Category Archives: Pop and rock

St Vincent: ‘I’d been feral for so long. I was sort of in outer space’

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Inspired by her father’s release from prison, Annie Clark’s new album asks where to run when ‘the outlaw’s inside you’. She discusses his incarceration, the delusions of love – and why she remains as perverse as ever

The cover of St Vincent’s 2011 album, Strange Mercy, depicts an open mouth and teeth shrink-wrapped in white latex. It provoked much fascination. Was it Annie Clark’s mouth? She wouldn’t say. One song involved a pearl-handled whip, wielded for pain over pleasure; others negotiated submission and debasement. Perhaps it was a BDSM thing?

The startled questions showed the overnight evolution of Clark’s image from the “asexual Pollyanna” (her words) of her first two records. Over the following decade, she restyled herself as a white-haired “near-future cult leader” and then a “dominatrix at the mental institution”. She transcended her indie-rock origins to work with David Byrne, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, date the model Cara Delevingne and front Tiffany campaigns. Confounding such a journey into celebrity, her pyrotechnic pop got stranger and stronger.

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Bunny Wailer, last surviving founder member of the Wailers, dies aged 73

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Reggae artist and three-time Grammy winner found worldwide fame alongside Bob Marley in the early 1970s

Bunny Wailer, the co-founder and last living member of Jamaican reggae group the Wailers, who took Bob Marley to global stardom, has died aged 73.

His manager Maxine Stowe confirmed his death to the Jamaica Observer. Wailer had been frequently hospitalised since suffering a stroke in July 2020.

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Gabrielle: how we made Dreams

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‘I was singing Luther Vandross covers in a club and a woman said: “This is as good as it’s going to get for you.” I went home and wrote Dreams’

When I was 12, I got up in the school canteen and sang a song I’d written called Teenage Love. A few years later, as I left school, everyone went: “Hope we you see on Top of the Pops, ha ha!” As if that would ever happen. A woman wasn’t allowed to look imperfect on TV, and I had a lazy eyelid. People would say: “Stop winking at me.” Singers on Top of the Pops all had long hair and beautiful clothing. I didn’t. I’d sing in my brother’s suits because I didn’t have the figure or the clothing.

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Daft Punk were the most influential pop musicians of the 21st century

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By resurrecting disco, soft rock and 80s R&B, and bringing spectacle to the world of dance music, the French duo changed the course of pop music again and again

It’s hard to think of an act who had a greater impact on the way 21st-century pop music sounds than Daft Punk. The style Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo minted on their 1997 debut album Homework – house music heavy on the filter effect, which involved the bass or treble on the track gradually fading in and out, mimicking a DJ playing with the equalisation on a mixer; drums treated with sidechain compression, so that the beats appeared to punch through the sound, causing everything else on the track to momentarily recede – is now part of pop’s lingua franca.

In fact, no sooner had Homework come out than other artists started to copy it. Within a couple of years, Madonna had hooked up with another French dance producer, Mirwais, employed to add a distinctly Daft Punk-ish sheen to her 2000 album Music, and the charts were playing host to a succession of soundalike house tracks – 2 People by Jean Jacques Smoothie, who turned out to be a bloke from Gloucester called Steve; Phats and Small’s ubiquitous Turn Around; and No 1 singles, Modjo’s Lady and Eric Prydz’s Call on Me among them.

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Katy Perry found me my first friends – they were online, and in Brasil

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Finding devotees on the other side of the world let me escape from school, though my misbegotten responsibility soon became too much like hard work

Raising a child is always a burden – though not all mums are terrorised by their pre-schooler’s obsession with the video for Hung Up by Madonna. I will never forget my mother’s exasperation as the song popped up again and again on MTV: the sound of a clock counting down to reveal Abba arpeggios recast in a nu-disco reverie. I was a four-year-old boy thrashing around on the living room floor, mimicking Madge’s arm rolls and hip thrusts. An undignified spectacle? Perhaps, but one my mother invited as she allowed me to steep in the music TV of the mid-2000s.

As I grew into an awkward, introverted child, that parade of fleeting images and sounds became tangible. All the divas, once interchangeable vessels for catchy tunes, came to life. Kylie Minogue, Kanye West or Rihanna: each was their own glitzy, magnetic brand and accompanying legion. I figured I had to enlist in a pop army as well: the burgeoning, cartoony Katy Perry seemed like a sure bet. While the faux-sapphist I Kissed a Girl had failed to evangelise me, the dance-pop froth of California Gurls engulfed my summer of 2010. The pirated MP3 file (thanks, Dad) fed my curiosity about the forthcoming Teenage Dream, the first album I would experience in real time.

