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Why aren't Britain's guitarists plucky enough to indulge in a solo? It's
something to fret about, says David Sinclair

There has been a lot of talk lately about the return of the Great British
guitar band. Along with the success of Coldplay's album, Parachutes, we've
had Travis dominating the summer festivals, Oasis hogging the headlines and
a raft of new-ish groups such as Toploader, Doves and Delgados all committed
to music built around the sound of the six-string guitar.
Yet nowhere amid this sea of strumming, twanging and riffing do we hear even
one decent guitar solo. Even Reef, the most unreconstructed modern guitar
band of the lot, who return to the Top 20 this week with Set the Record
Straight, never feature guitar solos per se.
The job description of the guitar hero has changed dramatically since the
days when Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck regularly offered
free-standing, improvised guitar solos.
The emphasis among today's hot guitarists is on rhythmic dynamics and sonic
textures, a prime example being the playing of Radiohead's Jon Greenwood.
While he can be every bit as explosive as the 1960s pioneers, Greenwood's
technique is cloaked in lots of angular, eccentric phrasing and his sound is
routinely stretched and shaped by an arsenal of strange pedal and mixing
board effects.
Among the more recent batch of newcomers, Matthew Bellamy of Muse, whose
easy, outrageous sense of showmanship most reminds me of Hendrix, probably
comes closest to fulfilling the role of a traditional guitar hero, but even
he is careful not to put too much emphasis on soloing as opposed to
integrating the guitar parts with the song arrangements as a whole.
In fact, if you are looking for latterday mainstream rock guitarists who are
both willing and able to play solos in an old school way, the men who most
closely fit the bill are Steve Cradock of Ocean Colour Scene, a group
ritually slagged off for being the personification of Dad rock, and John
Squire, formerly of the Stone Roses and Seahorses, who stands revealed on
his recent albums as a second-rate Jimmy Page impersonator. And therein lies
the key to the demise of the guitar solo.
"Real" lead guitar playing is a discredited art and no one outside the
specialist areas of heavy metal or blues seems remotely interested, let
alone capable of addressing the situation.
As with so many aspects of pop, the aesthetic shift came during the punk
era, when any degree of technical sophistication was regarded with suspicion
by the fashion police of the music press. Serious plank spankers such as
Queen's Brian May or David Bowie's henchman Mick Ronson were deemed beyond
the pale, and after punk, guitarists with an evolved technique, such as Andy
Summers or Paul Weller, took great care to avoid sounding too obviously
flashy or unnecessarily complicated on the rare occasions when a solo was
required.
Today's equivalents of Clapton, Beck, Steve Howe and Ritchie Blackmore are
American virtuosi such as Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, invisible men who can
sell out Wembley Arena to hordes of heavy rock fans and student types, but
who otherwise remain completely hidden from mainstream view. Partly it's a
British thing. In pop, as in sport and the arts in general, we are
embarrassed by needlessly flashy displays of technical ability.
While American musicians take the time and trouble to learn their
instruments properly, their British counterparts, however successful, still
cling to their status as noble amateurs determined not to allow undue
technical sophistication to get in the way of expressing themselves.
Things have come to a pretty pass when your only hope of hearing a decent
guitar solo is by buying into the Santana revival, listening to the Black
Crowes rehashing old Led Zeppelin songs or else, in extremis, being prepared
to put up with the grunting egomania of David Coverdale on his forthcoming
album Into the Light (featuring some dynamite soloing by Bowie's current
sidekick, Earl Slick).
So, while it's good news to hear that British guitar bands are back in
vogue, it would be even better news if some of these bright new hopes could
rekindle some of the old "joi de axe", and take a moment to master the lost
art of the guitar solo.

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm