pop music
Gary Naylor
It’s 2012 and the London Olympics might as well be happening on the Moon for Jen and Stacey. In fact, you could say the same for everyone else scrabbling a living in Bradford – or anywhere north of Watford – and we know what those left-behind places did when presented with a ballot box in 2016 and 2019.Not that such weighty matters concern our two girls, out for a banging (in more senses than one) £1 Thursday night out, living for the sex and booze and rock’n’roll that get them from one week to the next. (Writer, Kat Rose-Martin, wisely keeps other temptations out of arm’s reach, one of many Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly, reveals their genius and/or brings them a new audience. Rarely, it can work, as on Johnny Cash’s final albums, but usually it simply renders sonic perfection as bland, naff slop. Such is the case with Trevor Horn’s latest.Horn is a great and visionary pop producer. He’s also performed in bands, notably his breakthrough group Buggles and prog behemoths Yes. In 2019 he released Reimagines the Eighties, which featured star singers on hits of the relevant Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Both of us have always enjoyed listening to dance music, and we wanted to interpret disco in our own way. We wanted to make good quality soulful electronic dance music, more biting than the usual bland disco stuff. We wanted to make records that would stand out in a disco and that you could listen to in your own bedroom."Speaking to NME’s Paul Morley in May 1981, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond clearly expressed where he and Dave Ball intended to go with their music. At this point, the duo had not issued much. October 1980’s barely available Mutant Moments EP was followed by one track on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Listening to the best of what they’ve created since their post-2005 reformation, it would take a staunch anti-Take That churl to hold fast to the punk-rockin’ claim the “man band” are, musically, just talentless piffle. “Shine”, “Patience”, “Hey Boy”, “The Flood” and others are evidence to the contrary.But it’s understandable why the (now) trio are so divisive. For those old enough, they’re manufactured tween-fangirl pap (from the era that gave us rave, grunge and Britpop rising). To those younger, they’re softy nan music. Their latest album contains a few memorable tunes but slips, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madness are an English institution due to deathless, jolly hits such as “House of Fun”, “Baggy Trousers” and “One Step Beyond”, but there’s always been another side to them.The London band are often at their best when bittersweet. Lesser-known songs such as “Grey Day”, “Madness (is All in the Mind)” and “One Better Day” showcased a downbeat poignance. Their new album, their 13th, is a case in point. It’s a response to the disturbing times we live in, and to “a disparate couple of years which saw the band at their most polarised and fragmented”. I can’t stop playing it.Ignore the iffy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH Being Dead When Horses Would Run (Bayonet)Being Dead are ostensibly an indie trio from Austin, Texas, but that description doesn’t really do justice to their smörgåsbord sound. Their default setting seems to be Trashmen “Surfin’ Bird” (just check “Come On”) but they also enjoying fooling around with synths. They’re not easily categorizable. What they are is catchy, whether combining sing-along choruses with flamenco and dream-pop on “Daydream”, or inventing narcotic underwater country’n’western on the mournful, murky and bizarre “Livin’easy”. Three more comparisons (faint) Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).From their beginnings to demise, filmmaker Bill Butt was an accomplice, creating films and videos as asked. The BFI's 23 Seconds to Eternity gathers these together Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you thought being a pop star might be fun, this four-part voyage around the tortured soul of Robbie Williams may convince you otherwise. He has sold 75 million records and historic numbers of concert tickets, scored 13 Number One albums and seven Number One singles in the UK, and has a shed full of gongs including 18 Brit Awards. But even so, now three months short of his 50th birthday, he still seems to feel that it could suddenly all end tomorrow, or possibly even this afternoon.“Nobody graduates from childhood fame well balanced,” he comments, having first been blasted into the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This splendid book proves that trivia need not be trivial, and that a miscellany of apparently disconnected facts can cohere, if done well. It is in the proud lineage of the “toilet book”, a form sadly in decline in these days of the smartphone. Although modest in its ambitions, it provides entertainment, enlightenment and a sense of serendipity, transcending its bullet-point format to be more than the sum of its parts.Justin Lewis has set out to tell a history of pop music not chronologically, but day by day from 1 January to 31 December, uncovering important – or sometimes delightfully Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“How psychedelic is your pop? This is the demanding question posed to many groups today, struggling for acceptance. It's no longer any good to say: ‘Well, mate, we can play Wilson Pickett, James Brown and all that gear,’ to anybody contemplating booking a band. One has to explain whether one is likely to set fire to the auditorium, or batter the audience’s senses with flame, light and fiendish noises.”When music weekly Melody Maker got to grips with psychedelia in its 14 January 1967 issue, it was noted that Pink Floyd were “originally an R&B blues-type group.” Drummer Nick Mason told the Read more ...
Cheri Amour
Just over 30 years ago, avant-pop icons Stereolab released their debut album Peng! establishing the early hallmarks of the English-French band’s sound; 1960s pop harmonies, chorus-laden guitar riffs and a borderless world of analog electrics. Helmed by longstanding members English songwriter and guitarist Tim Gane and French lyricist and vocalist Laetitia Sadier, Stereolab was born from the ashes of 80s indie pop band McCarthy after frontman Malcolm Eden called time on the band at the start of a new decade. Spurred on by their shared stage antics, Gane and Sadier continued their Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The three previous albums that Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark have released since reforming in 2010 have all, to varying degrees, adhered to their early sound. The band were part of the post-punk, post-Kraftwerk, 1979-82 synth-pop boom, alongside the likes of The Human League, Depeche Mode and Gary Numan.Those three albums, History of Modern, English Electric and The Punishment of Luxury, were all deep dipped in the sonics of that era. This time round, though, OMD’s sound often moves towards their mid-Eighties output; a less universally loved era.They sound also like they’re having fun. Read more ...