albums
‘We knew there was greatness in these songs’
Graeme Thomson talks to Steve Diggle, front man of Buzzcocks, about orgasms, boredom and Pete Shelley
Ambassador, you are really spoiling us
In classical music circles, Christmas arrives with the overture to Handel’s Messiah. Or so they’ll tell you. In truth, festivities…
AC/DC: Power Up
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
‘It was like a survivors’ circle’
Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism
Fish and fire
Anyone who invited the Russian composer Mily Balakirev to dinner had to be jolly careful about the fish they served.…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
The Pineapple Thief: Versions of the Truth
Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has…
Deep Purple: Whoosh!
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…
Magnificent muddle
In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti…
Beauty and the beast
Michael Hann talks to Kevin Rowland about Dexys, insecurity and the cocaine years
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
The Peter Cook of pop
In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even.…
The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
Public enemy
Many performers hated playing live. But freed from the stage they often made their best and wildest work, argues Graeme Thomson
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Haydn seek
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his…
Mick Hucknall on women, rejection and cultural appropriation
What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not…
Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band…
Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed
Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their…
Reliably odd but the deranged proggery grates: King’s Mouth by The Flaming Lips reviewed
Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and…
Hideously tasteful elegies to useless country singers: Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars reviewed
Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked…
David Coverdale, lead singer of Whitesnake, talks hair, love handles and ‘sexism’
‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and…
Much as I admire Morrissey’s refusal to conform, I don’t much like his music
Grade: B Rock stars who utter something a little gamey, something a tad right-wingish, are usually coerced by the lefties…
They. Cannot. Write. Songs: Mumford & Sons reviewed
Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and…
