Category Archives: Pop and rock

Self Esteem: Prioritise Pleasure review – Britain’s funniest, frankest pop star drums out her demons

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(Fiction)
The sound of an artist coming into her own, Rebecca Taylor’s remarkable second album as Self Esteem mixes the intimate and conversational with the unabashedly dramatic

Throughout Prioritise Pleasure, her second album as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor searches for a feeling she can rely on. Her stomach and heart seldom align. A callous lover makes her doubt herself. “Casual” texts from an ex evidently conceal ulterior motives. She has to check out emotionally in order to climax from a zipless fuck. Marriage and babies don’t appeal, yet other people’s still make her insecure. Even the nostalgia induced by a warm summer’s day can trick her into self-sabotage.

Pacing these shifting sands is exhausting. But simply by defining them, and acknowledging how normal it is for these contradictory states to coexist (especially in the lives of women, contorted by diet culture and dating), Taylor establishes a sturdy sense of common ground – one on which the makings of a stellar pop second act are taking shape.

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Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode: ‘Regret is a weird word. I don’t look back on my life like that’

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The Depeche Mode frontman answers your questions, on his new covers album, taking early dance lessons from Mick Jagger and the right way to load a dishwasher

Did you accomplish everything you set out to on [forthcoming album] Impostor? MrBeelzebub

I was really burned out after the last Depeche Mode tour, then Rich [Machin, long-time musical partner in Soulsavers] and I started talking about songs and artists who had influenced us. Before we knew it, we were making a Soulsavers record with me as frontman that paid homage to those songs, but was almost a new piece of work. I realised that the choices were songs that put me where I am, suggested where I have been and where I might be. They are songs [such as Dan Penn/James Carr’s Dark End of the Street or Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet] that reflect on lives lived. I would not have known how to sing these songs when I was 18.

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‘Our music charts are still kind of segregated’: critic Kelefa Sanneh on pop, fandom and race

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The New Yorker writer’s book Major Labels examines why we tag music with a genre, be it for commerce or community. He explains why people still argue over great songs – and why they can thrive on cultural appropriation

When Nik Cohn wrote Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock in 1969, he only had 15 years of the rock’n’roll era to process. Five decades later, telling the story so far is such a daunting prospect that, while writing Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh’s trick was denial.

“I figured if I thought too much about the span of it, I would go insane,” he says cheerfully. “The idea of sitting down to write the history of music is horrifying. It feels more fun if I’m telling seven overlapping stories.”

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‘I’m so glad you guys exist!’ Carrie Brownstein meets the Linda Lindas

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When teenage LA punks the Linda Lindas went viral, they caught the attention of Amy Poehler, Jimmy Kimmel and original riot grrrl, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, who joins them for a cross-generational chinwag

In May, the US punk band the Linda Lindas went viral with a performance of their no-holds-barred track Racist, Sexist Boy. Written in response to a real-life incident in which drummer Mila de la Garza was racially harassed by a classmate, the song alternates between sludgy punk and brisk, hardcore thrash, topped with cathartic, defiant lyrics: “You have racist, sexist joys / We rebuild what you destroy.” What made the performance even more striking was its setting among the usually hushed bookshelves of the Los Angeles Public Library.

On the back of that viral hit (currently at 4.3m views on Twitter), the teenage Los Angeles quartet – Mila and her sister Lucia (guitar), their cousin Eloise Wong (bass), and longtime friend Bela Salazar (guitar) – have signed to Epitaph Records, recorded their debut album, due in 2022, and released a snappy, and snappily titled, punk-pop single Oh!.

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Adele: Easy on Me review – reliably, relatably Adele-esque

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(Columbia)
The first single from her divorce-focused new album 30 is quintessential Adele: piano, romantic recrimination, and soaring vocal work

Adele’s statement announcing the release of her fourth album was published on social media earlier this week. In it, the singer doesn’t talk much about music, more about her emotional state during the album’s making, provoked, one assumes, by the breakdown of her marriage: “absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by grief”. She compared the album she made amid it to friends coming over with “a bottle of wine and a takeaway” and offering earthy, if astrologically based, advice: “It’s your Saturn return, babes, fuck it.”

