pop music
Adam Sweeting
The bittersweet career of The Kinks is portrayed to surprisingly potent effect in this fast, funny and sometimes poignant musical, now transferring to the West End from the Hampstead Theatre. No mere "jukebox musical" – though it's crammed with songs – it finds space for some kitchen-sink drama, a bit of psychotherapy and a few smart insights into the Sixties pop business.Ray Davies wrote all the music as well as the original story, from which playwright Joe Penhall has spun a pacey and eminently performable script. The stage-show format has to skate briskly over issues like dubious Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's a "foreword" which accompanies the new Taylor Swift album – because it's not enough for the one-time Nashville starlet gone full New York pop star merely to create physical objects for the digital age: she also has to give them forewords – which says that these songs that were "once about my life" are "now about yours". It's for this reason that those articles that list the romantic encounters claimed to have inspired every song Swift has written since 2010's "Dear John" onwards do her an incredible disservice: the gossip column inches are irrelevant. That Swift can use vivid Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A first live experience of the French-Cameroonian singer Sandra Nkaké leaves many questions unanswered. Once the immediate bewilderment has passed, the most pressing question for a British audience should be: why is this extraordinary performer not block-booking the festival circuit? In a single set, accompanied by flautist and controller of the electronics, Jî Drû, Nkaké gave a stunningly complete display, as voice, accompaniment, movement and stage presence combined to project her mesmerising, leonine charisma. For Georgia Mancio’s ReVoice Festival, it was an inspired booking.There’s a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Oasis: (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?Adding anything to a story so familiar, so raked over and one played out in public is tricky. Most probably, there are few revelations left about the Oasis of 1995, the year they released their second album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? In its slipstream they racked up a set of mostly unbroken records: it sold 347,000 in the week of release; 2.6m applications were made for tickets to their Knebworth shows.A large proportion of the latter figure must have bought the album, begging the question of whether it’s worth buying again 19 Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
How does an artist follow a debut album as well-received as Jessie Ware’s Mercury-nominated Devotion? With something just as insistent, just as beautiful and just as likely to stick in the brain. There’s something incredibly unassuming about the London-born diva, who despite having the sort of voice that would lend itself perfectly to big, belting R&B ballads, is content to play it subtle and let the music speak for itself.Tough Love is, according to Ware, one last record about unrequited love before she becomes a happily married woman; and there’s a sepia-tinged late-night sadness to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For someone who tags himself rock and roll's greatest failure, John Otway hasn’t done too badly. Anyone attempting to navigate their way through a career in rock ‘n’ roll wouldn’t do badly looking to Otway as an example to follow. He’s had chart singles, headlined the Royal Albert Hall, written two autobiographies and has a massive, loyal fan base. At age 61, he’s still at it over 40 years after the 1972 release of his first single. Judging from Otway the Movie, he does what he does full time, has a roof over his head, has a wife and an enviably articulate daughter. Failure? Hardly.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Cilla Black still fighting fit and eminently telly-worthy at 71, it feels a bit odd to find a three-part dramatisation of her life popping up on ITV. Black apparently gave the project her blessing and has hailed Sheridan Smith's performance in the title role, but all this does is to tacitly suggest that it's a fairly harmless piece of entertainment which is unlikely to go poking about in any dark or controversial areas. Team Cilla would surely have had the scheme quashed otherwise.Thus it was no great surprise to find the first episode (of three) of Cilla bringing us a fluffy, comical, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Game Theory: Blaze of GloryThe news of the death on 15 April last year of Scott Miller was a shock. Although hardly a household name, he was one of pop’s great auteurs. The California-born songwriter may no longer be with us, but the music he made with his bands Alternate Learning, Game Theory and The Loud Family will forever testify to his originality, single-mindedness and, above all, way with a tune and a meaning-filled snarky lyric. The structure of his songs twisted and turned, but they were always melodic. He was clever, eloquent, sarcastic and, in person, always charming. All of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Calypso CrazeIn 1956, calypso battled it out with rock ’n’ roll to become America’s hottest musical craze. As the year ended, newspaper reports quoted pundits predicting it would wipe Elvis and his like out. One such was Reverend Norman O’Connor, a “Catholic chaplain at Boston University and a jazz authority”, who said “rock ’n’ roll is on the way out.” Showbiz trade mag Variety concurred in December, proclaiming calypso “the exterminator of rock ’n’ roll” and “the hot trend.” They seemed to have a point. Pop’s first million selling album became Harry Belafonte’s Calypso, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Five albums down, and it seems that The Pierces are yet to stop dressing up their music in different, albeit recognisable, clothes. If 2011’s You & I was the big pop album that with any justice would have made Allison and Catherine household names, then its follow-up finds them going full Stevie Nicks. The sisters have made much in interviews of enlisting the help of a shaman and the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca to get them in touch with their “spiritual” sides before recording Creation – and certainly these compositions make for a heady brew, even if the basic premise of the musings Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It looked like Dresden after the bombing.” Blondie’s Chris Stein may be a member of one of pop’s most-loved bands, but he also has a way with words. Describing 1970's New York City in this way is offensive to the memory of the 25,000 who died in the World War II air raids on Dresden. More pertinently for New York-dweller Stein, his comment also chimes badly with the destruction of the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Centre in 2001.Blondie’s New York and the Making of Parallel Lines unquestioningly celebrated the band’s massive-selling, breakthrough third album but some care could have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Popcorn GirlsAlthough the sole single by troubled American televison and film star Tuesday Weld seems an unlikely dance floor filler, 1962’s cute and gently shuffling “Are You the Boy” became a staple with one of continental Europe's most important and longest-lasting dance music subcultures. Weld sang flat but what mattered for Belgium's Popcorn scene was the rhythm: a mid-tempo, almost-martial two-step which could accompany the “slow swing” dance which gripped the country in the late Sixties and continues to do so.Like Northern Soul – its closest cousin – Popcorn is a Read more ...