Pop

Some years ago, when I was the music editor of a newspaper, I called a number of historians of black music asking if any of them could write about why the audience for new music made in the styles of classic soul, blues or jazz was almost entirely white. The people I asked, some of them august commentators on African-American culture, offered a few suggestions: black music was historically co-opted and deracinated by the white music industry so comprehensively that black artists just didn’t want to go back there; black music has always been about progression rather than revival, and it is simply of no interest to look back; the

Grade: B– Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The affected drawl. The shameless pillaging of every hard rock album made between 1969 and 1972, but especially the Faces and the Rolling Stones. The moronic lyrics. The hard-left radical chic posturing and condemnations of Israel from a man with all the geopolitical understanding of a nipple-clamp. The desperate, pathetic, yearning to be cool. Trawl back through those Primal Scream albums and show me a moment of true originality. There isn’t one, is there? Which isn’t to say that — annoyingly — they’re devoid of fun and the occasional good tune.

Grade: A– The problem with Norwegians is that they are so relentlessly, mind-numbingly pleasant. Well, OK, not Knut Hamsun or Vidkun Quisling. And probably not the deranged fascist murderer Anders Breivik either. But then maybe that’s what unrestrained, suffocating niceness does to a certain kind of person: they end up strapping on a machine gun, or yearning for Hitler. Or both. Kings of Convenience are two earnest and very pleasant youngish men who often wear nice jumpers. They come from Bergen, which is as pristine and congenial a city as you could wish for: sharp, clear northern air and wooden-framed houses filled with agreeably plain furniture. Oh, and fish everywhere.

I’ve given up comfort food. I’m trying to shift lockdown pounds that have left me with the physique of the kind of ageing second-string wrestler you used to see on World of Sport early on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s. It’s all eschewing oils and measuring portions round these parts, and so I have been seeking my comforts in music. Enough with your Lithuanian drone and your polyrhythmic technical metal from Indonesia! Bring me verses and choruses and melodies and vocal harmonies! Katy J. Pearson — a young woman from the West Country who perhaps wishes she were, instead, from the American west coast — was true comfort food.

When Trojan Records attempted to break into the United States music market in the early 1970s, it hit an insurmountable barrier: the company shared its name with America’s most popular brand of condom. ‘It was a case of commercial coitus interruptus,’ says Rob Bell, at the time the label’s production manager. In America, Trojan signified rubber, not vinyl. The label proved to have greater staying power in the UK, where it was at the forefront of popularising Jamaican music. Founded in 1968 as a joint venture between Chris Blackwell’s Island Records and Lee Gopthal’s Beat & Commercial, from a Willesden warehouse Trojan introduced the music of Desmond Dekker, Lee Perry,

Grade: A– Imagine a really disgusting and immoral scientific experiment in which the members of Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson and Wire were somehow fused together into a giant caterpillar or something. This album is the kind of racket the forlorn creature might make. It sits in that usually arid zone where prog meets jazz fusion, with frequent bursts of staccato slash-and-burn brass and more ludicrous time signatures than you could shake a stick at. Or imagine Captain Beefheart speeded up, given a little focus and stripped of even the vaguest semblance of a sense of humour. That’s Black Midi. It works, even if singer Geordie Greep’s croon

On the way home from This Is The Kit’s show at a socially distanced Barbican, I listened to Avalon by Roxy Music, which had been brought to mind by the previous 90 minutes or so of music. It’s perhaps worth saying that This Is The Kit — the nom de chanson of Kate Stables, backed by a three-piece band and three horn players — have absolutely nothing in common with Avalon by Roxy Music, visually or musically. Stables, hair piled on top of her head, and dressed for comfort, not speed, did not look as though she intended to boost the Colombian export trade after the show; perhaps, instead, she

There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the business side of things. Our dirty secret is that, for all our exquisite taste, most of us — with a few exceptions — have no conception of what the rest of the world actually wants from their music. The first piece I ever wrote was a student newspaper review of a gig in a Leeds pub, in which I gushed about the headliners but noted, with a sneer, the fact that the support didn’t appear to have any actual tunes. We would be hearing no more from them, I cautioned.

