Music

I recently underwent a surgical procedure that according to the surgeon who performed it would cause either no discomfort at all or result in ‘exceptional pain’ for at least two weeks. No way to tell until I was on the operating table, apparently. She said this matter-of-factly, as if discussing bus routes, just as I was about to receive a general anaesthetic. As soon as I came to, I learned it was the latter. In the following days, bedbound and near-delirious with pain and medication, I listened to hour after hour of Taylor Swift. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I found her music, with its vast emotional depth

In my day job, I work with children. Well, OK, they’re in their twenties, but when they ask me who my favourite musician of all time is, and I say Madonna, they usually look blank. That funny-looking woman who had a few hits in the 1980s? Meh, what about Taylor Swift? Madonna may not have topped the charts for a few years, but for me and many other women of my generation, she is the greatest. And she always will be, in a way that the pop stars of today – derivative, airbrushed, on-message and PRed to the max – can only dream of. She changed the world of music,

More than 200,000 people have schlepped down the ley lines for another year of ‘Glasto’. It’s tempting to deride these people: they’ll stink, they’re anchorless hedonists, they’re blue-haired hippies. However, they’ve got tickets to Glastonbury and I haven’t, so they win.  Actually going to the festival, however, is a minority experience. More of us will be watching it on TV. And whether you dig the Glastonbury vibe or not, there’s plenty of good music for all across this weekend.  The most important thing to remember, though, is to watch as little of the coverage as possible. It’s fluff. For three whole days, everything is ‘fantastic’, everyone will ‘bring it’ and

We might never have taken the Eurovision Song Contest terribly seriously in the UK – but with British Ted Neeley lookalike Sam Ryder winning second place last year and the staging of this year’s event in Liverpool, some are singing to a different tune. This year’s UK entry comes from Mae Muller – ‘I Wrote a Song’ is a serviceable enough generic toe-tapper, but no ‘Puppet on a String’ (Sandie Shaw, 1967 winner) if you ask me. Or even ‘Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit’, Gina G’s 1996 banger that claimed eighth place in the contest. Ahead of tomorrow night’s final, here are ten movies to get you in the

Move over vinyl: the cassette tape is back. According to the British Phonographic Industry, sales of this retro piece of technology last year came close to a two-decade peak. Having been the top-selling format for albums in the UK from 1985 to 1992 and then seemingly disappearing (selling only 4,000 units in 2012), last year saw more than 195,000 cassette tapes shifted. HMV, which recently announced that it will reopen its flagship store on Oxford Street after a four-year closure, plans to bring out cassettes for ‘specific new releases’ and has credited its return to profit with a growing interest in ‘collectable’ music from an analogue era. As a child of

At one level, asking why the coronation matters is to slightly miss the point. Living as we do in a constitutional monarchy, the coronation doesn’t need to make a case for itself. It is simply an indispensable part, primarily in symbolic terms, of the installation of our new head of state. But setting aside for a moment its constitutional and religious significance, the coronation is important for another reason. Unlike almost every other nation state, the UK does not have an official national day. The patron saint days of the respective countries of the UK, of course, are celebrated to varying degrees ­– though St George’s Day far less so

The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie. Two words: ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall’. The romantic image of the modern musician as tasty but troubled troubadour roving from town to town on his lonesome (except for his bandmates, backing singers, roadies, drug dealer and manager, of course) and taking sensual solace where he may is

When you hear the word flamenco you probably think of a lady dancing in a polka-dot dress, stomping her feet, accompanied by guitars and singing. And in the fair capital of Andalucía, Seville, you would have no problem finding such a sight. All across the old town, around the cathedral and in the lee of its 12-century minaret turned cathedral bell-tower, glamorous flamenco dancers are busy at it, stirring up passion on the cobbled streets and in the city-centre tourist shows. There’s no denying such flamenco demonstrations will raise your pulse and the tourists, not surprisingly, love them. Dancers on Plaza de Espana in Seville [iStock] But if you think

Hearing about the death of Burt Bacharach at the age of 94, I thought of one word: maestro. The word is variously defined as ‘a master, usually in an art’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘a man who is very skilled at playing or conducting’ (Cambridge), but my favourite is the beautiful simplicity of the Longman definition: ‘Someone who can do something very well.’ The good (Brian Wilson: ‘He was a hero of mine and very influential on my work… he was a giant’), the bad (Billy Corgan: ‘A titan of beautiful and effortless song’) and the ugly (Mick Hucknall: ‘Farewell, genius’) of the music business spoke as one on this loss, with

A transgender woman and a non-binary person dressed as Satan walk into a bar. That’s not the beginning of a bad joke, but the defining performance of the 65th Grammy awards, held in Los Angeles on Sunday.  You may have seen the clips. The singer Sam Smith wore what appeared to be a terrible Halloween costume: red high heels and a red hat with devil horns. He clomped around the stage performing ‘Unholy’ with Kim Petras, who was in a cage surrounded by flames and whip-wielding dominatrices. Sam Smith performing at the Grammys [Getty Images] CBS’s broadcast of the ceremony on American television was sponsored by Covid vaccine-maker Pfizer –

Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of the ‘hate-read’. In the specific case of biopics (always an easy thing to get wrong when one person imitates another, often with hilarious results), perhaps ‘sham-shaming’ is even better. Madonna was reported to be directing, producing and co-writing the film with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who has since moved on to the live-action Powerpuff

To understand Bob Dylan’s Fragments – Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) – due to be released on Friday – you have to go back half a century to the release of the Beatles’s Let It Be. As millions of fans around the world bought the band’s final album, Paul McCartney was horrified. This was not the disc he had conceived: some of the most cherished songs in his oeuvre had been hijacked by superstar producer Phil Spector, who stamped his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ during the album’s post-production process, filling it with lavish embellishments. Fast-forward to the mid-1990s and another legendary songwriter was at loggerheads with a different superstar

He was one of the most unlikely pop stars this country has ever produced: extraordinarily badly dressed and famously contrarian, with a voice that sounded more like an angry man shouting than anything recognisable as singing. But Mark E. Smith, front man of the Fall, became one of the most recognisable and eventually revered figures on the music scene. And five years on from his death at 60, his stock is higher than ever – his influence heard in the sound of newer bands such as Sleaford Mods and Idles, his name regularly evoked on the likes of BBC Radio 6 Music, and a giant tribute mural an unlikely tourist