Pop
Being Dead: When Horses Would Run
Grade: A– The point of a sudden, abrupt change in the time signature and instrumentation of a song is to…
Playing it cool
Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic…
California dreaming
Adam Sweeting talks to Graham Nash about Joni Mitchell, the Hollies and the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash in the Laurel Canyon idyll of the 1960s
Deluge and delight
I love Green Man. The smallish festival is the second most beautiful site I’ve ever visited (after G Fest, which…
Uneasy listening
I have always been fascinated by artists who bounce between tonal extremes when performing, particularly the ones who serve their…
Come let us adore them
It’s not just who our pop heroes are that marks the passing of the generations; it’s how those heroes present…
Salve Regina
We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music…
Heaven knows they’re miserable now
Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth.…
Matters of life and death
Seven years ago, I asked Bruce Springsteen what he meant when he talked of the covenant between himself and his…
A tale of two fortunes
Here’s a mystery for you. Why were Spoon, one of the most dynamic, sharpest rock bands in the world, playing…
Time to start popping the pills
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
Amazing Grace
Some artists need flash bombs to make an impression on stage. Some need giant screens. Some need to run around…
Nepo daddies
Rob Grant releases his debut album, Lost at Sea, this week. A 69-year-old millionaire and former ad man, furniture exec…
Metal fatigue
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything worse than Mötley Crüe in Sheffield. Nothing more tuneless, empty, vapid and dismaying.…
Hoists, HD and horses
Scheduling open-air concerts in mid-May in northern Europe is a triumph of hope over experience. I last spent time with…
Back to black
Michael Hann on the most enduring of pop subcultures
Irish ayes
I was listening the other week to a solo album by an ageing rock guitarist, once terrifically famous. It was…
Me and Mr Jones
Adam Sweeting talks to the documentary-maker Nick Broomfield about the forgotten Rolling Stone
Sad-face emoji
Whether by accident or design, the mathematical theme of Ed Sheeran’s previous album titles (+, ×, ÷ and = respectively)…
Something special
Bob Dylan has always toyed with audiences. He plays what he wants, how he wants, letting his mood dictate tempo…
Something special
A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages…
Blasts from the past
Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the…
Fallen idols
The definition of ‘pop star’ in the Collins English Dictionary is unambiguous: ‘A famous singer or musician who performs pop…
Spark of genius
Lindsey Buckingham, at 72, still has cheekbones that cast shadows. He has the upright shock of hair, too, though now…
