Category Archives: Pop and rock

US composer Harold Budd dies aged 84

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Composer of calmly beautiful works who rejected the term ‘ambient’ collaborated with Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins and more

Harold Budd, the left-field American composer whose work straddled minimalism, jazz, dream-pop and more, has died aged 84. His death was confirmed by his close collaborator Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, who wrote on Facebook that he was “feeling empty, shattered lost and unprepared for this”.

Cocteau Twins wrote on Facebook: “It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Harold Budd. Rest in peace, poet of the piano.”

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Tina Turner: ‘When I was in the zone, it was like I was flying’

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She was a rock’n’roll powerhouse who electrified audiences worldwide. As Tina Turner releases a guide to happiness, she talks to playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) about how she found the strength to overcome illness, abuse and tragedy

The first time I experienced Tina Turner in the flesh, I was a 16-year-old hippy chick doused in patchouli oil. I didn’t just see and hear Ms Turner sing Proud Mary at the Fillmore East in New York City – I felt her in every cell of my teenage body. I was transfixed by the ecstasy of her thunderous hips and legs, the vibrating canopy of her shaking fringe, the irrefutable bidding of her sultry, raw voice.

She was female sexuality fully embodied and unleashed. She catalysed the same in me and in multitudes across the planet, selling more than 200m records in her lifetime. The queen of rock’n’roll seemed as much shaman as singer. I knew instinctively that she had suffered abuse and pain. We survivors have a kind of radar.

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After no club dancefloors for almost a year, last night was cathartic, joyous and sweaty | Ben Neutze

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Sydney and Melbourne nightclubs are finally open (with a few Covidsafe caveats) – and for LGBTQI people, an essential space has returned

The perfect lockdown anthem came pretty early in 2020: Charli XCX’s frantic, party-thirsty Anthems, from her album released in mid-May. She starts by declaring “I’m so bored” before recounting days in lockdown and everything she desperately craves about partying: anthems, late nights, her friends, “the heat from all the bodies”. Charli also misses New York – although the city that never sleeps is still very deep in its Covid-induced nap.

It’s a different story in Australia where, after seven months, Sydney and Melbourne finally got the green light to return to nightclubs on Monday. There was one sticking point: no more than 50 people on the dancefloor at once, with enough space for one person per four square metres.

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The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb: ‘There’s fame and there’s ultra-fame – it can destroy you’

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The band’s last surviving member talks about falling out with his brothers before they died, how his wife saved him from drugs – and why he had to ask Michael Jackson to leave his house

From underneath a black Stetson hat, Barry Gibb stares out of my laptop screen. He is in Miami, where he has lived since 1974 when the Bee Gees’ career was in the doldrums and Eric Clapton suggested a change of scenery might do them good. They relocated en masse, moving into the house Clapton immortalised in the title of his album 461 Ocean Boulevard. Gibb never really left, although he still has a home in England. He liked Miami, he says, because it reminded him of Australia, where his parents emigrated when he was 11.

He lives in a waterfront mansion in an exclusive country club, which is clearly a long way from the penury the Gibb family experienced in Australia – of which more later – but that’s what comes of selling between 120m and 220m records, depending on whose estimate you believe. His late brother Robin used to own a house a couple of doors down – Tony Blair caused rather a fuss by holidaying there when he was prime minister – and, as he puts it, “multiple Gibbs” live nearby: five children, seven grandchildren. There are clearly worse places in the world to be holed up during a pandemic. “We’ve been trying to self-isolate and do everything we’re supposed to do,” he says. “As you’ve seen on the news, [coronavirus] is pretty rampant in Miami.”

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How did Bad Bunny become the world’s biggest pop star?

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The superb Puerto Rican vocalist is now the most streamed artist on Spotify globally, but has never had a UK hit – something he’s determined to change

Each December, Spotify announces who has been the world’s most streamed artist that year, and this generally tallies with who has been popular in the UK. Drake, the Canadian rapper who has had six UK No 1 singles, was first in three of the previous five years, with fellow UK chart-toppers Ed Sheeran and Post Malone leading the others.

