been successfully reverse-colonised by the music of the Caribbean, Britain has also become partly Asian, a promise confirmed when in late 1996 'Dil Cheez', a Bally Sagoo track sung in Hindi, entered the mainstream pop chart.
