R&b

Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats in the house, with fantastic sightlines and excellent sound (a PR who used to work for U2 told me she would routinely reassign press into even better seats than the already splendid ones they had originally been given; you do anything you can to get an extra 1 per cent more enthusiasm into the review). When we go to standing venues, though, we are as prone to the vagaries of geography as anyone else. And because we go to a lot of shows, we tend to arrive only five minutes

Touring’s not what it used to be. When I were a lad, even big bands would do 30 or 40 shows around the UK to promote their new albums, stopping in places such as Chippenham Goldiggers, Hanley Victoria Hall, Ipswich Gaumont, Preston Lockley Grand Hall that would only see a major act today if they happened to need a local motorway services. Those days are gone. If you’re a superstar, you’ll do a handful of arenas in a few big cities. And if you are not a superstar, you might not even tour your new album at all, at least not in the old sense. Rather than playing 20 different

Grade: A Hell, there’s a lot not to like, or even to be a little suspicious of, with this young woman. Her politics are, as you might have guessed, banal and stupid. She has been in a relationship with the ghastly Matty Healy of the 1975. But she has huge talent and is probably a more interesting musician than any other we have right now, if we’re just talking pop music. She exists just beyond the Kuiper Belt of digital, alternative rhythm and blues, where pop meets modern classical. The conventional description is ‘art pop’, but as that brings to mind 10cc I think we’d better move on. Her songs,

Song for song, line by line, blow for blow, Elvis Costello remains the most consistently fascinating songwriter Britain has produced in the past 50 years – an opinion which seems these days to be mostly confined to a smallish section of an ageing demographic. Certainly, Costello’s music has, as far as I can tell, proved largely resistant to TikTokification, even if Olivia Rodrigo did ‘pay homage’ (nicked, with the author’s approval) to the riff to ‘Pump It Up’ for her song ‘Brutal’. Surveying the audience at the Theatre Royal on the opening night of a UK tour with his long-term foil Steve Nieve, these would appear to be mostly the

A few years ago, my nephew informed me that he and his friend were planning to come up to London for the weekend for the Wireless Festival. Did they need somewhere to stay? He looked at me like I was a mad old man. No, of course not. They were going to camp. In Finsbury Park. Because when you go to festivals, you camp. Thankfully, he didn’t turn up on the Victoria Line with his tent and then wonder why no one else was similarly equipped. Phoenix have the air of being as much a lifestyle choice as a pop group Inner-city festivals such as Wireless and All Points East

You won’t see two more contrasting shows this year than Corinne Bailey Rae performing her album Black Rainbows and Brian Eno presenting work with a symphony orchestra. One had music that did everything; one had music that did very little. But both were overwhelming and filled with joy of rather different kinds. When Bailey Rae last made an album, in 2016, it was gentle, tasteful, soulful R&B, the kind the young professional couple in a prestige Netflix drama listen to before their lives are overturned by a vengeful nanny. Black Rainbows,by contrast, from earlier this year, was an abrupt embrace of everything: from scuzzy garage punk to psychedelic soul to

Grade: D– For my first review of popular music releases in 2020 I thought I’d deposit this large vat of crap over your heads. This is the fifth album from Canada’s androgynous, tattooed bratlette — purveyor of corporate trap dross to the world’s pre-pubescent thots, skanks and wannabe hos. Trouble is, even for the dumbest of the world’s unter-mädchens, Bieber’s schtick has long since worn a little thin. So his new album is called Changes, which is the only echo of David Bowie you will find within. But as Justin puts it on the title track: ‘Tho I’m goin thru changes, don’t mean that I’ll change.’ No indeed, well put.