It all sounds thoroughly grim, but it also has a hint of reassurance about it for her fans, who come to Adele in record-breaking numbers for relatable heartbreak – the musical equivalent of an old friend in the pub, tearfully relating the latest chapter in their reliably disastrous love life as they demolish a third glass of pinot grigio. For one thing, it underlines that she has fresh heartbreak to write about, which had been an issue with her last album, 25, on which she was forced to rake over the same relationship that had inspired its predecessor for material. For another, her fans might have cause to be alarmed by what the cover of Vogue refers to as “a new look, a new love, a new sound”. How reliably relatable can Adele now be, with her home in LA, her squad of Hollywood A-list pals, her three-times-a-day exercise regime and, the Vogue profile suggests, an employee on hand with a different pair of shoes should the singer want to change out of her heels? It’s a statement that, consciously or otherwise, sends out a message: “Business as usual babes, fuck it.”

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60s hitmakers Manfred Mann: ‘I’ve sung this 10,000 times and never liked it!’

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They had screaming fans and transatlantic hits as part of the 60s’ British invasion – an unlikely result for a band of jazz and blues heads. Still touring as the Manfreds, they look back on one of the strangest catalogues in UK pop

In an office in the middle of Pinewood Studios, former members of Manfred Mann are discussing their EP The One in the Middle. It was recorded in 1964, at the height of their first flush of fame – between the first and second sessions for the EP, their single Do Wah Diddy Diddy had gone to No 1 in the UK and the US. But, in spite of that success, it is perfect evidence of how different Manfred Mann were from their contemporaries in what was then called the beat boom.

The EP features a version of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man. With the greatest respect to peers like the Swingin’ Blue Jeans, you didn’t get a lot of repurposed hard bop from them. It also features a Bob Dylan cover, six months before the Byrds released Mr Tambourine Man and sparked a trend for taking Dylan songs in new directions. Manfred Mann, for their part, retooled With God on Our Side as a kind of epic southern soul-influenced piano ballad. And then there’s the title track, an extraordinarily early example of pop music in self-referential, meta mode.

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K-boom! How the unstoppable stars of K-pop went gunning for the art world

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First came K-cinema, then K-pop and K-TV. Now South Korea’s young stars are conquering the world with K-art. But what do their dark visions say about their nation’s psyche – and ours?

Ohnim is having a blue period, just like Picasso. Over Zoom from a gallery in Seoul, the Korean rapper Song Min-ho, better known as Mino to K-pop fans but Ohnim in the art world, shows me a painting he finished the previous evening in collaboration with artist Choi Na-ri. It depicts a blue crouched figure, like a depressed version of Rodin’s Thinker. It may be still wet but will soon be shipped to London’s Saatchi Gallery for an art fair that showcases work by three of Korea’s biggest K-pop stars.

The meeting of K-pop and K-art is making the art world lick its lips. Businessman David Ciclitira, who set up the StART Art Fair at the Saatchi, says: “K-pop stars have immense reach through their social media. Guys like Mino, Henry Lau and Kang Seung-yoon, whose work will be in the show, have six to seven million followers each on Instagram. In Seoul, fans queue round the block just to see a work of art by any of them. Then they fight each other to buy. I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that at the Saatchi Gallery, but you never know.”

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‘My God, we were mobbed so much!’ – how we made Overload, by Sugababes

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‘Some people thought our vocals sounded sarcastic. I felt like I was just being a normal teenager, moody as hell’

We made Overload at Mayfair Studios in Primrose Hill. We were running between two rooms, recording the poppier stuff for our debut album, One Touch, with Matt Rowe, who was famous for his work with the Spice Girls. And then, in the other room, working on Overload with [co-producer/writer] Cameron McVey and his team. The writing process was pretty organic, everyone adding lyrics and melodies. But for me, Cameron was instrumental in Overload. He has a way of pulling the best out of you, and he loved to ask us what was going on with our schooling, our mates, going out.

