Pop

The title of the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival is also the thesis statement for this year’s entire EIF programme. All Rise is intended to be a celebration of integration, pluralism and collective acceptance, ‘togetherness and ascendance’, at a time when such notions could hardly be less in vogue. It takes a big work to live up to the billing. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s 12-part symphony, which premièred in New York in 1999, certainly doesn’t lack scale or ambition. For this mammoth hybrid composition for jazz ensemble, symphony orchestra and choir, Marsalis and his Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra were joined at the Usher Hall by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

It would be difficult to do certain shows in the courtyard of Somerset House. One can’t really host anything too confrontational in a Georgian quadrangle: the clash of surroundings and sound would be too jarring. So instead the annual Summer Series tends to gravitate towards the feelgood or the inspiring, which is perfectly fine. However, if you go to more than one of the shows, it can feel as though you are watching some variant of the same performance. Flaming Lips and Black Country, New Road are very different bands at a surface level. The former – a psychedelic band formed in the early 1980s in Oklahoma City who, somehow, after nearly 20 years, catapulted to success at the end of the 1990s – come from outside the pop industry.

Plenty of critics have mocked Trainspotting – the musical (with lyrics and music by Irvine Welsh and Stephen McGuinness, respectively) but the producers know their audience’s mind. They want to see live theatre without taking the risk of a new play, which might be gruesome, and they prefer a dead-safe replica of a glamorous movie to something by Chekhov or Pinter. Reviewers admire novelty and inventiveness so they tend to punish theatre-makers who reheat leftovers. The show follows the book more closely than the film, where Renton was the central figure, and here he blends in with the community of wasters and criminals who mope around Edinburgh trying to raise cash for smack. The characters are reduced to simplistic gestures, as easy to read as hand signals. Begbie is a cocky thug.

There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backwards seems to be the only possible way to move forwards. Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; ‘Hung Up’, from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song. Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold.

For the first time at a gig, I spent much of Harry Styles’s show thinking about the maths. He’s cunningly doing his 68 shows in seven cities, with 12 of them at Wembley Stadium, which means he has transferred a significant amount of the costs of touring to the fans. In other ways fans are rewarded. As is common when stars play stadiums, Styles spent little time on the main stage. Instead he peddled his wares from a series of walkways – around 350 yards of them, apparently – stretching way out into the crowd, along which he remained in near-constant movement. That meant an awful lot of people got to be at the barrier. At an estimate there were maybe 20,000 people who got within a few feet of Styles. That’s as many people as fit in the whole O2. Clever.

It’s 50 years since an assortment of scruffy youths from the leafy suburb of Bromley, the grimy streets of Finsbury Park and under the Westway gathered together, often in art colleges, to form ‘punk’. They will be celebrated this summer – but more for what they became than what they were. The Clash became the towering public statues of rebel rock. Johnny Rotten again became John Lydon – musical adventurer and perpetual irritant. Siouxsie Sioux became the unwitting, and unwilling, inventor of goth. The Damned became national treasures. The ones we remember wrote books, took up acting, went where the wind took them. They didn’t stay punks. Not like Charlie Harper. When he first came across the punks, he didn’t see anything new.

Madonna Louise Ciconne has had one of the more eventful American lives of the past half-century, and it is little wonder that she might wish to depict it on screen in a big-budget film. After all, as the recent success of the Queen and Michael Jackson biopics have shown, it doesn’t matter how good the pictures are, as long as they include the best-known songs that made the artists household names and a smattering of the drama that led to their current eminence. Even if, as in Michael, it was the decision to omit most of the really interesting events that led to cries of whitewashing. Yet there’s been no Madonna biopic, and this is not because she has refused to cooperate. Far from it.

The first thing I did after getting home from the Barbican the other week was google ‘Aldous Harding neurodivergent’. It seems I’m not the only one: messageboard threads debate it; fans speculate. Once you’ve see her perform, you would know why: she twisted and contorted herself not like a dancer, but like someone trying to work out the kinks in her own physicality. She also barely spoke to the audience. Spot this kind of behaviour on the street and you’d walk on, pretending not to see. On stage, one had to look, and it was wholly compelling. Liberating even – especially if, like me, you are neurodivergent (look, I know everyone is now, but I do have an actual diagnosis). We were being forced to confront our own embarrassment. Forced to see someone being exactly who she was.

