Pop

Grade: A Old skag head’s back, then — older (40 now!), probably none the wiser, still a very good songwriter. This may be the best thing he’s ever done, at least since those incendiary first moments of the Libertines. Yeah, I can do without the affected drawl skittering this way and that around the melody — he’s better doing his affected Steve Harley yelp — but there’s not too much of that, still less the old angular post-punk guitar. Instead you get the occasional lo-fi shambolic babyish jug-band thrash, all of which are good, and a bunch of slower songs illustrated with violin and delicately picked guitar. The best is

Last autumn, anyone who a) has an interest in pop music, and b) reads the weightier end of the press, would have come to the conclusion that the world was shortly to enter some kind of musical singularity, in which all of civilisation would be transformed by the 39-year-old Swedish pop singer Robyn. ‘After more than a half-decade of psycho-analysis, a relationship meltdown, the death of one of her closest collaborators and four years spent working on her masterpiece… a new Robyn is ready to return,’ a profile in the New York Times solemnly pronounced, ahead of Honey, her first album for eight years. The Guardian devoted 6,000 words —

Grade: A– If your 12-year-old daughter’s a bit thick, she probably likes Ariana Grande. Come on, dads — you’ve got to face up to this stuff, you’ve got to JUDGE. Be ruthless. If, however, she’s a bit smarter, but also sullen, lazy and probably prone to self-harming, she’ll be a big Billie Eilish fan. Only just 17, from Los Angeles, Eilish is kind of sparse and woke emo electropop misery, very self-consciously ‘edgy’. An agreeably large number of her songs seem to be about killing herself, or just ceasing to exist. The rest are a little darker, and terminally angst-ridden. She has a very pretty voice, usually deployed as a

On 29 June 1991, a record called ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams entered the UK charts, at No. 8. At that point, I was blissfully in love with my girlfriend, had just got a first at university and had won a scholarship to a postgraduate journalism course. By the time it departed from the charts, on 14 December — after a run that included a still-record 16 weeks at No. 1 — I had been dumped by my girlfriend, had dropped out of the journalism course, and my dad, who had been poorly when the record entered the charts, was a month away from

The teenage girls are often right. They were right about Sinatra and they were right about Elvis. They were right about the Beatles and the Stones. They were right, too, about the 1975, whose emergence in 2013 playing tuneful and accessible pop-rock with unusually self-questioning lyrics was driven by a large and voluble following among those teenage girls. Naturally, that led a swathe of male critics to write them off. One dismissed them on the baffling grounds that their songs were ‘ridiculously catchy’, as if that were a bad thing; the NME proclaimed them the worst band in the world Six years on, the critics have caught up. The 1975’s

Grade: C A derided year in pop music, 1975 — and yet a great one. The mainstream was horrible, but we had Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, Patti Smith’s Horses, Guy Clarke’s Old No. 1 and Television just beginning to break through. It is in the lacunae, before the next big wave, that we hear the most inventive music, which is why ’75 — with Queen and disco hogging the charts and the blind alleys of prog and metal as your only alternative — was so good. But I suppose you want to hear about the band, The 1975 — one of Britain’s biggest. Oh, Britain. The 1975 are a

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

Let’s get the ‘was-it-good?’ stuff out of the way first. Yes, it was good. It was better than good. It was incredible, fabulous, dazzling. It was whatever adjective you want to throw at it. I can’t recall seeing a more engrossing pop production, ever. You don’t just get great songs — come on, you’re not going to quibble about ‘Once in a Lifetime’, or ‘Burning Down the House’, or ‘Slippery People’, or ‘Road to Nowhere’, are you? — played by brilliant musicians. You get them presented in a way no one has thought to present a rock show before. That way was to remove all fixed points from the stage.

Grade: B– Ooh goody — a parade to rain on! You wouldn’t believe the hyperbole expended by the rock critics on this middle-class French lass, real name Héloïse Letissier. Or maybe, being used to such mass gullibility, you would. ‘Bogglingly intelligent’ and ‘a thrillingly uncompromising artist, playing with ideas of gender, identity and individuality to pop-bright melodies’, for example. Her first album in English, Chaleur humaine, was similarly bestrewn with pop-hack ejaculate, to the extent that it resembled a plasterer’s radio. Why? Oh, check out the back story. Very gender fluid. Leftie. French. Channelling early 1980s electro pop and dance. And here she is with her hair cropped and calling

When Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops in summer 1981, miming along to their version of Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, it felt like a moment of palpable newness. Well, it certainly did if you were prepubescent and really had no idea what sex actually was. Romantic love — in either its glory or disappointment — was the everyday subject of the pop song, but here was this funny little fella in black, with studded accessories, singing of a love that was ‘tainted’. I had no idea what he got up to when the lights went out. I knew that homosexuality existed — in the same way that

‘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

In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the

Early in 1987, a middle-aged woman approached me on the record counter of the Slough branch of Boots. ‘What do you have by Ladysmith Black Mambazo?’ she demanded. Nothing. Boots in Slough wasn’t big on South African isicathamiya choral music. ‘Well,’ she suggested, ‘you really ought to get their records in. They’re going to be huge.’ She was wrong, but I knew why she was so sure. Ladysmith Black Mambazo had been among the standout guests on Paul Simon’s Graceland, released a few months before. Graceland made Simon, by my reckoning, the first pop star who had emerged from the rock’n’roll era to make a major cultural impact across three

Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment in her entire adulthood (she’s now 28) has she been able to do any of the everyday things the rest of us take for granted. No wonder, then, that so much of what surrounds her seems so peculiar. No wonder her last two albums (2014’s fabulous 1989, last year’s rather less fabulous Reputation) have been dominated by songs about how other people perceive her life: every thing she does, as she is well aware, goes through a filter. She sings not about her love life — her relationships with the