‘It felt like skinny-dipping,’ says singer Susanna Hoffs. ‘I ended up doing it for most of the album’
In 1988, it felt like the Bangles had been touring endlessly. Our second album, Different Light, with the singles Manic Monday and Walk Like an Egyptian, had been released two years earlier. Now, finally, we could take a break from living on buses together.
Continue reading...For the first single from her hugely anticipated second album, Eilish uses a disarmingly dreamy sound to confront a man preying on a young woman
To say that Billie Eilish’s forthcoming third album is eagerly-awaited is an understatement. It wasn’t just that 2019’s triple-Grammy winning When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was incredibly popular, although it was. Eilish was already a phenomenon among tweenage girls, but its commercial success – it went platinum or multi-platinum in 17 countries – catapulted her into a different sphere of fame, where everyone from Tyler, the Creator to Pete Townshend expressed their approval, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it among the greatest albums of all time and the producers of the James Bond franchise commissioned Eilish to sing the theme to No Time To Die.
What invites quite so much anticipation, though, is that its success clearly impacted on the music industry: you don’t have to look too far in 2021 to find Eilish acolytes, hastily signed in an attempt to mimic her success. The question of what the 19-year-old and her brother and co-collaborator Finneas do next – on an album that was apparently hastened by the Covid pandemic and the cancellation of Eilish’s world tour – is an intriguing one.
Continue reading...Against a backdrop of Covid, a striking number of musicians, from hard rock to jazz, made music rich with positivity. In the first of a two-part series, they tell their stories
I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.
Continue reading...Overblown musical pomposity to some, the guitar solo is seen as a benchmark of brilliance to many. But which is best?
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it
“My solos are my trademark,” announced Nigel Tufnel in 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap. Cue footage of the topless musician performing some signature fret-fondling while curling his lip in satisfaction, then swapping his plectrum for a violin. Before long, the real-life rock stars satirised by Spinal Tap were handed a second blow – when the irreverent grunge scene of the 1990s arrived, ripping up the guitar histrionics rule book, and instead favouring scuzzier playing. Yet, while not as revered as it once was, the guitar solo remains the benchmark of musical brilliance for many.
Continue reading...Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital
These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.
The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”
Continue reading...Back with a new album, the Fannies frontman remembers his teenage years, from the kindness of the Specials to selling guitar strings to John Martyn – and trying to impress with his ice-skating skills
I got my parents to buy me a bass, because I admired the Clash’s Paul Simonon and thought that would be the easiest instrument to learn. McCormack’s was a Glasgow institution: when the Beatles played the Apollo, when it was known as the Green’s Playhouse, the amps came from McCormack’s. I got a cheap Fender Precision copy and a Wem Dominator amp from there. Plugging in for the first time was an incredibly visceral experience because it was so loud. I moved on to guitar, but after I left school I didn’t have a job and so asked if I could work in McCormack’s, which was amazing aged 17. I got to meet the artists that came in when they were playing Glasgow. I was told that John Martyn never paid for his guitar strings so I handed them over and he went: “Thanks, wee man!” I got to test the latest synthesisers and the reason I’m good at tuning guitars is because I did it 5,000 times in McCormack’s. I could also play them all day. In those days, Sean Dickson [Soup Dragons], Francis McKee from the Vaselines and Duglas T Stewart [BMX Bandits] and myself went busking together. My first band was with Duglas, whom I was at school with. It’s completely ridiculous but we were called the Spanking Newts.
Continue reading...Whether her theme is desire or depression, Marie Ulven’s honesty, wit and willingness to share her secrets have turned the Norwegian musician into a Gen Z queer icon
“I’ve never heard a song with people screaming they want to cut their hands off,” muses the Norwegian singer-songwriter Marie Ulven. Recently, she decided to rectify this with Serotonin, a joyfully effervescent pop-punk track about her long-standing battle with intrusive thoughts (produced by Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator). For Ulven, writing about her mental health is an act of both catharsis and public service.
“Just saying that you have intrusive thoughts is very liberating,” she says, hovering her phone camera close to her hoodie-encircled face. “I think at some point pretty much everyone will get some weird thought. Not everyone has them so intensely; I have OCD, so when I’m very sick I get them a lot and go crazy.”
Continue reading...The brilliant songwriter for Meat Loaf, Céline Dion and Bonnie Tyler, who has died aged 73, reminded us that pop music should involve fantasy and a sense of the ridiculous
In 1989, the NME interviewed Jim Steinman. The late journalist Steven Wells found him on fine, very Jim Steinman-ish form. He was presiding over a video shoot for a single by his new project Pandora’s Box, directed by Ken Russell, a man who shared Steinman’s zero-tolerance policy towards subtlety and good taste. Amid Russell’s exploding motorbikes, white horses surrounded by fire, and S&M gear-clad dancers gyrating on top of a tomb, Steinman offered his thoughts on current rock (U2 were “the most boring group in the world”) and dished scandalous gossip about the artists he’d worked with. He also announced that the Pandora’s Box album had been inspired by a scene in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights where Heathcliffe exhumed Cathy’s corpse and “danced with it on the beach in the cold moonlight”. It should be added that this scene seems to have existed entirely in Steinman’s head – nothing like it happens in Brontë’s book. But then, Jim Steinman seemed very much the kind of guy who might read Wuthering Heights and decide it needed amping up a little.
