Music

It begins with an electric swish sound that makes you feel like you are falling backwards, followed by an arresting synthesiser da-da-dum drumbeat. Then we get the voice, in double-time: ‘She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge. She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College…’ With those words, singer Jarvis Cocker and his fellow members of Pulp caught the attention of a nation. And chances are, three decades on from the release of ‘Common People’, this musical intro will still send a tingle down your spine, particularly if you’re aged anywhere between 40 and 70. Forget the record-marketing buzz of ‘Blur vs Oasis’ (always less entertaining than the

The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists, the Georgian fiddler Lisa Batiashvili, supplied the highlight of this year’s ‘first night’ with a mighty performance of the Sibelius concerto. The concert ended with Sancta Civitas, a rarely heard choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed with love by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Sakari Oramo. Musically, it was a good

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, ‘Harvest Moon’, the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.  This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then

‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man… the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over,’ laments Danny the Dealer of the 1960s at the end of Withnail and I. These days, given the apparently insatiable appetite for all things 1990s, you could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve pinched that title. Nineties fashion and music are back: Pulp have just released their first album in 24 years, while Oasis are reforming for a series of mega gigs. There’s even been a Labour landslide. The Face magazine, which launched the career of the ultimate 1990s supermodel, Kate Moss, is currently pulling in the crowds with its Culture Shift exhibition

They were a stalwart of Britain’s towns and cities from the 1970s until their disappearance in 2007 – and now Virgin is set to bring its Megastores back to the high street. According to the Times, the Virgin Group has in mind at least one central London site as a possible location for a new Megastore. Its chief executive, Josh Bayliss, said he wants to return the ‘human connection’ to the Virgin brand. Quite right. We should applaud this news, not just on nostalgic grounds – but for financial, aesthetic and communitarian ones too. Like so many once-familiar high street names, Virgin Megastores may have succumbed to supermarket competition and the online shopping revolution, but that

I tried getting my husband to go with me, but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him so I forced a friend’s son to come instead. I’m talking about going to see Tyler, The Creator at the O2. That’s Tyler, The Creator, the magnificent hip hop artist who was banned from the UK in 2015 by then Home Secretary Theresa May on the grounds of supporting homophobia and acts of terrorism.  What, you’ve never heard of him? Well, that’s clearly because you are not as down with the kids as me. I may be a middle-class boomer from Chiswick but I’m also a raging hip hop fan and I know my

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.  The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile

I recently made a programme about the British jazz pioneer Arthur Briggs. Yes, I know. Arthur who? The much-missed Jeremy Clarke told me: ‘If only he’d been called Arthur “Big-Boy” Briggs or “Honeydripper” Briggs, maybe things would have turned out differently.’ As it was, his name always suggested a painter-decorator from Edwardian Brixton rather than one of the hottest cornetists on the prewar jazz scene. Briggs was a Caribbean child of empire who, as a teenager, fell in with makers of the new music in New York, then after the first world war helped bring jazz across to Europe. His various adventures – seeing black bodies in the Mersey after

Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003. To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year for chart music ever; Dido had the top-selling album – going 6x platinum – with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Daniel Bedingfield and Norah Jones completing the top five. The bestselling single of 2003 was the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Where is the Love?’, followed by ‘Spirit in the Sky’ by Gareth Gates and the Kumars, R.

In a small, dark room in the depths of Banshee Labyrinth, a gothic-looking venue just off Cowgate in Edinburgh, 11 people cheer and clap as I thank them profusely for spending the past hour with me. My backdrop is a red and white no-smoking sign and two coffin-shaped blackboards with drinks offers scrawled on them in chalk, and the portcullis-style door offers little soundproofing from inquisitive festivalgoers peering in and wondering aloud whether to take one of the 40 seats – but the setting is perfect for my first ever Edinburgh Fringe show. As soon as I finish the last song and receive warm applause, I switch almost immediately from

Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death yesterday at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock and roll in its wildest youth. For Marianne embodied every cliche associated with rock excess: the lover of three of the original five members of the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones), she also took on David Bowie, but had the good sense or taste to reject the amorous advances of Bob Dylan