Least successful music genre?

[Screaming Lord Byron]

My nomination goes to 'Romo'. It existed for six weeks in London in early 1996, purely because two guys who wrote for the thankfully now-defunct Melody Maker were bored. And it sucked dogs eggs.

http://www.thisisromo.com/

What is Romo?
For 6 months in late '95/early '96 London had it's own Studio 54 scene which was actually spread over 2 clubs, Arcadia and Club Skinny. Think celebrity, excess and glamour. It took 16 years from the fall of Studio 54 to the birth of Romo. A lineage of successful London clubs have sprung from the heady days of summer 1995.


http://www.the-horse.net/orllive.htm

LOOKS LIKE WE FAILED, then. This was Orlando's last gig. That's a shame, but hardly a surprise, a depressingly inevitable end to a frustrating story.

Rewind to March 1996. In a few select London venues, something called Romo is happening - but more importantly, it's also happening in the pages of Melody Maker. Towards the end of the golden Allan Jones era, two journalists called Simon Price and Taylor Parkes are allowed to write about a different Romo group every week, with prose so colourful and full of conviction that it fairly leaps off the page. At a time when Britpop is booming - Weller, OCS and the absolutely baffling Cast are in the Top 20 - Simon and Taylor write about groups with names like Hollywood, Plastic Fantastic, Massive Ego, Viva!, Sexus… and Orlando. Sure, there's glitter and make-up and synths but, more importantly, there's verve and drama and daring and grand gestures. It's disposable pop music at its most thrilling, and right then, it's essential. The great Allan Jones allows Romo a cover feature and a free cover-mounted cassette - and there it is, Nature's Hated by a duo called Orlando, Tim Chipping and Dickon Edwards.

The first point to note is that Orlando immediately stuck out like a sore thumb. Nature's Hated was the only song on that tape not to rely at all on drama-pop icons like Soft Cell, Human League or Roxy Music (for inspiration, or for direct assistance - the other tracks were produced by Almond, Thurston, Ball, and Chris Hughes). It was a ballad built on pianos and violins - gorgeous, ingenuous, unabashed pop, a skinny white male take on The Carpenters and late-period Supremes - with words that immediately announced Dickon Edwards as an intelligent, high-stakes lyricist who could easily pick up the Moz/Richey baton.