Aqualung surveys the suspicious British landscape. Photograph: Linda Nylind
The rest of the world sees the US and the UK as a monstrous, joined-at-the-groin, Siamese Popzilla, crushing all other cultures to matchwood with its crazily flailing DM-shod feet. We know different. We know there are subtle but crucial differences to be negotiated by any act wishing to straddle the Atlantic like some awesome pop colossus.
But for every 879 bands that achieve transatlantic popularity, there's a tragic case that doesn't. Aqualung, like Bush before them, are big in America but not in their native Britain. Pity them, because like Bush before them, they'll be scorned, vilified and ignored at home.
Nobody in Britain speaks to Bush. No club will accept them as members. They are regularly jeered at by urchins.
Being big in America but not in Britain is considered by all right-thinking Britons to be an unforgivable social faux pas, far worse than queue jumping or forgetting to say sorry when bumped into. Far worse even than not standing one's round.
We don't do sloppy seconds.
It's the dream of any sensible band from the British Isles to be big in America. The US, after all, contains millions of affluent young English speakers who find male British musicians who look like girls utterly irresistible.
Of course, not all bands are sensible. For every Coldplay, willing to shed every iota of artistic smartness in a whorish, dollar-crazed downward spiral into a festering abyss of "uplifting" rock anthem blandness, there's an EMF, who snobbishly stripped their second album of anything resembling a tune because "a single off the last album got to number one in America. And you've got to be shit to be number one in America."
Some acts, of course, manage to straddle both sides of the pond while not sucking. One thinks of Led Zeppelin, Fatboy Slim and Right Said Fred. But they all, crucially, did it the right way round.
Then, there are those bands who make the hideous mistake of getting big in Des Moines, but not Milton Keynes. Like Bush, like Aqualung and like Stonesthrow.
Who? Stonesthrow - perhaps best described as cross between New Model Army and Greenwich Village-era Bob Dylan - hail from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire but have spent so long touring the US (where they are beyond huge) most Brits don't even know they exist.
Their debut album Truth Teller sold over a half a million copies in the US. Its UK release was delayed after preview CDs were greeted, in the words of Rolling Stone magazine, with "derision verging on maniacal hatred ... [from a] notoriously arrogant British music press angered [that} the band happened without their permission".
There's another reason you've not heard of Stonesthrow. I just made them up. I think. Stonesthrow might well exist but if they do, so what? Like all my fellow countrymen, I instinctively know that all bands that make it big in America but not in Britain are bound to be rubbish.
It doesn't work the other way round. Jimi Hendrix and the Doors had to come to Britain to be discovered because most Americans at the time had astronaut-wife haircuts and itchy tweed suits and still hadn't gotten over the hard-rocking, hip-thrusting excitement of Herman's Hermits.
The fact is, in pop terms, the US is Microsoft: vast, lumbering, clunky and a bit shit.
While the UK is Apple: nimble, zippy, innovative and totally up its own arse.
Gene Vincent, the Beatles, heavy metal, punk, disco, house and electronica - for decades, Britain has stolen American pop music, gayed it up and sold it back for a profit.
The bottom line is that stolid, worthy, earnest America needs ADD-addled, fidgeting, flibberty-gibberty Britain. Without us they'd still be sporting mullets, porn-star tashes and lumberjack shirts. In fact, even with us - as anybody who's been to a Dave Matthews Band concert can testify - many of them still are.
But it's a one-way street. Aqualung are about to find out you can't go home.