But in 2020, someone who has never had an album or solo single in the UK Top 100 is the world’s most popular artist: 26-year-old Puerto Rican vocalist Bad Bunny, streamed more than 8.3bn times this year on Spotify alone. Granted, he has featured on one UK Top 10 hit, but that was back in 2018, appearing on it for less than a minute: Cardi B’s I Like It. He appears nowhere in Spotify’s 50 most-played songs in the UK today, with Brits preferring Christmas classics and Gen Z pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Internet Money and 24kGoldn. Meanwhile, Bad Bunny’s current (and superb) single Dakiti is the most-played in the world at time of writing, earning more than 7m plays each day, 3m more than Ariana Grande’s Positions in second place.

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Mariah Carey’s 30 greatest singles – ranked!

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With All I Want for Christmas Is You on the cusp of claiming the UK No 1 for the first time in 26 years, what better time to celebrate one of the great R&B repertoires?

Written and recorded in 2011, but – in Carey’s own words – “left in a holding pattern for a special reason”, this eventually came out this summer, by which time its lyrics, not least the line “we’re all in this together”, sounded weirdly appropriate. Lauryn Hill’s guest appearance turned out to be in sampled form, but never mind: the real power is in Carey’s heartfelt vocal.

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‘My coolness has disintegrated’: how pop stars cope with fatherhood

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Pop’s mothers have told of guilt, loneliness and record-label prejudice – so do men face the same problems? Wayne Coyne, Tom Fletcher, Ghetts, Thurston Moore and others respond

This summer, two of the world’s biggest pop stars became parents for the first time. Katy Perry told an interviewer that after becoming pregnant, “a lot of people have asked me: are you going to go away?” Presumably, though, nobody has enquired if new dad Ed Sheeran will be exiting the music industry with immediate effect. Perhaps they should.

In recent years, female artists such as Perry – but rarely their male counterparts – have been speaking with increasing candour about the anxiety, guilt, unrealistic expectations and logistical nightmares involved in balancing parenthood and pop stardom. Paloma Faith said the toil of touring with a young baby made her ill, and that her record company assumed her sales would divebomb because “people wouldn’t find a mother as appealing”. In 2018, Cardi B cancelled a tour due to begin six weeks after the birth of her daughter, saying she had “underestimated this whole mommy thing”.

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Nigerian pop star Davido: ‘Africans were made fun of. Now everyone wants us’

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The singer was taking a good-time sound to the world – but after his song Fem became the anthem of the EndSars protesters, he joined them on the streets

The buoyant, trumpeting chords of Fem, the opening track on Davido’s fourth album, A Better Time, suggest an artist who is vivacious, free of self-doubt, revelling in the limelight. David Adedeji Adeleke, 28, is part of a generation of Afrobeats artists who have blown the African dance-pop genre on to the global stage over the last decade; his songs have become the feelgood soundtrack of Nigeria’s nightlife, and made him one of his continent’s biggest pop stars.

Yet “Fem”, meaning “shut up” in pidgin, has taken on a different meaning. Last month, Lagos governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu pleaded with EndSars protesters, who had taken a stand against police brutality. The largest protest movement in Nigeria for decades had erupted, incensed at the abuses by the infamous and since disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars). As the protesters outside the government secretariat in Lagos grew impatient, a DJ at the demonstration suddenly played Fem, already a hit across the country. Scores began belting out his lyrics, drowning out the governor’s futile pleas. In a culture where reverence for authority figures can be brutally enforced, protesters recast the song into a defiant statement.

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The xx’s Romy: ‘I can now write about loving a woman and not feel afraid’

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Her forthcoming solo album is a love letter to formative years of queer clubbing and 00s Euro-dance, as the singer swaps black clothes and bleak moods for Technicolor euphoria

The problem with being an introvert writing dance music is that eventually you will have to dance in front of other people. “I’m definitely quite a shy dancer,” says Romy Madley Croft over a video call from the home she shares with her girlfriend, the photographer Vic Lentaigne, in north London. In lockdown, with no prospect of live shows, this wasn’t a problem, but now she’s starting to nervously ponder how she will perform her upbeat, house-indebted new music. “It’s taken a long time to get to the place where I really enjoy being on stage.”