He also ruminated on his own position within rock music. “It’s always struck me as weird that a lot of people in rock’n’roll think my stuff is ridiculous,” he said. “I think that so much rock’n’roll is confessional. It’s like black and white film. That’s what a lot of people think rock’n’roll should be … I just see it as fantasy, operatic, hallucinations, stuff like that … I kinda think rock’n’roll is silly, in the best way. The silly things are kinda the things that are alright.”
Continue reading...Soul classics, German film soundtracks and chugging rap – here’s a workout of bangers to get you off the couch
Continue reading...They scored a UK No 1 single and the biggest-selling independent album ever. Thirty-seven years into their career, the California band ponder middle-aged sex – and being denied respect
“It’s very fashionable now to say, ‘When we were young, we didn’t fit in,’” says Dexter Holland, frontman for multi-platinum punk-rockers the Offspring, Zooming from the band’s plush Orange County recording studio. “But it really was true for us in high school, where everything was about looks, athleticism and popularity. I mean, look at us!”
Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman, guitarist and Holland’s long-standing foil, leans in and taps his milk bottle-lensed specs. “And you should have seen me back when I had braces and headgear,” he grins.
Continue reading...It’s easy to laugh at hardcore patriots misunderstanding Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, but such appropriation is increasingly widespread – and dangerously twisting the truth
“Did you know that Born in the USA is actually an anti-Vietnam war anthem?” Since Donald Trump embraced the 1984 Bruce Springsteen song during rallies, the lyrics have prompted so much explanation it now borders on cliche. Yet it’s no less unsettling for it, becoming a prime example of a startlingly widespread trend for the right wing to co-opt music about struggle and progress.
President Ronald Reagan made the first attempt to gloss over the context of the song’s ironically upbeat chorus after the release of the Born in the USA album. Reagan name-checked Springsteen during a New Jersey rally in an attempt to connect the musician to a “message of hope” for America. Springsteen’s opposition to its use didn’t affect the fervour for the song from Trump and his supporters. As Barack Obama noted in an episode of his podcast series with Springsteen this month: “It ended up being appropriated as this iconic, patriotic song. Even though that was not necessarily your intention.”
Continue reading...The Grammy award-winning rock band have received commercial success yet critics haven’t been quite as receptive – can their new album change that?
Talk to Josh Kiszka, lead singer of the band Greta Van Fleet, about his time growing up in a small town in the American midwest and you’d think he was describing the life of Huckleberry Finn. “We were outside most of the time, building rafts and taking them down the river,” the 24-year-old told the Guardian. “There wasn’t a lot of television in the house. And when all the other kids wanted cellphones, I fought that. I preferred to take a hike.”
Kiszka’s parents strongly encouraged him and his two brothers in that pursuit. “My mother even took the clocks off the wall at one point,” he said. “They were the opposite of helicopter parents. They taught us to do things independently.”
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Painstakingly re-recording her breakthrough 2008 album to hit back at her music business enemies proves a fruitful endeavour for the songwriter
Since about 2018, Taylor Swift has been at the centre of arguably the most riveting contract dispute in music business history since Prince wrote “slave” on his cheek. It has been a conflict fought in public, in detail. No precis does the nuances justice, but the crux of Swift’s unhappiness is that the rights to her first six albums were sold out from under her nose when her former label, Big Machine, was acquired by a man she regards as an enemy: Scooter Braun.
Braun is Justin Bieber’s manager; more pertinently, he also managed the rapper Kanye West at a time when West was tormenting Swift – another vexed tale wrapped around this one in a double helix. The antagonism between Swift and West began when he interrupted her acceptance speech for best female video at the VMAs in 2009. The video in question was You Belong With Me – a hit from Swift’s hugely successful 2008 album Fearless. That album has now been totally re-recorded by Swift and was released on Friday.
Continue reading...Magic mushrooms and gigs in toilets – the creation of a new album for the raucous band is far from ordinary, as a new film shows
“I’ve never been so fucking cold,” says Lias Saoudi, singer of the riotous scuzz rock outfit Fat White Family. “I thought we were going to die.” Saoudi is recalling an evening when he and his band took psilocybin mushrooms, hit Hastings beach at 1am, stripped to their underpants and soaked up the white glow of the frosty night’s winter moon. The result is Moonbathing in February, a film made with director Niall Trask that is part performance, part fly-on-the-wall document of recording the band’s new album, the follow-up to 2019’s lauded Serfs Up.
