Category Archives: Pop and rock

Super-producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis: ‘Prince sidelined us’

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The duo started their debut album 36 years ago, but work for Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and others got in the way. Now it’s finally complete, R&B’s great studio psychologists look back at an unmatched career

Some albums take a long time to make, but few have had the gestation period of Jam & Lewis: Volume One. The production duo started work on their debut artist album 36 years ago, just as their career was taking off on the back of the SOS Band’s hit single Just Be Good to Me, but they were thrown off-course working for a minor figure with a couple of flop albums to her name: Janet Jackson.

Together they started shaping what would become her 10m-selling 1986 breakthrough Control, which understandably “kind of stopped the progress on our own album”, as Jimmy “Jam” Harris, 62, puts it today, when he and his partner, Terry Lewis, 64, appear on a video call from their homes in Los Angeles. With Control ready to be delivered, they wrote a song for themselves that sounded the perfect calling-card for a Jam & Lewis album. “We thought we were done with Control, then Janet’s manager came to hear the album,” says Harris. “We played him Nasty, When I Think Of You, The Pleasure Principle … And he says: ‘I just need one more song, for Janet.’ I’m going: ‘No, man, no.’ We get in the car to go to a restaurant, Terry puts a cassette in, and about the third song in, Janet’s manager says: ‘That’s the song I need.’”

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The Velvet Underground’s greatest songs – ranked!

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As Todd Haynes unveils his documentary about them, we rate the best work of a band who overturned and reinvented rock’n’roll

The Velvets recorded two versions of Ride Into the Sun: a fabulous 1969 instrumental laden with fuzz guitar and a hushed 1970 vocal take backed by organ. Somewhere between the two lies one of their great lost songs; Lou Reed’s disappointingly flat 1972 solo version doesn’t do it justice at all.

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Raffaella Carrà, Italian entertainment icon, dies aged 78

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Star of music, TV and film who had UK Top 10 hit in 1978 with Do It, Do It Again had been suffering an undisclosed illness

Raffaella Carrà, the pop singer and actor who was an entertainment icon in her native Italy, has died aged 78.

Her long-term partner, Sergio Iapino, announced her death, saying: “Raffaella has left us. She has gone to a better world, where her humanity, her unmistakable laugh and her extraordinary talent will shine forever.” He said she had been battling an unnamed illness for some time.

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Rock sideman Earl Slick: ‘Bowie had gone levels into insanity’

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He played through extreme drug-taking on Bowie’s Station to Station, and with Yoko Ono weeks after Lennon’s death. The guitarist explains why he’s great at backing legends – and terrible at selling timeshares

It’s not surprising that Earl Slick was in the middle of a tour when the first Covid lockdown began. The guitarist is, by his own account, “the biggest roadhog on the planet”, one of rock’s most celebrated sidemen: his association with David Bowie stretched over five decades; he has played with everyone from John Lennon to the Cure to Carl Perkins. This time, he was playing in the UK with his friend Glen Matlock, which meant he spent the first six months of lockdown living not at home in New York but in the former Sex Pistol’s spare room in London, an experience he winningly likens to the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple. Apparently, Matlock was the neat-freak Jack Lemmon character and Slick the more laissez-faire Walter Matthau figure. They put on shambolic Facebook live performances, which, Slick notes, “probably had more comedic than musical value”. Between songs, there was certainly a lot of peering at the camera and discussing whether or not it was switched on.

Video-calling from his home in New York, he says he “lost a lot of gigs and a lot of dough” as a result of the pandemic, but at least he had time to put the finishing touches to a solo album, Fistful of Devils, his first in 18 years. It’s instrumental – a stark contrast to 2003’s Zig Zag, which featured Bowie, Robert Smith and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott among its supporting cast. “But when I go out live,” he notes, “I always go out with a singer. When I’m on stage with a singer, all my sideman tools get pulled out the box. Even if my name’s on the marquee, the main focus should be on the vocalist.”