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Tom Morello: ‘We came within a baby’s breath of a fascist coup in the US’

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Lockdown and ‘looking after the grandmas’ may have kept the Rage Against the Machine guitarist away from recent protests – but he refuses to be silenced

Tom Morello has made more than 20 albums, as a founding member of Rage Against the Machine – the political rap-rock band who have sold 16m records, and whose 1992 track Killing in the Name has become a perennial protest anthem – and of the bands Audioslave and Prophets of Rage. He also plays solo under the name the Nightwatchman, and has toured with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. His unique approach to the guitar, which he has self-deprecatingly described as “making R2-D2 noises”, has led to him regularly being voted as one of the greatest guitar players of all time. His latest album, The Atlas Underground Fire (released on 15 October), features a series of collaborations recorded in lockdown – with Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Damian Marley and Bring Me the Horizon, among others. He is a celebrated “nonsectarian socialist” political activist, famed for performing at demonstrations – he played at Occupy events across the US and Europe – and a co-founder of the nonprofit “social justice” organisation Axis of Justice.

You recorded your new album in lockdown. Did the pandemic also mean you missed out on the ongoing protests in the US?
Not only was there a global plague to contend with, there was the US political situation and the white supremacy comeuppance, all happening at a time when I was locked down with my 97-year-old mom, my 90-year-old mother-in-law, and two kids going crazy trying to learn remotely. I was unable to be on the literal frontlines for the first time in my adult life, because I’m trying to keep the grandmas alive, you know. So in the middle of the George Floyd protests I recorded a song called Stand Up, with Imagine Dragons, the great trans soul singer Shea Diamond and Bloody Beetroots as well. I was trying, from the bunker, to contribute in any way I could. But you’re absolutely right: that’s my bread and butter. I’m at the front of that march for 30 years, and now, you know, there’s a plumbing problem, or one of my kids broke a window with a basketball, so that’s my day

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Roger Taylor: ‘My most treasured possession? A massive statue of Freddie’

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The Queen drummer and singer-songwriter on former girlfriends, forgetting lyrics and liking red wine

Born in Norfolk, Roger Taylor, 72, is an original member of the band Queen, which formed in 1970. Their hits include Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You and Radio Ga Ga. Taylor’s new solo album is Outsider, and he is currently on tour in the UK. The Queen + Adam Lambert’s Rhapsody European tour takes place next year. Taylor is married, has five children and lives in Surrey and Cornwall.

When were you happiest?
When I first heard one of our records on the radio.

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From hardcore to bardcore: Kedr Livanskiy, the Russian producer inspired by Tolkienists

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Livanskiy’s operatic vocals and hazy beats put her at the forefront of Moscow’s underground club scene. Now she’s retreated from the city to the forest to nurture her imagination

Yana Kedrina’s earliest exposure to music came in a wooden dacha in a pine-forested village 2,000 miles from Moscow. Kedrina’s grandmother, who built the summer cottage with her husband, would invite Kedrina and her seven sisters over to sing Russian folk songs and drink cherry leaf tea. The rustic surroundings and feelings of kinship nurtured in Kedrina an infatuation with her culture’s folklore and a devotion to community.

“A large family, gathering to connect to its ancestral heritage, was an experience unique to a time that predated this individualism we live in now,” Kedrina says, speaking in Russian. Her grandmother never lived to see her blossom into an internationally recognised musician under the name Kedr Livanskiy (Russian for the Lebanese cedar tree). But Kedrina, 31, takes solace in the fact that her career has spiritually fulfilled her grandmother’s dream of travelling beyond her village in Russia’s Tomsk region.

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‘I saw something in Bruce Springsteen that nobody else saw’: the world according to Stevie Van Zandt

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The Boss’s trusty sideman has many plans – from saving central America to TV Hogmanay at the Playboy Mansion – and he’s more than happy to share his rock wisdom

It is the middle of the 1980s, and Stevie Van Zandt, having departed the E Street Band and left Bruce Springsteen’s side, is pursuing a solo career. He has also parlayed decades of experience playing in bar bands into a new and unusual role: international activist and campaigner against injustice. And so he finds himself, in company with Jackson Browne, in Nicaragua, against which the US is waging a proxy war.

He arranges a meeting with Rosario Murillo, the wife of Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, as he notes in his memoir, Unrequited Infatuations. “After a few drinks, I moved off the small talk and suddenly asked her if she loved her husband. She was taken a bit aback but said, Yes, señor, very much. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should spend as much time with him as possible, because he’s a dead man walking. It’s just a matter of time and time is running out’ … She was a very smart woman married to a revolutionary. But she was expecting a pleasant conversation about the arts, and the reality of what I was saying hit her hard.”

