Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking and svelte, into the watery winter sun, the small venues of London attempt to pack in the curious by filling their schedules with seasons of up-and-coming artists. In east London this past week, the excellent
How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their first records, just getting bigger and bigger? Only now are they touring the arenas of the UK for the first time. They’re nominated for a Grammy. Their current album, No Geography, is a top-five hit.
A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at
In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled
In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’. In neither case,
What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those
Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs. Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the
Those who cherish the notion that the current prime minister really is ‘electoral Viagra’ should have paid a visit to Brixton last Friday evening to see what actual young people think about him. Before Slowthai — the young rapper from Northampton who ignored complaints about the toxification of political discourse by brandishing a dummy of
It’s amazing what the movies can do. In 1986, the John Hughes teen flick Pretty in Pink — the one where poor girl Molly Ringwald and rich kid Andrew McCarthy get it together despite their friends’ disapproval — took its title from a Psychedelic Furs song, which featured heavily in the film. Whoosh! Suddenly they
‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’ by Muse was on heavy rotation on MTV at a time, 15 years ago, when my infant son could be magically coaxed away from tears and back to sleep by pop videos. The only lasting effect of this proved to be my developing a deep and lasting aversion to Muse, because I
It’s entirely possible for a band to be quite the most brilliant thing in existence for the briefest of times, and for them to leave almost no trace on the world. The writer Jon Savage has been known to say that Vic Godard and the Subway Sect were the best band in the world for
Last weekend, in a pleasant park outside Maidstone, a most unusual rock festival took place. For one thing, it was a rock festival. Despite ‘rock festival’ being a common term for any live music event featuring multiple artists taking place outdoors, there are very few actual rock festivals any more. There are festivals for specific
‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and as big as a guardsman’s bearskin, even at the age of 67. (He won’t say that number. He insists his age is ‘three score and seven’.) ‘People say to me: “Do you colour your hair?”
There is something inexplicably exciting about pop’s notion of a ‘scene’: young musicians of similar outlooks drawn together by a common aim to transform music, referring to the past to create something of the present. But enough of Fleetwood Mac and the British blues boom. Instead, to fashionable Dalston, where a young quartet called Black
The last time Bikini Kill played in London was in a room that now serves as the restaurant of a pub in Kentish Town. What a change 26 years can bring: on their return to the city last week, they filled the 5,000-capacity O2 Academy, Brixton, for two nights. That changed status, in truth, is
May was a cruel month for those middle-aged liberals who treasure their old alternative rock heroes. There was Morrissey, appearing on American TV wearing a For Britain badge. There was XTC’s Andy Partridge tweeting that ‘the holocaust is not holy writ, it isn’t a religion, it can be historically revised’. And there was Bobby Gillespie
Many is the pop star who has craved gravitas. Only Sting, however, has pursued it by covering John Dowland on an album on which he played the lute. Only Sting has released an album of winter-themed madrigals. Only Sting has written a musical about the closing of the shipyards in Wallsend. He’s the rare pop
Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take That were still a boy band in the early 1990s, as opposed to a man band, the idea that in middle age they would be one of the most successful live groups in Britain would
Last autumn, anyone who a) has an interest in pop music, and b) reads the weightier end of the press, would have come to the conclusion that the world was shortly to enter some kind of musical singularity, in which all of civilisation would be transformed by the 39-year-old Swedish pop singer Robyn. ‘After more
In March 1968, Frank Zappa released an album called We’re Only in it for the Money. Presumably, then, Zappa — who died a little over a quarter of a century ago — would be delighted to discover that he begins his latest tour next month, with a series of shows in the US followed by
