Rock

No one ever joined a rock band because they didn’t want to be recognised. Being adored matters to stars, sometimes too much, but that only makes those who love them care even more. That could be heard in the cries of ‘We love you, Mac!’ at a glorious night in Regent’s Park. Echo & The Bunnymen’s singer Ian McCulloch – who was once famous for pronouncing on how much better his band was than any other – has not had an easy time of it in recent years. Unlike his peers in the Cure and U2, he’s not playing to 50,000 people at a time, though his band were regarded as every bit their equals – perhaps their betters – in the early 1980s.

It’s a measure of Geese’s rise – their flight? – that, on Thursday night, the social media accounts of End of the Road were receiving requests for refunds from ticket-holders stuck in traffic somewhere near Shaftesbury who feared missing the first-night headliner. For many the four-day event would have been rendered meaningless without a glimpse of the New York quartet. For those who didn’t make it, well, you missed a treat. I entered a Geese-sceptic. I really enjoyed their first album from 2018, but they had become a completely different band in the intervening years. Their debut had been a charming, youthful indie-pop record made by actual kids in their mid-teens.

You could have been forgiven for mistaking Hackney for the site of an El Alamein reunion the other Sunday. Victoria Park was cloaked in a cloud of dust. Tens of thousands of feet had scrubbed the grass clear during All Points East festival and were pounding the scorched earth. People were covering as much of their faces as they could with masks, pulled right up to their eyes, sunglasses blocking the remaining skin. I saw a couple of enterprising chaps wearing pilot’s goggles – and given the state of my eyes as I tried to move around the site, I don’t blame them. The Californian band Deftones were headlining the park as part of an event called Outbreak, in turn part of a multi-weekend series of events under the All Points East banner.

My, how other so-called legacy acts must envy the Cure. There are plenty of bands of 40 or 50 years standing where the original fanbase brings along their offspring to concerts– but very few where so many tribes seem to gather so willingly under their own steam. From post-punk survivors to domesticated millennials, Gen Xers and Zeders, pop kids, neo-goths and sundry alternative types, the Cure seem to say something specific and urgent to each constituency. Perhaps it’s something about their songs speaking to the child in the adult, and the adult in the child. In any case, there we all were, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, on a warm summer Sunday, rising and falling to the music as the planes came and went at the airport next door.

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.

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.

How is it that two things that are fundamentally the same can be completely different? Two bands, each harking back to a specific historical reference point in heavy music, each using distortion and volume as an important part of their presentation. Standing just outside the big old turntable shed’s main room you could just hear them and easily imagine Wednesday and Airbourne following each other on some festival stage and sharing the same audience. Not so much inside the room, though. Wednesday, however they might care to describe themselves, are currently a grunge band, but with a singer-songwriter, Karly Hartzman, who dwells more in introspection and observation than rage and self-flagellation.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, but you wouldn’t know it from the activity of the last few years. In no particular order, we have had an underwhelming valedictory single, “Now and Then,” raised from the dead thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and Peter Jackson alike; an eight-hour – eight!– documentary, Get Back, resurrected from the footage of the Let It Be sessions; and now, an all-singing, all-dancing reissue on Disney+ of the Nineties Anthology documentary series, which has been promoted with the fourth volume of offcuts and rare tracks from the band’s career, appropriately titled Anthology 4.

The last time Gillian Welch and David Rawlings played in London it was a different world: the world of David Cameron and Barack Obama and a Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. Welch and Rawlings have changed, too: Welch is silver rather than red, and Rawlings as grizzled as a bear. Welch was in brown floor-length dress and Rawlings in suede jacket and cowboy hat. With a rather younger upright-bass-player, Paul Kowert, the trio looked like farmers trying to save their land from The Man in some Taylor Sheridan TV series. And then they started singing. Welch and Rawlings have released records under their own names and as a pairing.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will doubtless satisfy the completists. But non-completists – I could have named only two of his songs, tops – may wonder if it’s that interesting. Also, as White’s performance isn’t a million miles from tortured chef Carmy in Disney+’s The Bear I kept expecting him to put down his guitar and go tweeze micro-herbs on some fancy dish. This may be a problem. ‘I know who you are,’ says a fan. ‘That makes one of us,’ he replies.