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‘Racism is rampant’: Alien Weaponry, the metal band standing up for Māori culture

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The New Zealand trio have gone global thanks to their forthright Māori-language songs, which confront colonial history and ongoing inequality

New Zealand was a war zone in the mid-1800s. On one side were the British and the colonial government, craving a stranglehold on more of the country’s land. On the other were the indigenous Māori people, fighting to preserve tino rangatiratanga: their sovereignty and self-determination.

On 29 April 1864, the British invaded Pukehinahina, also known as Gate Pā. Despite being grossly outnumbered, the Māori fended off the attackers using concealed trenches and guerrilla tactics. It was a fleeting victory in a war that, ultimately, led to the confiscation of 3m acres of Māori land.

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Rolling Stones review – a funky, heavy first show without Charlie Watts

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The Dome at America’s Center, St Louis, Missouri
The veteran rockers return to the road with an emotional tribute to their longtime drummer and a reinvigorated sense of purpose

For many musicians, it has been an emotional return to live music after the coronavirus pandemic put a protracted end to touring. For the Rolling Stones, picking up their No Filter tour in Chuck Berry’s hometown of St Louis, Missouri, the stakes are even higher. Not only have the stalwart performers not played in more than two years; it’s also a commemoration for drummer Charlie Watts, who died last month.

It opens with an empty stage and only a drumbeat, with photos of Watts projected on the stage backdrop. The band appear, kicking their way through Street Fighting Man and It’s Only Rock’N’Roll (But I Like It), before Mick Jagger pauses the show to devote the tour to Watts’s memory. He along with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, walk centre stage to thank fans for the outpouring of love and support for Watts.

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Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

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The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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‘We’re like Mork and Mindy!’ Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, music’s odd couple

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Fourteen years after their Grammy-winning debut, the roots duo have reunited – facing high expectations. They explain how they left their comfort zones with a ‘nuts but tasteful’ all-star band

More than half a century since arriving to play his first show in the US with Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant was in the strange position of having to explain himself to the authorities.

“I had to prove that I was contributing to the betterment of the American system somehow, which is kind of cute, really,” Plant says of this post-lockdown trip to Nashville. He is sitting in the city’s famous Sound Emporium studio with his collaborator, the bluegrass legend Alison Krauss. It is the same place where they recorded their second, highly anticipated record as a duo, Raise the Roof, before the pandemic put the world on pause.

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Iggy Pop on finding new music: ‘At my age, it helps to remain curious’

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The source of the rocker’s enviable eternal youth? In the words of the man himself, it’s avidly rooting out new artists into his 70s (and beyond)

I keep reading that we decline in our 70s so I try to keep using my brain. Discovering new music opens my mind and the element of surprise keeps me connected. I feel like I’m mining for diamonds – and when you find the diamond, you know. When I heard Chaise Longue by Wet Leg I got really excited: it’s cheeky, with a wicked groove, but it’s the vocals – they’re almost metronomic. You could ask 100 people to sing it and it wouldn’t sound the same.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Britney Spears’ 30 greatest songs – ranked!

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As she celebrates her engagement and fights for her autonomy, we celebrate the best of an artist who helped to define 21st-century pop

Spears previously flirted with dubstep on 2007’s Blackout, but it was Hold It Against Me that dragged the then-underground dance music into the mainstream. A decade later, and its blistering amalgamation of industrial EDM and saccharine pop melodies still feels every bit as audacious and innovative.

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Alanis Morissette says she was victim of multiple statutory rapes as a teenager

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Canadian music star says in new documentary: ‘I would always say I was consenting, and then I’d be reminded … you’re not consenting at 15’

Speaking in a new documentary, Alanis Morissette has said she was the victim of multiple statutory rapes as a teenager.

The documentary, Jagged, is screening at the Toronto film festival this week. The Washington Post has reported that Morissette describes the attacks during the film. “It took me years in therapy to even admit there had been any kind of victimisation on my part,” she says. “I would always say I was consenting, and then I’d be reminded like ‘Hey, you were 15, you’re not consenting at 15.’ Now I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, they’re all paedophiles. It’s all statutory rape.’”

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