Category Archives: Pop and rock

Lena Zavaroni: fame, anorexia and the tragedy of a 1970s child star

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Zavaroni was in the charts at 11 and died after years of illness aged 35. Her father talks about their family life as a new stage show about her is about to open

There are a few recordings of television interviews with Lena Zavaroni around online. One with Russell Harty where he comments that her eating disorder must save on restaurant bills and another when Terry Wogan tells her to eat up so she can get back to “your chunky self”.

The little girl with the big voice was 10 when she appeared on Opportunity Knocks – television’s predecessor to Britain’s Got Talent and Pop Idol – singing Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me, 11 when it was a hit and 13 when she was diagnosed with anorexia, a barely known illness then called the “slimmer’s disease”. Before she died in 1999 the girl from Rothesay on the Scottish island of Bute had hosted her own TV shows, performed at the White House and shared a stage with Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. She remains the youngest artist ever to have a record in the Top 10 UK albums chart. Lena was huge.

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Mark Lanegan obituary

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Former singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age who also found success as an author

The death of Mark Lanegan, the former vocalist with the bands Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, at the age of 57, feels painfully premature, but he had been walking a tightrope for most of his life. Last year, Covid-19 rendered him deaf, unable to walk and frequently comatose; he wrote a terrifying account of the experience in Devil in a Coma (2021). As a teenager he had numerous brushes with the law for drug and alcohol offences. A notorious drunk by the time he was 12, he admitted that he had started taking heroin as a way to beat his alcohol problem.

At 20, he was run over by a tractor; the accident came just as he was preparing to leave his native Washington state and head for Las Vegas. Instead of going to Nevada, he ended up joining the prototype grunge band Screaming Trees, which set him off on his musical career. Despite releasing a string of frequently impressive albums, which helped establish Lanegan as an expressive singer blessed with a rich and dark array of vocal tones, the group were handicapped by violent personality clashes, and never hit the commercial heights enjoyed by contemporaries such as Nirvana or Soundgarden.

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Pranks, panic attacks and baby poo: Belgian pop star Stromae on his first album in nine years

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In early 2010s, he was one of the biggest French-speaking artists in the world, but then he suddenly stopped. Now he’s ready to resume his spot at the top – and is as controversial as ever

A few months ago, Paul Van Haver, better known as the Belgian singer-songwriter/rapper Stromae, announced his comeback. In the French-speaking world, this was big news. As the 00s turned into the 2010s, Stromae had established himself as one of the biggest Francophone artists in the world. He sold 8.5m albums. His single Alors On Danse went to No 1 in 19 countries: in 2010, it was the most-played French-language song in the world. Its level of success was almost freakish, leading to the assumption that he was, as he puts it, “a one-hit wonder … when you have a hit people say it’s going to be the only hit in your life”.

But he wasn’t. His second album, 2013’s Racine Carrée, spent five years in the French chart: it was the best-selling album of the year twice on the trot. He was critically acclaimed for a kaleidoscopic sound that takes in everything from Congolese soukous to knowingly cheesy Europop to the mordant chanson of his countryman Jacques Brel, an unpredictable mishmash that he thinks is rooted in his peripatetic childhood. His largely absent father was Rwandan – he was killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide – and his Belgian mother was an inveterate traveller. “Sometimes we loved it and sometimes it was pretty close to a nightmare, because we didn’t have a lot of money, so they weren’t all-inclusive vacations,” he says. “Sometimes good memories, sometimes really bad, but memories you don’t forget.”

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Gang of Youths: Angel in Realtime review – overcrowded anthems with a few special moments

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The big, bold songs will get the airplay and crowds singing, but it is the stripped-back ones where the Aussie rockers truly shine on their third album

If Angel in Realtime is ostensibly an ode to David Le’aupepe’s late father, it reveals itself as a portrait of the son, passing back and forth between grief and searching and understanding, in his father’s wake.

In the opening track, You in Everything, Le’aupepe asks of himself: “How do I face the world or raise a fucking kid/Or see beauty in the earth and all its majesty replete/When I’ve spent the better part of my 20s doing self-indulgent bullshit on repeat?” A dozen tracks later, as he contemplates “the sum of a life” in Goal of the Century, he hasn’t found an answer but the path to it looks a little brighter: “Head down I’m writing this shit out/On my phone/A way that I can talk to you/And reach you.”

