I keep on meeting people who split pop music into two categories. The first category is, as they see it, music which is merely popular; and the assumption is made that all pop music that is very popular is also merely popular, with the one famous exception: the Beatles. The second category is, often enough, described to me as "the music you write about." When I say: "What do you mean?" the answer is, "Oh, you know, the way-out stuff. Progressive Underground music." And the assumption is made that such music is not popular, with the one famous exception: the Beatles.

Another way of expressing this distinction is to say, as several people have said to me lately: "pop music is going the way jazz went, isn't it? The mainstream is breaking up, as it did with jazz, and all the best people are pursuing relatively private ideas." The singer of one of the bands playing at Montreux last week said, after a rocking number: "That's the commercial number. Now we'll do something deeper, more worthwhile" (and off the band went into a rambling jam). Someone in a London record company asked recently for information about Ricky Nelson, said: "I don't know about him. I just deal with progressive music." The big record companies now have progressive labels (as if to record on such a label is a mark of virtue: "We dare you to buy this album; or is it too far out for you?").

Self-styled "progressive" albums are, often enough, easily recognised. The sleeves feature bands kitted out to look like grotty versions of Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments", squinting at some doped-up vision of the promised land. And I can't resist quoting a sleeve note on the Third Ear Band album: "The raga is for Peter, Sumi, John, Dave, Steve, all the cats in the Grove and elsewhere who gave us the energy and created the Karma that put it all together."

That is to say, some pop musicians in Britain are beginning to believe in, and therefore to help to create, a division between commerce and art in pop music, and are being encouraged to do so by record companies, and by the media. Pete Townshend said recently that because "Tommy", the Who's double album, was classified as art, the band was now losing all its old raver fans, and had to play in Britain, to university audiences all the time. He was outraged.

And Pete Townshend is right to be outraged. There is no meaningful distinction between commerce and art in pop music. Of course there are many pop groups who sell well who produce rubbish. Popular rubbish is not peculiar to pop music. But what I see now is groups being projected as "art" who are encouraged, and who encourage themselves, to be detached from any of the main streams of pop. (Unlike the Who; "Tommy"; is marvellously inventive, and in the main stream at the same time.) Such groups, to earn a label as "progressive" or "underground", write their own songs, refuse to create any structure within the songs, refuse to learn from other pop music, and make afirmative statements about ecology, the state of the world, and (of course) love.

The usual reslut is tedious nonsense. It's not necessary to be popular to produce garbage. Terms like "progressive" and "underground" are fake labels which could prove sufficiently persuasive to suck pop dry of a lot of its dynamism and excitement.

In America this ruinous division doesn't exist. The best rock music in America, with very few exceptions, reaches large audiences. Some of the most exciting American albums recently released are, for example: Crosby Stills Nash and Young's "De ja Vu"; the Doors' "Morrison Hotel"; John B. Sebastian (ex Lovin' Spoonful leader, now solo); Creedance Clearwater Revival's "Willy and the Poor Boys"; Jimi Hendrix's live album, "Band of Bypsies"; Joni Mitchell's "Ladies of the Canyon"; "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash"; and "Delaney and Bonnie on Tour" just to name eight. And all these albums are in the toop 40 of "Billboard" magazine's album charts. They're good because they're popular. Because the musicians, in each case, understand that to be a rock star means to succeed in expressing what's on everybody's mind. It is not the job of rock bands to talk to themselves. But that's what is happening in Britain.