Class Control

The Vaccines are posh.
Brother aren’t posh – they’re from Slough – but they used to be in another band.

Acting like they’d just seized their inner David Icke and uncovered a plot that could threaten mankind forever, it was over these two facts that music journos have been frothing themselves silly on Twitter of late. The Vaccines’ quite-literally rich heritage has been met with the sort of howls of derision that made me wonder if I’d missed the bit where Columbia plucked them straight out of an east London workhouse in some Oliver Twist-style march from the gutters to their HQ – I hadn’t, cos they didn’t – whilst the reactions to a two-year old video (which, admittedly, is really shite and which you can watch here) of Brother in a former guise, meanwhile, suggested that not only had it been uncovered that they used to be emo-y Lostprophets-meets-Snow Patrol types who, astonishingly, were actually worse than Brother are now, but also that their singer is a green-skinned reptilian called Ergozmatron sent to take over the planet.

That it’s ok to put the boot in to two new bands whose releases amount to one unofficial online release (Brother) and one limited edition single (The Vaccines) isn’t really my point here – building things up quick and thwacking them in the face even quicker is what we do in Britain, isn’t it? That is just one of the side-effects of hype and, in Brother’s case, probably the sort of riposte the little gobshites have been asking for. It’s just the reasoning - peoples got their angles all wrong; the Brother thing could be attached to nearly every band who’s ever existed, even if most don’t get to the point of making a music vid with their rubbish first band. In fact, the only band who comes to mind who’ve skillfully avoided the hope-no-one-finds-out-about-our-rubbish-former-band is Arctic Monkeys, and they did that by releasing their debut album when they were eleven years old. Franz, Bloc Party, Foals, Elbow, Kaiser Chiefs, White Lies - all were shadows of their current selves before a career-bettering reinvention. It’s nothing new.

As for The Vaccines poshboy snobbery jibes, well, firstly, writing about bands for a living – a job that involves tasks such as listening to bands, going to see bands, speaking to bands – is about as working class as wine tasting. But, if this is the way certain music writers wanna go, then I wanna see ‘em in for the whole hog and eschew every band who’ve come from a privileged background. You might be lauded as the Citizen Smith of music listeners, but your record collection’s gonna be shit; no Radiohead (they went to one of them public schools – off with their heads!), no Arcade Fire (Win Butler’s family are like King and Queen of Texas or some shit – off with their heads!), no Strokes (they went to public school in Switzerland and Julian Casablancas’ dad set up Elite Model Management – off with their heads but first make them spend time with ugly people!)… you get the message. But, hey, well done cos at least you still get to listen to The Twang. Yes, I’d rather my rock stars weren’t all born with James Blunt levels of elocution, but last time I checked The Vaccines were making dumb, fun rock’n’roll, not striving to be the next Billy Bragg. It’s fine if people wanna put the boot in, but I’m not sure trying to invoke a poorly executed class war is the way to go with it…