This catch-all category tentatively includes the most innovative and influential band in the history of popular music, namely The Beatles, although in truth their music spans every style from pure rock & roll through pop to progressive and avant-garde rock. It encompasses everything that came in their wake not categorised as vocal pop or modern rock

The Beatles emerged from the early British rock scene to dominate popular music throughout the 1960's. They spawned a host of bands which collectively made up the so-called 'Mersey Sound', such as The Merseybeats, The Swinging Blue Jeans, The Fourmost and Gerry & The Pacemakers, who for a while rivalled the watered down Elvis-inspired pop sound of Cliff Richard & The Shadows. Countless bands based more or less on the Beatles format were to follow - The Hollies, Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers, The Dave Clark Five, The Zombies, Herman's Hermits, The Troggs and Badfinger for example, but it was the idiosyncratic producer Joe Meek who came up with perhaps the most innovative sound of the era by applying the experimental zeal of 1950's classical avant-garde to pop production. His trademark spacy sound epitomised by The Tornados' international hit Telstar in 1962 was brand new, and places Meek in a similar bracket to pioneering American record producer Phil Spector.

After the break-up of The Beatles in 1970 the pop scene was gradually taken over by the glam rockers.. T.Rex, Slade, Sweet, Mud, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust to name a few. Their rise was largely a triumph of style over substance, challenged only by an increasingly ostentatious Elton John and balladeers turned disco-meisters The Bee Gees. The centre ground of British pop then gave way to the new wave bands of the dance culture and the highly polished, well-crafted but largely vacuous pop of Wham, Simply Red, The Pet Shop Boys, Phil Collins and The Eurythmics. The sudden arrival of Kate Bush in 1978 with her groundbreaking hit Wuthering Heights, showcasing her unique vocal style and erudite, eclectic songwriting was a major high point, and her subsequent career proved she was no one-hit wonder, but a rare and uniquely gifted artist in the true sense of the word.

The 1990's saw the rise of the boy & girl song and dance groups aimed directly at the teen market. Although the major players - Take That and The Spice Girls - were conceived as Britain's answer to New Kids On The Block and Madonna, dance-pop actually grew out of 1970's disco, and teen pop goes even further back via The Bay City Rollers, and The Osmonds to The Monkees and, dare I say it, The Beatles, although in their case it was an inadvertent consequence of their wider appeal rather than part of a marketing strategy. The growth of the style also owes much to the phenomenal success of ABBA in the 1970's, although the industry seemed largely unaware that much of their success was based more on high quality songwriting than visual appeal.

Since the late 1990's dance-pop groups have declined in favour of the 'pop lolita' exemplified by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in the States and Kylie Minogue in Europe and Australia, reflecting the barely disguised cynicsm of a mainstream music industry acting on one of the oldest truisms of marketing - 'sex sells'.