Category Archives: Pop and rock

‘It was the happiest time’: The Beach Boys on their strange second coming

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They helped define the 60s, but were hopelessly uncool as the 70s began – and Brian Wilson was unravelling. The band discuss the masterpieces they made against the odds

In the 1960s, the Beach Boys staked their claim as the US’s most popular band, as their dazzling, harmony-drenched songs about surfing, cars and California Girls epitomised the American dream. So, at the end of the decade, when leader and principal songwriter Brian Wilson – who had recently spent several months in a psychiatric hospital – suggested that the band were on the verge of bankruptcy, everyone thought it was a joke.

“We arrived in London for a tour on the day that hit the headlines,” co-founder Al Jardine says over the phone from California. “The IRS [US tax collection agency] had closed our studio and our offices in Hollywood. The hotels wouldn’t accept our corporate credit cards. In the end, I had to use my personal American Express card to pay for our rooms.”

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‘Not just a drummer – a genre’: Stewart Copeland and Max Weinberg on Charlie Watts

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The Police and Bruce Springsteen drummers share memories of their late Rolling Stones counterpart, explaining his technical brilliance, his verve – and his clothes-folding skills

I’m an early-period Stones fan, and not so much because of losing interest in them, but because when you’re 16, music is 100 times more important – and the Rolling Stones were right there when I was 16. Humans are sort of like ducks. A duck comes out of the shell, the first warm thing it sees is mama; for adolescent teenage humans, the first raucous sound of rebellion, that’s daddy. And in my generation, that sound was the Stones.

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‘I’m a one in a billion’ – how Diane Warren penned windswept power ballads for Cher, Gaga and Dion

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She’s the queen of the power ballad mega hit – and has even written songs for Biden, Harris and Ringo Starr. Now the world’s most successful female songwriter is finally releasing her own album

At the end of the 1990s, when Diane Warren was the unrivalled queen of the power ballad, her music publisher presented her with a quartet of gold discs and a plaque hailing her as “the career saviour of the 90s”. The discs celebrated the windswept mega-hits Warren had written for Toni Braxton (Un-Break My Heart), LeAnn Rimes (How Do I Live), Celine Dion (Because You Loved Me) and Aerosmith (I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing), the first two of which are still among the bestselling US singles ever.

To be imperial in one pop era is usually to be defined by it for evermore, but Warren has been writing hits for almost four decades, notching up nine US No 1s and 32 Top 10 hits. In 2015, Til It Happens to You, her potent Lady Gaga collaboration for a documentary about campus rape, made her once again the pop equivalent of the striker you turn to when you absolutely have to score a penalty.

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Charlie Watts: a rock’n’roll legend whose true love was jazz

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He may have backed the world’s most successful rock band, but the late drummer worshipped his jazz heroes through big bands and other projects

Everyone knew that Charlie Watts’s heart was always in jazz. Even when he grew his hair long and put on hippie garb while the Rolling Stones were going through their Satanic Majesties period, underneath he was still the cool bebopper who could see through the nonsense that surrounded his group and the rampaging egos at its heart.

Wisely, he never let his true musical allegiance show in his playing with the Stones. When they recruited him from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in January 1963, not long after he’d been serving an apprenticeship with trad jazz bands, he listened to the records of Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in order to absorb the way that master Chicago blues drummers such as Earl Phillips, Fred Below and Elgin Evans kept things simple, soon appreciating that simplicity is often the hardest thing of all to achieve.

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Baby on Nevermind cover sues Nirvana over child sexual exploitation

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Spencer Elden, who appeared at four months old on iconic album design, claims the image is child pornography

Spencer Elden, who appeared as a naked baby on one of rock music’s most iconic album covers – Nevermind by Nirvana – is suing the band, claiming he was sexually exploited as a child.

In a lawsuit filed in a Californian district court against numerous parties, including the surviving members of the band, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love, and the record labels that released or distributed the album in the last three decades, Elden alleges the defendants produced child pornography with the image, which features him swimming naked towards a dollar bill with his genitalia visible.

