Culture

Somebody obviously thought it a good idea that Emmylou Harris play her last ever Scottish show in a soulless sports hall in the east end of Glasgow. Built for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the feel of the Emirates Arena on a chilly January night was less Sweet Home Alabama, more Home Counties Ikea. As well as kicking off this year’s Celtic Connections, the city’s annual festival of roots music, Harris was also kickstarting her farewell tour of Europe. She plays her final UK shows in May, including one at the Royal Albert Hall, which seems a more fitting setting for a regal adieu than a pimped-up cycling track. Presumably, the choice of venue was a numbers game. Whatever the reason, it was a poor one.

Bernard Butler has popped up a couple of times in this column, but not alone – once, with two fellow songwriter-guitarists as Butler, Blake & Grant; but also writing and performing with Jessie Buckley, to sublime effect. Over 30 years Butler has become one of pop’s great enablers. He’s worked on hit records, miss records and records that were never intended to be hits. He’s played with everyone, but has seldom sought much of a spotlight himself. Like Johnny Marr, he stepped away from a generational band – Suede – at the height of the mania for them. Like Marr – and unlike most others who step away from stardom and seek the shadows – he continued working, but always on his own terms.

There would, on the surface, appear to be little common ground between the wife of stuffy old Malcolm Muggeridge and the latest bard of blue-collar America. Yet the unlikely ascendancy of Zach Bryan brings to mind Kitty Muggeridge’s killer putdown of David Frost as the superstar who ‘rose without a trace’. You may be surprised to learn that Bryan, a 29-year-old US Navy veteran from Oklahoma, will headline two concerts later this year at Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium, as well as perform to 60,000 people each night in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He now ranks alongside Bon Jovi and Bruno Mars as a gold-star draw on the 2026 summer show circuit.

Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad who had grown up in Worcestershire, became the leonine singer of Led Zeppelin in 1968, a self-proclaimed ‘golden god’. Lydon, a scrawny kid from Holloway, who had been hospitalised for a year with meningitis as a child, became Johnny Rotten, and in 1976 helped deliver ‘the filth and the fury’ – as the Daily Mirror put it – on the nation’s TV screens as a quarter of the Sex Pistols. Both, it would be fair to say, have ambivalent relationships with their pasts. After Zeppelin’s demise in 1980, Plant spent a couple of decades being active, but without much direction.

The path that links the Spice Girls to Jeffrey Dahmer – necrophile mass murderer of at least 17 men – is a circuitous and unusual one. It involves the establishment of Mothercare and Harold Wilson’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the New York underground of the early 1980s. The thread that joins the ends is a 76-year-old Ohioan called Chris Butler. Butler was part of that art underground in 1981. He was – and is – a musician. Back home in Akron he’d started several bands – the wonderful art rock group 15-60-75 (aka the Numbers Band), and Tin Huey – and he’d brought the newest of them, the Waitresses, to New York. They were signed to ZE Records, an extraordinarily hip label run by a Frenchman, Michel Esteban, and an Englishman, Michael Zilkha.

There were times watching Radiohead’s first UK show for seven years when Ricky Gervais came to mind. As Thom Yorke dad-danced around the circular stage in the middle of the arena, his bandmates all hunched over their equipment – which made it resemble a server room of a call centre – I felt as though I was witnessing David Brent doing the samba around the office. I have to confess that there are large chunks of Radiohead I simply don’t understand.

A male British rapper who is unafraid to show tenderness and vulnerability is not a particularly new phenomenon: Dave, Stormzy, Headie One and Kano have all walked this path in recent times. None, however, has made emotional fragility his USP to quite the same extent as Loyle Carner, who writes about his children, his masculine role models, mental health, race and inherited trauma in an unthreatening sing-song style which has made him both a pop star and a bit of a poster boy for Feeling Things. His tour is named after his fourth and most recent album, hopefully!. To his credit, he has put his money where his rhymes are. Carner has preached about knife crime from the stage at Glastonbury. He was talking about his ADHD before it became the topic du jour for celebrity over-sharers.

On YouTube – and I urge you to look it up – there is a magnificent piece of footage from German TV, in which big band leader James Last leads his orchestra into a medley of hard rock hits, opening with Hawkwind’s deathless space-rock drone ‘Silver Machine’. And damn it if they don’t nail it. The members of the band with electric instruments play it just as Hawkwind did: the whooshing synth, the thudding bass, the fuzzing guitar. But instead of Lemmy growling out the topline melody, there is a huge rush of brass from the band, the brightness cutting unexpectedly through the murk. It is, unironically, brilliant. I have no desire to investigate much else of Last’s colossal oeuvre, but I can watch those few minutes over and over again.