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Sex-positive pop star Shygirl: ‘I want to affect your equilibrium’

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After feeling sexualised even before her teens, the south London rapper wrested back her power. She explains how her disruptive club music creates a space where anything can happen

Shygirl’s tracks are, for want of a better word, filthy. The 28-year-old musician’s lyrics detail sexual exploits and disposable partners. “I like to glide, figure skate,” is not about ice dancing. This week she releases BDE, a collaboration with Northampton rapper Slowthai, and it’s less rapping on her part, more an intoxicating mix of cooed and snarled commands over ominous production. This is sex as chaotic workout, and if it ends up jarring the listener, the artist has achieved her goal. “I love it when art makes me uncomfortable, because I have to question where that’s from,” she says. “How can something affect my equilibrium like that? I want to affect other people’s equilibrium.”

Her domineering musical persona is worlds away from the chatty, pleasant woman I meet in a bar outside Cambridge University’s Union, where she has just given a talk about her artistry and the accessibility of the creative industries. About a quarter of our time is spent laughing; sharp introspections on owning one’s narrative as a public figure come as easily as self-deprecating tales of recording angry voice notes about previous partners. And it’s easy to see why she’s increasingly considered a fashion force: following a recent Burberry campaign and soundtracking runways for Thierry Mugler, she stands out majestically via orange hair, wholesome babydoll dress and eye-catching Telfar Clemens boots, noticed by wide-eyed students in our vicinity.

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Jazz-funk guru John Carroll Kirby: ‘When musicians are uncomfortable, it can be interesting’

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He’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Harry Styles and more – and his own music is wondrously fun and spiritual. The LA artist explains why it sounds like butterflies and mountain lions

Amid the swirling sounds and scenes intersected by Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, John Carroll Kirby is somewhere at the centre of it all, shirt open, hair slicked back. He circles the city’s buzzing jazz movement with his soul-dappled instrumentals and is a keysman, composer and producer who’s been enlisted by some of the most exciting names in contemporary pop: Frank Ocean, Mark Ronson, Harry Styles, Blood Orange, and Solange Knowles, whose incendiary past two albums, A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home, were shaped in part by Kirby.

He laughs as he describes his own work as “French cat burglar music”: it blends jazz with new age, funk and exotica, flutes often taking centre stage. Tracks are inspired by paintings of ayahuasca visions or stories about dolphins that turn into lost boys. Kirby is of a spiritual persuasion, but he has a sense of humour about it, too.

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Belinda Carlisle on punk, cocaine, body image and Buddhism: ‘I was born a little bit of a rebel’

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As the singer for pioneering all-female band the Go-Go’s, Carlisle took on a sexist music industry – at a cost. She talks about overcoming addiction, the media’s obsession with her weight and finding happiness in her 60s

It hardly matters – who really cares about these things? – and yet it does. This year the Go-Go’s will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and earning a place at the museum in Cleveland, Ohio, for all its naffness, is still a mark of influence and recognition. “I always said: ‘Fuck them, I don’t care,’” says Belinda Carlisle, the band’s lead singer. “But when it actually happens, it’s: ‘Oh, this is not so bad.’”

The Go-Go’s have had a reappraisal in the past year, thanks mainly to a documentary by the film-maker Alison Ellwood. It tells the story of how these scrappy young LA punks put together a band (the lineup shifted until arriving at the current five members) and made history – incredibly, they are still the only female band who write their own music and play their own instruments to have reached the top of the US album charts. That was in 1982. As with many female artists, belittled for years by the male-dominated music industry and press, the recognition feels long overdue.

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Elton John and John Grant: ‘We help each other. We are both complicated people’

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The pop legend and the US indie star have long been friends and fans of each other’s music. With Grant staying chez Elton and about to release a new album, the pair sat down to discuss politics, homophobia – and why Elton should never write lyrics

It’s a boiling hot day in rural Berkshire, and a man in navy satin Gucci shorts has just walked into his library. It’s all ornate chairs, wooden globes and Buddhist statues, its oiled shelves lined with books about history, the arts – and tons about music. The scene is one of airy tranquillity, the perfect place for two culture-loving good friends to hole up for a chat.

One of them isn’t here yet – he’s popped to the bathroom after having his photo taken – but Elton John can’t stop raving about John Grant. “We have so many things in common – photography, art, music – it’s as if we’ve known each other for ever. And he’s fun!” Grant wanders in shyly in a pink baseball cap, weathered Talk Talk T-shirt, and glossy white DMs. “Much more fun than his records are anyway, haha.”