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Charlie Watts: the calm, brilliant eye of the Rolling Stones’ rock’n’roll storm

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Unruffled amid excess, personality clashes and musical disputes, the Rolling Stones’ exceptional drummer used technique to deepen the meaning and power of their songs

By any standards, Charlie Watts was an unlikely candidate for rock stardom.

He was quiet, drily funny and unfailingly modest, characteristics theoretically better suited to his initial profession as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop. Furthermore, by his own admission, he didn’t particularly care for rock’n’roll (“I didn’t know anything about it … I used to hate Elvis Presley. Miles Davis – that’s what I considered someone,” he told an interviewer in 1993) and had initially had to have the rhythm and blues so beloved of his bandmates explained to him: “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow”.

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Turnstile: can hardcore punk’s biggest band conquer the mainstream?

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With their major-label deal and collaborations with Dev Hynes, the Baltimore five-piece are pushing at rock music’s boundaries

All music scenes have a splintering. In 1989, grunge fans were excited about Nirvana and Tad. By 1991 it was a different story. One had transcended a scene. The other remained simply a part of it. And so to Turnstile, the Baltimore, Maryland-based five-piece who arrive at their third album, Glow On, on the precipice of becoming the standout band of the new hardcore punk scene.

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Paul McCartney to reveal unseen Beatles lyrics in new book

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The Lyrics will feature a ‘self-portrait’ in 154 songs, including the unrecorded Tell Me Who He Is

Paul McCartney will include the previously unseen lyrics to an unrecorded Beatles song in his forthcoming book The Lyrics.

On Monday, the former Beatle revealed the 154 songs to feature in the book, which will be based on conversations McCartney had with the poet Paul Muldoon. Described as a “self-portrait in 154 songs”, The Lyrics will feature songs from throughout McCartney’s career, including Blackbird, Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, Band on the Run and Yesterday.

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Grace Slick and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane: how we made White Rabbit

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‘I wrote it on a $50 piano with eight or 10 keys missing, but I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there’

All fairytales that are read to little girls feature a Prince Charming who comes and saves them. But Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did not. Alice was on her own, and she was in a very strange place, but she kept on going and she followed her curiosity – that’s the White Rabbit. A lot of women could have taken a message from that story about how you can push your own agenda.

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Harmony, melancholy and the Everly Brothers’ indelible influence

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From Neil Young to Keith Richards, a generation of musicians revered Phil and Don’s haunting music

• US music star Don Everly dies aged 84

Among the hundreds of hours of outtakes from the recording sessions that eventually became the Beatles’ Let It Be album, there is a version of Two of Us, taped on 25 January 1969. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney harmonise, the latter says to the former: “Take it, Phil”, a reference to Phil and Don Everly, the duo upon whom the pair had originally attempted to model themselves. On an early holiday, Lennon and McCartney attempted to impress local girls by telling them they had a band back home and they were “the British Everly Brothers”.

Shortly afterwards, the pair temporarily stopped working on the song entirely and began performing a ragged cover of Bye Bye Love instead. It’s both oddly sweet – a fleeting moment where the ill-tempered sessions actually achieved their aim of returning the Beatles to their roots – and oddly telling. At the end of a decade in which they had done more than anyone to alter rock music entirely, shifting its parameters until it was occasionally unrecognisable from the state in which it had started the 60s – and rendering the likes of Don and Phil Everly old news in the process – John Lennon and Paul McCartney still wanted to sound like the Everly Brothers. Throughout it all, McCartney later wrote, “their music echoed through my mind”.

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US music star Don Everly dies aged 84

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Singer and guitarist who formed one of pop’s greatest vocal partnerships, the Everly Brothers, dies in Nashville

Don Everly, one half of the rock’n’roll duo the Everly Brothers, has died at his home in Nashville at the age of 84.

A spokesperson for the family confirmed Everly’s death to the Los Angeles Times, but did not disclose a cause.

