Pop
Spellbinding performance of a career-defining record: Corinne Rae Bailey, at Ladbroke Hall, reviewed
You won’t see two more contrasting shows this year than Corinne Bailey Rae performing her album Black Rainbows and Brian…
The case against re-recording albums
In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was…
Virgin on the astonishing: Madonna, at The O2, reviewed
When I was a kid listening obsessively to AC/DC and Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, I despaired of music writers.…
Drunk on devotion
The intimate acoustic show can denote many things for an established artist. One is that, in the infamous euphemism coined…
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