Fifteen years, in fact. The familiar image of Madley Croft is as bassist and singer with the xx, the band she formed with London schoolfriends in 2005: dressed in black, shielded by her guitar, expression ranging between pensive and troubled. Even performing a sparkling dance track on stage, such as Loud Places by her fellow wallflower and bandmate Jamie xx (“I go to loud places to find someone to be quiet with,” she sings on the chorus), she stayed largely rooted to the spot. Yet on the cover of her debut solo single, Lifetime, in an acid-hued image captured – like the ones accompanying this article – by Lentaigne, she is caught in motion, arms raised high, hair swooshed.

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Taylor Swift: The Long Pond Studio Sessions review – cosy campfire confessions

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The pop star’s Disney+ movie about quarantine album Folklore reveals the potency of her songwriting, though it’s hazy on any ‘pandemic epiphanies’

Pre-pandemic, few artists were so keenly attuned to the music industry’s calendar as Taylor Swift. She timed her album releases for awards contention and singles to sustain her world tours; the promotional cycle for 1989, released in 2014, seemed to go on for years. With coronavirus, that “circus” – as she puts it on Mirrorball, one of a few songs on her “quarantine album”, Folklore, that address the pandemic directly – was abruptly called off.

Stripped of those structures, “this lockdown could have been a time where I absolutely lost my mind”, Swift says in The Long Pond Studio Sessions, a film that explores the making and meaning of Folklore. Instead, in a matter of months, she created an album as good as any she has ever written. She collaborated remotely with the National’s Aaron Dessner, writing to his musical sketches and self-recording her performances at home.

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Could Steve McQueen start a lovers rock revival with Small Axe?

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Streaming services expect rise in searches for the 70s pop-reggae genre, a staple of the blues parties that shaped UK music

One of the most memorable moments in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock – the latest film in his five-part anthology series Small Axe – comes when a room full of young revellers sing Janet Kay’s classic Silly Games with their eyes closed, lost in the music, as they imitate her signature falsetto.

A staple of the lovers rock genre, which emerged in the 70s and was a blend of pop, reggae and disco, Kay’s song is the centre piece of McQueen’s film, which is itself an ode to the house parties, or “blues”, that his auntie attended as a young woman.

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Megan Thee Stallion: Good News review – galloping into greatness

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With easy flow, hard barbs and a magnetic persona, the rapper casts herself as the successor to hip-hop’s old-school heroes

On YouTube, you can still see one of Megan Thee Stallion’s early appearances at a 2016 rap cypher in Houston. It’s a very telling performance. Twenty-one years old and still an unknown student (“Support the artists,” pleads the accompanying text, “this is only the beginning of their journey”) she’s vastly outnumbered by male counterparts who don’t seem to be taking her terribly seriously. It could be that they’re laughing and high-fiving while she performs because they’re incredulous at her skills, but it doesn’t really look that way. Yet she seems impossibly confident and self-possessed, ending her performance with the salacious, tongue-out taunt of “ahhh” that has since become her trademark. It isn’t just the benefit of hindsight that makes her seem the artist most likely to.

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Jamie Lynn Spears: ‘Britney created so much power for herself – I wanted that too’

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The former teen star on why she’s not jealous of her more famous sister, and the strain that legal battles have placed on the Spears family

Jamie Lynn Spears was sitting in a car, surrounded by screaming fans, when it finally hit her. Of course, she knew her sister Britney was successful – she had seen her swap family singalongs for pop stardom – but this was next-level. “Something clicked in my head on that car ride,” she recalls, “like, my sister is famous: Mariah Carey famous. She’d created so much power for herself. At that moment I knew I wanted it, too.”

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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10 of the best Christmas songs (that aren’t by Mariah Carey)

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The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?

Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.

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Map of the soul: how BTS rewrote the western pop rulebook

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Contrary to their dismissive framing as manufactured robots, South Korea’s BTS use social media, documentary and storytelling to make themselves into profoundly human stars

BTS’s leader RM looks up from under a black baseball cap, then stares back down at his hands. “Doing the promotional interviews, [I kept saying], ‘Music truly transcends every barrier.’ But even while I was saying it I questioned myself if I indeed believe it.”

It’s late September, and the rapper is confiding in over one million fans live from his Seoul studio. His “complex set of feelings” about the explosive, record-breaking success of Dynamite – the first fully English-language single from the South Korean megastars – is not the celebration you’d expect from a band that just topped the US Billboard Hot 100, the first K-pop act to do so. But this kind of frank, unfiltered conversation is exactly what their global “Army” fanbase love: BTS’s candid social media presence has included their fans in every step of their artistic journey, and, as they release new album Be this week, has made them the biggest pop group on the planet.

