Category Archives: Pop and rock

Eric Clapton to waive legal costs against woman who attempted to sell single bootlegged CD

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The artist’s management have issued a clarifying statement after the singer attracted criticism over the David v Goliath win

Eric Clapton has waived the legal costs that a German court ordered a 55-year-old woman to pay, over a single CD containing a bootleg copy of a 1980s concert she attempted to sell.

The musician’s management has also issued a clarifying statement in response to widespread social media criticism over Clapton’s decision to take legal action in the first place, saying Clapton was not involved in the specifics of the case and she “is not the type of person Eric Clapton, or his record company, wish to target”.

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The person who got me through 2021: Huey Morgan comforted me amid a deluge of human waste

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I had plumbing problems and his radio show transported me from the faecal hellscape in my garden. It became the ideal soundtrack for my pandemic reality

It was spring, and human excrement was pumping into our garden. I watched through the window as a perplexed young plumber with a long metal pole excavated the dark, gurgling drain. As if lockdown hadn’t been bad enough, our kitchen was now heavy with the stench of a thousand flushes. No one knew how to stop it. There was only one thing to do: brew weapons-grade black coffee and switch on the radio. That’s how I discovered Huey Morgan’s Saturday morning breakfast show on BBC 6 Music. It made everything feel a little more right in the world.

What started as a way to distract from the tide of hot, liquid excrement on our patio quickly became the highlight of the week for my girlfriend and me. Huey – of Fun Lovin’ Criminals fame – thumbing you through his records: early 90s rap, early 80s disco, and early 70s soul to blow away the cobwebs, with choice modern selections marbling the retro soundscape.

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‘This thing was trying to dismantle me’: Mark Lanegan on nearly dying of Covid

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In this extract from his new memoir Devil in a Coma, the alt-rocker recalls how Covid-19 put him in hospital for months this year – and gave him a series of hallucinogenic visions

I had been feeling weak and sick for a few days and then woke up one morning completely deaf. My equilibrium shaky, and my mind in a surreal, psychedelic dream state, I lost my footing at the top of the stairs. Head over heels over head, I knocked myself out on the windowsill as I crashed down the narrow staircase at my house. Bang. My wife was out horseback riding for the day, and I came to hours later still unable to hear a thing, unable to move, two huge opened welts on my head and my knee not supporting any weight.

For two days I tried to get from stairwell to couch, with no success. I could not move, nor could my wife support my 200lb body, so I lay suffering on some blankets on the hard floor. My ribs were cracked, my spine bruised, battered and sore, and my already chronically messed-up knee gone again, as if some tendons were ripped or a ligament severed. My leg was useless. Every attempted breath was a battle, no matter how hard I tried to take a natural one. Though I refused to go to hospital my wife finally called an ambulance behind my back and I was wheeled out of my yard on a gurney. I eventually ended up in intensive care, unable to draw oxygen, and was diagnosed with some exotic new strain of the coronavirus for which there was no cure, of course. I was put into a medically induced coma, none of which I remembered.

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Go easy on me: why pop has got so predictable

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Adele, Ed Sheeran, Abba, Lana Del Rey and Drake all found success in 2021 by delivering more of the same – a result of how our chaotic lives, on and offline, are informing our taste

The biggest album launch of 2021 began with a social media statement tacitly assuring fans that nothing had changed. Adele was once more in a state of heartbreak – “a maze of absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by my own grief” – and that the contents of her album 30 would reflect that, as mired in romantic misery as its predecessors, 25 and 21. It was the musical equivalent, she said, of a friend who comes over “with a bottle of wine and a takeaway” to discuss the disastrous state of your love life.

The second-biggest album launch of 2021 was preceded by its creators proudly announcing they had written it “absolutely trend-blind”. Abba had traversed a considerable musical distance over the course of their original career, buffeted by the shifting musical trends of the 70s and early 80s – from the clompy Europop of their debut album to the sophisticated, chilly electronics of The Visitors, by way of glam and sleek disco – but Voyage would offer them preserved in amber, exactly as they were in the late 70s, unspoiled by any musical trends from the 40 years since their split.

