pop music
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
William Onyeabor: World Psychedelic Classics 5 – Who is William Onyeabor?A primitive drum machine rattles out a Latin rhythm. Keyboards begin. The gaps between the repetitive spirals of notes are plugged by blobs of fat synth. A disembodied yet warm voice sings “Good name is better than silver and gold. And no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name.” The melody nods towards Kraftwerk’s “Computer World”. The music is as intense as early Marshall Jefferson and the whole suggests Tom Tom Club.William Onyeabor's “Good Name” is compelling and electrifying: minimal and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s taken Avril Lavigne more than a decade to release a self-titled album, but in some ways it’s appropriate: after all, the Canadian singer’s best music still sounds exactly like what she was releasing as a teenager. The difference is that when she first burst onto the scene, all sweatbands and heavy eyeliner, Lavigne was a breath of fresh air - but now, on her new album, she seems to be taking her cues from the women she blazed the trail for.What she ends up with is the fun pop hits Katy Perry didn’t have room for in her spiritual new direction (“Sippin’ on Sunshine”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”); Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway is currently attracting an uncommon degree of attention due to the absurd “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” by Ylvis, the comedy duo Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker. The country’s mainstream music hasn’t been this newsworthy since a-ha conquered the world in 1985. After 150 million YouTube hits for “The Fox”, the figure is still rising.The Ylvisåker brothers host the television chat show I kveld med Ylvis and the catchy musical novelty was meant for a sketch in the programme. It was intended to be the worst song ever. Ylvis had, though, roped in Stargate, the New York-based Norwegian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Oh Yes We Can Love – A History of Glam Rock Despite Marc Bolan fashioning glam rock’s starting block in 1971 with T. Rex’s “Hot Love”, 2013 has been the year when pop's era of androgyny, inappropriate and shiny trousers, and stomping, sometimes arty music has been marked. The 40th anniversary passed largely unmarked, but the 42nd saw Tate Liverpool mount the Glam! The Performance of Style exhibition. Now, this confounding five-disc box set – the first to tackle glam – has arrived to tell the story too.The choice of 1973 as a marker makes some sense: it was the year Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Union J are a boy band consisting of George Shelley, Josh Cuthbert, JJ Hamblett and Jaymi Hensley. They finished fourth in last year’s X Factor.In November 2012, after being voted off the talent contest, teen competitor Ella Henderson revealed to Look magazine that she had actually been hoping for romance with Union J’s Josh Cuthbert, not George Shelley as everyone had previously assumed. Jaymo Hensley, meanwhile, revealed to the Sun on Sunday the same month that he was gay and also growing close to Katie Price.Twenty-five-year-old JJ Hamblett’s girlfriend, model Caterina Lopez, recently Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
It’s official. The Saturdays are the nation’s number one girl group. Well, these days they’re more of a yummy mummy collective, with two of their members having recently popped out sprogs. Since Girls Aloud bowed out last year amid the usual round of back-stabbing and bitch fighting, this overly made-up fivesome have elbowed their way to the top of the charts.With Little Mix battling to overcome both second album syndrome and the X Factor curse, The Saturdays have little competition. No longer a cheap alternative to the glossier girl groups, their sound and style has matured since they first Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
“I hate surprises!” joked Cilla Black, for 20 years host of the family reunion show Surprise, Surprise, in ITV’s toothsome tribute to her 50 years in showbusiness. She needn’t have worried, for there were no shocks in this clean-heeled gallop through her career, from gigs in her native LIverpool as Swinging Priscilla with The Big Three, to discovery by Brian Epstein, The Cavern Club, television and national treasuredom. Live guests on The One and Only Cilla Black, including Christopher Biggins and warmed-over contestants from old shows, were cut with prerecorded segments shot on location Read more ...
Russ Coffey
You couldn’t help marvelling at how good Alison Moyet looked. It wasn’t just her dramatically slimmed-down physique, but also the sense of her being truly comfortable in her own skin. Partly, that may have just been a result of an increasingly optimistic outlook. But also it seemed to emanate from Moyet's confidence in her new material. Since its release in May, her new album, The Minutes, has been well received. Could the songbird from Billericay also work that synth-heavy magic, live?Certainly there were no complaints from the audience. Indeed, at times, it appeared as if Alf could have Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking Read more ...
joe.muggs
I am increasingly finding it almost impossible to express just how bored I am by Miley Cyrus. I mean, seriously, are we really in such a fix that this guff is a serious talking point? A second-generation celebrity and former child star seems to be going off the rails a bit? OH REALLY, GOSH, THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, PLEASE TELL ME MORE. A young female celebrity is flashing her parts? SWEET BABY JESUS ON A BORIS BIKE THIS IS AMAZING. A white pop star is crassly adopting the tropes of black culture? WOW NO WAY, YOU'RE LITERALLY SHITTING ME. An American TV awards show has indulged in tacky Read more ...
joe.muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...