Tuesday, August 12, 2008

From a mush in Shepherd's Bush

In some sort of survey, Shepherd's Bush has been named the centre of British Rock And Roll on the grounds that if you count up all the rock stars who born there, and divide them by all the people including rock stars who came from there, the number is higher than anywhere else.

But it turns out you have to treat Shepherd's Bush as a place in its own right, as London fares quite badly:

However, despite producing the highest number of rock stars overall (89), London as a whole does not top the list for the UK's capital city of rock 'n' roll.

In fact, the study found that Coventry, Newcastle and Cardiff all fared better than the capital when rock star birthplaces were calculated by proportion to population.

Manchester - home to the likes of Oasis' Gallagher brothers, The Smiths' Morrissey and Johnny Marr plus Happy Mondays' Sean Ryder - topped that list, having produced one rocker to every 17,850 of the population.

Liverpool will be slowly grinding its corporate teeth, because their favoured method of measurement - diving the number ones earned by the city's children by the total population - usually puts them at the top of the list. And, to be fair, at least number one singles is a measure that has some scientific rigour to it, rather than a vague list of "rock stars".

Some scientific rigour, although not very much. Of course, this whole survey exists only to promote something or other, and so the rigour probably isn't all that important.


No comments:

Post a Comment

As a general rule, posts will only be deleted if they reek of spam.