Damon albarn

Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice of singer Matt Johnson politely asked the audience to refrain from using mobile phones when the band was performing. In Edinburgh, while Johnson was speaking, the chap next to me was preoccupied filming an empty stage. A sea of screens can be priceless in a genuine emergency but that’s about it As it happens, most of the crowd complied most of the time, but proscribing phone use at concerts is increasingly challenging. A few artists are up for the fight.

Bands that have hung around, or gone away and come back again, occupy an increasingly sizeable percentage of pop’s bandwidth. When it comes to making new music, many are happy not to rock the boat, scraping by on the goodwill accumulated from past endeavours. Others strive to present a moving target, enjoying a more evolved, even argumentative, relationship with the sounds of their glory days. Two new albums tackle this dilemma, with varying degrees of success. Together for the first time since 2015, Blur do a fine job of straddling past and present.

Public fallouts between major music stars are far from unheard of, but the speed and ferocity of the recent contretemps between Damon Albarn and Taylor Swift is a reminder that, in this social media age, arguments can go viral in seconds. The initial cause of the row was an interview that Albarn gave to the Los Angeles Times. The Blur and Gorillaz star, presenting himself as an elder statesman of the industry, decried Swift as one of a breed of artists who use "sound and attitude" to conceal thin songwriting. For good measure, he then alleged that these songs were not even written by Swift. After the interviewer suggested that Swift wrote or co-wrote all her songs, he said, "That doesn’t count. I know what co-writing is. Co-writing is very different to writing.

The new music economy relies on cross-promotion and artists reaching out to different scenes. And the rise of streaming means everyone can hop between audiences with ease, hence those singles apparently by one person but with a cricket team’s worth of other names credited. As the Beach Boys once sang, ‘you need a mess of help to stand alone’. Alongside the featured artist sausage factory there are musical patrons. Take Damon Albarn, who has spent much of the past 20 years elevating the work of other artists, using the strength of his own name — made, of course, as the frontman of Blur — to promote music that might otherwise slip past his core audience.