SERVING UP ENGLISH SOUL

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

The British aren't coming. Three decades after the Beatles led the first British invasion of the American music scene, English rock 'n' roll is about as powerful a cultural force in the States as French cinema. The only British rock band appearing in the Top 40 of Billboard magazine's album charts is Bush-a grungy quartet whose passports may be British but whose lead singer looks and sounds as if he's been hanging out in Seattle coffee bars with Eddie Vedder.

But this is not to say that the English music scene is derivative or dead. Far from it. The most impressive, distinctive music to come out of Britain of late has not been the crunching chords of rock but the soulful sounds of rhythm and blues. The juxtaposition of reserved Britons and emotion-laden R. and B. may seem incongruous to some-like casting Hugh Grant in Panther. Well, burn those stereotypes. English diva Des'ree, with her relaxed vocals and optimistic lyrics, has sold a million copies in the U.S. of her new album, I Ain't Movin', and secured nearly constant airplay on vh1, an American music-video channel intended for an older audience than mtv's. The band Portishead smoothly combines feathery, angelic vocals with mournful, cathartic lyrics. The genre-challenging Tricky draws freely and creatively from soul and hip-hop, with a dash of alternative-rock abrasiveness. And vocalist Terence Trent D'Arby, who burst onto the scene in 1987, is back with a new CD, Vibrator, that tempers his arty brashness with newfound maturity.

Rhythm and blues, like rock 'n' roll, was born and raised in America, with such influential exponents as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Prince. Now Britain is giving rise to what might be called alternative R. and B. Performers such as Tricky, Portishead, singer Carleen Anderson, Seal and others have enlivened the accepted, sometimes constraining formats of R.-and-B. songs with offbeat rhythms and the kind of enigmatic lyrics one would usually expect from alternative rock. Says Des'ree: "I think British soul tends to be less conventional. American soul music seems to be going through a phase now where most of the songs are quite similar. They've found a formula that works, and I don't know if they've exhausted it, but they're employing it quite a bit."

To be sure, these are a diverse group of performers, with varying musical agendas. Des'ree's pop-radio-friendly I Ain't Movin' is a series of personal affirmations set to music, with such lyrics as "Time is much too short to be living somebody else's life" and "Go ahead release your fears." Says Des'ree: "I've always tried to turn negative situations around." The more experimental Portishead, on the other hand, wallows in negativity: nearly every song on the band's gloomily ethereal debut CD, Dummy, deals with guilt or fear, or both. On one track, the tentative, tender It Could Be Sweet, Portishead vocalist Beth Gibbons sings, "I ain't guilty of the crimes you accuse me of/ But I'm guilty of fear."

Despite their differences, these performers are united by a love of disunity -- by their willingness, even eagerness, to defy categorization and expectation, to mix and match several musical genres and traditions in order to make new sounds. Des'ree was born in London, but her mother is from Guyana and her father from Barbados; she spent her formative teenage years in Barbados listening to calypso and reggae, both of which can be heard gently rocking her songs today. Tricky, son of a Jamaican mother and a "half-white, half-African" father, comes from the British city of Bristol, a multiethnic urban center that inspired him to make "mutant music for a mutant age." His stylistically eclectic CD Maxinquaye is driven by churning, yearning hip-hop rhythms accentuated by grungy guitar riffs. On the track Pumpkin, Tricky recycles guitar licks from the alternative-rock band Smashing Pumpkins and inserts them into a haunting aria. On Black Steel he employs a female vocalist, Martine, to cover a song by the black-nationalist rap group Public Enemy.

Many of these British R.-and-B. stars are the children of immigrants and are given to feeling like aliens even in their native England. D'Arby was born in New York City, but found his muse after moving to Europe as a teen. It is perhaps this feeling of dislocation that gives such musicians the creative wanderlust to transcend standard pop. "The value of acts like Tricky and Portishead is that they're giving people fits as to how to classify them," says D'Arby. "Guess what? Most of the interesting aspects of life don't fit into an easily defined category." One hopes the curiosity and ambitious invention of these new acts will catch on in across the Atlantic. The British may not be coming, but where they're going is fascinating.