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Lorde: Solar Power review – waking up from the nightmare of fame

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(Universal Music New Zealand/EMI Records)
Equipped with lovely melodies and a bombast-resistant sound, the New Zealander exchanges the spotlight for a sly reflection on true happiness

Plenty of mainstream pop stars have decided they no longer want to be mainstream pop stars. They’ve tried everything to achieve their goal, from making deliberately unlistenable albums, to – in the memorable case of the late Scott Walker – locking themselves in a monastery on the Isle of Wight.

But few have attempted to bid farewell to mainstream pop stardom as prettily as Lorde does on her third album. It opens with a guitar picking a gentle, woozy-sounding figure. A flute glides beatifically by and Lorde offers a grim depiction of life as a teenager superstar – complete with “nightmares from the camera flash” – before apparently saying goodbye to all that: “alone on a windswept island”, she “won’t take the call if it’s the label or radio”. “If you’re looking for a saviour,” she adds, “that’s not me”, which would sound a little self-aggrandising had the world of online fandom not become so overheated that whenever a female pop star posts anything on social media, the responses are clogged up by stans calling them “mum”, “queen” and “goddess”.

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Lockdown sensation Su Lee: ‘I believe in sharing vulnerability – it relieves the pain’

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The South Korean designer turned songwriter uses goofy, DIY pop to explore issues such as depression and social anxiety

If we could boil Gen Z internet, with all its anxieties and goofiness and creativity and openness, down into a person, the result would be Su Lee. The South Korean musician’s DIY pop songs shrug off frivolities such as love and sex in favour of bopping through the exhaustion and annoyance of having your brain chemistry work against you. Chuck in some videos featuring handmade wall art in “groovy chick” colourways and a dollop of ironic goofiness and Lee’s “spokesperson of Gen Z” status is pretty much assured. A case in point: when she logged on to Zoom for our interview, she asked: “Will we put this out as a video?” which made me feel ancient (and horrified).

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Brandon Flowers’ teenage obsessions: ‘I considered an Oasis tattoo’

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As the Killers release a new album, their frontman recalls his youthful love of Cheers, the Goonies and bonding over Bowie in Las Vegas

I grew up in Henderson, just outside Las Vegas. When I was eight, we moved to Nephi, this rural town in Utah. So at the same time I was falling in love with music, I was also being introduced to rodeos and farming. I didn’t realise the impact, but now if I hear the right song, I’m instantly transported back to the clouds, woods and mountains of the American west.

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‘I had no confidence, no money’: the pop stars kept in limbo by major labels

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Raye is one of the world’s most listened-to artists, but her label wouldn’t let her make an album. She’s the latest example of stars who say their music is being sidelined

At the end of June, Raye smashed through the shiny and carefully controlled veneer that usually surrounds music stars. The British pop singer’s numerous hit singles had made her one of the world’s 200 most popular artists on Spotify, but her label Polydor hadn’t allowed her to make even one album from a four-album record deal she signed back in 2014.

“I’ve done everything they asked me, I switched genres, I worked seven days a week, ask anyone in the music game, they know,” she vented on Twitter. “I’m done being a polite pop star.” Polydor responded saying they were “saddened” to read Raye’s tweets and the two have since parted ways.

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‘To dive into yourself is scary’: the anxiety and awesome alt-rock of Liars

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For 20 years, Angus Andrew has made Liars one of rock’s most interesting, slippery acts – and by microdosing drugs to help understand his fears, he’s written his masterpiece

One night, Angus Andrew woke to a blood-curdling scream. Rushing out into the darkness of the bush around his house in a remote part of Australia’s Ku-ring-gai Chase national park, he encountered a giant python attacking a kangaroo. “You could hear the kangaroo trying to breathe, I tried to bash the snake off it but my wife was all ‘nature, nature, you have to let it happen’,” he says. “The roo’s eyes are stuck in my brain – it was visceral.”

