Pop

Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has fared better than most, spawning its own devilish offspring in math rock and post-rock. Why? Maybe we are more amenable to bombast and pretension these days. Or perhaps new studio technology lends itself to the genre — hell, you can hear prog time signatures in top ten hits. Maybe more to the point, prog offers a broader avenue than, say, heavy metal or punk. Prog is often what bands end up doing even if that’s not what they think they’re doing: Radiohead, Muse — even Arcade Fire or the National. This is the 14th album from Somerset band the Pineapple Thief (prog is very much a West Country thing).

Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished Fireball and ‘Highway Star’. But by the same token they may be relieved that there are no six-minute drum solos, songs about the devil, or Jon Lord demonstrating that he can hammer the organ fairly quickly for an unimaginably long time. Instead you have extremely well played 1980s arena rawk — think Guns N’ Roses with a touch of prog thrown in. And decent tunes that do not outstay their welcome — Ian Gillan always was a catchy mofo, however ludicrously vaudevillian his vocals may be.

Is the world ready for the return of live rock music? On the evidence of the first gig in London since lockdown, no. The people who were arseholes at gigs in early March are still arseholes at gigs, but there’s rather more than an obstructed sightline at stake now. Miles Kane was the guinea pig for the experiment, playing to 150 people who’d applied for tickets and who stood in a summer downpour watching him play acoustically. More on Kane later, but his presence was the least important thing here. The gig was the first in a series of small shows in Camden Market, and the organisers had taken care: masks were compulsory and the ground was marked with green dots to ensure everyone stood where they were supposed to.

There was only so long anyone could put up with the live musical performances of the early days of lockdown: musicians in their living rooms, performing stripped-back versions of their songs in broadcasts that froze or stuttered. The time would come, inevitably, when everyone wanted more. Viewers would want something more closely approximating a full show; musicians would want to be paid. Laura Marling was early through the gates: last month, she promoted her latest album with two concerts at the Union Chapel in London, played to an empty hall but streamed for UK and US audiences.

Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly endless catalogue of stuff which, at the time it was recorded, failed to see the light of day. And people like me fork out each time. I remember looking forward to this album in 1975 — but just before the release date he shelved it in favour of Tonight’s the Night, easily the finest rock album of the 1970s (or, to my mind, since). This doesn’t come close but, as it’s from Young’s most rewarding period, it holds a certain interest. Five songs have been released elsewhere, including the lovely ‘Star of Bethlehem’ (on Young’s underrated American Stars ’n’ Bars).

A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and announces his intention to destroy the establishment via the medium of rock records. But who is it? Is it Bob Geldof or John Lydon? Citizens of Boomtown: The Story of the Boomtown Rats — another in the ongoing trend of the BBC screening films that are fundamentally ads for a band’s new album — made the case for Geldof, suggesting he and his bandmates singlehandedly dragged Ireland into the modern age (the Daily Telegraph’s chief rock critic popped up to say they were the first roar of the Celtic Tiger).

The Glastonbury festival has undergone a series of metamorphoses in the 31 years since I first attended as a 15-year-old fence hopper (as, indeed, have I, thank heavens). One of the most significant changes, to pillage Gil Scott-Heron’s famous prophecy, is that the evolution has been televised. Back in 1989, if your boots weren’t on the ground — often a quagmire, though not that year — you missed out on all the fun. This has not been the case for aeons. Television coverage of Glastonbury began on Channel 4 in 1994, switching to the BBC three years later.

In 1992 Prince released a single called ‘My Name Is Prince’. On first hearing it seemed appropriately regal. Cocky, even. Only in hindsight did it appear somewhat needy, a litany not of what Prince was going to do, but of the things he had already done. On it, he pulled rank on his status — ‘I’ve seen the top and it’s just a dream / Big cars and women and fancy clothes’ — called out young rappers for their potty mouths, and declared himself ‘fresh and funky for the 90s’. Context is everything. By 1992, Prince was still funky – but fresh? He had been, indisputably, pop’s premier agitator throughout the previous decade; as David Bowie was to the 1970s, so Prince was to the 1980s.

Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music can be. Its potency, however, is not innate. Amanda Prynne, from Coward’s Private Lives, would not have been especially struck by ‘Some day I’ll Find You’ had it been playing on a wireless in a shop; its impact came from hearing it as she again encountered her ex-husband. For cheap music to be potent, context is everything. Without a wider meaning, a cheap little pop song is just notes and chords. With meaning, the most throwaway frippery can become an object of fascination. That’s often true of the best known of songs.

Grade: B+ Just what you wanted. An opening track that matches banal piano noodling to an address by Greta Thunberg. Followed by a hugely unconvincing stab at tuneless industrial metal on a song called ‘People’, in which the aforementioned — me and you, not them, of course — are cautioned to ‘WAKE UP!!’ Leafy Wilmslow’s middle-class skag-head prophet, Matty Healy, is back, then, with a series of injunctions for us all, spread over interminable length and always skating on the very edge of parody. The 1975 are probably Britain’s biggest ‘rock’ band — those quote marks are needed — and this vast slab of pretentious, gullible, vacuous commendations to us all went straight in at number one.

The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on to record everything that amused them. And early on, in their teens-get-drunk debut album, Licensed To Ill, that resulted in obnoxiousness. But mostly they were kinetic and colourful, which is why the new Apple TV+ film about them works so well. The format suits the story. Beastie Boys Story simply documents a stage show where winningly they talk the audience through their personal history. It’s much like Netflix’s Springsteen on Broadway. But since the third Beastie, Adam Yauch, died in 2012, the band no longer perform, so where Springsteen punctuated his memories with songs, the Beasties do it with film clips.

Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song between them yet put out albums by the bucketload? Back in the day it was just Joni Mitchell, who had four good songs, Laura Nyro who had two and Dory Previn who had one. Now there are thousands of these creatures, flaunting their intemperance without showing much brilliance. And all slavered over by the (still male) music press. Years of oppression, of being disregarded, they would argue. But disregarded for very good reasons, in almost all cases. Yeah, Carole King is ten times the songwriter James Taylor ever was. I will give you that. We got that wrong. But that doesn’t mean we have to be tormented for eternity by the likes of Laura flipping Marling, does it?

The ghost of Samuel Beckett oversaw the Hip Hop Loves NY livestream last Thursday night. Time and time again its host, the veteran hip-hop TV presenter Ralph McDaniels — known to all his guests, unnervingly, as ‘Uncle Ralph’ — tried to connect to some Golden Age legend. Time and time again, his attempts at a straightforward interview went wrong. We saw Uncle Ralph, on one half of the screen, ask a question about Covid-19, nod along to the answer, then say, ‘Thank you, doctor.’ But we didn’t have a doctor on screen, or on our audio. We had Ice T. ‘I ain’t no doctor,’ Ice-T said. Cut to Nas. But Nas was inaudible, and his picture was breaking up. ‘I see Chuck D!’ He did, but we didn’t.

You have to admire the spirit of the organisers of last weekend’s One World: Together at Home concert. To put on an event that seemed to last longer than lockdown itself is the sort of can-do attitude we love to see. The main event — the really star-studded portion that was shown live on Saturday night on the big three US networks, and then adapted for the UK and shown on BBC1 on Sunday — began only after six whole hours of preamble from slightly lesser turns. Six hours. That’s an awful lot of watching people sit with an acoustic guitar in front of their webcam. Or sometimes not even sit with an acoustic guitar — Jessie J appeared to be doing karaoke with her own CDs and singing over the top of them.

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a period of solitary reflection, rather than as instantaneous public display.

There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the ownership of her old songs by her previous record label would scupper it. But no, Ms Swift is not to be resisted, and lo, Miss Americana is available right now on Netflix, one of its two big music documentaries for the spring. Many older men seem to have a visceral distaste for Ms Swift. If you share that distaste, then I’m sorry, it’s your loss, because she’s a fascinating figure (who has also made three truly terrific albums in Fearless, Red and 1989), and Miss Americana is well worth watching.