Michael Hann

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.

Everyone uses the word ‘indie’ to describe a style of music. And Pulp and Wet Leg are two bands that fit squarely into that rubric. But remember what the word originally meant. An abbreviation of independent, ‘indie’ was music recorded, manufactured and distributed outside the major label system. It began as an economic necessity: the only way the music that the majors were not interested in could reach a public. But it quickly became a belief system: DIY at all costs to avoid the corruption of filthy lucre. And eventually it came to mean a certain kind of music. Pulp’s show was part of a weekend of events at the Southbank Centre celebrating the 50th anniversary of Rough Trade, the label that began as a record shop.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By the time Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief was born in 1991, Kim Gordon had already released seven albums with Sonic Youth. It’s not that there were no women in bands in the 1980s but there were few enough that the concept of the ‘Women in Rock Special’ was very familiar to desperate music journalists. It was also still the case that, within bands, women were seldom granted centre stage – unless they looked extraordinary or ran the band. That meant Gordon, and Kim Deal of Pixies, were more celebrated than any male bassist of a 1980s indie band. (Keith Gregory of the Wedding Present, for example, was never considered brain-meltingly cool simply for existing.

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.

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 last time I saw CMAT – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – was in the middle of a grey afternoon at a festival. She brought a charismatic refusal to be embarrassed to the day, and walked off with rather more fans than she had walked on with. Three albums in, she’s become a big deal – big enough to have screens at the side of the stage for the 10,000 people watching, who knew almost every word of her songs. CMAT’s appeal, I think, is that her aesthetic is that of an ordinary woman acting out and acting up the Charli XCX image. The latter had said that her ‘brat’ aesthetic was: ‘Just, like, a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter, and, like, a strappy white top. With no bra. That’s, like, kind of all you need.

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.

John Mulaney appeared to be just another of those identical, slick, clean-cut, young comedians in suits until Covid. But all was not well. In December 2020, a bunch of his showbiz pals staged an intervention and sent him to rehab for his addictions to cocaine and various prescription drugs. Out of rehab, he promptly parted from his wife, the artist Annamarie Tendler, and met the actress Olivia Munn. As he noted in Mister Whatever, his latest show, when their son was born, he and Munn had known each other for ‘nine months and 45 minutes’. They are now married.

Annie & the Caldwells are a long-running family gospel ensemble from West Point, Mississippi – father and sons playing guitar, bass and drums, mother and daughters singing. The chaps offer a sinewy, stripped-down funk redolent of the late 1970s: dad, Willie J. Caldwell Sr, is a fantastic guitarist, and mother and daughters tear the roof off the place. They came to attention when David Byrne put out a record on his Luaka Bop label, and suddenly they were no longer just a local gospel group. Except they are. In an early show at Ronnie Scott’s, Annie – seated centre-stage in what looked like a black leather housecoat – was there to save souls. She refused to be discouraged by only three hands rising when she asked who believed in Jesus.

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.

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.

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.