John Cale

Wednesday

Graeme Thomson

Is Music, Fashion, Film really the best Charli xcx can do?

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

brat

Thursday

Clinton Heylin

Music to some ears: how 20th-century classical music led to pop

It was Sir Hubert Parry who in 1899 complained about ‘an enemy at the doors of [real] music… namely the common popular songs of the day’, ten years before he put a William Blake poem to music and came up with the most famous classical/pop fusion of all time, ‘Jerusalem’, which even featured on a mid-1970s number-one album by ELP. I did assume that a book subtitled How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop would reference such synergies. It does not. Elizabeth Alker’s is instead a competently written, entertaining if scattershot history of avant-garde electronic music, but presented as if some musical chasm separates John Cage from Sonic Youth. In fact one can easily draw a line between the two.

Wednesday

Michael Hann

Metal for people who don’t understand metal: The Darkness at Wembley reviewed

Midway through their thoroughly entertaining show at Wembley Arena, the Darkness played a song from a decade ago called ‘Barbarian’, about Ivar the Boneless and the Viking conquest of Britain. ‘Barbarian’ exists in a long tradition of men with long hair, tight trousers and loud guitars singing about our Danish friends. Led Zeppelin did it on ‘The Immigrant Song’: ‘The hammer of the gods/ Will drive our ships to new lands/ …Valhalla, I am coming!’ Iron Maiden did it on ‘Invaders’: ‘The smell of death and burning flesh, the battle-weary fight to the end/ The Saxons have been overpowered, victims of the mighty Norsemen.’ Scores of others you are less likely to be familiar with have, too. The Viking anthem is a rite of passage in hard rock.