Surrounded by menacing beasts, with no roads, shops, sewerage, or running water, isolation characterises the latest in a very long line of homes and workplaces for the sole remaining member of Liars, the alt-rock band Andrew co-founded 20-odd years ago. Though they emerged from the New York scene that also spawned the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem, Liars perplexingly remain a cult concern.

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Bryan Adams photographs Cher, Grimes and Iggy Pop for Pirelli calendar

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Jennifer Hudson, St Vincent and other music stars also feature in touring-themed photoshoots conceived by rocker-photographer

Images of recording artists including Cher, Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson and Grimes will feature in one of the world’s best known photographic commissions.

For the 2022 Pirelli calendar, the rock star and photographer Bryan Adams has captured superstar singers as if they were touring – precisely what they have been unable to do for more than a year.

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Brian May: ‘I never have a single day without thinking about Freddie’

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As he reissues his debut solo album, the Queen guitarist recalls how making it helped him cope with a time when his band, marriage and the life of Freddie Mercury were coming to an end

Brian May has been up to his neck in it, and he is fed up. We are talking a little more than a week after we were meant to, our initial chat having been postponed because the basement of May’s London home was filled with effluent after torrential rain caused the capital to flood and sewers to spew forth their contents.

The basement was where he and his wife, the actor Anita Dobson, kept their memorabilia. “It’s made us feel violated,” he says. “It’s what it does to your soul to lose your possessions, to see them swimming about in it. I had to tear up all my old photograph albums, the very first ones I ever had when I was eight years old, to try to save the photographs.” May was born in the outer London suburbs and he’s had a home in London all his life; now he has had enough. “I think London is wrecked,” he says. “It’s brutal, it’s noisy, it’s polluted. Nobody has any consideration. So we’re feeling like we want to get out. That is very wounding: I love London, I grew up here. But I don’t think I can deal with it any more.”

When we speak, May, 74, is engaged, amused and frank, but this is the latest episode in a tough 18 months. Early last summer, he suffered an accident while gardening that tore muscles in his buttocks, and caused a heart attack. It is almost as if we have come around in time: May is reissuing Back to the Light, the solo album he made between 1988 and 1992, another tough period for him. This was when Freddie Mercury, his bandmate in Queen, had become increasingly sicker with Aids-related illnesses, dying in November 1991 of bronchial pneumonia. And that was only the half of it.

I was convinced it was over. I would drive past all these arenas we used to play, thinking: I’ll never do that again

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Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts likely to miss US tour to recover from procedure

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A statement said the 80-year-old drummer accepted he needed more time to recuperate from unspecified medical issue

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts appears likely to miss the band’s upcoming US tour to allow him to recover from an unspecified medical procedure.

A spokesperson for the musician said on Wednesday night that the procedure was “completely successful” but that the 80-year-old drummer needed time to recuperate.

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Los Lobos: ‘La Bamba gave us an identity crisis’

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Best known for their global No 1 in 1987, the Los Angeleno band first emerged through the phlegm of the punk movement and are now returning to their roots

Los Lobos reached pop’s pinnacle in 1987 when their cover of La Bamba, recorded for a film of the same name, reached No 1 around the world. On their way up, and indeed back down the other side, the Los Angeles roots-rockers have mastered multiple musical styles during nearly 50 years together – from traditional Mexican folk to jump blues and avant-rock – and have earned 11 Grammy nominations (with three wins), working or appearing with Paul Simon, the Clash, film-maker Robert Rodriguez and more along the way.

Now, to move forward, Los Lobos decided to look back. Native Sons, their 17th studio album, is a wide-ranging celebration of the LA artists that inspired the band early on. With covers of well-known pop tunes by the Beach Boys (Sail on Sailor) and Buffalo Springfield (For What It’s Worth) sitting alongside rare cuts from 60s garage rockers Thee Midniters and Latin jazz legend Willie Bobo, it’s the perfect polyglot collection for this multi-faceted ensemble. “You wouldn’t run into [these artists] at the same party,” says guitarist Louie Pérez Jr. “But once they all got to the party, everyone in the band thought, ‘Hey, this is kind of fun.’”

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