Category Archives: Pop and rock

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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How we made: Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

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‘The Sex Mix got so many complaints – even some gay clubs found it offensive’

I wanted to be provocative with the way Frankie Goes to Hollywood looked and for the lyrical content to be modern and edgy. We had been living through a politically charged time, the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow had made headlines, and I knew we had to do the same to make an impact. I had a vision of something that merged punk and disco. I was always badgering the drummer to just play a four-on-the-floor bass drum.

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Baxter Dury: ‘Everything was about Dad. It was the only way he knew how to survive’

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The musician talks about growing up with a pop star dad, escaping his shadow – and the 6ft 7in drug dealer who lived with them

• Read an exclusive extract from Chaise Longue: ‘After a certain point of drinking, Dad’s behaviour became a lottery’

Baxter Dury strolls up to the pub, casually dressed and apologetic. The indie musician, known for his stylish suits, is wearing a white vest and unbuttoned denim shirt. His face is even whiter than the vest. Food poisoning. He ate oysters the other day, and has never been so sick. He orders a pineapple juice and soda water, sheepishly. “That’s going to be the headline, isn’t it?” The 2010 biopic about his father was named Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – after one of Ian Dury’s most celebrated songs, and a fair summary of his life.

But we’re not here to talk about Dad, says Baxter, a successful musician in his own right. It’s 21 years since his father died, and 19 since Baxter recorded his debut album, the fabulously titled Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift. Don’t get me wrong, he says, he loved the old man, but he’s got Ian Dury fatigue. He’s tired of the comparisons – their music, voice, looks and lifestyle.

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Big quiffs, zombies and dead crows: the wild world of psychobilly

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The turbocharged twist on rockabilly enraptured 80s punks and rock’n’rollers – and alienated plenty more – with its food fights, ferocious club nights and phantasmagoria

If you wanted to date the moment one of the biggest youth subcultures of 80s Britain arrived, you could pick 40 years ago this month, on 4 July 1981. That night, at the Marquee club in Soho, a few hundred kids gathered to watch a band who were almost singlehandedly kickstarting a new wave of alternative music. Waiting for them to come on, those fans launched into the song that served as their heroes’ unofficial theme, from David Lynch’s Eraserhead. “In heaven, everything is fine,” they sang. “You’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine.” A few months later, that chorus opened, and gave its name to, the first LP by the Meteors. And as their frontman would later claim, “Only the Meteors are pure psychobilly.”

In time, psychobilly – a turbocharged twist on rockabilly, the country-enhanced variant on R&B that prefigured the classic rock’n’roll of the late 50s – would become codified. “My take on it would be a much more aggressive, loud approach to rockabilly that must include a double bass, modern lyrics – no cars, pinups or bubble gum – lots of graveyards, vampires, zombies, horror flick and death-influenced lyrics,” says Mark Harman of Restless, who came through the psychobilly scene in the early 80s. “Anything goes, really. Overdriven guitars and full rock drum kits, big quiffs, weird and wild clothing, makeup and props – blood and skeletons welcome. It should be fast and loud, exciting and fun.”

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Billie Eilish: Happier Than Ever review – inside pop stardom’s heart of darkness

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(Darkroom/Interscope)
On perhaps the most anticipated album of 2021, Eilish uses subdued yet powerful songwriting to consider how fame has seeped into every corner of her life

“I’m getting older,” sings Billie Eilish, who’s 19, on Happier Than Ever’s opening track. “I’ve got more on my shoulders”, she adds, which is certainly true. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wasn’t just a huge global hit, but an album that significantly altered mainstream pop music. Two years on, streaming services are clotted with bedroom-bound, teenage singer-songwriters dolefully depicting their lives: anticipation for what the genuine article does next is understandably running very high.

When We All Fall Asleep … was an album that turned universal teenage traumas – romance, hedonism, friendship groups – into knowingly lurid horror-comic fantasies, in which tongues were stapled, friends buried, hearses slept in and marble walls spattered with blood. That playfulness is less evident on its successor. It flickers occasionally, as on Overheated’s exploration of stardom in the era of social media, complete with death threats (“You wanna kill me? You wanna hurt me?” she mumbles, before giggling: “Stop being flirty”) or on NDA, where the “pretty boy” she entices home is required to sign the titular legal agreement before he leaves. But the overall tone is noticeably more sombre.

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Joey Jordison, Slipknot’s founding drummer, dies at age 46

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Family announce that metal musician, who had transverse myelitis, a nerve disease, died ‘peacefully in his sleep’

Joey Jordison, the drummer whose dynamic playing helped to power the metal band Slipknot to global stardom, has died at age 46.

His family wrote in a statement: “We are heartbroken to share the news that Joey Jordison, prolific drummer, musician and artist passed away peacefully in his sleep … Joey’s death has left us with empty hearts and feelings of indescribable sorrow. To those that knew Joey, understood his quick wit, his gentle personality, giant heart and his love for all things family and music.”

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Bring it all back: why naff noughties pop is suddenly cool again

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Perhaps longing for a more carefree era, artists such as Lorde, Billie Eilish and Haim are fondly looking back to when S Club 7 and Shania Twain frolicked in low-rise denim

The turn of the millennium is not generally considered a vintage era for mainstream music in the UK. Sandwiched between Britpop and the mid-00s indie revival, it was a period dominated by talent show winners, girl- and boybands, ex-boyband and girlband members, acts with tie-ins to kids’ TV shows, and doleful singer-songwriters such as Dido and David Gray. It was sometimes trite, occasionally rapturous and – Dido and Gray aside – frivolous, family-friendly fun.

