Music

Tuesday

Jonathan Maitland

The strange endurance of Dr Feelgood

At the recent West End run of the play about Wilko Johnson, the guitarist and co-founder of 70s rockers Dr Feelgood, one exchange always got a big laugh. It was part of an argument between Lee Brilleaux, the band’s singer, and Wilko himself. Lee: We were more popular after you left. We had our biggest hits after we kicked you out of the band. I mean, do you know how many Dr Feelgood tribute bands there are now in Spain? Wilko: I dunno. And I don’t care. Lee: Twenty-seven. It is a peculiar phenomenon, this: there may be plenty of 70s bands still going strong, but most are way more successful than Dr Feelgood in terms of what used to be called record sales. Spotify, for example, currently lists approximately 30 million monthly listeners for the Rolling Stones.

Wednesday

Simon Sebag Montefiore

How my ancestor dealt with anti-Semitism

I’m not a member of the Establishment, even though I’m writing this in what might be described as its literary organ. I know my voice will be correctly interpreted as that of a maverick outsider riding shotgun into the lair of privilege. The early weeks of Andy Burnham’s First Lordship of the Treasury have been defined by clips using edible class indicators – baps, crisps, beer – to signal that, despite Cambridge and decades in Westminster, he is a contra-establishmentarian. But there’s nothing new in this (except TikTok). Walpole scoffed Norfolk apples in the House to garnish his backwoods-squire credentials; Lloyd George declared, ‘The day of the cottage-bred man dawns’, promoting his taste for bara brith.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

RIP Dolly Parton

“And try to make the most of every moment / ’Cause if you never try, you never win.” There are few more appropriate lines with which to begin an obituary of Dolly Parton, although they do have the slight disadvantage of sounding like something that might be printed on an especially tawdry greetings card. Dolly – always Dolly, never ‘Ms Parton’ – was never particularly concerned about that sort of thing. She understood that sincerity was generally more effective than sophistication, and that if something was true there was little point in making it sound cleverer than it was. She was the greatest singer of her generation, the female Elvis if you will, and she was damned if anyone was ever going to persuade her otherwise.

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

‘A wonderful, wacky woman’: a tribute to Betty Freeman

David Hockney painted ‘Beverly Hills Housewife’ between l966 and 1967, during an exceptionally happy period of his life. He was thrilled to be living in Los Angeles and was enjoying his first great love affair, with Peter Schlesinger, who loved him back. John Kasmin, his art dealer, came out from London to introduce him to various collectors. One of them was Betty Freeman, who lived at 703 Hillcrest Road, a fairly typical Beverly Hills house. Hockney asked if he could take some polaroids, which became the source for the painting. Hockney and Freeman liked each other from the start and would become lifelong friends.

Tuesday

Andrey Kurkov

The intrepid volunteers who risk all to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage

‘The nonsense was over at last,’ wrote the Lithuanian-Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in 1939, as a period of uncertainty gave way to the horrors of the second world war. Charlotte Higgins quotes these words at the beginning of Ukrainian Lessons, describing the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine after eight years of ‘local’ warfare in the Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. From the first pages of this profound study of the impact of war on culture, replete with life stories, the author places the Russo-Ukrainian conflict within the context of global cultural history and geopolitics. References to Rwanda in 1994 and the bloody events in Londonderry in 1972 are in no way out of place.

Monday

James Jeffrey

The best German music? It’s not Bach

Outside of Germany, the virtues of ‘Schlager music’ are barely known and appreciated. Admittedly, the label ‘virtues’ is contestable. This style of German music, whose roots go back as far as the late 19th century, is characterised by catchy instrumentals with easygoing and usually sentimental lyrics. It serves as the country’s musical equivalent of Marmite: Germans seem to either love it or hate it. I fell in love with Schlager after encountering it at German beer festivals and dive bars during a long-range Camino pilgrimage that took me through Germany, France and Spain. The Pet Shop Boys are fans too (see their 2024 hit, ‘The Schlager Hit Parade’).  The music is cheesy but, set against the cynical blandness of modern pop music, it's a welcome tonic.

Wednesday

James MacMillan

Pity us poor Celtic fans

Although the past few footballing weeks have been dominated by the convulsive conclusion to Arsenal’s season – and the upcoming few will be dominated by the World Cup – I wonder if some of you might spare a thought for my own traumas north of the border. As a Celtic supporter, I’ve had one of the worst seasons imaginable. After years of victory in the relatively impoverished (and severely mocked) Scottish Premier League, my team has had one of their most disastrous stretches, knocked out embarrassingly early from all European competitions and then continually shamed and outperformed by a resurgent Hearts, who haven’t won the Scottish League since 1960.

Tuesday

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘If you’re inspired by music, you’ll do better in exams’: Conductor Ralph Allwood on why music matters for children

Here’s some life advice Ralph Allwood gives to the teenagers who attend his week-long residential Rodolfus Choral Courses, held all through the summer at various schools and colleges across the country. Some of the singers are being pressured by their parents to take just maths and sciences, or other lucrative career-oriented subjects, for A-level or at university, and to give up music. ‘Right,’ he says, as the teenagers assemble for a final rehearsal, ‘this is how you decide what you’re going to do next. Get advice from everyone you can: from your teachers, your parents, the universities, that aunt who wants you to do a sensible subject. Say thank you, then go into your own room and close the door. There, make up your own mind about what you want to do.

Philip Womack

School choir music is in peril

You’d be hard pressed to find a more continuous strand in British culture than the chorister. They’ve been warbling in Westminster Abbey since the 1380s. Every national occasion is marked by choirs, the choristers dazzling in their splendidly anachronistic ruffs and robes, present at moments of collective joy or sadness. Funerals, memorial services, royal weddings, carols from King’s College, Cambridge. They are ornaments to our culture. Oodles of composers, musicians and singers, professional or not, have, over hundreds of years, stood in the choir stalls at dawn, at midnight, and lifted their voices to the vaulting roofs. Some of the most beautiful music in the canon was written for choirs: Gregorian chants, Thomas Tallis.