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‘BTS taught me that I am worthy’: readers on why they love the K-pop superstars

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Guardian readers from Scandinavia, the Philippines, Morocco and beyond explain their fandom, which has helped rejuvenate them, heal racial trauma and understand their identity

K-pop boy band BTS swept the American Music Awards last month, making history as the first Asian act to win artist of the year; they were also nominated for a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance for their single Butter.

The seven-member band has a huge global following and their fans, known as Army, are known for their passion and loyalty. Here Guardian readers, who are BTS fans, speak about why the band means so much to them.

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‘I never worked in a cocktail bar’: How the Human League made Don’t You Want Me

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‘Philip turned up to meet my parents fully made up, with red lipstick and high heels. My dad locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out’

I had intended to recruit just one female backing singer but when I walked into the Crazy Daisy nightclub in Sheffield, the first thing I saw was Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing. They somehow looked like a unit while being clearly different individuals. I knew they were right.

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Charlie Watts remembered by Dave Green

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2 June 1941 – 24 August 2021
The Rolling Stones drummer’s childhood friend and fellow musician recalls a home-loving connoisseur and collector of ephemera

I first met Charlie Watts in 1946, when I was four and he was five. We moved into new prefabs built after the war in Wembley Park – we were number 22, he was number 23 – and our mums hit it off pretty much straight away. We were very close, Charlie and me, throughout our lives. There was one point after he joined the Stones when we didn’t see each other for years, but when we did eventually reconnect, we picked up where we left off. Our relationship never really changed.

From an early age we were both interested in jazz. It was a mutual thing. I used to listen to records in Charlie’s bedroom, discovering musicians such as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. Later, when his dad bought him a drum kit and I got a double bass, we’d only been playing for a few months when we heard that a jazz band was doing auditions for a drummer and bass player. We did the audition and as we were the only ones that turned up we got the gig with the Jo Jones Seven and started doing weekly sessions at the Masons Arms pub in Edgware.

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Supermodel Karen Elson on fashion’s toxic truth: ‘I survived harassment, body shaming and bullying – and I’m one of the lucky ones’

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She has been at the top of the industry for decades. Now she’s speaking out about the dark reality of life behind the scenes

When Karen Elson was a young hopeful trying to make it in Paris, a model scout took her to a nightclub. After long days on the Métro trekking to castings that came to nothing, and evenings alone in a run-down apartment, she was excited to be out having fun. The music was good and the scout, to whom her agent had introduced her, kept the drinks coming. She started to feel tipsy. A friend of the scout’s arrived, and the pair started massaging her shoulders, making sexual suggestions. “I was 16 and I’d never kissed a boy,” she recalls. “It was my first experience of sexual – well, sexual anything, and this was sexual harassment. They both had their hands on me.”

She told them she wanted to go home, and left to find a taxi, but they followed her into it, kissing her neck on the back seat. When they reached her street, she jumped out, slammed the taxi door and ran inside. The next day she told another model what had happened, and the scout found out. “His reaction was to corner me in the model agency and say: ‘I’ll fucking get you kicked out of Paris if you ever fucking say anything ever again.’”

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George Michael’s 30 greatest songs – ranked!

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With Last Christmas sailing up the singles charts again, now’s the time to reappraise Michael’s best tracks, from sublime pop to haunting elegies

Tucked away on the B-side of The Edge of Heaven, Battlestations is a fascinating anomaly in the Wham! catalogue. Raw, minimal, and influenced by contemporary dancefloor trends – but still very much a pop song – it gives a glimpse of what might have happened had the duo stayed together and taken a hipper, more experimental direction.

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Belgian pop sensation Angèle: ‘When we speak about feminism, people are afraid’

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A million-selling superstar at home and in France, she discusses her confrontation with Playboy, growing up in a famous family and being publicly outed as bisexual

A few years ago, a popular pub quiz question involved naming 10 famous Belgians. The answers often revealed more about British cultural ignorance than Belgium’s ability to produce international celebrities, given that the fictional Tintin and Hercule Poirot were the best many could come up with.