It isn’t, in other words, an era you’d expect a pop star on the cultural vanguard to be into. Yet last month Lorde revealed that her forthcoming third album was influenced by what she calls “early 00s bubblegum pop” – in particular, tween-targeted hitmakers S Club 7, Natasha Bedingfield, Natalie Imbruglia, All Saints and Nelly Furtado. She is not alone – the reclamation of late 90s and early 00s mainstream pop by young artists is now fully under way. Many heard shades of S Club in Dua Lipa’s 2020 album Future Nostalgia, and Lipa’s single Don’t Start Now had more than a bit of Spiller and Sophie Ellis Bextor’s 2000 smash Groovejet in its DNA.

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Suzi Quatro: ‘I’ll never be too old to wear a jumpsuit’

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The singer, 71, on enjoying her grandchildren, missing her mum, giving everything on stage and her need for an Ego Room

My mouth is my weapon. I can destroy somebody with a flick of my tongue. I’ve got a sharp wit and a sharp way of talking. I’m not a hitter, but when I’m mad, I’m mad. I scream it out, then I’m done.

Nobody could believe it when I once used the men’s toilet at a petrol station. I was on tour. Our bus had stopped for us to get snacks and use the loo, but there was a huge line for the ladies’ and my impatience is really bad, so I refused to wait. I walked right past everybody, into the men’s, used a stall and came out.

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Amy Winehouse’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!

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With the 10th anniversary of her death this week, rediscover the best of Winehouse’s discography, where heartbreak and anger are mixed up with wit and joy

After all its emotional strife, the Back to Black album concludes with a jokey paean to weed. You could construct an argument that Addicted is Winehouse once more tapping into a venerable jazz tradition – it’s easy to imagine Fats Waller singing about someone snaffling his stash in the 30s – but perhaps it’s better to just enjoy its mordant wit.

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Biz Markie, rapper known for Just a Friend, dies at age 57

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Hip-hop star known for his personality, beatboxing and freestyle skills scored his biggest hit in 1989

Biz Markie, the New York rapper, beatboxer and producer, has died at age 57.

Markie’s representative, Jenni Izumi, said the rapper and DJ died peacefully Friday evening with his wife by his side. The cause of death has not been released.

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Gaz Coombes: ‘It felt good that life was speeding up’

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As Supergrass return to festival stages, their frontman remembers his younger days, from the majesty of Spacemen 3 to love letters via mixtapes

This was a big thing for me: lots of recording off the radio. I’d wait for the chart show, and I’d know that Madonna’s Into the Groove was currently at No 3. I remember that pressured feeling of trying to hit record at the right time so you don’t get too much of the DJ introducing the track, and I’d build up these compilations. I did my own best-ofs – the Cure: 79-82 – or call them things like Dark Trip. I’d draw stuff and then go down to my dad’s office to use the photocopier and cut it all out, and print out homemade covers, getting the tracklisting really nice on the back.

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‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s

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Their Adam Driver musical sent Cannes into raptures and Edgar Wright has made an all-star documentary about them. The Mael brothers explain why they’ll always be hopelessly in love with pop

In 1974, John Lennon was startled as he was watching Top of the Pops. He rang Ringo Starr. “You won’t believe what’s on television,” he reportedly said. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.”

This was Sparks, performing their glorious pop opus This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. “It was equidistant between the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Daleks on Doctor Who,” says Edgar Wright, the director of Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead, and now a documentary about the duo, The Sparks Brothers. “Fifteen million people saw it. Think of the next generation of bands watching: the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Duran Duran, Joy Division, Squeeze, Vince Clarke. They’re all watching and they’re all thinking the same thing.”

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Stevie, Gladys, Nina … Summer of Soul uncovers a festival greater than Woodstock

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As the US boiled with violence, 1969’s Harlem cultural festival nourished spirits with soul, jazz and gospel. Now, Questlove has turned lost footage of it into a brilliant, pertinent documentary

It’s 29 June 1969, and at Harlem’s Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park), the 5th Dimension are about to take the stage. The Los Angeles group are already stars, thanks to hits including Up, Up and Away and Aquarius, from the musical Hair, which topped the Billboard charts that spring. But their pop-oriented repertoire, often penned by white songwriters, has kept them off the US’s R&B radio stations and thus from Black audiences. “We’d tried to separate ourselves from the segregation in our society, but we still got caught up in all that,” remembers the group’s founding singer, Billy Davis Jr, today. “And the average Black family didn’t earn enough to come see us at the nightclubs we were playing. They’d seen us on TV, but they’d never seen us live.”

That was about to change with their headline performance on the opening day of the Harlem cultural festival. A series of six Sunday concerts that summer, the festival showcased the cream of the era’s soul, gospel, blues and jazz artists before an audience of 300,000, many from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “I looked out and saw a sea of faces, and their response was so loving, so welcoming and exciting,” says Davis Jr’s wife and bandmate, Marilyn McCoo, for whom the festival remains a treasured memory. She’s not alone. Harlemite Musa Jackson, then just a five-year-old, still remembers how the 5th Dimension’s orange costumes, gleaming in the sun, made them look “like Creamsicles”.

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