The rebirth of art rock

At the end of his meticulous history of British rock music and politics in the 1990s, The Last Party, the critic John Harris paints a grim picture of the state of music in 2003.

Rock has become "homogenised and conformist" and obsessed by "the vulgarising pull of the mainstream". He complains, not without reason, that British artists' raison d'etre now appears to be "providing songs that could be played when princesses died, Tim Henman crashed out of Wimbledon and the England team once again returned home early from the World Cup".

In the book's final sentence, he offers a glimmer of hope: "In-the-not-too-distant future, though the odds are stacked against it, some arrogant young pretender might begin a new renaissance."

Rock critics' powers of clairvoyance are open to question, as anyone who has ever bought an album because the NME claimed it would change their life will ruefully attest. However, less than a year after The Last Party's publication, Harris's words are beginning to look prescient.

"It's a really exciting time now," says Simon Gavin, A&R director of Polydor Records. "Instead of Britpop, it does feel like the birth of this art rock movement."

The excitement centres around two singles, both of which reached the Top 10 last month: Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out, and Comfortably Numb by New Yorkers the Scissor Sisters. It is perhaps slightly premature to start talking about a musical renaissance based on just two singles, particularly when they are hits in January, a month when sales slump to the point that the charts become something of a free-for-all. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Take Me Out and Comfortably Numb are unlike anything the British charts have seen for some time.

The former - a thrillingly angular piece of guitar music pitched between punk and funk and featuring a lyric in which the protagonist begs to be shot by the object of his desires - is the work of a band conceived around Glasgow's art scene.

Franz Ferdinand's mythology has the quartet forming as a result of an argument about the essence of art and includes early performances at galleries and in a converted art deco warehouse, where between songs, members of the audience would be encouraged to target-shoot an air rifle from a rocking horse. "We wanted to take ideas that were more than music into music," says bass player Bob Hardy, who graduated from Glasgow's School of Art last summer. "The cerebral side of music's half the fun, isn't it?"

Meanwhile, Comfortably Numb is an arch work of musical satire, recasting Pink Floyd's self-pitying ballad bemoaning the drugged ennui of the rock superstar as a hedonistic Bee Gees-influenced disco track. The Scissor Sisters also have their roots in visual art. Lead singer Jason Sellars is a former performance artist, who worked in New York under the thought-provoking stage name Jason The Amazing Back-Alley Late-Term Abortion.

On the one hand, none of this should come as a surprise. Rock music and art have a long and distinguished history together: The Velvet Underground were managed by Andy Warhol, punk rock bore the influence of the Situationist International. Legions of rock stars, including John Lennon and Pete Townshend, studied at art school. As Hardy points out: "The reason you go to art school isn't to get a degree, because the piece of paper is worthless - it's just about conversation, meeting like-minded people, realising that you can do anything."

Nevertheless, the current success of art rock does seem surprising, because in recent years, British rock artists and audiences have looked askance at anything which suggested artifice. Some Britpop artists produced literate and intelligent music, including Pulp's remarkable social satire Common People, the obtuse, arty punk of Elastica and the work of Blur.

Weird

But in Britpop's aftermath, this was to prove far less significant than the work of Oasis, a band who stood for earthy honesty, rigid musical conservatism, and a bullish distrust of anything that seemed too clever. Noel Gallagher was recently to be heard complaining that music was getting "fucking weird".

Oasis's influence is at least partly down to the caprices of the music industry. If artists inspired by Pulp, Elastica or Blur were out there, they were unlikely to get a record deal. After their commercial peak, all three bands went on to deliver "difficult" albums that alienated large chunks of their mainstream audience. As record sales began to drop in the late 90s, labels plumped for bands which offered reliable, straightforward music: Coldplay, Starsailor, Travis and the Stereophonics. The artists championed by the music press were stripped-down, hard-rocking garage bands who, in their own way, were equally prosaic.

The result was a chart filled with deeply conservative records, a situation compounded by the fact that dance music - which provided the two most experimental and sonically extreme hit singles of the 90s in Underworld's Born Slippy (Nuxx) and The Chemical Brothers' Setting Sun - appeared to have run out of puff. By 2003, the labels appeared to have given up on alternative music, preferring to sell easy-listening records by Jamie Cullum and Norah Jones to their new target market: thirtysomething housewives.

"Last year the business was gripped with fear: what's going to happen, we're all going to be out of work, doom and gloom," says Gavin. "I think it paralysed people. When a band like Coldplay or Travis came along, there was a feeling of 'why don't we just do that again?' It became a bit derivative, a bit bland. Up until last Christmas, the charts did seem incredibly conservative. There was mainstream music and more mainstream music."

Yet the sheer lack of anything challenging may have created the perfect circumstances for a new breed of art rock bands to emerge. Hardy notes that the members of Franz Ferdinand felt rock music was "getting really boring". In addition, the post-Britpop bands had entirely exhausted the possibilities of ripping off the rock canon - the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Faces - forcing new bands to look further afield for inspiration. The Scissor Sisters offer a hybrid of disco and mid-70s soft rock. Interviews with Franz Ferdinand, fans of brainy glam rock band Sparks, forgotten Scots post-punks Josef K and Prince, suggest their influences stretch beyond music: they nearly called themselves 1933, as an ironic reference to the year the Nazis took power, Hollywood introduced the Hayes screen code and "the curtain just fell on creativity".

New mood

Gavin - whose company signed the Scissor Sisters - claims there is a new mood in British record companies. "People started to think, let's just sign what we want, whatever will be, will be," he says. "Record companies started to feel like they had to challenge the market. It's a time to be bold. Most companies are in a position where they have a very successful mainstream roster and it would be criminal not to exploit the resources, both financially and in terms of personnel, not to try something different as well.

"You go and see bands at the moment and you feel like you're watching someone who's a little bit different to you. Without sounding namby-pamby, there's a sophistication about the music now, there's a bit of glamour. Bands are offering something more aspirational."

Of course, for every thrillingly original combination of art and rock - David Bowie, Roxy Music, the Sex Pistols - there's an unfeasible act of pretension to match. Art rock bore such unlovely concepts as the rock opera, the heavy use of onstage mime and the musical film directed by Ken Russell. It is left to Bob Hardy to sound a note of caution about the whole concept of art rock and the terrible excesses it can lead to.

"The only danger with being clever is when you get confused and try to impress people," he sighs. "We're not going to walk around quoting Baudelaire or anything like that. We're just normal guys who like music to operate on different levels."

Other trends

· Retro rock

A return to the glory days of long hair, guitars and glitter.
Who? The Kings of Leon, Jet and The Darkness

· Neo prog rock

Constantly shifting time signatures, tempo changes and songs that last nine months.
Who? The Mars Volta, Muse, Elbow

· Emo - emotional rock

Punk rock with lyrics by Morrissey.
Who? Brand New, Dogs Die in Hot Cars and Hundred Reasons

· Alexis Petridis is the Guardian's pop and rock critic