Parenting & Family Quote by Kevin Ayers

Ayers is doing something sly: he’s puncturing the romantic myth that rock is automatically working-class truth and pop is automatically mass-market fluff. By calling it a "train going by", he frames a whole cohort of musicians not as originators or rebels but as opportunists with timing and cultural literacy. The image is kinetic and faintly dismissive: pop isn’t a calling, it’s a vehicle; you don’t build it, you hop on.

The class read is the real payload. "Middle-class kids from literary backgrounds" signals people raised around books, ideas, and the confidence to treat culture like a language you can code-switch in. That background makes "pop" less threatening and more pliable: something you can sample, quote, ironize, or turn into art-school commentary. It also quietly suggests insulation from risk. If you can afford to "join" a scene as it passes, you’re not gambling everything on it.

Then comes the contrast: the "rest of the rock scene" as mostly working-class, implying a different relationship to music - less about aesthetic stance, more about livelihood, escape, or identity forged under constraint. Ayers isn’t praising one side and sneering at the other so much as exposing how authenticity gets manufactured. Rock’s supposed rawness can be a demographic effect; pop’s supposed shallowness can be a strategic posture.

Context matters: Ayers emerged from the late-60s British counterculture where art-school sensibilities, literature, and pop commerce collided. His line reads like an insider’s correction to the tidy story we like to tell about who gets to be "real" in music, and why.