Michael Hann

The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on to record everything that amused them. And early on, in their teens-get-drunk debut album, Licensed To Ill, that resulted in obnoxiousness. But mostly they were kinetic and colourful, which is why the new Apple TV+ film about them works so well. The format suits the story. Beastie Boys Story simply documents a stage show where winningly they talk the audience through their personal history. It’s much like Netflix’s Springsteen on Broadway. But since the third Beastie, Adam Yauch, died in 2012, the band no longer perform, so where Springsteen punctuated his memories with songs, the Beasties do it with film clips.

You can’t move for them. At least, you wouldn’t be able to if you could leave your house. NHS charity singles as far as the eye can see – from Queen, from the collection of second division 90s musicians billed as the Indie Allstars, from the rather bigger names gathered together by Radio 1 to record Foo Fighters’ 'Times Like These'. From unknowns – The Singing Dentist, The Ideas. And from the charity hero du jour, Captain Tom Moore, accompanied by star of stage, screen and the Christmas CD market, Michael Ball. Then there are the charity gigs that have been announced, to raise money for the NHS, or to give NHS staff a free night out – gigs by Liam Gallagher, Manic Street Preachers, Rick Astley, Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott.

The ghost of Samuel Beckett oversaw the Hip Hop Loves NY livestream last Thursday night. Time and time again its host, the veteran hip-hop TV presenter Ralph McDaniels — known to all his guests, unnervingly, as ‘Uncle Ralph’ — tried to connect to some Golden Age legend. Time and time again, his attempts at a straightforward interview went wrong. We saw Uncle Ralph, on one half of the screen, ask a question about Covid-19, nod along to the answer, then say, ‘Thank you, doctor.’ But we didn’t have a doctor on screen, or on our audio. We had Ice T. ‘I ain’t no doctor,’ Ice-T said. Cut to Nas. But Nas was inaudible, and his picture was breaking up. ‘I see Chuck D!’ He did, but we didn’t.

You have to admire the spirit of the organisers of last weekend’s One World: Together at Home concert. To put on an event that seemed to last longer than lockdown itself is the sort of can-do attitude we love to see. The main event — the really star-studded portion that was shown live on Saturday night on the big three US networks, and then adapted for the UK and shown on BBC1 on Sunday — began only after six whole hours of preamble from slightly lesser turns. Six hours. That’s an awful lot of watching people sit with an acoustic guitar in front of their webcam. Or sometimes not even sit with an acoustic guitar — Jessie J appeared to be doing karaoke with her own CDs and singing over the top of them.

There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the ownership of her old songs by her previous record label would scupper it. But no, Ms Swift is not to be resisted, and lo, Miss Americana is available right now on Netflix, one of its two big music documentaries for the spring. Many older men seem to have a visceral distaste for Ms Swift. If you share that distaste, then I’m sorry, it’s your loss, because she’s a fascinating figure (who has also made three truly terrific albums in Fearless, Red and 1989), and Miss Americana is well worth watching.

The accepted line about Bryan Ferry is that his is one of the greatest reinventions in English pop culture: Peter York said, in 1976, that his life was ‘the best possible example of the ultimate art-directed existence’. But watching him at the Albert Hall, I couldn’t help thinking of my father. That’s not to diminish the show — which was a lush and all-enveloping pleasure, like getting into bed in a very good hotel — but I couldn’t help wondering if there was actually something very specific about Ferry that tends to get ignored: his generation. He’s 74 now, though from a distance you might put him in his mid-fifties, especially in his beautifully cut suit.

You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took to the stage at the Palladium last Wednesday night. She’d missed ten out of 93 appearances, and she’d been picking up the kind of niggling injuries — would her knees stand up to the strains of a long, hard season? How’s her hip? — associated with hard-running midfielders. Just as in the Premier League, there were gripes about ticket prices — go on Ticketmaster and they range from £69 to £511.50 (yes, there are tickets available throughout the run; you’ve got until 16 February to see her).