The British Music Experience

The British Music Experience

Wow! The British Music Experience is technically brilliant. No music fan visiting the O2 in Greenwich, south east London, will want to miss it. It has stacks of rock and pop memorabilia, sheet music, guitars, drumkits, dresses and interactive gadgets that play music and videos at the touch of a swipecard. You can learn a dance and get yourself filmed doing it, and then post the DVD on your own bit of the BME’s website. This will be very popular – perhaps they should have got a load of those cheap dance-mats from Argos instead so that more people can have a go without having to queue!

If you are travelling to the O2 it is worth allowing extra time for the queues and the fact that it is a vast venue. It costs £20 to park your car but there is an underground station, and also buses and a fast boat service from central London called the Thames Clippers.

The O2 Bubble is divided into small rooms, each representing a decade of British music and including some news headlines from those years to give a sort of context. There’s an idea borrowed from radio – roundtable talks by the industry’s greats on DVD, livened up with images of album covers and other memorabilia flashing onto the table top. You can click on maps to find out about the music in a particular place and there are audio commentaries for all the priceless, fascinating stuff in glass cases. Scary Spice’s tracksuit, Pete Townsend’s smashed guitar, the suit worn by the Thin White Duke – they are all here.

So what’s missing? Youth, drugs, swearing, politics, fun, fan clubs, passion, any Welsh, Scots or Irish music, any sign of a black face or voice and any mention of the role of radio DJs in discovering, promoting and nurturing music.

There are dollops of history alongside the musickabilia, but the role of world events in shaping music, and the rock stars and beat poets and lyricists who changed the world by influencing public opinion and political decision-makers are muted here.

The roundtable discussions show DVDs of music greats but of course they are all old men now, filmed in unflatteringly bright light against black backdrops so you can count the wrinkles. It would have been kinder to prop them against a bar with their gold and platinum discs in the background, or their favourite instruments. The DVDs make the ‘superfans’ around the tables look the same – old and nerdy.

Beside each exhibit is a caption explaining it, and these captions are all po-faced, ponderous and patronising. I looked hard for irony, wit and the sort of sarcastic faux-sociology that you get from Tom Baker’s voiceovers for Little Britain. There was none – they are being serious here. This is History.

Especially disappointing was the final room entitled The Future. How would the future of music look and sound? I imagined a giant MySpace with surroundsound. Or music that you carry on a microchip inside your head instead of an iPod n your collar. Or an intriguing mix of live unsigned new bands… or one of those vibrating floors like they have at Matter, the O2′s nightclub, and also at the nearby Firepower museum in Woolwich (these floors are so awesome that you can feel the noise coming up through your feet and exploding when it gets to your head). But this Future Room opens to reveal a virtual ‘curtain’ of a shelf of CDs (Mummy, what’s a CD? Is it like a book?) They part to reveal a mash-up of music videos from some historic sets and tracks – Jagger, Bowie, Beatles, etc. It is very loud, but not awesome.

 

The music is a compilation of very short excerpts hamfistedly spliced together so that most of them miss out the iconic riff or the crucial lyric (It’s all right now – in fact it’s a gas! Yes it’s all right….cross-fade into the next track of Annie Lennox, and so on.) It ends with Freddie Mercury bellowing ‘We are the Champions’ in a climax that makes me feel slightly uneasy before we are thrust out into the merch shop where everything is red, white and blue with what looks like RAF insignia but is actually the British Music Experience logo. And no, this is not ironic either as it was back in the day when the Mods wore it on their parkas. It is serious and it seems wrong, somehow.

This is the problem Joni Mitchell sang about in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’: “They took all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum. And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see ‘em.” Music is more like a tree than an exhibit. It is more powerful than tea-dunked cakes for bringing back a Proustian rush of memories, so it can transcend time. Several times whilst walking through the British Music Experience I was moved to tears – or giggles – as a snatch of a half-forgotten song brought it all back to me and my companion. This is the reason why people will want to visit, and there should be more music and more group listening opportunities to make it succeed. The museum tries to fix the music in one place, one genre and one decade, but it won’t lie down and keeps re-inventing itself and staging comebacks.

Last year the O2 Bubble hosted the Treasure of Tutankhamun exhibition and in one respect the BME is remarkably similar. It is a set of priceless objects representing a mummified youth who was worshipped and idolised across the known world. However King Tut’s real treasures stayed in Egypt where they belong. And the crown jewels of British music are also somewhere else – in the record collections, photograph albums and memories of music lovers and in the gigs and clubs and festivals that keep it alive.

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