Albums

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his

Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and soon everything in the universe is inside his necessarily large head. One day he sacrifices himself to save his subjects from a deluge of snow. The townspeople cut off his head and preserve it in steel so that it will last for ever. Some of them climb inside his mouth to have a look around. They see thunderstorms and stars, apparently. Exactly what you’d expect from another Flaming Lips concept album, I suppose, this time narrated by a bemused Mick Jones of the Clash. Everything else is in place, too

Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked the impassioned, overwrought self-mythologising, the grandiosity of the opening riff, the strange lack of a chorus given the promise of the verse. Well, OK, interesting, I reckoned — maybe even good. But great? Never. I shifted my judgment only once over the following 45 years. Born in the USA had the tunes and stories and the sheer heft that for once matched the chutzpah and the looks. The rest has been either just good or, more often than not, quite a bit less than good. I always reckoned that perpetual

‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and as big as a guardsman’s bearskin, even at the age of 67. (He won’t say that number. He insists his age is ‘three score and seven’.) ‘People say to me: “Do you colour your hair?” And I say: “Absolutely not.” ’ He pauses for half a beat. ‘ “I have a super hairdresser who does it for me.” Some guy came on Instagram, telling me: “Come on, David, it’s time to get rid of the wig.” It’s not something I bought from Frederick’s of Hollywood, you silly bastard! It’s a

Grade: B Rock stars who utter something a little gamey, something a tad right-wingish, are usually coerced by the lefties into a cringing apology before you can say a-wop-bop-a-lu-bop. This is not a new thing — it happened to Eric Clapton after his ‘Enoch’s right’ outburst in 1976 (which very quickly spawned the Socialist Workers Party-led Rock Against Racism movement). The message has always been: get with the programme, right-wing scum, or we’ll hate you and your career will be over. Credit, then, to Morrissey for refusing to resile from his belief that England is ceasing to be the England he knew and loved and that there are too many

Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and it hasn’t all been unspeakably vile. There were moments when Kevin Ayers held our interest, for example, and even Radiohead. And then there’s that man of the people, Joe Strummer. So let’s excuse Mumford & Sons their weighty class baggage and just concentrate on the music, which is irredeemably awful and makes Coldplay sound like the MC5. Someone has given them beats, cute little digital beats, to set beneath the faux folk which once irritated and now just bores one into a stupor. There is also that thing beloved by

Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men. Cypress Hill are now in comfortable middle age, almost as old as me, ffs. But they were ever ludicrously inventive and idiosyncratic, right back to that first album in 1991, which wrote the template for many lesser and even more profane hip hop gods. This one is mired in psychedelia, as even Charles Moore might have guessed from the title. There are very knowing nods to, especially, early Jefferson Airplane — although the guitar sounds more like Barry Melton than Jorma Kaukonen — and Sly and the

‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m not going to be that person, but I still think I could have a hit record. For me a song like “Relative Poverty” is a song for this generation, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t be an anthem for today.’ Lawrence is now 57, and he has been trying (and failing) to become a

Grade: C+ Mumrock. A lucrative genre, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, when Mums suddenly wanted something a little bit hip. My own mother briefly succumbed to the inane imagery and kindergarten melody of ‘Song Sung Blue’, sometime in 1972, before she moved on to more sophisticated stuff (Gilbert O’Sullivan, as I recall). This is Diamond’s 40th anniversary collection of hits, live or otherwise, and his third Hot August Night containing the same songs. Hasn’t everybody got all this hideous dross by now? Is the only selling point this time that he’s singing them at 71, the voice still throatily pompous, the medallion still on display? Was he ever

Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our over-technologised world. Just what I wanted. There is no restraint on self-indulgence if you have a sufficiently remunerative back catalogue. This is also a Bowie tribute album, which fits in nicely with all that outer-space business. I have never heard any performer clamber so comprehensively into the skin of a dead rock star as Alex Turner does with Bowie here, in the writing and even more so in the mannered singing with its characteristic falsetto swoops. This is pure Bowie from the era between The Spiders of Mars and David

Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town with a decomposing dead dog on her back. ‘Slow Dog’, from Belly’s debut album Star, was mental and frenetic and possessed the kind of berserk and glorious chorus most bands would kill for. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either — the sincerely odd ‘Gepetto’ and the lowering, nagging almost-hit ‘Feed The Tree’ the best of a very good bunch. How would you define Tanya Donelly’s oeuvre, other than as delightfully idiosyncratic? Alt-rock, obvs. Maybe neo-psychedelic post-grunge shoegazey power pop. Either way, it was too good to last. After

Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na na na na na na na na’. The best was Cozy Powell’s ‘Na Na Na’ (all the better for being capitalised), but Kylie’s magnificently vacant synth pop disco lament ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, written by the ubiquitous Cathy Dennis, ran it close. Everything else the pouting Aussie sockpuppet chanteuse has done has been utterly excremental, so credit to the lass for maintaining a certain consistency with her latest album Golden. It has received half-decent reviews in some quarters, but only, I suspect, from people who have either

They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one is about blowing people to bits with firepower, cos they’re really EVIL. There are spurts of lead guitar that sound like knives slashing at an empty plate and those strange, pompous, strangulated vocals — operatic diva meets Freddy Krueger — common to most UK heavy metal. Anything to hide the Brummie accent, I suppose. Thank you, the West Midlands, for foisting on the world the blind alley of HM, blues with the rhythm, wit and soul replaced by volume and bellowing and posturing and almost continual references to the poor

Rarely has one irate punter so affected a band’s trajectory. Without the anger of the man who went to see the Moody Blues at the Fiesta Club in Stockton in 1966, the band would never have reinvented themselves, never have transformed into psychedelic pioneers, and next month they would not be travelling to America to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the honour bestowed annually upon those the US music business deems the most significant artists of all. The Moody Blues had been a moderately successful group — everyone who has ever listened to an oldies radio station knows their version of ‘Go Now’, a No.