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Rafaella Carrà: the Italian pop star who taught Europe the joy of sex

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A new jukebox musical of Carrà’s songs caps a 60-year career for a cultural icon who revolutionised Italian entertainment – and gave women agency in the bedroom

At the beginning of Explota Explota, a new Spanish-Italian jukebox musical comedy set at the tail end of the Franco dictatorship in 1970s Spain, airport employee Maria is making a delivery at a TV studio when she catches the attention of Chimo, the director of a variety show. When she tells him she’s not a dancer, he replies: “No dancer with blood flowing in their veins can resist this rhythm.”

He plays her Bailo Bailo, a hit by Italian pop star Raffaella Carrà, who, on top of becoming one of the best known personalities in her native Italy, ended up a sensation in the 20th-century Spanish-speaking world. Where Sweden had Abba, Italy had Carrà, who sold millions of records across Europe. Sure enough, Maria can’t resist Bailo Bailo, and Chimo hires her.

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AC/DC: Power Up review – the last crank up to 11?

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(Columbia)
The band’s first album in six years is a riotous hymn to unreconstructed rock, not to mention something of a medical miracle

In 1980, AC/DC released Back in Black, arguably the loudest wake ever committed to tape. On the one hand, the band were mourning their departed singer, Bon Scott; on the other, they were rebooting with a new frontman, Brian Johnson, whose Muttley chuckle became as much of an AC/DC trademark as the twin-guitar might of Angus and Malcolm Young. Back in Black remains one of the biggest-selling studio albums ever made.

And here they are again: back, metaphorically, in widow’s weeds, staging another resurrection in the wake of events that might have extinguished a punier outfit. Power Up, their 16th international album, is a particular celebration, given that these purveyors of electrical metaphor since 1975’s High Voltage looked like a spent force in 2017.

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The impossible return of AC/DC: ‘You could feel the electricity in the air’

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The bassist quit, the singer lost his hearing, the drummer was under house arrest and founder member Malcolm Young died from dementia. But somehow AC/DC are back (in black)

At the end of an AC/DC show, Angus Young has a routine. After a couple of hours of perpetual motion in his schoolboy outfit, he heads straight for the shower and then, because he hasn’t been able to eat since noon – you can’t do an AC/DC show on a full stomach – he looks for food. “The first thing that enters my head is: I’m starving.”

When he left the stage of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 20 September 2016 – the last night of the Rock or Bust tour – he might have been running through that routine for the last time in the band’s then 43-year history. The final 23 shows had been completed with Axl Rose as singer (brilliantly, it must be said), after hearing problems had forced Brian Johnson to retire from the road; he could no longer find his pitch onstage, and every show made his hearing worse. That summer, their bassist Cliff Williams had said he, too, would be leaving the band.

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Neil Diamond’s teenage obsessions: ‘The Brooklyn Dodgers betrayed me and broke my heart’

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As his 80th birthday approaches, Neil Diamond reminisces about Pete Seeger, the Everly Brothers and how a baseball team’s desertion led him to the guitar

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and for me the most important aspect of growing up there was the Dodgers baseball team. Everybody in Brooklyn loved the Dodgers. They were the underdog but we were loyal. I followed the games closely, with dreams that they would win the World Series and be recognised as the champions I knew they were.

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Joan Armatrading: ‘I want to make a heavy metal album – with lots of guitar shredding’

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At the age of seven, she flew to Birmingham from Antigua on her own – and became the first globally successful British female singer-songwriter. As she wins the award she once gave to Margaret Thatcher, Joan Armatrading looks back

‘It’s very nice to be honoured,” says Joan Armatrading, down the phone from her home in Surrey. The 69-year-old is talking about receiving this year’s Women of the Year lifetime achievement award, which sees her honoured alongside the likes of child burns survivor Sylvia Mac and Adwoa Dickson, who set up a community choir for young women who survived trafficking. “Whether I measure up is another question.”

She’s joking, of course, but what does the continued existence of the award tell us about where the struggle for equality is in 2020? “It’s maybe not as relevant as it was in 1955,” she says, “when Tony Lothian set it up after being denied admission to a men-only meeting. But women are still doing incredible things in this society, so reward them.”

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