Pop

There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be faked or fudged. No lofty exposition, no pleading discourse, no mitigating circumstance, no ifs, buts or boo-hoo back story can bend a piece of so-so music into a great pop song. We simply know one

If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In rock and pop there is only one: the dizzying rise, the imperial period, the fall from grace (either commercial or ethical, sometimes both), and the noble return (historically prefigured with a glossy music mag cover

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of

What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and be unable to replicate the technical skills that define you. To suddenly find the thing you do well absolutely impossible. Golfers who lose their swing, cricketers whose bowling deserts them, snooker players who can’t sink

It is not uncommon for (predominantly male) music critics to invert the ‘great man/great woman’ dictum in order to suggest that behind the success of every powerful female artist there simply must be a moustache-twirling Svengali pulling the strings. It’s less common for the artist themselves to pose the question. On ‘Lonely’, the penultimate track

No one who went to see Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway residency a few years back came away disappointed because they knew what they were getting: a tightly scripted show, in which there was more speech than music. The country star Eric Church – who made his name with a single called ‘Springsteen’ – appeared to have

I have a friend who insists that had Status Quo hailed from Düsseldorf rather than Catford, they would nowadays be as critically revered as Can, Faust, Neu! and those other hallowed Teutonic pioneers of unyielding rhythm from the 1970s. Maybe so. Very probably not. Canned Heat and ZZ Top seem more reachable comparisons. But it’s

Young male singers won the right to be sensitive in 1963, when The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released. And in the 63 years since, being young and vulnerable and questing has been one of the great default settings. I’d say you can’t go far wrong singing sadly about your feelings, but of course you can,

There’s a lot to be said for an artist making an audience feel uncomfortable. Richard Thompson used to say that he considered it sound practice to keep punters ill at ease and on their toes. Mark Eitzel would probably agree, although it’s never been entirely clear whether the nervous exhaustion he induces among his fans

The most compelling character in the newish documentary One to One: John & Yoko isn’t either John or Yoko. It’s one A.J. Weberman, inventor of ‘Dylanology’ and ‘garbology’. He’s shown practising both in the film, rummaging through Bob Dylan’s bins for clues to the thought process of genius.  Fifty years on, two things struck me.

One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the

Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats in the house, with fantastic sightlines and excellent sound (a PR who used to work for U2 told me she would routinely reassign press into even better seats than the already splendid ones they had

There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past. Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent

Midway through their thoroughly entertaining show at Wembley Arena, the Darkness played a song from a decade ago called ‘Barbarian’, about Ivar the Boneless and the Viking conquest of Britain. ‘Barbarian’ exists in a long tradition of men with long hair, tight trousers and loud guitars singing about our Danish friends. Led Zeppelin did it

I was talking recently to a rock guitarist about the amount of music an audience hears during a typical concert that is ‘on track’ – in other words, not played live in the moment but instead stored, supplied and sequenced via computer. They suggested that nowadays every artist, from pop starlets to indie rebels, relies

Touring’s not what it used to be. When I were a lad, even big bands would do 30 or 40 shows around the UK to promote their new albums, stopping in places such as Chippenham Goldiggers, Hanley Victoria Hall, Ipswich Gaumont, Preston Lockley Grand Hall that would only see a major act today if they

Progressive rock never died. Whenever some grizzled punk soldier next appears on a BBC4 documentary relaying their version of that beloved old fairytale, the Sex Pistols’s Slaying of the Dinosaurs, it’s worth remembering that nothing of the sort occurred. The big beasts of the 1970s – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes – thrived into the 1980s

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe and Wise, Clough and Taylor. And it’s perhaps even harder for a behind-the-scenes collaborator to step out in their own right. Jack Antonoff, for example, is one of the creative powerhouses

I am a regular attendee at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh’s most ornate and venerable concert venue. On more than one occasion recently I have seen Hamish Hawk here – albeit each time he was showing the audience to our seats. Hawk has graduated from Grand Circle stair duty to centre-stage spotlight, the kind of local-boy-made-good