Radio GA GA: How GB News Plan to ‘Take Back Control’ of Music

GB News’ owner Paul Marshall has decided that it’s time to reimagine rock and roll through the prism of blood and soil.

It’s not enough, apparently, to tap your toes along to a hit in Marshall-land. You must first examine Kate Bush’s ancestry, or work out how Irish Johnny Marr is, or query what passport Paul McCartney had in his back pocket when he belted out the anti-Enoch Powell inspired ‘Get Back’.

Anything not stamped with a tatty Union Flag or imbued with Britishness is unworthy of ethnonationalist ears and so from Monday Marshall’s new channel ‘GB Music Radio’ station will broadcast a solid diet of “Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa and Adele” under the banner “All British, All day!”

The project, I need hardly add, is undoubtedly the most dimwitted idea to emerge from the encephalon-challenged GB News stable since they last managed a collective thought. And here’s why.

Music is born out of fusion. The best of it is a glorious soup, spawned from many and varying ingredients. Its very hybridity defies the ‘purity’ of ethnonationalist logic and all attempts to control, contain or cancel it. It reaches out and embraces the world beyond too and that is what long made British pop so good.

There would have been no rock and roll at all if it hadn’t been for African American artists like Leadbelly, Sister Rosetta Tharp and Big Mama Thornton and as it seeped across the Atlantic big names absorbed everything that followed.

Delta blues informed the Rolling Stones, and Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Ravi Shankar all variously influenced the Beatles.

Caribbean migrants gave us ska, reggae, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep, garage, and the grime scene.

New York bands inspired British punk and David Bowie – and just about everything else from German electronica to Belgian crooner Jacques Brel to the Balinese gamelan stimulated David Bowie’s creativity too.

North American house and acid house music – which sprang from Chicago’s Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ underground club scene gifted UK Generation X-ers rave and the fabled Second Summer of Love.

Take all that ‘foreign’ influence away and you’d be left with little else bar Winston Marshall forlornly strumming Greensleeves on his banjo.

Many of Britain’s biggest stars came here either as migrants or were the children of them too.

The GB Music Press Release bigged up Dire Straits on their playlist – but are Marshall’s minions aware that lead singer Mark Knopfler is the son of a Hungarian Jew who came here as a ‘fighting age refugee’? Dua Lipa is the daughter of Kosovan refugees too – so are her hits OK with these self-appointed gatekeepers? Will Ghanaian-Swiss-British Raye pass the Marshall test? Will minions at GB Music be checking through birth certificates before playing Little Simz, Olivia Dean, One Direction’s Zayn Malik or even Chris Martin – whose mum was born in Zimbabwe?

It’s undoubtedly bad news for Georgian-born Katie Melua, Kosovan child refugee Rita Ora, Anglo-Indian Cliff Richard, Argentinian born Irishman Chris de Burgh and all the lads in Boyzone, Westlife and U2 – but it’s good news (of a sort) for the estate of the late Olivia Newton John. Because while Olivia’s mother also came here as a refugee the singer herself was born in Cambridge and is therefore stamped ‘British’ under Marshall’s witless logic.

The station can play all her hits – apart of course from her duets with John Travolta on account of him being American.

GB Music, you see, will only play a song where the “main proportion of the band is British”.

So “You’re the One That I want!” is off limits and there’s ‘nothin’ left’ that you can do about it.

By this same logic Freddie Mercury (aka Zanzibar born war refugee Farrokh Bulsara) can’t have his solo work played but can feature on the channel when he sings with Queen – because 75% of the group were British.

The 50% + rule poses a headache where Fleetwood Mac are concerned too because their line-up went from being predominantly British to a bit more American than British in the 1990s. Will GB Music only play their early stuff? Or will they ‘go their own way’? And what of AC/DC –  whose founding brothers Angus and Malcolm Young were born in the UK but grew up Australian?

With Christmas coming up there’s good news for Wham! fans who want a radio feed devoid of Bing Crosby, Mariah Carey and ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ because although Andrew Ridgeley’s father Alberto Mario Zacharia was a Yemeni-Italian refugee who had to flee Egypt in 1956, and George’s dad was a Greek Cypriot – both singers were born in the UK and thus pass the “Marshall Purity test.”

So there you have it. GB Music is a pathetic, poisoned, muddled nasty little project and, in that, indicative of everyone and every idea behind it.

I can only imagine that the nation’s supposedly overwhelmingly woke music artists are as appalled as anyone that their work is going to feature, and we can only hope that the best of them choose to give what royalties they receive to migrant charities instead.

Imagine Marshall’s vanity if that were to happen as John Lennon – the descendant of Irish immigrants – might have sung.