pop music
Barney Harsent
“I don’t really care about reviews because if someone slags it off, they’ve missed the joke. How can they slag off a fictional character? It’s win-win. It’s pain-free. It’s bulletproof – commercially and critically.”Ricky Gervais there, talking about the album tie-in with his new film David Brent: Life on the Road. In many ways, he’s right: the songs, written in the guise of Gervais’ best comic creation, are meant to be bad, but entertainingly so, like, say, Spinal Tap. It's a comparison that Gervais doesn't shy away from: “Once you know the context, you can enjoy the songs without jokes, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If you like the feeling of leaving a show, surrounded by the gently glowing faces of happy fellow audience members, then this is one for you. It’s a musical evening full of joyful singing – mixing classics by Mendelssohn and Bartok with a best-of chunk of the back catalogue from the Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne – that transports you to a different world. Adapted by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall from the 1998 novel Sopranos by Alan Warner, it delights with its onstage music and raucous lust for life, and offers an exceptionally exhilarating explosion of swaggering joy and rampaging Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A two-bar flurry of guitar lays the table for a skip-along beat, handclaps, and an arrangement and melody akin to Martha and the Vandellas’ March 1964 single “In my Lonely Room”. This though was not a Motown production and did not tell the story of a girl so distraught at her boyfriend’s dalliances that all she could do was take to her lonely room and cry. On “The 81”, Candy & the Kisses sang of a dance craze for anyone “tired of doing the monkey, tired of doing the swing.”Despite being a knock-off of the Detroit sound, the irresistible “The 81” did not sound like a Motown record. It Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As the album featuring Simple Minds’ first Top Twenty single, “Promised You a Miracle”, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was aptly titled. After the success of the next single “Glittering Prize”, it hit number three in the album charts. Five albums in and three years after their first single, Simple Minds were indeed touching gold.Whether their breakthrough into the mainstream was a miracle or not depends on how the band is seen. The album preceding New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was actually issued as two separate records: Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. Each featured a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The weight of expectation can be a terrible thing to bear. When Since I Left You, The Avalanches’ patchwork party debut, was released in 2000, there was no sense of how long it had taken to make, just a collective intake of breath at the dense layers and intricate detail. Plundering anything and everything in their bid to create this delightful decoupage, it was the sheer scale of the band’s collective imagination that thrilled. How could any follow-up possibly compare?Listening to their long-awaited comeback Wildflower, which has been 16 years in the making, it sounds like they've not given Read more ...
joe.muggs
If last night made anything clear it's that some things are still some way beyond the reach of hipster reappropriation. The audience in Hyde Park for Carole King was 99% white and middle-aged, with the very few younger people scattered about appearing to be teenagers there with their parents. Within that, though, there was a broad spread of class, and – reflecting the appeal of King's Tapestry album at the time of its release – everyone from grizzled old hippies to a whole legion of straight-as-a-die mums and dads of the kind who have probably only bought half a dozen other albums since the Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
How does Hannah Georgas’s 98-year-old grandmother feel about her collaborations with Graham Walsh, her two-time producer better known as part of Canadian electronic quartet Holy Fuck? It is, one suspects, one of a few aspects of this rich, immersive record that the Evelyn of its title might raise an eyebrow at – but in its themes of family, longing, loyalty and resilience, particularly on the gorgeous not-quite-title track, there’s plenty for her to be proud of.It was obvious from their work together on her 2013 self-titled album that Walsh had a knack for drawing out the unexpected from Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After two albums in rapid-fire quick succession, 2012’s eponymous debut and its 2013 follow-up, Shangri-La, Jake Bugg could be forgiven for taking a little longer to get his third out into the world. There was talk of working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, of taking risks, and rumours were of something darker, different and more diverse.Feburary’s unveiling of the new album’s title track, “On My One”, gave no such sense of a shift. Although Bugg reigned in the worst excesses of his nasal tones, it was familiar and surprisingly safe ground. Then, barely a week later, “Gimme the Love” arrived, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Telegram Sam” by T. Rex spent its second and final week at the top of the singles chart in the week of 12 February 1972. A month later, on 18 March, Marc Bolan and his band played two shows at Wembley’s Empire Pool to a sell-out crowd under the spell of what was labelled Bolanmania or T. Rextasy. Bolan seemed unstoppable. Before “Telegram Sam”, the success of “Ride a White Swan”, “Hot Love”, “Get it on” and “Jeepster” suggested he was as big as The Beatles. Fittingly, a real-life Beatle directed the camera crews capturing the Wembley shows on film.Born to Boogie was made at these shows. Its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Adam Ant was one of the few who saw Sex Pistols’ first live show. On 6 November 1975, his band Bazooka Joe was playing Charing Cross Road’s St Martin’s School of Art. They found an uninvited support band had gatecrashed the evening. The impact of the interlopers on the then Stuart Goddard wasn’t instant, but he would go on to form The B-Sides and, then, Adam and the Ants, whose manager became Jordan, who worked at Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road shop SEX. Adam was hotwired into what became codified as punk rock. But his music was never defined by templates.Mainstream impact took a while to come Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in the long-ago year of 1982 that Martin Fry and ABC released The Lexicon of Love, a feast of addictively lush pop-soul swathed in Anne Dudley's orchestrations and producer Trevor Horn's sparkling electronic innovations. Fry bestrode it like a knowing nouveau-glam mastermind, treading in the ironic footsteps of Bryan Ferry and David Bowie as he effortlessly juggled camp, kitsch and sardonic wit. The album's multi-million-selling success was underpinned by vintage songs like "Poison Arrow", "The Look of Love" and "All of My Heart".Yet all things must pass, and Fry spent much of the Read more ...