Britain Is Trying to Draw Up Plans for Its Next Pop Invasion

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Eurythmics, Culture Club: What do they all have in common? They’re British and they all topped the American charts, mid-’60s to mid-’80s, mop-top pop to camp new romanticism.

After 10 lean years in the U.S., the industry here is proposing extraordinary measures to restore its stateside standing. Essentially, by early next year it wants to establish a rock and pop embassy-cum-trade mission in New York to be called the United Kingdom Music Office.

This recommendation is the keystone of a report--”Make or Break: Supporting U.K. Music in the USA”--that hammers home some bleak statistics. On market share measured by rankings in Billboard’s Top 100 album chart, U.K. artists scored 18% of the action in 1965 (beat boom bands), 26% in 1972 (the prog and heavy rock era) and a whopping high of 32% in 1986 (glam pop, abetted by Dire Straits, in the early days of MTV, when British videos ruled).

The last decade, however, saw the Brits hit the skids, bottoming out in 1999 with 2% of the market, provided in its entirety by the Prodigy’s “Fat of the Land” collection.

“What that figure tells us is we can’t be too proud anymore,” says Paul Brindley, the report’s co-author.

Brindley was the bass player with the Sundays, a pop-rock group that had two gold albums in the U.S. in the early ‘90s; he later became a researcher, working in Tony Blair’s office before Blair was elected prime minister in 1997.

His fellow author is music industry veteran Doug D’Arcy, who started out as Jethro Tull’s road manager on a North American tour in 1969 and went on to run Chrysalis Records (Ten Years After, Procol Harum), then the Dedicated label (Spiritualized) until its demise in 1998.

Together they sifted fact and opinion to analyze what had gone wrong. The only argument they couldn’t countenance, says D’Arcy, was “It’s the music, stupid!” because defeatism was not part of their agenda.

So “Make or Break” traced the topography of decline. Among its salient features:

* The damage done around the turn of the ‘90s by the absorption of lively and powerful mid-size U.K. independent record companies Virgin, Island and Chrysalis by major labels.

* The tendency for ever-fewer U.K. labels and artist managers to maintain offices in the U.S.

* The mysterious cultural chemistry that decreed that British artists could neither copy nor creatively reinterpret rap and its metal sub-genres at the same time that the U.S. saw nothing in U.K. dance music, although it was rooted in hip-hop.

Perhaps defensively, some believe that U.K. music doesn’t need the U.S. After all, Robbie Williams sold 6 million copies of his last album, “Swing While You’re Winning,” without releasing it in the United States.

But Brindley and D’Arcy reckon that 40% of the world market can hardly be ignored. And radio DJ Nic Harcourt, an Englishman at Santa Monica’s KCRW-FM (89.9) who contributed to the report, says there are emotional considerations too.

“We like to do well in America. It validates who we are,” he says. “When, say, David Gray breaks and sells a couple of million records here, I think, ‘Bloody good for you, mate.’ ”

Harcourt is one of many, Anglo and American, who lay some blame for recent British failure at the door of Oasis. “They blew it for themselves and they blew it for bands who followed them,” he says. “The laddish thing worked for them in England, but over here, once they started behaving like [jerks], that was it.”

Although unwilling to finger individuals, D’Arcy agrees there has been an “attitude problem.”

“We always think we’re cutting-edge,” he says. “But our artists have to stop trying to convince Americans that if they don’t get it, they’re stupid. We need a period of being as wide-eyed and innocent as we were in the ‘60s. We need to be more modest and more determined.”

Still, says Brindley, “I don’t think the U.K. Music Office will be there to lecture nasty rock stars on how to behave.”

More practicably, the “Make or Break” report proposes that the music office provide advice on taxes, legal matters, insurance, visas, copyright, licensing and distributing records, marketing, the ins and outs of touring, promotion, etc., as well as collective deals that could give low-budget acts and their connections access to crucial information, including Broadcast Data Systems radio play and Nielsen SoundScan retail sales surveys.

If D’Arcy, Brindley and their colleagues on the steering group responsible for translating the report into action can pull it off, the music office will have a $1.5-million budget--financed by industry and government grants and augmented by user subscriptions--and three staff members, including a high-profile director whom they hope to appoint this fall for an initial three years.

Then, maybe, the slight post-’99 recovery stirred by the unanimously well-mannered Dido, David Gray, Craig David and Coldplay can be consolidated.

Peter Edge, who worked closely with Dido during the recording of the singer’s hit album “No Angel” and is now a vice president at New York-based J Records and an Englishman who has worked in America for many years, is optimistic that the “music embassy” will prove effective: “Knowledge of the American marketplace is vital, and someone who can connect you to the right people, give you a bit of a road map, is going to be very useful.”

His colleague Peter Leak, Dido’s manager, transplanted from U.K. to L.A. a decade ago, hopes the venture will encourage more British labels and managements to set up American offices.

“You have to be here a lot of the time,” he stresses. “You need a constant connection or you will be forgotten.”

Asked what standing the music office project might achieve in its first three years, D’Arcy says, “I’d like people to be telling us, ‘You were so damn lucky to start that office at the very moment when the resurgence of British music in America began.’ ”

Adds Brindley, “We don’t see it as a cure-all, but we want American record company chief execs to know who the director is when he knocks on their door.”

It might just work. So long as the pop ambassador doesn’t expect to be called “Your Excellency.”