News just in: as I write this, Klaxons - with their house-influenced tunes, poor dress sense and occasionally rotating award-ceremony jaws - are apparently "invading" America. It says so on page 14 of this week's NME, so it must be true: in locations as diverse as Milwaukee and Kalamazoo, they have all gone New Rave barmy; Jamie Reynolds is on the cover of next week's Rolling Stone; and Linkin Park, Justin Timberlake and Avril Lavigne have mysteriously all gone to ground.
And at that point, let us pause for thought. There is an undeniable romance about the prospect of acclaimed British musicians even halfway replicating the feats pulled off the Beatles circa 1964, but 1) if anything similar happens, it usually involves completely the wrong people (witness the enviable US profile of James Blunt), and 2) the fate of 99% of British groups lies so far from such dreams that you wonder why most of them bother.
I am old, and have seen the story enacted scores of times. You fly economy to Newark, and get briefly wined and dined. You are then shoved on to a rented bus, handed your itinerary, and sent on a long but inconclusive trek around the USA's bigger cities - or, if you are truly unlucky, what are called "secondary markets". By way of illuminating the latter, I refer you to memories of touring America once dispensed by the venerable Alex James: "Club Babyhead is the one place that sticks out. It was in Providence, Rhode Island - a really nasty, sticky place that smelled of vomit."
The average musician's stateside progress will be overseen by the kind of US record company type who must affect spurts of enthusiasm for their British charges while knowing full well nothing is going to happen. I once met one of these people. His name was Steve, and he was great: a thick-set, bearded man with a marble-lined apartment on the Upper West Side who had evidently done something very wrong to his superiors, and thus been charged with seeing to the non-existent prospects of an array of British hopefuls.
Steve drove me and a colleague to a Wonder Stuff concert in Long Island, an hour-long journey during which he filled us in about the essential futility of British indie types coming to the New World with any hopes of success. "Do you know what the Stone Roses mean in this country?" he asked.
"No, Steve," we said.
"Diddly shit!" he said. There was no answer to that, so we fell silent, and so did Steve. But then he thought of something else. "Do you know what I got Lee Mavers from the La's to do for me?" he said.
"No, Steve," we said.
"A motherfuckin' MTV jingle!" he said. Given the chief La's reputation for truculence, this was quite a feat, but he and his group also amounted to "diddly shit". So did the Wonder Stuff, who had come to America shortly after playing to 20,000 people in Walsall. That night, they were the pre-disco attraction at what appeared to be an S&M club. It is not the kind of thing one admits to these days, but I was quite a big fan, and thrilled by their performance, so I bounded up to Steve and asked him what he had made of it. "It was OK," he said. They would be going home soon. If only until the next group of funny-accented herberts got off the plane, his hell would end.
Fifteen years later, not much has changed. They send us everything from 50 Cent to Rilo Kiley, but we only manage such piecemeal successes as Coldplay, KT Tunstall, the aforementioned Blunt and Amy Winehouse (the solitary Briton among this week's Top 40 US albums, as far as I can tell). You will usually find enough Anglophiles in most halfway sizable settlements to draw a 200-strong crowd, and truckstops, double-jointed groupies and American hotels make for a nice kind of busman's holiday - but really, that's about it.
Klaxons, then, are probably stuffed. As my friend Steve would have it: Invasion? Schminvasion!
