The Human League are one of the brightest lights in the history of electro-pop. They have had many incarnations over the years but since late 1980 the core of the group has been frontman Philip Oakey (b 1955) and singers Joanne Catherall (b 1962) and Susan Sulley (b 1963).The Human League bloomed out of Sheffield’s electronic underground in the mid-Seventies, releasing the seminal electro-pop single “Being Boiled” in 1978. They signed to Virgin but success was not quick in coming and by 1980, with two albums under their belt, they split. Synthesizer wizards Martin Ware and Ian Craig Read more ...

Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of all the grizzly details. That is until I watched what turned out to be another of those cheap-to-make caffeine-charged documentaries which goes off on so many tangents that it’s hard to recall what it was meant to be about in the first place. For last night’s look at what was described as a pivotal year for the BBC’s once-essential weekly viewing Read more ...

Is Guy Garvey really as lovely as he seems? I hope so. Last night, on the first of two nights for the Bury band at the O2 Arena, their lead singer, this big bearded bear of a man, came across as clever, funny, confident, warm, positive and inspirational. He can sing a bit, too, possessing a voice of uncommon sweetness and purity and unerring accuracy, slipping effortlessly into falsetto and back when required. Really, unless you happen to be the kind of person who likes to swim through seas of cynicism, what’s not to like?And blowing away cynicism was what this gig was all about: shamelessly Read more ...

Katy B has something of the everygirl about her. Part of her appeal is that, unlike Ke$ha, The Saturdays and so many other female pop stars, she hasn't embraced pole-dancer chic, nor does she appear to be gagging to be spread over the pages of Heat pondering her love life, her diet or her cleavage. Katy B is a 21-year-old from Peckham who looks like a 21-year-old from Peckham.With girl-next-door features and a penchant for unobtrusive casual wear, she presents herself as the young woman perched by the bassbins in your local dubstep hotspot, nodding along with a satisfied smile. As with Read more ...

Forget Lady Gaga – Mica Levi, aka Micachu, is modern pop’s true maverick. More likely to sport jeans and T-shirt than frock of flesh, she’s a skinny, scruffy tomboy who can hold her own in a game of keepie-uppie. Her take on music is similarly unassuming, but it’s also, genuinely, extraordinary. Debut album Jewellery, originally recorded for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label but then snapped up by Rough Trade, deserved to be classed as pop, in her own eyes, because it comprised “short songs, with choruses and verses”. But its wonky and defiantly lo-fi tunes, hammered out on a tiny, charity- Read more ...

If you just knew him from the pop and world-music part of his career you might struggle to believe that Peter Gabriel was once considered to be synonymous with everything that was white and stiff in music. His Genesis work, all public-school poetry and am-dram costumes, not only practically invented prog rock, but also spawned its most infamous practitioner, Marillion. By “Sledgehammer” and “Steam”, however, Gabriel had fully switched sides of his brain. That was, however, until last year when he revisited prog by replacing his touring band with an orchestra. Not everyone was impressed.The Read more ...

There was not likely to be much ballet here, despite the Pet Shop Boys’ proud use of the word to distinguish their substantial three-act score. This delivers a richly James Bond-ish ride through big pop tunes, opulent filmic moments and some nice bumps between fantasy scene-setting and camp nightclubbing. It was the two musicians who thought up the idea of turning Hans Christian Andersen’s very beautiful and poignant 1897 fairytale into a ballet, a story in which the deliberate destruction of an astonishing, ingenious clock is not the end of the story, but becomes a celebration of creativity Read more ...

Anyone expecting the 1977-style foghorn-voiced Poly Styrene from Generation Indigo is going to be disappointed. Instead, this album is sweetly delivered, melodic and driving modern pop with a Euro electro-dance sheen. She’s not bellowing “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” over bee-in-a-jar guitar and caterwauling sax, but embracing something much more friendly.Of course, this review is tempered by the recent news that Poly has been diagnosed with cancer. Produced by Youth, Generation Indigo isn’t for those sporting punk blinkers, although she’ll always be defined by having fronted X-Ray Spex between Read more ...

Anyone remember Haddaway? Or Dr Alban? These were flash-in-the-pan early-Nineties pop stars who combined European dance music with tints of R&B and Afro-Caribbean pop. Who'd have thought their sound would be the template for mainstream American pop for the early 2010s. From Black Eyed Peas to Jennifer Lopez, everyone's into low-calory trance-house cheese with a side order of gutless electro.And now here's Chris Brown riding the tepid gravy train. The US R&B superstar's fourth album is overflowing with under-par rave leftovers, vocoders everywhere but flavour and bite duly neutered, as Read more ...

Jet Harris was one of the architects of British rock'n'roll. His death rams home just how distant that era now seems. A former skiffler, he joined The Shadows after a spell backing Terry Dene, British rock's first bad boy. In time, Harris became a bad boy too, setting the template for the self-destructive lifestyle that would become a cliché. But his moody image will survive too. His rumbling bass guitar will forever be synonymous with those evocative Shadows' hits.The Shadows' world-changing moment came in August 1960 when they topped the British charts with “Apache”. Everything in British Read more ...

Arnaud Fleurent-Didier’s La Reproduction was one of the most striking albums of last year. The news that he and his band are playing the UK for the first time next week at the Institut Français is exciting as La Reproduction was more than great musically. It was also a cultural benchmark, putting the Mai 68 generation under the microscope and taking them to task for being inward-looking – they made great mayonnaise at the expense of paying attention to their kids.La Reproduction is Fleurent-Didier’s fourth album, his first for a major label. His songwriting draws on the classic romantic arc Read more ...

Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air hostess to shaven-headed loon lunging aggressively towards her public through the paparazzo's lens, she's provided no end of provocative and iconic images, and stirred up all kinds of problematic issues around post-feminism, celebrity and voyeurism, while remaining an odd non-presence at the centre of it all. Not an obvious provocateur like Madonna or Read more ...