Pop

Lady Gaga’s show was to begin at 7.30  prompt, we were told. No opening act. And at 7.30 something did happen: the big screen over the stage started showing a film of Ms Gaga, clad in scarlet finery, writing on a scroll with a peacock-feather quill, while the PA played opera’s greatest hits. For more than an hour the film ran, an impassive Gaga doing nothing but writing. An hour. It was nearly as dull as a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and it’s a miracle it took 45 minutes for the handclaps to start ringing around the arena. Was she about to do a Madonna – who had to keep

In January, it will be ten years since David Bowie died. I remember Bowie songs playing out of every London orifice that day. People who only knew ‘Life on Mars’ went down to the Brixton mural and cried. And then, for a whole year afterwards, the BBC’s arts coverage consisted entirely of salt-and-pepper fatties sitting in studios, in the mandatory uniform of T-shirt and blazer, all of them finding different ways to wheeze: ‘Day-vid Bow-ie chay-nged everyfing.’ As we approach the anniversary, the BBC is having another go – except this time with Kate Moss. ‘This is David Bowie Changeling’, Moss purrs, inaugurating a nine-parter on BBC Sounds and Radio

I think a lot about Wishbone Ash. A disproportionate amount. Partly because I have had to listen to them for around ten hours while researching a book. Partly because when I was a kid, I always found it curious that Wishbone Ash were advertised in the weekly music press but never reviewed. Back then, broadsheets barely covered rock, so there was no room for their gigs and albums there. But they were never on Top of the Pops or The Tube or even Whistle Test  either. Perhaps Tommy Vance occasionally gave them a spin on the Friday Rock Show, but other than that they were not on Radio 1. They

The last weekend of August is my favourite of the year. That’s when I pootle down to Cranborne Chase to the loveliest, most thoughtful festival in the UK. End of the Road is a festival for those who look at TV coverage of Glastonbury and see only the size and the heaving crowds and come out in a cold sweat. It’s lovely because it’s small – around 15,000 people. You can walk from the furthest campsite to the furthest part of the festival area in 25 minutes or so. If you’re not enjoying what you’re watching, you’ll be able to find something else within five minutes’ walk, via an array

I have nothing but admiration for those men who burn a candle for the music of 1966. Partly because, like them, I believe 1966 to be pop’s greatest year, but mainly because being a psychedelic hipster requires a commitment that invites ridicule. It’s one thing to be an ageing fella who likes rock’n’roll – sharp denim and a well-tended quiff can look just fine. And you can never really tell the age of a metalhead – they just look like a metalhead. But to wear your hair in an outgrown bowl cut, and to strut around in tight red trousers as Seeds singer Paul Kopf does, is inevitably to invite

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years

You’d have thought Wembley Stadium was a sportswear convention, so ubiquitous were the three stripes down people’s arms from all the Adidas merch: veni, vidi, adi. Pints drunk: 250,000 a night, apparently. All along the Metropolitan line pubs noted an Oasis dividend. At a corner shop, I was sold an official Oasis Clipper lighter. It’s surprising Heinz hasn’t yet offered an Oasis soup; you get a roll with it. Plainly, an awful lot of people have missed Oasis. And an awful lot of people – Noel and Liam Gallagher included – saw the chance to make an awful lot of money from their reformation. I don’t think any of them

The Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy is releasing a new album this week. It is called Ain’t Done With The Blues – a statement which one might argue seems redundant considering Guy, who is 89, has been releasing albums with the word ‘blues’ in the title since 1967’s Left My Blues In San Francisco. Since then, we’ve had A Man And The Blues (1968), The Blues Giant (1979), DJ Play My Blues (1982), Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues (1991), Rhythm & Blues (2013), The Blues Is Alive And Well (2018) and The Blues Don’t Lie (2022). This is a man who isn’t ever going to give David Bowie a run

The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone who heard that phenomenal group play ‘Living for the City’ or ‘Superstition’ and didn’t feel ‘ants in my pants and I need to dance’, as James Brown once put it, should resign from life: they do not deserve such joy. That said, there were oddities. We were blessed with visits from four of Wonder’s nine

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 when we hear one. Commentators may gush about Beyoncé’s genre-strafing cultural significance until the cows come home, but it doesn’t alter the plain fact that she hasn’t released a single piece of music in more than a decade that will stand the test of time come pop’s judgment day. ‘Pop’ implies freshness. Fizz. This doesn’t

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 proclaiming: ‘Booze! Fights! Madness! How Rubbish Band went to hell – and came back’). All three were on view in London this past fortnight. Waxahatchee was the one on the way up: this was, Katie Crutchfield announced proudly from the stage, the ensemble’s biggest-ever show. Dua Lipa was the one entering her imperial phase –

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 the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed

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 a pot. Stage fright – something both Robbie Williams and Cat Power have suffered from – is much the same. Williams took seven years off touring last decade because of it, which must have been devastating for someone whose need for validation is so intense that he has made it his brand. Chan Marshall, the

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 on her compelling sixth album, London rapper and actor Simbiatu Ajikawo, who performs as Little Simz, interrogates the doubts and insecurities she felt while writing and recording this record. In doing so, she asks: ‘I’m used to making it with [redacted]/ Can I do it without?’ The bleeped-out name is likely that of Dean Cover,

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 been taking notes, for that was the model for his ‘residency’ at the Albert Hall. All that he lacked was the tight script – and Springsteen’s charm and charisma. It was, the MC told us, Church’s first time in the UK in eight years, but the place was horribly undersold, the top tier almost empty