Category Archives: Music

Only music reached my wife after dementia hit, says John Suchet

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Ex-ITN presenter tells how Abba transformed Bonnie Suchet as study reveals most carers are unaware of the benefits of music

When John Suchet discovered the effect that music had on his wife Bonnie’s dementia, it was transformational. “She would close her eyes and love it, beat in time to the music with her hands, tap her feet,” he said.

The former ITN newscaster’s wife had lost her ability to speak. She had been locked inside her head, sitting blankly, apparently unable to make sense of the outside world.

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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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Fine Young Cannibal Roland Gift: ‘I went back to where being pretty didn’t matter’

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He was ‘the first black punk in Hull’ and was named one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people. But the singer turned his back on pop stardom. He reveals why he’s returning with a gritty musical about a band called The Blacks

There are no film posters up in Roland Gift’s house in Holloway, London, and the platinum discs are all packed away. It’s a home that gives few clues to the remarkable life story the 59-year-old is about to recount: how the “first black punk in Hull” went on to become an international pop and movie star.

“I’ve always been afraid of getting wrapped up with fame and that glamour world,” is how he puts it today. Indeed, even when Gift’s band, Fine Young Cannibals, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their 1989 second album, The Raw & the Cooked (reissued this month, along with their eponymous 1985 debut), he had an uneasy relationship with stardom.

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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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Billie Eilish talks to younger Billie Eilish – with both wisdom and wit

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In ‘time capsule’ interviews with Vanity Fair, the singer listens, responds and sometimes rolls her eyes at her younger self

In 2009, a website went viral – it allowed you to send yourself a message that would automatically turn up in your inbox three years later. A friend of mine sent himself the number of a girl he liked. Given the same exercise years earlier at school, another friend sent himself the lyrics of a Black Eyed Peas song. I never sent myself anything, though I probably would have chosen some edgy quote from a political philosopher. These exercises are always telling because you get to see what was important to you when you were young – and whether you lived up to it years later.

Related: A man tried to body shame the gloriously unabashed Billie Eilish. It didn’t go well

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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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Rita Ora apologises for breaking England lockdown with party in restaurant

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Singer admits ‘inexcusable error of judgment’ after Met police called to birthday party

The singer Rita Ora has apologised for breaching lockdown rules by holding a “small” gathering with friends for her 30th birthday.

Ora admitted a “serious and inexcusable error of judgment” after celebrating with friends at a restaurant in Notting Hill, west London, on Saturday night.

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French police caught on CCTV beating black music producer in his Paris studio – video

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France's police watchdog, IGPN, said on Thursday it was investigating allegations a black music producer was physically attacked and racially abused during a police check. The incident was captured on CCTV, which was obtained by the Loopsider news organisation. 

The alleged victim, identified only as Michel, told reporters he was jumped on by police at his music studio on the 17th arrondissement of Paris on 21 November. He said he had been walking around nearby without a mask, against French Covid health protocols, and upon seeing a police car, went into his music studio to avoid a fine. 

However, the officers followed him inside the studio and started to physically attack and racially abuse him, he alleged. The Paris police force previously faced criticism this week after clashes erupted when officers cleared a migrant rights protest in Place de la République  

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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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‘People in their 40s were crying’: the sad final days of New York’s coolest record store

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Other Music fuelled New York’s 00s indie boom, boasting Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective among its fans. Then it closed. A new documentary tells the story of the store’s tragic demise – and its ‘terrifying’ staff

A lot of skulking went on at Other Music, the celebrated New York record store. It was an odd kind of dance: nervous customers, hiding behind CD racks or LP sleeves, trying to conjure up a question that wouldn’t result in utter humiliation. The staff there had quite a reputation, after all.

The experience is relived in a surprisingly moving new documentary about the shop, also called Other Music. Notable fans Regina Spektor and Jason Schwartzman still sound daunted by Other’s intense atmosphere. “If I’m completely honest, I was never just ‘chill’ in there,” confides Spektor, to camera. “I always got that first-day-of-school feeling, like: OK, just don’t fuck up.”

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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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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review – Chadwick Boseman glorious in his final film role

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The movie version of August Wilson’s story of the blues, starring Boseman and a tremendous Viola Davis, is a ferocious opera of passion and pain

A detonation of pure acting firepower is what’s on offer in this movie version of August Wilson’s 1982 stage play. Declarative and theatrical it might be, but it’s also ferociously intelligent and violently focused, an opera of passion and pain. We see African-American musicians hanging around a white-owned Chicago studio one stiflingly hot day in the 1920s, waiting for the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey to show up with her entourage so they can cut an album. The lead track is expected to be her live hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the drama imagines a certain pushy trumpeter in the band named Levee angling for his own version to be recorded. A simmering argument about how this song is to be arranged and performed forms the basis of a confrontation about race, sex and power.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with tremendous hauteur: Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I never arrived at Hampton Court with more magnificent display or more queenly prerogative than Davis’s Rainey making her entrance, with her own lovers and court favourites, sweating at the temperature, her painful feet and the incompetence of the studio chiefs. And Chadwick Boseman gives a moving performance as the fiercely talented but insecure Levee, crucified by a childhood experience of racist violence and dreaming of fronting his own band.

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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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Bobby Brown Jr found dead in Los Angeles home at age 28

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Police pronounced son of singer Bobby Brown dead at the scene but provided no additional details

Bobby Brown Jr, the son of singer Bobby Brown, was found dead at a Los Angeles home late Wednesday. He was 28.

Los Angeles Police spokesman Jeff Lee said officers were responding to a medical emergency when they found Brown Jr’s body around 1pm at a home in Encino, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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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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