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Ed Sheeran: Bad Habits review – a certain smash that’s ready for the Weeknd

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The UK’s biggest pop star returns, singing of compulsive hedonism over 80s dance-pop – remind you of anyone?

Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheeran’s new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. The “plays” column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. Every track is immediately recognisable – you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and you’d still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. He’s spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldn’t argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life.

This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. That Sheeran has trailed it as a “surprise” and “mad” tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: it’s a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.

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Lorde: ‘I’m not a climate activist. I’m a pop star’

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She quit social media, embraced the feral and grieved for her beloved dog. Now rejuvenated, Lorde is back with a nature-inspired new album – though she tells our writer there’s a sinister side to its sunniness


Lorde, in case it wasn’t obvious, has made her name on glorification. Ella Yelich-O’Connor was an aristocracy-obsessed 16-year-old when her imperiously cool debut album, 2013’s Pure Heroine, elevated suburban New Zealand adolescence to pop echelons in which those kids had never previously seen themselves. In 2017, Melodrama cast post-breakup hedonism in glittering synths, dramatising one fabulous night on the cusp of adulthood as if it were Greek tragedy.

Her forthcoming third album, Solar Power, has humbler origins, especially for a songwriter who likes describing inspiration as “divine”. The loose, sunny instrumentation – inspired as much by Crosby, Stills & Nash as Nelly Furtado – mirrors a shift within the 24-year-old. “When I got my dog, all of a sudden you’re literally picking up shit, cleaning up vomit and not caring,” she says cheerfully, video-calling from the start of a jet-lag-addled workday in Los Angeles.

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‘Something had gone horribly wrong’: me, Mick Jagger and the lost autobiography

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Ghostwriter Barry Coleman says he was given two ‘awful’ weeks to finish an entire book with the Rolling Stone – then the singer pulled the plug in case it was too dull

Barry Coleman still remembers the day in 1983 when he was called by his editor at the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson and told: “We’ve got a problem. Can you come in … tomorrow?”

“The urgency was a bit disorienting,” he recalls. “Something had clearly gone horribly wrong.”

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The Doors’ greatest songs – ranked!

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Ahead of the 50th anniversary of singer Jim Morrison’s death, we rank the LA band’s best tracks, from the summer of love anthem Light My Fire to the apocalyptic The End

Jim Morrison frequently drew on his romantic dalliances for lyrical inspiration. Take Morrison Hotel’s raucous rocker Queen of the Highway, a song about his soon-to-be-wife, Pamela Courson, that frames their relationship as loving, if somewhat ill-fated: “He was a monster / Black dressed in leather / She was a princess / Queen of the Highway.”

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Britney Spears speaks at last: will her day in court upend all we thought we knew?

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The singer will today make a bid to take back control of her life. After a glut of speculative documentaries and conspiracy theories, her own voice can finally be heard

Britney Spears never used to be an enigma. In the early years of her career, she did interviews for print, TV and radio. She held press conferences and endured day-long junkets. She shot behind the scenes videos, documentaries, TV specials. Britney was candid and trusting. “I’m from the south,” she told the Observer in 2001, “so I’m a very open person and I’ve had to teach myself not to open up to too many people.”

These days however, if Britney interviews are granted, they are conducted under such strict terms that few publications have bothered. Even the radio and TV appearances when she has a record to sell are strictly surface level. Her music gives few clues to her state of mind. Her last four albums offer up sexy party tunes that don’t reflect the artist’s lived reality: now 39, by her own account she doesn’t drink, keeps a small circle of friends, only went out clubbing twice in the four years she spent in residence in Las Vegas, and prior to meeting current boyfriend Sam Asghari in 2016, was “over” dating.

