Pop
Greatness and idiocy
Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London…
I’m missing moshpits
There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown:…
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Dysfunctional music by dysfunctional people
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
Homage to Avalonia
Televising Glastonbury has changed the festival, and in turn transformed television, says Graeme Thomson
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.…
Walnut whips and Stafford Cripps
The National Theatre’s programme of livestreamed shows continues with the Donmar’s 2014 production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston. The play…
Cheap thrills
Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music…
A sting in the tale
Did the US secretly write a power ballad in order to bring down the Soviet Union? That’s the question behind…
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.…
Beasties and besties
The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on…
Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
Hopping mad
The ghost of Samuel Beckett oversaw the Hip Hop Loves NY livestream last Thursday night. Time and time again its…
A kind of magic
You have to admire the spirit of the organisers of last weekend’s One World: Together at Home concert. To put…
Public enemy
Many performers hated playing live. But freed from the stage they often made their best and wildest work, argues Graeme Thomson
The fascinating Ms Swift
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
Waking the dead
‘No matter what they take from me,’ sang Whitney Houston towards the end of a peculiar evening in Hammersmith, ‘they…
Green Day: Father of All…
Grade: B+ It is an eternal mystery to me why Britain has never had much time for power pop, seeing…
Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
Grade: B The old axiom no longer applies. In modern popular music, it is possible not only to gild a…
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……
A son-et-lumière spectacular: The Chemical Brothers at the O2 Arena reviewed
How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their…
Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed
A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the…