The game has got easier since the rise of Angèle, a stridently feminist Belgian pop singer-songwriter who shot to fame in 2016 after posting short clips singing covers and playing the piano on Instagram. She was young, talented and not afraid to make fun of herself, pulling faces and sticking pencils up her nose. Her 2018 debut album, Brol, sold a million copies; by 2019, she was a face of Chanel. “I’d always wanted a career in music, but I was thinking more of working as a piano accompanist,” she says, folding into an armchair at a five-star boutique hotel near the Paris Opéra. “I really didn’t expect it to happen like that.”

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60s psych-rockers the Electric Prunes: ‘We couldn’t sit around stoned!’

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Discovered in an LA garage, the band rode a psychedelic wave into Easy Rider and a trippy Latin mass – even if they didn’t actually take acid. As a box set revives the music, their lead singer looks back

“I guess I’m part of history,” says James Lowe, lead singer of the Electric Prunes, of the band’s oeuvre being gathered into a box set this month. “It suggests the idea we had for the band was viable – at least for a while.”

Indeed, the Los Angeles quintet were, if only briefly, one of psychedelic rock’s pioneers. Ironically, as Lowe confirms, the Prunes weren’t particularly interested in hallucinogenic drugs – “we had no support crew, no tour bus; we couldn’t sit around stoned” – and no Prune possessed the dark charisma of fellow LA psychedelic shamans Arthur Lee or Jim Morrison. Initially a surf-rock outfit, a passing real-estate agent heard the band rehearsing in a garage and suggested a friend of hers might be interested in them. Lowe gave his phone number but thought nothing of it, because “everyone in LA knows ‘someone’ in the film or music industry”.

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Joni Mitchell: ‘I’m hobbling along but I’m doing all right’

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Singer discusses health difficulties in rare public speech as she accepts Kennedy Center award

Joni Mitchell addressed her health difficulties in a rare public speech as she accepted her Kennedy Center Honor, one of the most prestigious awards in American cultural life.

At a ceremony attended by Joe Biden – in a show of support for the arts after the awards were snubbed by Donald Trump – Mitchell discussed the issues she’s faced in the wake of an aneurysm in 2015 that left her temporarily unable to walk or talk.

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Billie Eilish: ‘I’ve gotten a lot more proud of who I am’

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The pop superstar on her extraordinary year – the Bond theme, that Vogue cover, the success of her second album – and hosting Saturday Night Live

It’s a measure of what Billie Eilish’s life has been like in 2021 that she woke up one morning last month, rolled over to check her phone and found out she’d got seven Grammy award nominations. She’d overslept the actual announcement. “I was up late, watching Fleabag. Again!”

We’re speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “This is my third time watching Fleabag. I’ve literally just paused it, again, to do this interview. Andrew Scott is my favourite actor in the world! And Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] is so fucking good, I can’t stress it enough. When I met her at the Bond premiere, I was trying not to blow smoke up her ass the entire night.”

Eilish would be a standout figure of 2021 for her Grammy-winning title music for No Time to Die alone, written, as always, with her big brother, Finneas. It premiered at the pre-Covid 2020 Brit awards and was finally unleashed in the cinemas just over two months ago (“We saw the whole movie in December 2019… we’ve had to keep all the secrets for two years… that was hard!”). But the Bond theme is old news, given everything else that has happened this past year.

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Security, intimacy and money: why Adele is going to Las Vegas

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Once a place ‘where careers go to die’, in Vegas you can see the big stars up close – and it makes sense for Adele

Las Vegas shows once conjured images of early-bird dinner specials, corny magicians and Cole Porter standards sung to happily clapping coach parties. But with another of the world’s biggest pop stars signing on to perform in the city, namely Adele, the Vegas concert residency is further cemented as a glamorous and lucrative rite of pop passage.

