Pop
Indie heaven
‘Well, it’s just not Glastonbury, is it?’ said my daughter aggressively, when told that our yurt featured an actual bed,…
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…
The borrowers
‘Version’ is an old reggae term I’ve always loved. It refers to a stripped-down, rhythm-heavy instrumental mix of a song,…
The real deal
One of the biggest talking points in pop these past couple of years has been how successful old musicians have…
Imperial measures
At the turn of this century, looking back on the late 1980s when the Pet Shop Boys could do 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…
‘I came, I saw, I scribbled’
Graeme Thomson talks to former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan about his first art folio
Family entertainer
Stormzy occupies a curious place in British pop culture right now. He’s the darling of liberals for all his good…
Band of Horses: Things Are Great
Grade: B That thing, ‘indie rock’, is so well played and produced these days, so pristine and flawless, that it…
Her dark materials
It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark…
The Weather Station: How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars
Grade: C– Anyone remember that TV advert for Canada from the 1980s – a succession of colourful images, including a…
Avril Lavigne: Love Sux
Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…
Playing hooky
One of the curiosities of modern pop’s landscape is that no one knows any longer how to measure success. An…
Such sweet sorrow
We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to…
Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There
Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new…
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…
Mike Yarwood moment
Any artist who has habitually written or performed in character — from David Bowie to Lady Gaga — eventually arrives…
Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Barn
Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a…
The potency of cheap music
Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the…
Ed Sheeran: = (Christmas edition)
Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The…
I saw a film today, oh boy
My late friend Alexander Nekrassov loathed the Beatles, which I used to think was a wantonly contrary position akin to…