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired piece called ‘Lick My Love Pump’) become part of our lives. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, by contrast, comes amid a loud fanfare – which may be part of the problem, because the result certainly doesn’t live up to expectations that are inevitably sky-high. Then again, the sad truth is that it mightn’t have lived up to lower ones either.

You’d have thought Wembley Stadium was a sportswear convention, so ubiquitous were the three stripes down people’s arms from all the Adidas merch: veni, vidi, adi. Pints drunk: 250,000 a night, apparently. All along the Metropolitan line pubs noted an Oasis dividend. At a corner shop, I was sold an official Oasis Clipper lighter. It’s surprising Heinz hasn’t yet offered an Oasis soup; you get a roll with it. Plainly, an awful lot of people have missed Oasis. And an awful lot of people – Noel and Liam Gallagher included – saw the chance to make an awful lot of money from their reformation. I don’t think any of them – neither fans nor entrepreneurs – will have been disappointed. At Wembley, the atmosphere was remarkable.

The highs of Stevie Wonder’s Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone who heard that phenomenal group play ‘Living for the City’ or ‘Superstition’ and didn’t feel ‘ants in my pants and I need to dance’, as James Brown once put it, should resign from life: they do not deserve such joy. That said, there were oddities. We were blessed with visits from four of Wonder’s nine children, two of whom were given whole songs to sing while the great man had a breather, as were three of the backing singers.

One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the scrape and the scratch; the arbitrary beauty of found sounds and field recordings. The meaning can be as banal or as profound as desired. Is that distant clanging the bells of mortal dread tolling for us all; or simply next door’s bin lid clattering on to the pavement?

Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats in the house, with fantastic sightlines and excellent sound (a PR who used to work for U2 told me she would routinely reassign press into even better seats than the already splendid ones they had originally been given; you do anything you can to get an extra 1 per cent more enthusiasm into the review). When we go to standing venues, though, we are as prone to the vagaries of geography as anyone else. And because we go to a lot of shows, we tend to arrive only five minutes before the turn we want to see goes on stage, which means we rarely find great positions.

I am a regular attendee at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh’s most ornate and venerable concert venue. On more than one occasion recently I have seen Hamish Hawk here – albeit each time he was showing the audience to our seats. Hawk has graduated from Grand Circle stair duty to centre-stage spotlight, the kind of local-boy-made-good dramatic arc that positively begs for the Richard Curtis treatment. Making his debut headlining the 2,200-capacity venue, Hawk had the good grace to allude to his change in circumstances halfway through his set: ‘Please, be kind to the ushers…’ Everyone loves a hometown hero, but the pressure to deliver as a returning prodigal must be oppressive.

It was Irish week in London, with one group from the north and one from the south. Guinness was sold in unusual amounts; green football shirts were plentiful; and so, at both shows, was a genuinesense of joyful triumph – these were the biggest London venues either group had headlined. The Irishness was much more visible onstage at Kneecap, not least because, as a proudly Republican group, they can’t really not make a big deal of being from west Belfast. Their statements have prompted the inevitable fury from some quarters: Kemi Badenoch (as business secretary) refused them a £15,000 grant to help them tour, on the grounds that the British state should not be aiding those who despise it.

‘Can I have a photo with you, please?’ It’s the most embarrassing question you can ask of someone you’re interviewing. But I had to. Not only because Evan Dando is one of my favourite songwriters. But also – vainly – because years of on-off drug addiction (mostly on) mean Dando is no longer quite the beautiful young man he was when he became famous in the early 1990s. Back then, I’d have looked like a troll standing next to him. Now, not so much. It was a night of beautiful imperfection – the kind that feels truer than a thousand arena shows He still, however, looks better than he has any right to, and in the evening he proved that he sounded better than I had dared to hope. Better still, he was fully present – not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.

A few years ago, I received an early morning phone call from Nick Cave’s former PR, berating me for not crediting his band the Bad Seeds in an album review. She was quite right. As Cave says, with a hint of paternal pride, during this powerhouse Glasgow show: ‘This band can do anything.’ It’s not just that the Bad Seeds’s task ranges from delicately enhancing the most nakedly exposed ballads to unleashing a raging firestorm of noise. It’s that supporting a performer as mercurial as Cave takes oodles of nous and empathy. He’s a wild thing, but they never once lose him.