Her fourth album, 30, released last month, became the biggest-selling album of the year in the US after just three days on sale. That is the kind of popularity that warrants a stadium tour – indeed, she played to nearly 3 million punters across the 120-show stretch of her previous 2017-2018 world tour.

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Ed Sheeran & Elton John: Merry Christmas review – an overstuffed, undercooked turkey

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Laudably released for charity, the favourite for this year’s Christmas No 1 leaves no musical cliche untwinkled – and its exhortation to forget the pandemic is crass

Given recent government advice to avoid kissing strangers under the mistletoe this Christmas, there’s a sense in which the long-trailed festive hook-up between Ed Sheeran and Elton John counts as a reckless incitement to anarchy. For his part, Sheeran wants nothing more than a relentless tonguing beneath those poison berries this December: “Kiss me,” he sings; then later, “just keep kissing me!” (To be fair, this noted Wife Guy is unquestionably singing about his wife. Did you know he has a wife? He might have mentioned it.)

In every other respect, however, Merry Christmas – in case the perfunctory title didn’t make clear – is the very exemplar of avoiding unnecessary risk during this perilous season. There are sleigh bells. Church bells. Clattering reindeer hooves. A kids’ choir. Sickly strings. The full selection box, and delivered with about as much imagination as that staple stocking filler. Old friends Sheeran and John encourage us to “pray for December snow”, and the overall effect is a blanketing avalanche of plinky-plonky schmaltz rich in bonhomie and derivative in tune.

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The world owes Yoko an apology! 10 things we learned from The Beatles: Get Back

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Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary on the Fab Four reveals Ringo is an amazing drummer, McCartney was a joy and their entourage were coolest of all

The concept for Let It Be was: no concept. The Beatles arrived in an empty studio and wondered where the equipment was. (And revealed that they knew very little about setting up PA systems.) What were they rehearsing for? A show on the QE2? A concert on Primrose Hill? A TV special in Libya? A film? What would the set look like? Would it be made of plastic? Why, George Harrison wondered, were they being recorded? Get Back makes clear that the Beatles didn’t have a clue what to expect from Let It Be.

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Barbados’s icon: why Rihanna’s national hero status is so apt

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Honoured by her newly independent country, Rihanna has always proudly worn her Bajan heritage – broadening her sound from her Caribbean roots, while staying true to them

Rihanna’s designation as a national hero of Barbados, to coincide with the country’s transition to an independent republic, could not be more apt. Not only has she been an official ambassador for culture and youth in the country since 2018, the singer remains the country’s most famous citizen and indeed advocate. She has never softened her Bajan accent, and her music, while tapping into pop, R&B and dance music, has remained rich with her Caribbean heritage.

In her investiture ceremony, the country’s prime minister Mia Mottley addressed the pop singer, fashion icon and hugely successful entrepreneur as “ambassador Robyn Rihanna Fenty: may you continue to shine like a diamond” – a reference to 2012’s global hit Diamonds – “and bring honour to your nation, by your words, by your actions, and to do credit wherever you shall go. God bless you, my dear.”

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Daniel Johns and the fame trap: get famous enough to buy back the freedom you once had | Brigid Delaney

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The anxiety that results from extreme fame can become a prison, but it can be escaped

Fame. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, particularly not if your enemy was very young.

Fame of the extreme kind – when you are a household name and your image is worshipped on bedroom walls and all manner of fantasies are projected on you – can be experienced as a form of trauma.

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Paul Weller’s 30 greatest songs – ranked!

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Drawn from the Jam, the Style Council and his solo work, all of it powered by romance, storytelling and political vim, here is the best of a British songwriter unbounded by genre

On the B-side of A Solid Bond in Your Heart lurks Weller’s mea culpa take on the sudden demise of the Jam, the arrogance of youth and the perils of becoming the Voice of a Generation. “I was a shit-stained statue / Schoolchildren would stand in awe … I thought I was lord of this crappy jungle.”

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