Mogwai and Franz Ferdinand - the last of a dying breed?

Question: do you listen to many who formed this side of the Millennium? If you have children or grand-children of traditional band-forming age, are they in a garage somewhere right now plotting to be the next Coldplay? Maybe. But they’re just as likely to be on a laptop cooking up beats solo in Garageband, a music-making software programme. It’s cheaper and easier and there are fewer arguments of the famed ‘creative differences’ sort.

Cast an eye over the BBC’s recently announced Sound Of 2024 longlist, an annual survey by assorted music industry experts of the hottest new acts for the year ahead, and you’ll see the list is dominated by solo artists, most of them female.

This is to be commended, of course. So too is the list’s refreshing diversity and internationalism. Illustrative of that are the presence on it of Peggy Gou, a South Korean DJ/producer raised in London and now living in Berlin; South African-born pair Tyla and Kenya Grace; and Benin-born model-turned singer Ayra Starr, who grew up in Lagos and whose music fuses trap, soul, R&B and Afro-pop.

Maroon 5

But where are all the rock bands? It isn’t just me asking. “I feel like there aren’t any bands any more,” said Adam Levine of Los Angeles rock band Maroon 5 in a 2021 interview. “I feel like they’re a dying breed.”

A similar thought had already occurred to Rostam Batmanglij of American indie favourites Vampire Weekend a few years earlier. “What happened to all the bands?” he mused. “Is it just that bands are corny now?”

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The top five acts in the BBC Sound Of competition will be announced in reverse order beginning on January 1, and we’ll know the winner on January 5. There is one band on the 10-strong list, all-female art rock outfit The Last Dinner Party, and given the headlines they have generated recently they might win. But going strictly on the numbers the odds are against them, as they were against rock bands Wet Leg and Yard Act, who faced off against eight solo artists when they were nominated in 2022.

As they were against Wigan indie rockers The Lathums when they were the only band nominated the previous year. As they will be against whichever band makes the list next year, if one even does. In fact, you have to go back to 2013 before you find a genuine rock group winning the Sound Of crown – American band HAIM, another all-female concern.

Kaiser Chiefs

Contrast that with the early years of the BBC Sound Of list in the mid-Noughties. Back then you couldn’t move for rock bands, many of them carrying definite article ‘We’re lads in a band’ signifiers in their names: The Thrills, The Datsuns, The Dead 60s, The Feeling, The Automatic, The Rumble Strips, The Dears, The Magic Numbers and The Bravery were all nominated. So too were Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Keane, Bloc Party, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and – slap your head say: ‘No way!’ – McFly.

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In the real world, already established bands tour extensively and record album after album. But even here it’s solo artists making the running now, at least in terms of cash generated from concerts and accolades acquired from studio work. Between 1992 and 2010 it was relatively unusual for a band not to win the Mercury Music Prize. Since then, only four have. One was Edinburgh’s Young Fathers and another was this year’s victor, jazz-fusion group Ezra Collective.

The three biggest grossing touring artists this year? Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, all solo acts, while Scotland’s biggest draws – i.e. the ones who could pack a stadium rather than a large hall – are probably Lewis Capaldi and Gerry Cinnamon. Sure, Young Fathers did two nights at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom this autumn and West Lothian’s The Snuts will do the same in February.

But though popular, it’s hard to see either act repeating Gerry Cinnamon’s feat of playing to 100,000 people across two sold-out nights at Hampden Park. These days, the rock and pop game is played solo.

So is the gradual disappearance of the rock band over the last decade just another aspect of music’s endless churn of styles and fashions? Like the skinny jeans those Noughties band-members all wore, will it make a triumphant return when a new generation re-discovers the thrill of the four-piece? Maybe. Or perhaps the band is no longer the sine qua non for those with a yen to make music – and will never be again.