live music
Miracle in an evening gown
When Motown first packaged up a roster of artists and songs that could be embraced by a non-black audience, no…
Oops! He did it again
Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group…
Skin in the game
Drummers are patient chaps, in the main. Think of Ringo in Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles docuseries, Get Back. Lolling around…
The perfect pop star
Dua Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia, was released at the least promising moment possible: 27 March 2020, the day after…
The essential Wellerness
You don’t need to be a historian of pop to realise that having been part of a huge manufactured group…
Her dark materials
It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark…
Such sweet sorrow
We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to…
Hardcore thrills
Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic.…
A great leap forward
The single thing you don’t want when you are beginning a run of four shows in a prestige venue, with…
The weird turned pro
Pop quiz time: which act was named Melody MakerGroup of the Year in 1975? The answer is not, as you…
Soul searching
No musician ever went bust overestimating the public desire to hear classic soul. Slapping on a Motown backbeat has revived…
Running on full and empty
The bigger the next big thing, the smaller the room you want them playing in. You want the people who…
The beautiful and damned
Nick Cave has always been drawn to parable and fable, but more than ever these days he is engaged in…
Hot metal and methadrine
They may no longer get many teenagers at their shows spending all their money on merchandise, then throwing up on…
Another Albion
As August unwound, the EIF settled into the cavernous gazebo that is Edinburgh Park, and things began to loosen up.…
Live and kicking
There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the…
Yes man
Rod Liddle talks to Rick Wakeman about lockdown, the Sex Pistols, and how you can’t have opinions any more
Ordinary but extraordinary
How hard must it be to make music that sounds like no one else? And how unrewarding, often, as well?…
Greatness and idiocy
Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London…
Waking the dead
‘No matter what they take from me,’ sang Whitney Houston towards the end of a peculiar evening in Hammersmith, ‘they…
Material world
You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took…
Purified scarification
Every development in heavy music is derided by mainstream critics. When Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin emerged in the late…
New faces
Come January, when the proper pop stars are all in the gym working off the pounds before they emerge, blinking……
Range and power – and amazingly she sang all her songs: Christina Aguilera at Wembley reviewed
In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and…
Fascinating and compelling: Bruce Hornsby at Shepherd’s Bush Empire reviewed
In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for,…