On 30 May 1966, the Beatles released ‘Paperback Writer’ – a fortnight after ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones and only days before Bob Dylan released ‘I Want You’ as a single. Paul Simon wrote and recorded (with Art Garfunkel) ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’ not long after. Yes, yes, what bliss it was in that dawn etc. But anyone predicting back then that, exactly 60 years later, all four artists would still be releasing new music and touring to large and appreciative audiences would have been laughed clean out of the Bag O’Nails. Even when glossy monthly music magazines such as Q started appearing in the 1980s, 40 was regarded as the dark side of the moon for the foundational pop stars of the 1960s.

It was odd, walking around Camden Town during Desertfest – the annual weekend-long celebration of doom, stoner and sludge metal (we’ll come to what they all are later). Odd in particular to see so many men wearing tall, brightly coloured pointy hats: the kind your mum rolled and stapled for you out of a piece of card. While surveying the floor of the Electric Ballroom from the balcony, I eventually asked the chaps next to me what was with all the wizard hats. One looked at me as though I was an idiot. ‘They’re not wizard hats. They’re gnome hats.’ Oh, right. Why are they wearing gnome hats, then? Again surprise at my ignorance. ‘Because of the Belgian band. Gnome.’ Of course. Silly me. The sound of Desertfest would be cosily familiar to the parents of attendees.

About 15 years ago, I spoke to a relatively unknown neo-psychedelic musician from Western Australia called Kevin Parker. It was shortly before the release of Lonerism, the second album by his one-man-band bedroom project, Tame Impala. Their previous album, Innerspeaker, had been acclaimed in Australia but had made relatively few inroads anywhere else. Parker seemed sanguine about it all. ‘In Perth being a muso is part of a whole lifestyle,’ he told me. ‘It’s a symptom of a directionless existence.’ Lonerism and its follow-up, Currents, shifted the coordinates. Parker’s (clearly very ambitious) dedication to turning an apparent lack of focus into genre-busting psych-rock grooves and sugar-sweet pop ensured that Tame Impala have become a very big deal indeed.

If Olivia Dean is the girl next door, Rosalia is the girl next planet. Their shows in successive weeks at the O2 – Dean had six nights, Rosalia two – were object lessons in presentation. Dean’s gig looked like some high-end light entertainment from the 1970s, Rosalia’s like something the National Theatre might dream up for a new revival of Murder in the Cathedral. Rosalia emerged in 2017 as the apparent saviour of flamenco – though flamenco traditionalists disagreed: she was Catalan, not Andalusian, and she wasn’t even a gypsy. Then across four albums, she travelled so far that it’s hard to categorise her extraordinary latest one, Lux: a heavily orchestrated, intensely dramatic reverie about the lives of assorted recondite saints.

Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising line-up becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the years. Pop stars spend the first part of their careers trampling over their grandmothers in the unseemly rush to demand the world take notice of who they are, and the second part whining about being pigeonholed. The only thing harder to escape in the music industry than your name is your original haircut. Hence, the pseudonymous offshoot, offering a degree of separation with very little sense of jeopardy.

Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars ​will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris de Burgh at the Royal Albert Hall. Not with Belle and Sebastian. When Stuart Murdoch stepped off the stage, barely anyone even stood up. One chap had a little dance with him but no one reached out for a touch of his hand. He climbed from the arena floor to the stalls that circle it, and made his way into a row, where everyone swivelled their seats to let him pass. Yet as soon as he gave them permission, dozens of them were up on stage dancing with this joyful band.

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as ‘Heil Hitler’ and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

Classic rock used to be an American radio genre made up of bluesy guitar bands from the past. It spawned Fathers’ Day compilation albums, a magazine and endless lists where ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Free Bird’ argued among themselves about which was the public’s favourite. But that’s not classic rock any longer; that’s heritage rock, music by the dead or dying. When the radio format was invented, the bands it celebrated were largely extant, or only recently departed; the oldest of the musicians were not yet 40. Their music was both current and nostalgic because new groups were still nicking from them, and their songs weren’t yet period pieces.

The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavour, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways. It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline and eventual demise from early onset dementia, while also becoming a father.