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TLC’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!

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Confident, unpredictable and irresistible, TLC set a benchmark in a golden age for R&B. Thirty years since the release of their debut album, we count down T-Boz, Chilli and the late Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez’s best tracks

Far sassier than your standard early 90s slow jam, blessed with a laconic Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes rap: let rumour-mongers and spreaders of “crap street yap” beware! Somethin’ You Wanna Know is the sound of a band already far more sophisticated than their cartoonish early image suggested.

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From tuna fishing to teen love: the producer behind K-pop’s biggest stars

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Bumzu is one of the most influential people in K-pop, helping shape South Korea’s multibillion-dollar global music business

When Jin from the superstar boyband BTS released Super Tuna – an upbeat song about his favourite pastime, fishing – it instantly went viral.

The track, written to commemorate the star’s birthday, has logged more than 53m YouTube views since December, and on TikTok the #SuperTuna hashtag has inspired a viral dance challenge.

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Midlake: ‘A big part of getting back together was just missing our friends’

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A ghostly vision in a dream prompted the Texan folk-rockers to return after a decade away. The result is their most daring album yet

The next time you’re in the city of Denton, Texas, you could do worse than swing by the speakeasy-style Paschall Bar, pull up a stool and order a Pulido Old Fashioned. “It’s my signature cocktail,” grins Midlake’s frontman Eric Pulido from under a well-worn baseball cap. “I think they just started getting tired of me saying: ‘Instead of the sugar can you do Bénédictine [a liqueur], and then can you also put in maple bitters … ’”

Pulido isn’t simply a fussy customer, but alongside the rest of Midlake actually owns this dimly lit, book-lined boozer, which, like so many others, found itself on the brink of collapse during the early stages of the pandemic. “We experienced the up and down of ‘We’re good’, ‘We’re not’, ‘Now we’re OK!’” offers Pulido with a sigh. “It was definitely a trying time, but I feel like we’re coming out of the woods now.”

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What does your music taste say about you? Nothing actually | Barbara Ellen

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A study that finds ‘agreeable’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘open’ types are fans of the same artists misses the point of music – and people

Does music taste reflect personality? A study from the University of Cambridge involving 350,000 participants, from 50 countries, across six continents, posits that people with similar traits across the globe are drawn to similar music genres. So, “extroverts” love Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. The “open” thrill to Daft Punk, Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix. The “agreeable” are into Marvin Gaye, U2 and Taylor Swift. The “neurotic” enjoy, presumably as much they can, the work of David Bowie, Nirvana, and the Killers. And so on.

While the study doesn’t claim to be definitive, how strange to be allotted only one personality trait/genre each. It sounds like Colour Me Beautiful for music. “What sound best goes with my personality? Did you bring along swatches?” Certainly, back when I worked for the New Musical Express, journalists, musicians and readers alike resisted being wrangled into such rigid categories.

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Ziggy bows out, Madonna scares the pope and Dylan goes electric: 50 gigs that changed music

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Five decades after David Bowie’s seminal tour, our music writers reflect on the concerts that have left a mark, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish

Café Society, New York City, early 1939
The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. John Fordham

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Lord of the bling: Peter Jackson tops Forbes highest paid entertainer list

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Get Back and Lord of the Rings director made an estimated $580m last year, topping annual list that also features Bruce Springsteen, Dwayne Johnson and Kanye West

The Lord of the Rings and Get Back director, Peter Jackson, has topped the Forbes magazine rich list as the highest paid entertainer of 2021.

Jackson made US$580m (A$809m, £428m) last year, primarily through the sale of part of his visual effects business Weta Digital to Unity Software, for $1.6bn. Forbes estimates Jackson personally made about $600m in cash and $375m in stock from the deal, making him the third person in history to become a billionaire from making films, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

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Manic Street Preachers’ 30 greatest songs – ranked!

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Marking 30 years of their debut album, Generation Terrorists, a look back at the Welsh rockers’ best bits: from the song about the Spanish civil war that kept Steps off No 1 to their glorious duets

Manic Street Preachers were always Guns N’ Roses fans: on A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun, they collaborated with the band’s bassist Duff McKagan. Charmingly perverse as ever, they turned in one of their poppiest latterday melodies, liberally decorated with metal guitar.

