The songs are instantly recognisable. Bacharach & David’s “Don’t Make Me Over” “There's Always Something There to Remind me”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” will always be evocative. So will Dionne Warwick’s voice, though it’s huskier these days. Now sits the old alongside a brace of new songs, two by Burt Bacharach and one with a lyric by Hal David, the last he wrote.Another of the 50th anniversaries washing up right now was the impetus for Now. In this case, it’s been a half-century since the release of Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over”. It must have Read more ...

The Royal Albert Hall is pretty big. It's a prestige venue, but everything is relative. For the overwhelmingly French audience, the first British headlining show by Johnny Hallyday was the equivalent of seeing Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard sharing a bill at the back room of the Dog & Duck.Hallyday is a stadium-packer in France and the French-registered cars and coaches parked around Kensington Gore testified that this was an international draw. He sang mostly in French, spoke in French and was, well, French, even though his music is very firmly a blues, soul and rock'n’roll Read more ...

Leona Lewis has a whole new look: all mouse-brown hair, sullen expression and the oddest-looking facial jewellery since Kate Nash misappropriated the bindi in the video she made to accompany “Underestimate The Girl”. It really doesn’t suit her.Forgive me. I too find it pretty disrespectful when writers comment on an artist’s appearance before they start to consider what a work sounds like. But as I listened to Glassheart, the third album from one-time X Factor winner and ridiculously successful Lewis, it was the artwork I kept coming back to. The head-and-shoulder shot makes her look washed- Read more ...

A lot has blown in since the last Scandinavian round-up. The most recent releases sifted here include singer-songwriter intimacy, various forms of electropop, several shades of jazz experimenta, joyous dance-pop and some distinctly non-Scandinavian flavours. High points are many. Satisfaction is a certainty.On their last album, 2010’s Magic Chairs, Danish moodists Efterklang gently embraced a more direct way of presenting their songwriting. Up to that point, their sepulchral melodies had intertwined with instrumentation that merged glitchiness with the organic. Magic Chairs smoothed the edges Read more ...

Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Although a self-originated vanity project, none of this points to it being a home movie. The negative reception received at the time seems to have skewed the collective consensus. Read more ...

 B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. KingKieron TylerOne of the stranger manifestations of U2’s Eighties fascination with the iconography of American music was “When Love Comes to Town", their collaboration with B B King. As a single, it was a hit, something King has never chased. This smart, career-spanning box set is probably not going to have the same effect as U2’s patronage, but the still-constantly touring 87-year-old blues legend is unlikely to be fussed about that.Ladies & Gentlemen…, confusingly, comes in two configurations: a 4-CD, 77-track set and a 10-CD, 194-track Read more ...

After 65 years in music, over 55 of them as a solo artist and songwriter, it’s a tad surprising that Neil Sedaka has taken until now to declare he’s revealing the real Neil. Even when his former girlfriend and Brill Building colleague Carole King was baring it all in song, he kept it less personal. The Real Neil isn’t so much a window into his soul though, but a follow-on from recent tours where Sedaka has performed solo, accompanying himself on piano.The Real Neil, a mix of old songs and newly written material, opens with a speech from Sedaka: "Hi, this is Neil, welcome to my world of music Read more ...

A.R. Kane: Complete Singles CollectionJoe MuggsIn my early teens, circa 1988, certain records would appear on The Chart Show indie chart countdown on a Saturday morning, records that hinted disquietingly at something far beyond the standard categories of rock, dance, indie and the rest. “Birthday” by The Sugarcubes, for example, or “You Made me Realise” by My Bloody Valentine. Perhaps the one that haunted me most, though, was “Baby Milk Snatcher” by A.R. Kane, a narcotic fog of blurred guitars, dub echoes and an insistent, insinuating vocal that obeyed only its own idiosyncratic rules of Read more ...

 R.E.M.: Document 25th Anniversary EditionKieron TylerAlthough the band themselves have not lasted out the 25 years since the release of their fifth album Document, R.E.M. haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. The memory will live, fed by reissues. Document built on the more straightforward approach of its predecessor, Lifes Rich Pageant, and was issued in the wake of their breakthrough hit “The One I Love”. A re-promoted “It’s the End of the World as we Know it (and I Feel Fine)” gave them another hit in early 1988. Both singles were included on the album. At this point R.E.M. were Read more ...

 Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, StreetcoreLisa-Marie FerlaAs well as marking the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death, 2012 would also have been the year the legendary Clash frontman turned 60. The reissue of these two albums, recorded with his last band the Mescaleros, is therefore doubly timely.The band's three albums built on the very best of the globe-trotting, more experimental themes that had begun to sneak into The Clash's work before they disbanded in 1985, but did so in a way that kept them vital and accessible to those of us raised on three-chord punk Read more ...

It's hard to hear P!nk without thinking of the kind of “punks” that scowl in the corners of American high-school movies, possibly befriending some “nerds”, revealing a sensitive side, and/or standing up to a “jock” at some crucial point in the plot. Angst and outsiderdom with a predictable designated role to play within a regimented and ritualised ecosystem. None of which is a bad thing as such – teen movies can be great, and so can P!ink albums, if you're in the mood. Or drunk. This is her sixth album since switching from R&B to punky-poppy-rocky-pop for 2001's M!zzundaztood, and the Read more ...

After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end. The song she sang an hour after screaming that she would "sing her pussy off" and no one could stop her. Someone stopped her and no one could name it. (See Update in the penultimate paragraph.)If someone had stopped her approximately an hour earlier, you would have felt shortchanged from such a brief evening but at least left on a high, perhaps Read more ...