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.

Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the mainstream acclaim he gained for his debut – when, for a solid five minutes, he was the latest in a long line of ‘new Bob Dylans’. He has, however, carved out an interesting and worthwhile career across five further albums, expanding his core skill set of folk guitar and knottily poetic wordplay with experimental touches of electronica and orchestration.

Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young Mick Hucknall being interviewed. What he wanted, he said, was to be a great singer. Usually, that’s the cue for a gag about fate having other plans. Not this time. He’s 65 now, and he truly is a great singer as he showed for the best part of two hours. He knows it, too. A couple of songs in, he benignly told his audience at the first of two nights at the O2 that he liked it when they sang along with the choruses, but maybe leave the verses to him. The person next to you, he explained, had come to hear him sing, not you. But not just hear – Hucknall is worth watching as well. Seeing him was like witnessing one of the great standards singers of the 1950s.

The Last Dinner Party received quite the critical backlash when they arrived amid much fanfare in 2023. Posh, precocious and theatrical, armed with lofty ideas that matched their station as four young women who had benefited from very expensive educations, the band encountered widespread suspicion that they were industry ‘plants’, or had somehow bought their way to instant recognition. Happily, their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, proved sufficiently accomplished to repel these waves of hostility (strange how the success of privileged young women tends to attract far greater opprobrium than that of privileged young men). In any case, the excellence of the follow-up should settle the matter.

Lady Gaga’s show was to begin at 7.30  prompt, we were told. No opening act. And at 7.30 something did happen: the big screen over the stage started showing a film of Ms Gaga, clad in scarlet finery, writing on a scroll with a peacock-feather quill, while the PA played opera’s greatest hits. For more than an hour the film ran, an impassive Gaga doing nothing but writing. An hour. It was nearly as dull as a Paul Thomas Anderson film, and it’s a miracle it took 45 minutes for the handclaps to start ringing around the arena. Was she about to do a Madonna – who had to keep cutting short her O2 shows because she was about to break their curfew? In the end, no. Gaga just managed to end in time, but it was tight. And she won back her crowd.

Let’s hear it for the odd couples of popular music: Bowie and Bing. Shaggy and Sting. Metallica and Lou Reed. Nick Cave and Kylie. U2 and Pavarotti. The ongoing collaboration between James Yorkston and Nina Persson isn’t quite so wildly unlikely as any of these but still seems intrinsically counter-intuitive; until, that is, the realisation dawns that each has a stakehold in the other’s natural territory. Yorkston is a fifty-something Scottish folkie with the honed melodic instincts of a pop aficionada. Persson is a former rock star from Sweden whose voice has the controlled command found in the best traditional singers. Which perhaps explains why a pairing that makes little sense on paper makes perfectly imperfect sense in the flesh.

I think a lot about Wishbone Ash. A disproportionate amount. Partly because I have had to listen to them for around ten hours while researching a book. Partly because when I was a kid, I always found it curious that Wishbone Ash were advertised in the weekly music press but never reviewed. Back then, broadsheets barely covered rock, so there was no room for their gigs and albums there. But they were never on Top of the Pops or The Tube or even Whistle Test  either. Perhaps Tommy Vance occasionally gave them a spin on the Friday Rock Show, but other than that they were not on Radio 1. They existed entirely outside of what I perceived of as the world of rock. At that point Wishbone Ash were 15 years on from their first album. Suede are 32 years on from theirs.

There is a downside to being fast-tracked into the position of this season’s newest pop sensation, and it became more and more obvious the longer Chappell Roan’s self-proclaimed ‘biggest ever show’ went on. A freshly risen pop star promoting their debut album should, by law, be performing a 40-minute hit-and-run set in a sweaty club, showcasing the absolute cream of their catalogue. Bang, bang, bang. Over and out. But the fast-track these days moves at positively breakneck speed. Barely a year after her first hit, Roan found herself playing to an audience of some 100,000 fans, convening over two nights on an ugly plot of land adjacent to an airport as part of the Edinburgh Summer Sessions series, whose fervour demanded the full event experience.

I enjoyed watching the Lemonheads fall apart on stage more than perhaps I should have Nowadays, when the default setting for live music is ruthlessly choreographed efficiency, there is a queasy kind of thrill in watching a performance forever teetering on the edge of pure unprofessional pandemonium. Which is to say, I enjoyed watching the Lemonheads fall apart on stage more than perhaps I should have.  The Lemonheads are and always were Evan Dando fronting whatever revolving cast of associates are willing to put up with him. This is both the band’s great superpower and its eternal Achilles’ heel. Dando is a fine and heartful singer, songwriter and interpreter. He is also the loosest of loose cannons.

