Pop

It was Irish week in London, with one group from the north and one from the south. Guinness was sold in unusual amounts; green football shirts were plentiful; and so, at both shows, was a genuinesense of joyful triumph – these were the biggest London venues either group had headlined. The Irishness was much more visible onstage at Kneecap, not least because, as a proudly Republican group, they can’t really not make a big deal of being from west Belfast. Their statements have prompted the inevitable fury from some quarters: Kemi Badenoch (as business secretary) refused them a £15,000 grant to help them tour, on the grounds that the British

‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing. But I had to. Not only because Evan Dando is one of my favourite songwriters. But also – vainly – because years of on-off drug addiction (mostly on) mean Dando is no longer quite the beautiful young man he was when he became famous in the early 1990s. Back then, I’d have looked like a troll standing next to him. Now, not so much. It was a night of beautiful imperfection – the kind that feels truer than a thousand arena shows He still, however, looks better than he has

In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still some tickets left. The price is reasonable but the price doesn’t matter when the band are unequivocally one of the finest of live acts. By whatever means you can, go. When you get there, enjoy Nick Cave himself, of course. Prepare to be awed by ‘Tupelo’, converted by ‘Into My Arms’. Prepare to cry to ‘Girl in Amber’ and dance to ‘Stagger Lee’. Get ready to experience an assault on every one of your orifices by the impossibly loud and dark ‘Jubilee Street’. ‘I think you feel like you’re a

A few hours before the doors opened for the Pretenders’ Edinburgh concert, Chrissie Hynde posted a message on her social media channels. The gist being that, while she appreciated the support of the band’s most devoted fans – the ones who travel from city to city and country to country to attend multiple concerts – she was, to be frank, getting sick of seeing the usual suspects plonked six feet in front of her at every damn gig. She was therefore formally asking her hardy but apparently increasingly tiresome acolytes to cede the front row to ‘local faces’. This would, she said, help keep ‘it new’ for the band each

Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice of singer Matt Johnson politely asked the audience to refrain from using mobile phones when the band was performing. In Edinburgh, while Johnson was speaking, the chap next to me was preoccupied filming an empty stage. A sea of screens can be priceless in a genuine emergency but that’s about it As it happens, most of the crowd complied most of the time, but proscribing phone use at concerts is increasingly challenging. A few artists are up for the fight. As they enter the venue, fans attending Bob Dylan’s forthcoming

There is no better cultural weather vane than pop. It’s not that pop singers possess incredible analytical skills – they don’t. It’s more that it’s in their interests to reflect some prevailing mood. And what people call a vibe shift can often be gleaned by comparing two artists. Take those featured this week: one very much au courant, the other regarded as a searing commentator on 1980s Britain. It’s a very good album, one for sitting down and listening to rather than standing in a vast shed to hear Over the past couple of years, Raye – a 26-year-old Londoner – has become rather a star. You may remember that

The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has historically been to fall from fashion. At some point in their rise they will be of the moment, the spirit of the age, and then they won’t be. At best, they’ll have a slow but perfectly lucrative fade, as their fanbase dwindles to the zealots. At worst they’ll become a punch line, a raised eyebrow: ‘What were we thinking?’ Every hit, every sold-out show, is just another step closer to irrelevance. ‘There’d be 800 teenagers in a club in Minneapolis, which felt absurd: we’re old enough to be their parents’

The Band Back Together is a newish play, written and directed by Barney Norris, which succeeds wildly on its own terms. It delivers a low-energy slice of feelgood nostalgia involving three musicians who reunite in their hometown of Salisbury. The action consists of talk and songs, more talk, more songs, some cider-drinking and a surprise ending to convince the audience that it was worth the wait. The play was commissioned by Farnham Maltings, an arts centre in Surrey, whose aim is to ‘bring artists, makers and communities together’ and it feels a bit am-dram. The script has no conflict, suspense or uncertainty. No harrowing emotions or life-changing experiences. It’s just

Recent acquisition of some insanely expensive hearing aids aimed at helping me out in cacophonous restaurants has set me thinking about the extent that modern life allows us to filter our intake of noise. This is big business. As sirens wail and Marvel blockbusters and rock concerts crash through legal decibel levels, controlling sound levels has become an increasingly sophisticated operation, abetted by everything from silicone pastilles and the volume-control knob to the wireless earbud. The National Theatre has virtually given up on ‘natural’ sound Concert halls and opera houses remain havens of what one might call ‘natural’ acoustics, places where the alchemy of balancing convex and concave surfaces with

One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra percussionist; the bassist has been replaced; and the singer is now front and centre. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people mutter. Have they lost the intimacy they once had? I’d never seen Big Thief before, which is something of an error on my part. Not least because I can’t answer those questions: I have nothing to compare Saturday night’s performance with. I can only say that without caring about what they were in the past, they are extraordinary in the

Towards the end of Declan McKenna’s snappy, enjoyable 90-minute set at the Edinburgh International Festival, something quite powerful occurs. The English singer-songwriter returns alone to the stage for the encore and proceeds to play a version of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ with only his electric guitar as accompaniment. It becomes a strange, emotionally layered moment. A young musician singing from the perspective of a parent ruefully reflecting on their child growing up, away and beyond reach; a predominantly teenage crowd singing those words back to him; and the older members of the audience, many attending with their own kids, staring blurrily into the middle distance. The first song is

Remember when we all knew what indie meant? Indie was what John Peel played. It was music that was recorded, manufactured and distributed independent of the major labels. In practice, that tended to be music played by young white people, usually more in hope than expectation of either competence or success. As the years passed it came to be applied particularly to a kind of whey-faced, solipsistic music, played on guitars by people who were either too clever by half or too wimpy by half. By dusk, what had not long before looked like the seventh circle of hell had transformed These days, though, indie means whatever you want it