albums
Magnificent muddle
In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti…
Beauty and the beast
Michael Hann talks to Kevin Rowland about Dexys, insecurity and the cocaine years
Neil Young: Homegrown
Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly…
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
The Peter Cook of pop
In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even.…
The 1975: Notes on a Conditional Form
Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg.…
Public enemy
Many performers hated playing live. But freed from the stage they often made their best and wildest work, argues Graeme Thomson
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Haydn seek
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his…
Mick Hucknall on women, rejection and cultural appropriation
What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not…
Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed
Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band…
Needed a shot of Stolichnaya: The Tchaikovsky Project reviewed
Grade: B+ I’m not sure about ‘Projects’. Aren’t those what ageing rockers produce, in a haze of sedatives, when their…
Reliably odd but the deranged proggery grates: King’s Mouth by The Flaming Lips reviewed
Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and…
Hideously tasteful elegies to useless country singers: Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars reviewed
Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked…
David Coverdale, lead singer of Whitesnake, talks hair, love handles and ‘sexism’
‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and…
Much as I admire Morrissey’s refusal to conform, I don’t much like his music
Grade: B Rock stars who utter something a little gamey, something a tad right-wingish, are usually coerced by the lefties…
They. Cannot. Write. Songs: Mumford & Sons reviewed
Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and…
Laudably perverse – maybe album of the year: Cypress Hill’s Elephants on Acid reviewed
Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly…
The man who’s spent 40 years trying (and failing) to become a pop star
‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in…
Pretentious jowly mumrock: Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night III reviewed
Grade: C+ Mumrock. A lucrative genre, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, when Mums suddenly wanted something a little…
‘I think The Kinks could have found a better frontman’: Ray Davies interviewed
‘I like your shirt today,’ Sir Ray Davies says to the waiter who brings his glass of water to the…
The best album of the year so far, by some margin
Grade: A+ While the young bands plunder the 1980s for every last gobbet of tinny synth and hi-hat, the singer-songwriters…
Musically, politically and culturally, Kanye West is uncontrollable and unignorable
Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the…
A Bowie tribute album: Arctic Monkey’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino reviewed
Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our…
Belly, the band responsible for one of my favourite 90s songs, is back
Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town…
