Rock

Steven Wilson is going about becoming a pop musician entirely the wrong way. For one thing, he’s into his fifties, not typically the point in life at which budding chart-botherers launch their assault on hearts and minds. For another, in an age in which pop stardom and identity politics have become entwined — in cultural discourse, at least, even if not necessarily in your teenager’s listening habits — he has everything going against him. ‘I come from a very well-adjusted family. I’m heterosexual. I’m white.’ Of course, Wilson doesn’t really expect to be competing against Stormzy and Dua Lipa and Cardi B. His new album, The Future Bites, is a

In Teenage Superstars, a long and slightly exhausting documentary about the Scottish indie scene of the 1980s and ’90s, there was a moment when a man revelling in the name of Stephen Pastel — his real name is Stephen McRobbie, and he must be pushing 60 now — was described as ‘the mayor of the Scottish underground’. Such a position — even one, as this, necessarily unelected — would be all but impossible to occupy today. With the internet and democratisation of music — its creation, its distribution, its consumption — has come the fallowing of what were once its most fertile fields: the local scenes created and inhabited by

Grade: A– The early 1990s were a lovely time for rock music: Beck, Sparklehorse, Sugar, Green on Red and Royal Trux. I wish I’d savoured it all more at the time, not realising that Damon and Noel would come along decked in Union Jacks and suffocate us with the precious (Damon) and the oafish (Noel). There was Matthew Sweet’s first album, too — Girlfriend; the missing link between Big Star and Neil Young. He is a criminally underrated songwriter, but then power pop has never found much traction over here since the fab four called it a day. Sweet is an engaging soul with a self-deprecation that occasionally teeters into

Grade: A- The greatest songwriter of the 20th century, or just one of the top two or three? Who else would you have up there? Kern, Gershwin, Ray Charles, maybe. Dylan for the words along with the music. But not, I think, John Lennon. It’s McCartney’s melodic imagination that captivates and sometimes staggers — ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’. The Beatle it was not OK to like, and yet who, today, would prefer to hear the overwrought ‘Strawberry Fields’ to the easy, loping chime of ‘Penny Lane’? Yes, Wings were the naffest band imaginable. But even then I would take their worst album (Red Rose Speedway) over Lennon’s

Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has fared better than most, spawning its own devilish offspring in math rock and post-rock. Why? Maybe we are more amenable to bombast and pretension these days. Or perhaps new studio technology lends itself to the genre — hell, you can hear prog time signatures in top ten hits. Maybe more to the point, prog offers a broader avenue than, say, heavy metal or punk. Prog is often what bands end up doing even if that’s not what they think they’re doing: Radiohead, Muse — even Arcade Fire or the National.

Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished Fireball and ‘Highway Star’. But by the same token they may be relieved that there are no six-minute drum solos, songs about the devil, or Jon Lord demonstrating that he can hammer the organ fairly quickly for an unimaginably long time. Instead you have extremely well played 1980s arena rawk — think Guns N’ Roses with a touch of prog thrown in. And decent tunes that do not outstay their welcome — Ian Gillan always was a catchy mofo, however ludicrously vaudevillian his vocals may be. This is not quite

Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London since lockdown, no. The people who were arseholes at gigs in early March are still arseholes at gigs, but there’s rather more than an obstructed sightline at stake now. Miles Kane was the guinea pig for the experiment, playing to 150 people who’d applied for tickets and who stood in a summer downpour watching him play acoustically. More on Kane later, but his presence was the least important thing here. The gig was the first in a series of small shows in Camden Market, and the organisers had taken care:

Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly endless catalogue of stuff which, at the time it was recorded, failed to see the light of day. And people like me fork out each time. I remember looking forward to this album in 1975 — but just before the release date he shelved it in favour of Tonight’s the Night, easily the finest rock album of the 1970s (or, to my mind, since). This doesn’t come close but, as it’s from Young’s most rewarding period, it holds a certain interest. Five songs have been released elsewhere, including the lovely

A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and announces his intention to destroy the establishment via the medium of rock records. But who is it? Is it Bob Geldof or John Lydon? Citizens of Boomtown: The Story of the Boomtown Rats — another in the ongoing trend of the BBC screening films that are fundamentally ads for a band’s new album — made the case for Geldof, suggesting he and his bandmates singlehandedly dragged Ireland into the modern age (the Daily Telegraph’s chief rock critic popped up to say they were the first roar of the Celtic Tiger).

The Glastonbury festival has undergone a series of metamorphoses in the 31 years since I first attended as a 15-year-old fence hopper (as, indeed, have I, thank heavens). One of the most significant changes, to pillage Gil Scott-Heron’s famous prophecy, is that the evolution has been televised. Back in 1989, if your boots weren’t on the ground — often a quagmire, though not that year — you missed out on all the fun. This has not been the case for aeons. Television coverage of Glastonbury began on Channel 4 in 1994, switching to the BBC three years later. In recent times, the Beeb has sent its staff in numbers comparable

In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even. Only in hindsight did it appear somewhat needy, a litany not of what Prince was going to do, but of the things he had already done. On it, he pulled rank on his status — ‘I’ve seen the top and it’s just a dream / Big cars and women and fancy clothes’ — called out young rappers for their potty mouths, and declared himself ‘fresh and funky for the 90s’. Context is everything. By 1992, Prince was still funky – but fresh? He had been, indisputably, pop’s premier agitator throughout

Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg. Followed by a hugely unconvincing stab at tuneless industrial metal on a song called ‘People’, in which the aforementioned — me and you, not them, of course — are cautioned to ‘WAKE UP!!’ Leafy Wilmslow’s middle-class skag-head prophet, Matty Healy, is back, then, with a series of injunctions for us all, spread over interminable length and always skating on the very edge of parody. The 1975 are probably Britain’s biggest ‘rock’ band — those quote marks are needed — and this vast slab of pretentious, gullible, vacuous commendations to us

Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song between them yet put out albums by the bucketload? Back in the day it was just Joni Mitchell, who had four good songs, Laura Nyro who had two and Dory Previn who had one. Now there are thousands of these creatures, flaunting their intemperance without showing much brilliance. And all slavered over by the (still male) music press. Years of oppression, of being disregarded, they would argue. But disregarded for very good reasons, in almost all cases. Yeah, Carole King is ten times the songwriter James Taylor ever was. I

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a

There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the ownership of her old songs by her previous record label would scupper it. But no, Ms Swift is not to be resisted, and lo, Miss Americana is available right now on Netflix, one of its two big music documentaries for the spring. Many older men seem to have a visceral distaste for Ms Swift. If you share that distaste, then I’m sorry, it’s your loss, because she’s a fascinating figure (who has also made three truly terrific albums in Fearless, Red and 1989), and Miss Americana is well worth watching.