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Continue reading...The singer’s fight against domestic violence and homophobia and her body-positive posts on Instagram have led to a torrent of abuse – some from very powerful people
Russia’s 2021 Eurovision candidate breezes into a conference room, Channel One documentary film crew in tow, offering a simple tea of mint leaves brewed in hot water. “On days like today, I want something calming,” Manizha says, pouring two cups, as a boom mic hovers over us. No pressure.
The Tajikistan-born singer, who will perform her feminist ballad Russian Woman next month at the much-loved, much-mocked song contest in Rotterdam, is the target of a fiery conservative backlash for her foreign roots and her lyrics attacking female stereotypes.
Continue reading...The singer who backed the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and more weathered a miscarriage, then the loss of her legs in a car accident – but her new album Beautiful Scars shows she refuses to give up
Merry Clayton has an excellent memory. The 72-year-old singer tells tales with such particular detail: the warmth of falling asleep between gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Linda Hopkins in the pews of her father’s church in Louisiana; the recording sessions with Bobby Darin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones, for whom she delivered the searing holler of Gimme Shelter.
What Clayton has no memory of is the 2014 car accident that was so severe that doctors were forced to amputate both of her legs below the knee. She remembers waking up in hospital, but the incident itself, and much of the five months she spent recovering, is lost. “It was like I was in another place,” she explains, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I was here in the world, but it was just like I was somewhere else. I was in la-la land.”
Continue reading...Last February, Sissoko’s historic instrument was disassembled on a flight home to Paris. Bolstered by a new kora, his latest album revives their borderless journey
In the Malian language Bamanankan, djourou – the title of Ballaké Sissoko’s forthcoming album – means string. “It’s the string that connects me to others,” he says. For this master of the kora, it is also the string that broke.
Last February, Sissoko returned to Paris after a US tour with his trio 3MA to find that border officials in New York had dismantled his kora. The neck, bridge, strings and custom-built pickup had been removed from the body, made of calabash and parchment. The instrument was beyond repair, and made headlines around the world.
Continue reading...One of the world’s most celebrated bass players has worked with everyone from Adele to Elton John, the Who and D’Angelo. But the Welsh musician has hidden from the spotlight – until now
By his own admission, Pino Palladino is not a man much accustomed to giving interviews. “Very reticent,” he nods during a Zoom call, his accent speaking noticeably louder of his childhood in Cardiff than his current home in LA. “You know, there was a time when I was featured in all sorts of musicians’ magazines, and then I just thought to myself, ‘Move over, there’s people out there that actually need the publicity.’ Not to blow smoke up my own arse,” he adds hurriedly, “but really I just didn’t want to see or hear from myself.”
It’s a remark in keeping with the astonishing career of one of the most celebrated bass players in the world. It’s hard not to blanche when you consider the sheer number of records that have been sold featuring his work. He played on not one but two of the biggest selling albums of the 21st century: Adele’s 21 and Ed Sheeran’s Divide, as well as with Rod Stewart, Elton John, Bryan Ferry, Simon and Garfunkel and Keith Richards. They’re the biggest names in a startlingly diverse back catalogue of collaborations: Palladino’s playing is the thread that links Perfume Genius with Phil Collins, Harry Styles with Chris de Burgh, and Nine Inch Nails with De La Soul. Indeed, his versatility and omnipresence is a running joke within the music industry. When another fabled bass player, Pink Floyd’s Guy Pratt, got married, he opened his groom’s speech with the words: “I’m only here today because Pino couldn’t make it.”
Continue reading...He was hailed as the new Nick Drake, but addiction nearly destroyed him. Now he writes songs ‘in a state of joy’ and, after stacking shelves for minimum wage, has released his best work yet
Speaking on a video call from Massachusetts, Ryley Walker is obscured by a blaze of sunlight coming through a large open window as he filters out the air in his apartment. “I must give up smoking,” the singer-songwriter frowns, lighting up his third cigarette.
Given how much Walker has had to give up over the last few years – emerging from the drug and alcohol dependency that shaped his adult life – it’s hard to begrudge him one last remaining vice. Walker, who attempted suicide as a consequence of his addictions, says that being here today is “a miracle”. His career-best new album – the proggy, unexpectedly pretty Course in Fable – is the sound of an artist treating his life as such.
Continue reading...Philippe Robrecht was living the quiet life with his wife and hens when stardom came calling back
Something odd happened to Philippe Robrecht while hunkered down in lockdown on Inishbofin, a tiny island with just 170 inhabitants off Ireland’s Atlantic coast: he became, again, a pop star.
The 55-year-old musician and singer had not made an album in almost a decade and was all but forgotten in his native Belgium when the Covid-19 pandemic reached Ireland last year.
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