XFM Column - Do Scenes Exist Anywhere Anymore?

With The Fratellis and The View waltzing into the Top 20 in the last few weeks I started off thinking about the Scottish Music Scene. Or lack thereof…

Don't get me wrong, there's loads of great bands north of the border just now, but I don't really see a 'scene' in the romantic, NME-sense of the word. You know, like a bunch of bands all hanging out with each other, playing the same music and wearing the same clothes.

And then, as I started to worry that Scotland was being left out, I got to wondering if these scenes truly exist anywhere outside the fevered imaginations of a few London journalists. In the never-ending quest to identify some sort of youth movement - our generation's 'Punk' - writers and magazines will try and string together a bunch of disparate bands to create a scene, thus making it easier to find stuff to write about for the next 12 months.

I'm not saying little musical cliques and communities don't exist all over the UK but sadly they're rarely the hotbed of undiscovered talent and bacchanalian excess that people would have you believe. I've been there, and although these little groups of like-minded friends mean the world to the people who are a part of them, they're rarely worthy of the world's attention outside of the one band who breaks out from its surrounds. Franz didn't open the floodgates for a flurry of boys with tight trousers, spiky guitars and Glasgow accents to take on the mainstream. And even the most methodical of major labels has unearthed little at the bottom of the Sheffield barrel to rival the Arctic Monkeys.

For instance, New Rave. A couple of hundred kids in London have started wearing fluorescent t-shirts and dancing to bands that owe more to The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem than Altern-8 and TTF, and all of a sudden it's supposed to be the third Summer of Love? Now, Klaxons are undoubtedly one of the most exciting live bands in the UK right now, but do we have to pretend they're part of something bigger to make them even more exciting?

On that kind of level scenes are silly, and these days redundant. Right now musical tribalism is all but dead. The same person who's out clubbing on Saturday is in HMV on Monday buying obscure indie-rock records, and even the most devoted rocker is just as likely to download the new Outkast as the new Slayer. If there's a new attitude in music right now it's that people just want to hear new, exciting music and lots of it, not wallow in the past or limit themselves to one genre.