Perhaps that was a bit over-critical !!

Perhaps just a little. ;-)

I don't think there was a decline - there was still the same mixture of good stuff, average stuff and crap stuff as usual, with plenty of adverse influence from record companies/producers manufacturing bands to be "The Next (fill in name)".

I think the difference was just that the style changed, and just as not everyone likes all kinds of folk, not everyone likes all kinds of rock. Me, I don't like thrash metal in general, but I think some of the more intelligent and melodic Metallica stuff is superb. And generally I thought grunge was a manufactured waste of time (just like punk was a manufactured waste of time), although again there was good stuff in there.

And the other big difference was radio. Once radio "standardised" what you heard, I think things died - you never heard anything different, so it never pushed your boundaries. John Peel tried, bless him, but everyone else knuckled under. Radio 1 went rap, Radio 2 only picked up the easy-listening stuff, and commercial radio played what they got paid to play.

That's one thing I like today - once you get away from Chris Moyles and Sara Cox and other wasters, Radio 1 has a lot of rock on it again. Particularly Zane Lowe, who like Peel has few boundaries on what gets played, but unlike Peel seems to vet them before he plays them, so what hits the air is a very diverse but generally high-quality set of music. And as far as I can tell, he's the only DJ on the air today who cares more about the music than about running his mouth, which makes a refreshing change.

Graham.