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‘I’m working through 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’: readers’ WFH playlists

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Some of you went classic rock; others Iranian ambient. And yet others took on epic challenges that will take years to complete … here’s what you’ve been listening to while working under lockdown

If I need to concentrate on something really thorny, I go for Bach every time. It seems to allow my brain to work at a high level and I do almost all my best work to Bach. András Schiff or Angela Hewitt playing keyboard works, and Hilary Hahn on violin. Beethoven’s late quartets and Schubert lieder are good for deep thought. If I’m just doing low-level stuff, then Radio Paradise is my go-to – it’s a commercial-free internet station, which I like because it mixes a lot of stuff I know from my younger days with music that I’m less familiar with. Edward Collier, software developer, Cheltenham

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Mykki Blanco: ‘I’ve helped to push open some closed doors. It’s a cool feeling’

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The rapper has worked with Kanye and Madonna and blazed a trail for black queer pop. Their new mini album, they say, feels like the start of a new chapter…

Mykki Blanco has just moved to Hollywood, and five minutes into our conversation, the 35-year old rapper’s beloved mother calls. “She needs to chill out. Like, I don’t work?” laughs Blanco. “She’s helping me pick out furniture and she’s gone crazy about the whole thing.” There is something pure about one of hip-hop’s most experimental figures having their mother help them decorate. The non-binary musician (who uses the pronouns they/them) has been living outside the US for the past five years, residing mostly in Europe: London and Portugal’s countryside. They also lived in Paris during the city’s second lockdown in late 2020 – an experience Blanco describes as “emotionally distressing”. But now, back living near family and friends, Blanco’s spirits seem high. Their new mini album, Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, an electric collection of love songs featuring Blood Orange and Jamila Woods, is a fresh beginning. For starters, it’s the first time they have had a record deal.

That may come as a surprise considering Blanco has not only worked with Kanye West, Charli XCX and Madonna, but was also a founding member of “queer rap”, a sub-genre of hip-hop that allowed LGBTQ+ people to express themselves freely. Tattooed and 6ft 2in tall, Blanco has long played with drag and gender presentation, whether donning waist-length braids and a pink corset or a shirt and a shaved head; rapping bluntly over trippy synths, their hyperactive lyrics address sexuality, partying and bravado from a queer perspective. In 2012 Elle magazine declared them “hip-hop’s new queen”, and in the New York Times Michael Schulman enthused about their “glamazon alter ego… a redoubtable presence on the New York downtown art and cabaret scene”. They self-released their 2016 debut album, Mykki, to critical acclaim: it was described by the Observer’s Kitty Empire as “one of the year’s most riveting musical self‑portraits”.

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Françoise Hardy, ‘close to the end’ of her life, argues for assisted suicide

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The French singer says radiation has left her in immense pain, and fears a natural death would bring ‘even more physical suffering’

Françoise Hardy, the French pop songwriter who found fame in the 60s yé-yé movement, has said she feels “close to the end” of her life in a new interview.

Hardy, 77, told Femme Actuelle that in 2018 she was diagnosed with a tumour in her ear. It followed her diagnosis with lymphatic cancer in the mid-2000s, and a hospitalisation in 2015 that led to her being placed in an induced coma. Her life was saved when doctors administered a novel form of radiation.

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Lorde’s comeback single is a lesson in letting pop stars take their time

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Solar Power delivers a statement of loose-limbed maturity from a mercurial star who is much imitated but utterly unique

Lorde has said she was “waiting for the right moment” to release her comeback single, Solar Power, and opted for 11 June to coincide with the year’s only solar eclipse (although leaks may have forced her hand). Her chosen date resonates beyond the obvious thematic associations of her hazy, sun-worshipping comeback single and its cheeky cover art.

Pop stars, especially young women, are expected to be available, relatable, always on. Lorde has defied this with an old-school release rate (just three albums in nine years) and such a low-key public presence that a recent update of her Instagram account on which she reviews onions rings generated headlines. (She benefits, too, from New Zealand’s minimal paparazzi culture.) The rare arrival of new music from the 24-year-old, last heard from in 2017, has come to feel like its own celestial event.

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The greatest ever songs of the summer – ranked!

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From Don Henley to Drake, we rate the hottest sounds of the season

For a fleeting moment Brooklyn’s the Drums were the skinny jean-sporting indie band du jour. This is their crowning moment, all pogoing bass, petal-soft whistle riffs and a lyric about waking up on a sunny morning and running to the beach. “Oh mama I don’t care about nothing” feels like a very summer 2021 mantra, too.

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