What's the new saviour of music? Playing it live and loud.

The news has it that rock is definitely back in the black. According to the Guardian, rock concerts over summer in Britain have been hitting the roof in terms of attendance, and everyone who once proclaimed rock as dead has been forced to eat humble meat pie.

I'm quite glad, but for the fact that no matter how much their newest record sounds like the last, every young spotty teenager deserves to come of age at an Oasis concert.

People may rightfully point out that the summer lineup is heavy with hip hop acts as well, but the truth is that rap rarely works as well live, simply due to the need for MCs to shout rather than speak when they're on stage. With festivals like Reading and Glastonbury in particular, the ones who get the turnstyles pumping are usually the guitar bands – rock is a dish best serves to thousands.

Where does the recent reprise of the live guitar sound fit in? In many ways, rock only "went away" because the dance revolution dwarfed it briefly. No matter how many producers from the dance scene there were crossing over at the time, there really isn't a time in recent history that British rock hasn't been vital and banging forth. The real movement, the lack of cutting edge dance music for the masses, only highlights the fact that rock is, well, dead good.

Thanks ironically in part to dance artists. The biggest dance smash of the past 12 months was that Deep Dish slab of niceness, FlashDance, which boasted one of the juiciest rock riffs this side of Norway. Deep Dish goes on and pays homage to rock on its latest album, with a fantastic mash-up of Flashdance with Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. You can bet the Dire boys were not unhappy about that one. And neither the White Stripes nor Coldplay are strangers to using a dance-friedly beat on their tracks – making their songs infinitely remixable.

And two of the most enduring dance acts, the Chemical Brothers and UNKLE, were always pulling up guitar heroes including the likes of Noel Gallagher and The Verve's Richard Ashcroft to appear on tracks. To these people, the recent talk of a "merging of sounds" or "death of dance" is not only old news, it's irrelevant. 'We was always on the same bus and still are' they may well say. Speaking well is seldom their strongest point.

The truth is, putting rock back on stage may well expose many of the more sheister-ish DJs out there, the ones who it appeared had a monopoly on style so big they didn't need to smile, let alone add any innovations to their stage act. Sasha, shake with fear, I hope you do.

And to all the kids? Rock on. As you know you must.