Grade: B– Advancing age has smoothed the edges of Bellshill’s finest lads, once — back in the early 1990s — arguably Britain’s best band. This is like being embalmed for ever in suffocating pleasantness. You doze off during ‘Warm Embrace’ and wake, perhaps hours later, to the same gentle, winsome, minor-key harmonies chugging by at a medium pace, the guitars strummed with deadening accuracy. Is it the same song? Have I died? The Fannies have been heading this way for a while and the departure of one of their better songwriters, Gerard Love (who jacked it in two years ago), has hastened their hitherto gentle descent towards the earnestly soporific,

Over the decades, Van Morrison’s role within the tower of song has shifted from chief visionary officer to head of complaints. It’s not a promotion. The title track of his new album, Latest Record Project, Volume 1, is a rebuke to those who insist on living in an artist’s past rather than his present. A laudable sentiment, perhaps, but one less easy to put into practice when Morrison’s present consists of 28 tracks which hone an already ornery world view to a paranoic peak. When he isn’t griping about his divorce he’s peddling half-baked conspiracy theories, sneering at internet users and ‘media junk’, and bitching about modern music, crooked politicians

St Vincent — Annie Clark, a 38-year-old singer-guitarist of prodigious gifts — spends a lot of time confounding people. She confounds them with stage shows that are less gig than theatre, ostentatiously choreographed and fabulously provocative (though not in any crude sense). She confounds them with an image that morphs from album to album (for her sixth, Daddy’s Home, she has adopted the dissolute Cassavetes-heroine look). She confounds them by, in a puritan age, placing sex squarely within her work, though usually in a plausibly deniable way (the title Daddy’s Home refers to her father’s release in 2019 from prison after serving nine years for his part in a stock-manipulation

Grade: C Revisionism has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with the kind of subtlety you might expect from someone who is about to nut you in the mouth. That enormous fruity bellow is one part threat, one part music hall. He was repackaged as someone whose roots supposedly lay in R&B, but I don’t remember Sam Cooke singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ or ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’. What Tom does, with everything, is belt it out, with bombast and bravado and the faint whiff of faggots and peas. He is as nuanced a vocalist as the late Revd Ian Paisley. This, his

The other week someone posted on Twitter a link to a YouTube clip titled ‘Family Lotus and D.J. Cookin’ at the Golden Inn, July 4 1981’. It showed a bunch of long-haired people on a makeshift stage in the New Mexico desert and a handful of people dancing around in the dust to the music, which was a weird, trippy, hyper-freaky form of electrified banjo music: ‘psychedelic bluegrass’, apparently. Watching the stream of the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar was an unnervingly similar experience: he and his three-piece backing band were set up in the dust outside a friend’s house, watched by whoever came along. And Moctar’s guitar playing — blurrily

Has any musical moment extended its tendrils in so many unexpected directions as the English folk revival of the mid-1960s? In its beginnings, it was a source of pilgrimage for Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, who pinched his arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’ from Martin Carthy way back in the dim and distant past when the Beatles walked the earth. It spread into progressive rock and heavy metal (the black metal musician Fenriz, of the Norwegian band Darkthrone, told me recently that he considered Steeleye Span to be an important band in promoting pagan traditions). As it evolved into folk rock, it laid down a path for rock bands seeking to

Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful hour, then you should invest in this bucket of infected expectorant streaked with blood. It’s all there. The depthless self-absorption and introspection, the me me me. The self-aggrandising, the wallowing in victimhood, the complete lack of personal responsibility for her very bad decisions in life, the lack of discernible talent, the mawkishness, the stupidity, the facile political ‘awareness’. This is Demi Lovato, recent subject of an emetic four-part documentary on ‘her life’. Of course she is bulimic and bi-polar. Of course she nearly died of a skag (fentanyl) overdose and

One thing about a streamed festival is that the toilets are better than at the real thing. The other thing, though, is that it’s not really a festival. That’s not to knock the North Will Rise Again (TNWRA), which took place over Saturday and Sunday nights a few weeks back, the first featuring Liverpudlian bands and filmed in that city, the second coming from Manchester, with Mancunian groups. The simple fact is, you can’t replicate a festival online: what the best festivals offer is chance, when one stumbles across something wholly unexpectedly on some outlying stage at an unpromising time of day. Simple economics make that impossible for an event