Letter from London, January 2002

WHILE, SINCE The Beatles, we British music fans have often affected insouciant confidence in the superiority of our taste over the rest of the world's - and particularly America's - regardless of crude measures such as sales and chart positions, we experienced a Damascene moment in the late '90s. It was when the Billboard 200 album chart revealed that the only British entrant under 50 was Charlotte Church. "Oh, crikey!" we said.