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On my radar: Brett Anderson’s cultural highlights

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The Suede frontman on his latest musical discoveries, the brilliance of Michael Clark and the enduring appeal of mudlarking by the Thames

Born in Sussex in 1967, Brett Anderson founded alternative rock band Suede in 1989 with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann and childhood friend Mat Osman. Billed by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain”, Suede released five albums including their self-titled debut and Coming Up, before disbanding in 2003. Anderson went on to front the Tears and release four solo albums. In 2010 Suede reformed and released a further three albums, the latest of which is 2018’s The Blue Hour. Anderson will perform with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra as part of the Gŵyl 2021 festival, 6-7 March.

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Dionne Warwick’s greatest tracks – ranked!

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As the soul legend is nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, we pick her 20 greatest songs from her 60s collaborations with Burt Bacharach to her later power ballads

The live album A Man and A Woman is both delightful and slightly odd: Warwick dueting with Isaac Hayes, who had just had a hit with a paen to troilism called Moonlight Lovin’ (Ménage à Trois). Its solitary single isn’t a medley, more an attempt to bind two songs together as a call-and-response. It works.

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Johnny Pacheco, co-founder of New York’s Latin label Fania, dies aged 85

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The Fania All-Stars player and record-label impresario worked with Latin music giants including Celia Cruz and fostered a more intense, political salsa sound

Johnny Pacheco, the co-founder of trailblazing salsa label Fania Records, has died aged 85. The cause was complications from pneumonia.

A representative for Fania said Pacheco was “the man most responsible for the genre of salsa music. He was a visionary and his music will live on eternally.”

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‘The drum needed a blood sacrifice’: the rise of dark Nordic folk

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Heilung jam with Siberian shamans and play with human bones, while Wardruna record songs submerged in rivers and on burial mounds. Now this vibrant undergound music scene is finding a wider audience

In 2002, holed up in an attic studio on the majestic Norwegian coast, Einar Selvik had a vision. He would create a trilogy of albums based on the 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, the world’s oldest runic alphabet. The multi-instrumentalist’s epiphany kicked off what is now one of the world’s most vibrant underground music scenes.

Calling on vocalists Lindy-Fay Hella and Gaahl, with whom Selvik had played in black metal band Gorgoroth, he created the band Wardruna and the first instalment of the trilogy arrived in 2009. It was called Runaljod: Gap Var Ginnunga (Sound of Runes: The Gap Was Vast) and had taken seven years to research, write and record. Each song told a story behind Nordic culture and traditions, via dark and ambient folk, played on ancient string and horn instruments, as well as animal hide drums.

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Belinda Carlisle’s teenage obsessions: ‘I was going to be Anita Ekberg in Rome, but ended up in a band’

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The singer recalls the joy of 60s California pop, being enthralled by Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and the Go-Go’s first gig

I grew up in Burbank in southern California. Music played a huge part in my life. I loved California radio – every summer, I would lie in front of the big speakers at my friend’s house. Her mother would go off to work and we would just sing along to the radio from 9am to 6pm every single day, every summer. When I was about 10, I saved up my babysitting and chore money to buy Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by the 5th Dimension on 45rpm. It was so joyous and still sounds fresh to this day.

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Mary Wilson: the Supremes’ tenacious star who refused to accept defeat

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The co-founder of the Motown group was overshadowed by Diana Ross but won her battle to protect the group’s integrity

• Mary Wilson: Supremes co-founder dies age 76

In November 1969, Diana Ross announced her departure from the Supremes. It was not an entirely unexpected turn of events for anyone who knew about the internal workings of Motown Records. From the moment in 1963 when label boss Berry Gordy began taking an interest in the trio – whose seven singles to date had met with such commercial indifference they’d become known around Hitsville USA as the No-Hit Supremes – it was obvious who he thought the group’s star was. First Ross became the de facto lead singer on all their singles, with her fellow members Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard relegated to occasional leads on album tracks or on stage.

It was clearly unfair – Ballard and Wilson were fine singers, the latter’s soft-toned version of Come and Get These Memories from The Supremes A’ Go-Go (1966) is delightful – but you couldn’t argue with the commercial results: they had five No 1 singles in 12 months. In 1967, the band’s name was changed to Diana Ross and the Supremes, precipitating the departure of the increasingly troubled Ballard. From that point on, the Supremes were a Diana Ross solo vehicle in all but name: subsequent singles, including Love Child and I’m Living in Shame, featured Ross backed by session singers.

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Elton John: Brexit negotiators ‘screwed up’ deal for British musicians

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Singer calls for return to negotiation as touring artists face red tape and new costs, with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood adding fresh criticism of UK government

Elton John: I learned by touring Europe in the 60s. Young artists need the same chance

Elton John has said that the UK’s Brexit negotiators “screwed up” a deal for British musicians and the broader music industry, and is calling for the government to re-enter negotiations.

