Cheese in a can, foldable pizza, the blues, baseball, M*A*S*H, stuffed crusts, hip hop, bowling and chocolate chips: America has brought the world some wonderful things. So, it seems only karmically right that we must be somehow punished for such profiteering. And so, my friends, I give you Aiden Grimshaw. And Lostprophets. And Diana Vickers. And Plan B.

Oh yes, I’m talking about fake American accents. The road to modern musical success is littered with buttock-clenching, teeth-grinding, stomach-churning pop affectations, with false Yankism being by far the worst.

Let’s first take that Lynch-haired lobotomy victim and recently X Factor-exited contestant Aiden Grimshaw. The man is so infected with pop affectations that it’s hard to know where to draw the line between man and beast. First we have that interesting, Elvis-inflected habit of curling his lip like a man who’s just been caught in the mouth by a passing fishing line. I was half expecting for the lip to rear up so far that it wrapped around the back of his head, essentially turning his face inside out to reveal 600 cubic centimetres of gum. Secondly, there was the crazy-eye, last seen on Lady Gaga, Britney and other pop songstresses of questionable mental health. Then we come to the worst of all; the fake American accent. When “caught” rhymes with “cot” and “getting” sounds like “geddin”, I pretty much turn green, rip my shorts and start punching holes through walls.

While some singers, like fellow X-Faeces contestant Diana Vickers, simply adopt wholesale an American accent, others choose to oscillate across the Atlantic like the Titanic. Consider Plan B’s apparent musical multiple personality disorder. Within 10 seconds of She Said, the man has leapt from Motown-lite American crooner to pit bull-baiting east London gangsta. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been quarantined.

The worst offenders, however, are that fearless race of guitar-wielding Celts who, in their American appropriation, create the ugliest accent ever to assault the human ear. Lostprophets, Biffy Clyro and Kids in Glass Houses are so shameless in their Yanking off that the resulting accent seems to have been dragged up from the very depths of hell via Ayrshire, California, Pontypridd and Chicago.

Of course, the English accent hasn’t always been so maligned in the world of pop. The British Invasion of the ’60s saw people across the world aping the vowel sounds of The Beatles, The Kinks and the Stones. In the late ’70s, glam rockers like Bowie and Bolan once again revived the British accent with their dirty sexy consonants, and so to the punk and post-punk pronunciation of Johnny Rotten and Adam Ant. Similarly, the Britpop phenomenon of the late ’90s saw bands like Suede, Blur, Elastica and Pulp hark back to their great British ancestors with shamelessly regional delivery.

But perhaps we should be looking beyond the simple world of chart-topping pop. During the Cold War, when every blockbusting film featured a villain with a sinister pan-European accent, the charts were full of electro-synth bands like Ultravox, Visage and The Passions singing in their own broadly European voice. Aping the accent of the villain became a one-way ticket to critical and commercial credibility, while cinematic association had made European accents darkly exotic and excitingly sinister.

So, if cinematic villainy inevitably leads to musical popularity, and singing in the voice of a Hollywood baddie can make you a recording hero, then surely the new wave of exciting, talented and independent British musicians will all be singing with Arabic accents. Inshalla indeed.

More Nell:

...on photographic freedom

...on naval gazing