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

My addiction to playing the piano is driving everyone mad

From time to time, I’ve given some famous pianists a bit of a kicking in the arts pages of this magazine. You may be a Bach specialist, but that’s no excuse for sleepwalking through all six keyboard partitas in a marathon recital. Your Beethoven Diabelli Variations may be renowned, but don’t expect a rave review if you trap me in an intimate concert venue while you pound the keys like a pneumatic drill. You’d think, though, that a journalist who snipes at world-class soloists would have the sense to keep his own amateur playing to himself. And if he’s idiot enough to post a recording on social media, he should learn to take what he dishes out. Alas, I never learn. The older I get, the more addicted I become to playing an instrument that I have no hope of mastering.

Tuesday

Rowan Williams

Why Leonard Cohen felt empowered to pronounce benedictions

If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists to’ is hardly fair, the whole persona, the register of his writing and performing, resists any mood of simple celebration.

Monday

Britt McHenry

The Super Bowl halftime show gets lost in translation

From our US edition

Bad Bunny strolled into a tropically transformed Levi’s Stadium for his first ever Super Bowl halftime show and kept his promise: He sang all of his songs as written, en Español. If a healthy swathe of English-speaking Americans stared blankly at their screens wondering, “what am I watching?” Bad Bunny was undeterred. The same man who boycotted the contiguous United States just eight months ago due to the perceived prospect of ICE raids at his concerts looked confident and ironically, smug, commanding America’s musical zeitgeist moment on the mainland. He began his show strolling through a quickly assembled Latin Margaritaville. Visually, the camera zoomed way too close to Bad Bunny’s face. We get it: The guy has a near-immaculate face card.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

The golden years of David Bowie

From our US edition

This year marks the anniversaries of two of David Bowie’s most compelling and powerful albums: 1976’s Station to Station and 2016’s Blackstar. Given that they are often – rightly – described as Bowie’s crowning artistic achievements, amid severe competition from his other releases, they also have the intriguing fillip that both were originally released in January: a fortunate time for the musician, who was born on January 8, 1947, even if it was also the month in which he finally departed this Earth. Yet the comparisons between Station to Station and Blackstar, which came out 40 years apart, are far more pervasive – and persuasive – than the serendipity of their release dates.

david bowie

Wednesday

Sophie Clark

Why Gen Z are singing the praises of community choirs

‘Screenagers’, ‘lonely’, ‘boring’ – all words used to describe Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, we are the first generation to grow up with omnipresent technology and are often maligned as phone addicts and loners. But things are changing. Now the first tech-native generation is actively seeking out the most analogue hobby of all: community choir.  Community choirs have boomed across the UK following the pandemic, and the country’s youngest adults are clamouring to get in. Some Voices, a non-audition choir in London which started as six friends singing in 2010, has grown to more than 1,200 members since 2020. Many of these newer members are Gen Z, searching for a connection which is more reliable than the wifi.

Flora Watkins

Don’t bring back cassette tapes

The nicest thing anyone has said to me recently is: ‘But surely you’re far too young to remember cassettes?’ Sadly, I had to break it to my new neighbour that, as a child of the 1980s and a 1990s teen, I’m not – which is why I’m bemused to learn that tapes are the latest piece of retro tech to make a comeback.  Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX are among artists who’ve released new music on cassette, fuelled by Gen Z’s apparently insatiable appetite for nostalgia and clunky devices long since sent to landfill.

Monday

Alexander Larman

The predictable politics of the 2026 Grammys

From our US edition

When Billie Eilish declared, during her acceptance speech for song of the year with “Wildflower” at last night’s Grammy awards, that “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter,” she was speaking in the approved register. "Fuck ICE," she added but it was more of the same. In contrast to the Golden Globes, where the neutral tenor of the event was made up of tame jokes about the age of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Grammys have turned into an opportunity for musicians to express political outrage. The awards themselves went as expected last night. Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny were the big winners of the night along with Eilish.

Saturday

J. Scott Turner

How mediocrity took over the Grammys

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon. One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music.

Thursday

Maia Roston

Kanye West’s anti-Semitism apology isn’t enough

When one of the 21st century's most acclaimed music artists takes out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his anti-Semitic behavior, deny that he is a Nazi and ask for understanding as he works on himself, what do we owe him? Mercy, punishment, or neither? In his letter, titled "To Those I’ve Hurt," Kanye West, now legally known as "Ye," writes that he is "not a Nazi or an anti-Semite" and that he "loves Jewish people." He attributes his anti-Semitic remarks, offensive use of Nazi symbolism and erratic conduct to an undiagnosed frontal-lobe injury from a 2002 car accident and to bipolar type-1 disorder that went largely untreated until recently.

kanye

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

What is Travis Scott doing in The Odyssey?

From our US edition

As far as teaser trailers for summer blockbusters go, it takes quite a lot to make jaded audiences – or cynical critics – sit up and say, “What the hell?” But what’s exactly what the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eagerly awaited The Odyssey has done. Not because it has featured a couple of new shots of Tom Holland’s Telemachus squaring off with Robert Pattinson’s villainous Antinous, or Matt Damon’s Odysseus participating in the bloody sack of Troy with his fellow Greeks, but because it introduces the most unexpected cameo of the year, possibly of the decade. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the latest feature of Nolan’s all-star cast: the hip-hop artiste Travis Scott, appearing in the somewhat unlikely role of a staff-beating herald.

travis scott