Writing in the Guardian, John said: “Either the Brexit negotiators didn’t care about musicians, or didn’t think about them, or weren’t sufficiently prepared. They screwed up. It’s ultimately down to the British government to sort it out: they need to go back and renegotiate.

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Massive Attack: ‘You resurrect ghosts when you bring something back from the past’

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Robert Del Naja, of the Bristol pioneers, talks about the power and danger of nostalgia as well as his work collaborating with Adam Curtis

Musicians have been faced with an impossible puzzle since March 2020: with gigs and festivals mothballed for the foreseeable future, how to maintain a profile? For Massive Attack, a solution was probably less of a reach than for many artists. After all, for the Bristolian pioneers, sound and vision have been interacting in unconventional ways for decades.

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From Massive Attack to Miley Cyrus: Adam Curtis’s favourite cover versions

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Radical rewirings and weird new realms – reinterpretations of old classics can give us hope for the future, says the film-maker

Much of modern culture has become like an ageing ghost that constantly haunts us and refuses to allow us to move on into the future. It is extraordinary that we now still listen to music from bands in the 1950s and 1960s, like the Beatles. It is the equivalent of people in the 1960s still dancing to music from the 1890s. One of the most powerful symbols of this frozen culture is the cover version – a symptom of a static world where people constantly rework the material of the past. Just as they do in sampling, and with people constantly reusing and re-editing archive film from the past. But every now and then, people do covers of songs that break out to create something genuinely new. They show that invention is still possible – and that gives you hope we might move on from this static moment in time.

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Carly Simon’s 20 greatest tracks – ranked!

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As her debut album turns 50, we select the best work by a songwriter with a standout talent for finely drawn character studies

As an album, Hello Big Man was all over the place: reggae tracks recorded with Sly & Robbie, very early 80s world music experiments, slick MOR. Its one undisputed gem is It Happens Every Day, a careworn song about divorce, set to music that, beneath the 80s veneer, is like a lush late-50s ballad.

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Jazmine Sullivan: ‘I want to get to the root of why people do things’

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With 12 Grammy nominations since her 2008 debut, the US singer is already a genre leader – and her new EP seals her reputation with a cinematic portrait of six women commodified by their beauty

“Did you see the message from Issa?” Jazmine Sullivan asks me excitedly. For all the acclaim and Grammy recognition the R&B star has accrued over the past 12 years, she still reacts to starry praise with joy and disbelief. A hopeful tweet suggesting Insecure’s Issa Rae turn Sullivan’s latest EP into a short film elicited a positive response, and later in the week, the pattern repeats with Mary J Blige. “Wait … wtf?! I’m so happy man!” Sullivan tweeted after the soul legend signals her eagerness for a guest spot.

To onlookers, though, there was little surprise about the Philadelphia native – also picked to sing the national anthem at this year’s Super Bowl – being treated as one of the modern greats of R&B. When Sullivan arrived on the music scene in 2008, a much-touted 21-year-old protege of Missy Elliott, her USP was familiar in the genre: a vocal force of nature, honed in church, who drew on personal experience to deliver raw soul in the lineage of Blige (with whom she toured in 2010) and Keyshia Cole.

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Caroline Shaw: what next for the Pulitzer-winner who toured with Kanye? Opera – and Abba

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She has scored films, played with rappers, starred in a TV comedy, and performed for the dying. As the classical sensation releases three new works, she talks about the shock of playing arenas – and making the leap into opera

When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.

Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.

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Steps on how they made 5,6,7,8 – ‘We spent years trying not to perform it!’

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‘We had giant models made of our heads and got dancers to do it looking like us’

When I auditioned for Steps, we had to dance to a demo of 5,6,7,8. I remember thinking: “Thank God it’s a line dance.” I wasn’t a trained dancer and learning a proper routine would have probably scuppered my chances. But, after the management told me I’d made it, they said: “That’s going to be the first single.” I was like: “Oh no!” Line-dancing was something your mum did. I was 19 and wanted to go clubbing.

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Hilton Valentine, founding guitarist in the Animals, dies aged 77

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Singer Eric Burdon pays tribute to his fellow band member who ‘didn’t just play but lived’ their classic The House of the Rising Sun

Hilton Valentine, founding guitarist of the 60s group the Animals, has died aged 77.

Valentine’s death was confirmed by the band’s label ABKCO Music, who wrote in a statement on Twitter on Saturdy night: “Our deepest sympathies go out to Hilton Valentine’s family and friends on his passing this morning, at the age of 77.”

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