Northern rock

A fortnight ago, the debut album by a young British guitar band entered the chart at No. 6. You might have expected to see this pored over with some interest by the press, for whom the search for the New Arctic Monkeys, the New Oasis and the New Smiths has long been a matter of urgency. Instead, you will scour the daily newspaper arts pages in vain for mentions of the Sherlocks, and you won’t fare much better looking at the specialist music magazines. According to the self-anointed tastemakers of British pop, they might as well not exist.

That’s because the Sherlocks are representatives of a growing trend in British music: the straightforward indie rock band who are hugely popular in the north — the north-west especially — but whose fame falls off a cliff the moment you get south of Birmingham. ‘We’d sold 9,800 copies of the Sherlocks as of this morning,’ Korda Marshall, who signed the band to his label Infectious, told me earlier this month.