This isn’t going to be a piece celebrating the rich cultural tapestry of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, sombrely expressing the importance of preserving its heritage and history. I just like going to Carnival. I see it as an opportunity to make the most of the last dregs of the summer. I’ll meet my friends, dance to a grizzled Rasta’s tunes with a Magnum or two (a syrupy, 16.5 per cent alcohol, Jamaican tonic wine), watch the steel drums and befeathered dancers, before decamping with a box of jerk chicken and fried plantain. There’s no £499 VIP Platinum wristband you can buy to have the premium Carnie experience I spent the first decade or so of my life in London, and returning here as an adult is a disillusioning experience.

I have nothing but admiration for those men who burn a candle for the music of 1966. Partly because, like them, I believe 1966 to be pop’s greatest year, but mainly because being a psychedelic hipster requires a commitment that invites ridicule. It’s one thing to be an ageing fella who likes rock’n’roll – sharp denim and a well-tended quiff can look just fine. And you can never really tell the age of a metalhead – they just look like a metalhead. But to wear your hair in an outgrown bowl cut, and to strut around in tight red trousers as Seeds singer Paul Kopf does, is inevitably to invite catcalls of ‘Oi, Austin Powers!’. You have to really believe in it to go through life like that.

Our relationships with bands are often very like our relationships with people. Some are pure and lasting love. Some start promisingly but spoil. Some are quick, thrilling flings, others a more meaningful yet distant connection. Elbow are the kind of band you enjoy having a pint with every few months. Not always the most exciting company, perhaps, but smart, convivial and good hearted. Thoughtful. Reliable. They might arrive – bang on time – for your latest rendezvous armed with a funny story about a beleaguered colleague, but they’re unlikely to announce they’re running off to Brazzaville with the intern. You know where you are with Elbow – in this instance, a shallow concrete amphitheatre in Glasgow’s leafy west end.

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 Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy is releasing a new album this week. It is called Ain’t Done With The Blues – a statement which one might argue seems redundant considering Guy, who is 89, has been releasing albums with the word ‘blues’ in the title since 1967’s Left My Blues In San Francisco. Since then, we’ve had A Man And The Blues (1968), The Blues Giant (1979), DJ Play My Blues (1982), Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues (1991), Rhythm & Blues (2013), The Blues Is Alive And Well (2018) and The Blues Don’t Lie (2022). This is a man who isn’t ever going to give David Bowie a run for his money in the shapeshifter stakes; Guy’s listeners can have their music any colour they want, as long as it’s blue, blue, electric blue. This is how it has to be.

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.

Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance, proves the point that just because you can sell enough tickets to fill a stadium doesn’t mean you should necessarily perform in one. Some music blossoms in the sun, some ripens in the shadows. Billie Eilish belongs in the latter camp. Even though her biggest hit, ‘Birds of a Feather’, was the most streamed song on Spotify last year and is now approaching three billion listens, and her duet withCharli xcx on ‘Guess’ was another ubiquitous sound of 2024, her appeal remains slightly subversive.

We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do not make rational decisions. They do not, when QPR are rubbish, pop across west London to support Chelsea, though it might be the economically rational thing to do. Same with pop. I’m a music fan more than I am a customer.

There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be faked or fudged. No lofty exposition, no pleading discourse, no mitigating circumstance, no ifs, buts or boo-hoo back story can bend a piece of so-so music into a great pop song. We simply know one when we hear one. Commentators may gush about Beyoncé’s genre-strafing cultural significance until the cows come home, but it doesn’t alter the plain fact that she hasn’t released a single piece of music in more than a decade that will stand the test of time come pop’s judgment day. ‘Pop’ implies freshness. Fizz. This doesn’t merely apply to the sound of the music, but the speed of delivery. It should be urgent, immediate, endlessly on tap.

If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In rock and pop there is only one: the dizzying rise, the imperial period, the fall from grace (either commercial or ethical, sometimes both), and the noble return (historically prefigured with a glossy music mag cover proclaiming: ‘Booze! Fights! Madness! How Rubbish Band went to hell – and came back’). All three were on view in London this past fortnight. Waxahatchee was the one on the way up: this was, Katie Crutchfield announced proudly from the stage, the ensemble’s biggest-ever show. Dua Lipa was the one entering her imperial phase – her first Wembley headline, with a production to match.