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Worthy winners aside, the Brits is struggling to keep pace with modern pop

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TikTok voting and gaming stars haven’t altered the music awards’ predictable roster of chart-toppers

• News: Adele sweeps gender-neutral Brit awards
• Liveblog: Brit awards 2022 – as it happened

The actual Brit awards ceremony has changed its complexion over the years: from the old-guard backslapping of the 80s to the boozy chaos of the 90s and early 00s. Today’s offering is slickly professional – hipper than it once was, less tone-deaf when it comes to representation, but not a hair out of place to the point of seeming faintly uneventful, unless you count the sight of Anne-Marie falling over, or the sound of Ed Sheeran gamely attempting to turn Bad Habits into a metal anthem with the aid of Bring Me the Horizon: even the person in charge of the mute button for swearing had an easy night. There was a lot of talk from host Mo Gilligan about hedonistic behaviour, but not many actual signs of it. Nor did anyone attempt to say anything controversy-stirring or political.

This year, the onus appeared to have shifted slightly again. In what was clearly an attempt to attract a younger audience – an audience that don’t watch music shows on television – there were categories voted for by fans via TikTok; elsewhere, there were “afterparties” starring tweenage favourite PinkPantheress on gaming platform Roblox and the unmissable opportunity to buy Brits-related NFTs.

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‘The epitome of joy’: 10 of Lata Mangeshkar’s greatest songs

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The late Indian star sang of love in all its glorious and terrible forms – but also rooted listeners in history and spirituality

Sitting in the back of my parents’ Peugeot 504 as a child, we listened to songs by the likes of Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and, of course, Lata Mangeshkar. We were too young to understand what they were about – love, loss, and romance – but we knew all the lyrics.

Well, not quite all of them. During her 92 years, Mangeshkar recorded 50,000 songs in 18 languages, breaking records as the most recorded artist in human history. As a playback singer for Bollywood films, she was never seen on screen, but her voice, dubbed in place of the actors’, was unmistakable. She got her start in 1942, and for a woman to have a career this long and distinguished in India, Mangeshkar must have been steely beneath those silk saris – her voice, though, remained gentle, and she was known as “the nightingale”.

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Pere Ubu’s David Thomas: ‘I expect rock music to be smart’

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Rolling Stone said that rock’n’roll peaked with Pere Ubu’s debut album. Now, after two near-death experiences, the ‘avant garage’ band are back – with an adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

‘I’ve been dead twice,” grins Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, over Zoom from his flat in Hove. “Death is very overrated. It was like being asleep. Once I was brought back by the ambulance crew. My wife said ‘Those guys worked like demons on you.’ The other time I woke up in ICU with all this stuff attached to me and it turned out I’d died again. I woke up and the doctor said, “You’re David Thomas!’’ It turned out that he’d been at the same Pere Ubu show that Ian Rankin had seen in the 70s, and was a lifelong fan.”

Now 68, seated in front of his computer in a furry hoody, the drily-humoured Ohioan cuts a more subdued figure than the “enigmatic giant of a singer” Rankin has subsequently remembered shouting requests at during that gig at Edinburgh University in 1978. Thomas needs kidney dialysis three times a week, and when he gets up to answer the door he needs a walker. But while he may no longer bark out lyrics while careering about the stage, his spirit is indefatigable. “I’m not in the best of health, but my singing voice is better than it’s ever been,” he insists, cheerily. “I’m sort of glad that I can’t jump around any more because I don’t have to worry about falling into the drums. All my concentration goes into singing.”

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‘I was getting bored so hit the vodka’ – Shakespears Sister on how they made Stay

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‘It was inspired by a fabulously kitsch 3D movie called Cat-Women of the Moon. A character has to go back to her planet and leave her human love behind’

Stay came to life one morning in my converted garage in the back of my house in LA: a very unassuming studio, all knotty pine and carpet, my recording equipment in a cupboard. Siobhan Fahey lived down the road and her then-husband Dave Stewart [ex-Eurythmics] had given her a lift over, then he came in, because he had an idea.

Hormonally Yours is released in a 2-CD deluxe edition and coloured vinyl on 17 February, the 30th anniversary of its release.

