One of many soul acts looking back 50 years and doing very good business: Black Pumas, at the Roundhouse, reviewed

No musician ever went bust overestimating the public desire to hear classic soul. Slapping on a Motown backbeat has revived many a career and made many a star. At the simplest level, what wedding band are you going to hire: the one playing note-for-note recreations of acid-rock wig-outs from 1968, or the one playing note-for-note recreations of the Motown, Stax and Atlantic catalogues from the same year?

It’s hardly evidence of the appalling taste of the music-buying public. If we’re going to play that silly ‘What pop era was best?’ game, then the answer — as any fule kno — is some point between 1965 and 1969, when rock was moving forward at the speed of light, and soul was not just embodying profound social and cultural changes, but was also just about the most beautiful popular music ever made, certainly in the post-Elvis era (I’m undecided about whether Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham or the Gershwins were the greater songwriters).

Hence the fact that at any given time you can be sure there will be a handful of soul acts on the circuit looking back 50 years and doing very good business, too: St Paul & the Broken Bones, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, Curtis Harding, Leon Bridges, and now Black Pumas. The Pumas had three nominations for this year’s Grammy awards, in the wake of their first album, and played at Joe Biden’s inauguration. You can see why: they’re a model of melting-pot America — a band formed by a Hispanic-American guitarist and an African-American singer singing about how we’re all going to be uplifted. Right on!