"I would be interested to be proved wrong - I would also be interested to know why 21st century urban Britain is so different than 21st century Northern Ireland in not being able to accept songs and peformances from the past"

Jim - but you are bound to be proved wrong,
because you are making too massive an over generalisation..
Music lovers do "accept songs and peformances from the past"
The evidence is plastered all over the internet...

I wish I'd had all that is available now when I was a kid,
when our music awareness was limited by meagre provision on TV and radio...

.. and the small town record shop with hardly any back catalogue stock...

We hardly knew of anything that existed outside the weekly pop charts back then...