pop music
Jasper Rees
The mechanism for securing a publicity still from the BBC is as follows. Go to the relevant website, log in, look for the photographs that illustrate the programme, then take your pick. For Dame Shirley Bassey: The Girl from Tiger Bay there wasn’t much of a selection. Only one image, in fact, at least that I could see. It finds Alan Yentob perching like a prize-winning schoolboy on the edge of the sofa, while the prize leans intimately on his shoulder. We need Imagine, especially now that the guillotine is slowly and insubordinately lopping Lord Bragg’s coiffeured head off over on the other Read more ...
robert.sandall
Martha Wainwright’s decision to perform and record a selection of songs by the late Edith Piaf is a bold, not to say high-risk strategy that made for a fascinating one-off concert at the Barbican last night. Plenty of pop divas from Minelli to Bassey and most recently Grace Jones have covered Piaf evergreens such as “Non, je ne regrette rien.” But none has dared to take the Wainwright route and build an entire concert and live album around interpretations of more obscure items from the soi-disant little sparrow’s giant catalogue.While tribute albums loom ever larger in pop’s rear view mirror Read more ...
robert.sandall
Before Matthew Herbert’s triumphantly anarchic appearance in the second half, stiflingly good taste ruled at last night’s concert at the Barbican. Middle-aged suits were out in force to celebrate the British Council’s 75th anniversary and a comfortable faith in liberal values permeated the hall, and the bill.Most of the acts featured were well-meaning collaborations designed to emphasise the spiritual and musical harmony shared by musicians from different continents or contexts. This is exactly the kind of cross-cultural exchange the august institution that is the BC has been promoting since Read more ...
robert.sandall
The success of Spandau Ballet's ecstatically received reunion lies in no small part in its impeccable timing. The band could hardly have chosen a better moment to re-form and revisit their well stocked catalogue of 1980s hits. Not only are their original fans now stuck firmly into middle age and feeling the usual nostalgia for the soundtrack of their youth, but a younger generation of listeners has at last decided that Eighties pop is cool.LaRoux, Florence and the Machine and Friendly Fires are just three of today's hot acts who derive their musical influences and fashion cues from Read more ...
robert.sandall
Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the failure of the major record labels to grasp the implications of the internet seems extraordinary. As Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper explains in this pacey account of corporate greed and myopia, they certainly had enough warning.At the heart of Knopper’s story is the record industry’s longterm tendency to view technological opportunities as threats. When the recession of 1979-1982 reversed a 20-year boom which had seen record sales steadily quadruple in value, opposition to the introduction of compact disc was rife. The tech guru at Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Last night I was thinking, as I often do, of Britney, Kylie, Beyoncé, and less of Shakira, mainly because her name doesn’t end in y or e. The reason that my thoughts turned to Britney et al (incidentally we are delighted to have britneyspearsfans @BritneySpears4u site following theartsdesk on Twitter) was a list published this Saturday in the Telegraph of the best 100 songs of the Noughties.As it’s the end of the decade, so cash-poor media types can fill up acres of space not only with year best-of lists, but decade best-of lists. The Noughty Girls will, quite rightly, be all over them.It may Read more ...
robert.sandall
When Miles Davis led his band into a deconsecrated church in New York in August 1959 to record the album that became Kind of Blue, drummer James Cobb recalled that “it was just another date for us. ” How wrong he was. A little over 50 years later, Cobb - the sole survivor of the original sessions – brought his So What band to London on Thursday to celebrate what many now regard as the most important and popular jazz record ever made.Thursday's concert at London’s Tower Festival marked another event in an anniversary that has been greeted with the sort of delirious fanfare normally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. The Sunday Times even managed to exhume an unpublished interview with John Lennon, in which he sabotaged the myth of the great Lennon-McCartney feud by confessing that he thought Paul McCartney was jolly good Read more ...
robert.sandall
At first sight, it seems extraordinary that there has never been a serious biography dedicated to the Supremes before now. They achieved more than enough to deserve a shelf-ful. In their heyday from 1964 to 1969 America loved them to distraction: only Elvis and the Beatles bettered the 12 number ones the Supremes racked up on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Their popularity with white audiences who had been raised on the Elvis principle – that it was OK for pop to sound black as long as the singers weren’t - rocked the mainstream on its axis.Black acts from the Four Tops to the Jackson 5 Read more ...