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‘I was astonished’: how a TikToker sent his dad’s unreleased 43-year-old song viral

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Zach Smith recorded himself jamming out to a tune he found in his car. Now it’s racked up 3m plays – and might be on its way to Marvel

Zach Smith never expected the song to go so viral.

On 4 January, the 19-year-old pressed play on an old track he found in his car; he was struck by how catchy it was – he’d never heard this song before.

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Pixies frontman Black Francis: ‘Kim Deal? We’re always friends – but nothing is for ever’

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As the alt-rockers release a live box set, their frontman answers your questions on Bowie, his 40 new Pixies songs and the alarming sexuality of his pets

Come on Pilgrim is the greatest debut album by anyone, ever. Discuss. mungoslut

I will partially agree, at least to appear humble. But seeing as I’m not so humble … I was listening to Murmur by REM a lot just before Come on Pilgrim and that was hugely influential on me as a songwriter. I’m going to be cocky and say: we were even better than Murmur.

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‘Our managers were like: it’s going to be a dud’: how Glass Animals became the biggest British band in the world

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The Oxford quartet’s song Heat Waves is the most played globally on Spotify this week, and a curveball amid pop’s solo artists. Frontman Dave Bayley explains how it happened

With solo artists currently dominating the charts and the zeitgeist, now is not the ideal time to be in a band – unless it’s Glass Animals. This week, the Oxford quartet became the first British group to top Spotify’s global songs chart with their synthpop single Heat Waves, racking up 4.26m plays per day on the streaming platform. It was a feat their fans saw coming: last year, Heat Waves was the fourth most-streamed song in the US and the most-streamed in Australia, having been played more than 1bn times worldwide.

This is a remarkable achievement for an act with no previous big hits – but that’s not the only strange thing about their success. A sultry, wistful number with an extremely catchy chorus, Heat Waves has had an unusually slow rise to prominence: it was released in June 2020 and for months it failed to break into the UK Top 40 or US Billboard Hot 100. Its subsequent ascent up the charts – peaking at No 5 in the UK, No 1 in Australia and No 3 in the US, where it currently stands – was unprecedented in its leisurely nature; it now holds the record for the longest climb to the Top 5 in the US chart’s history.

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Neil Young’s battle with Spotify is principled – and comfortable

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In pulling his music from Spotify in protest at Joe Rogan’s Covid misinformation, the singer continues a life of political action – but unlike others, he doesn’t need to please the streaming giant

If you had been forced to predict which blue-chip American rock legend was going to suddenly pull their music off Spotify in protest at the streaming site hosting a far-right-friendly podcast that spreads medical misinformation, Neil Young would have been a very safe bet.

He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of said blue-chip legends. The years that produced his most famous work also played host to Young wilfully sabotaging his own commercial prospects in order to follow his muse (or, as he memorably put it, “heading for the ditch”); suddenly abandoning tours midway by directing his tour bus to pull off the motorway en route to the next show; whimsically declining to release a succession of completed albums; and incurring the wrath of his partners in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) by removing their contributions from the master tapes of his songs before releasing them. He spent a substantial chunk of the 1980s making wildly uncommercial albums, apparently with the specific intention of annoying his record label, which ended up suing him for being unpredictable – it lost, perhaps because, as his labelmate Elton John put it, its lawsuit “felt a bit like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young”.

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‘I wanted to try cocaine, but Jimi was against it’: Janis Ian on her tough, starlit life in music

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Hendrix and Janis Joplin warned her off drugs, she sang for James Brown and Salvador Dalí offered to paint her. Janis Ian’s confessional folk-pop is still sensational – so why is she retiring from recording?

‘I learned the truth at 17 / That love was meant for beauty queens / And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles / Who married young and then retired.” Janis Ian’s At Seventeen is an indelible portrait of life from the perspective of a socially awkward unattractive teen, inspired by a newspaper article that the singer-songwriter read about a young woman who thought her life would be perfect. “I learned the truth at 18,” the girl told the journalist. Ian changed her age and spent three months working on the intimate and confessional lyrics.

“You couldn’t write a song like that without having gone through it,” Ian says, video-calling from her home in New Jersey. Now 70, her hair is short and white, no longer the dark curls she sported on her album covers during the 60s and 70s. “The first time I sang At Seventeen in public I did it with my eyes closed. I felt like I was naked and I was sure the audience was going to be laughing.”

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