Hack at work.
Killing Bono
"The best book I have ever read about trying to make it in the music business" - Elton John
"A fantastic book, which manages the difficult trick of being simultaneously very funny and very sad." - Bob Geldof
"I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book" - Bono
Kris Kristofferson: a throwback to an old mythic America
Kris Kristofferson, Cadogan Hall 29 Jul 2010
For a singer-songwriter who can barely play guitar, struggles with the harmonica and only has a few notes in his gravelly voice, Kris Kristofferson has come a long way. At 74, standing tall and straight at the centre of an otherwise empty stage, he held a London audience completely spellbound by the magical power of an open spirit and truly great songs.
You can’t argue with classics like ’Me And Bobby McGee’, ’Sunday Morning Coming Down’, ’Help Me Make It Through The Night’ and ’For The Good Times’, and no one here was in the mood to. Every scuffed note and wobbly harmonica solo (“Well it ain’t Bob Dylan but it’s all we’ve got,” joked Kristofferson after one particularly lame effort) was treated with indulgent delight.
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Tom Jones: the oldest swinger in the charts
July 29th, 2010
If midweek sales hold up, 70-year-old Tom Jones is on course to becoming the oldest man to top the British album charts. Jones previously held the record as a mere stripling of 59, when his contemporary pop duets set Reloaded went to number one in 1999. But he was superseded by then 68-year-old Bob Dylan last year with Together Through Life. Now Jones is poised to take the crown back, with an album or raw rocking gospel music, Praise And Blame.
The old guys are but spring chickens (well, autumn chickens, maybe) compared to Dame Vera Lynn, who got to number one last year aged 92, although that was with a compilation album recorded in her prime.
Age used to be one of the battlegrounds of pop culture. Now, one has to almost wax nostalgic to think back to a time when fans debated whether this or that artist was too old to rock and roll.
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John Cooper Clarke: punk’s poet laureate
John Cooper Clarke appears like a man out of time. He is stick thin, dressed in shiny black boots, tight black straights, sharp shirt and buttoned-up Sixties jacket, topped off with impenetrable Raybans and an enormous, spiky, dyed black barnet. At 61, Clarke is wrinkled, his lips have shrunk, and his teeth are full of bits of gold, but otherwise he looks exactly the same as when he was the poet laureate of punk, the self-styled bard of Salford, a comic wordsmith with almost household name status.
“You know what I like to think of myself as? Adam Adamant,” Clarke declares, recalling the short-lived BBC series from 1966 about a Victorian adventurer in swinging London.
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The Jolly Boys: sound that rocked Jamaica
Published: 5:18PM BST 21 Jul 2010
Jolly Boys, featuring Albert Minott, centre
‘Everybody knows Albert,” says Albert Minott proudly as he walks through the streets of Port Antonio, Jamaica, recognised by many of the passers-by. “This is my town. I was born here, and I’ll die here. All my life, singing and dancing. It’s like a fire inside.”
Tall and lean, the 71-year-old Minott cuts a dapper figure in a matching ensemble of crisp shirts and slacks, waistcoats and cravats, set off with nifty colour co-ordinated trilby hats. He would stand out anywhere, let alone amid the faded Caribbean glamour of Jamaica’s north coast resort, where painted wooden shacks lean up against collapsing colonial buildings, and the locals favour bright T-shirts and shorts.
Albert pauses to point out the marina, where he used to dive for coins back in the Forties, when the banana boat pulled in. “Way back when England was our mother,” he says, a mischievous smile displaying his few remaining teeth.
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Nas and Damian Marley: two tribes don’t go to war
Nas and Damian Marley, Hammersmith Apollo live review * * * * *
Published: 21 Jul 2010
the dude with the hair is the reggae superstar
The police were out in force for this concert bringing together superstars of two musical genres not particularly celebrated for advocating compliance with the letter of the law: hip hop and reggae. Perhaps it was the explicit declaration of opening number ’As We Enter’ that had Her Majesty’s constabulary concerned, when rapper Nasir Jones declares “I got the guns” and Damian Marley gleefully responds “And I got the ganja.”
Any apprehension that this might prove anything other than a celebratory union of exceptional talents was misplaced. Hammersmith Apollo was packed with the loudest, happiest, most upbeat audience I have witnessed in a while, and it wasn’t all down to secondary inhalation.
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The xx factor: its the quiet ones you have to watch
Published: 21 Jul 2010
When the Mercury Prize was announced this week, the xx were quickly installed as bookies favourites. Actually, they were favourites before the shortlist was even announced, topping every critic’s list of predictions.
There are more established names up for the prize (Paul Weller, Dizzee Rascal, Corinne Bailey Rae) but the xx have been taking the music world by stealth not storm, creeping up on the slow lane with one of the most original yet seductively approachable debut albums in recent memory. It never even broke into the UK top thirty (peaking at number 31, although that is likely to change now) but it has already quietly notched up over 150,000 British sales, with another 179,000 in America (where it just scraped into the top 100, at number 92).
Quietly is the operative word. Everything about the xx is low key and understated. Even their name is typed in lower case. Indeed, so minimalistic is the xx’s ethos that when keyboard player Baria Qureshi left right before a gig, they opted not to replace her, instead boiling down their already basic arrangements to accommodate a three piece of drums, bass and guitar.
What is truly remarkable is that they manage to create something unique with such a standard rock line-up.
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Mercury Prize: does anyone actually want to win it?
July 20th, 2010
Gorillaz reflect on their narrow escape from the curse of the Mercurys
Well, here’s that Mercury Prize list. I got six out of twelve in my predictions, so half marks: Corinne Bailey Rae, Laura Marling, Paul Weller, Villagers, Wild Beasts and the XX. I’m not particularly surprised by any of the other six, apart from the Kit Downes Trio, which takes the annual token jazz album spot with a record that has had no impact outside of its tightly enclosed genre whatsoever.
But it is hard to argue with the quality of the contenders. It is a more substantial and, in many ways, more mainstream selection than last year’s list, which I think is down to the simple fact that there has been a lot of interesting music released over the last year that has crossed from the margins to the mainstream. The only question worth posing is whether this absolutely represents the best of British and Irish music from the past year:
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Mercury Prize 2010: my predictions
July 19th, 2010
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on The XX
The shortlist for the Barclaycard Mercury Prize will be announced tomorrow. But I thought I’d get in there early and announce it myself. Or at least make my predictions. I am slightly hampered by not really understanding the criteria for the prize, but since this seems to be the case for the judges too, I’m not going to let it hinder me.
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Latitude: they threw a picnic & a festival broke out
Published: 19 Jul 2010
The first thing I saw as I arrived at Latitude was Sadler’s Wells ballet company staging Swan Lake on a platform on a river, a dancing, dying swan surrounded by reeds and rippling water. A massive rock festival crowd had gathered to enjoy a bit of high culture in the sun. The psychedelically painted sheep, munching grass in their enclosure, blithely ignored the whole spectacle.
Backstage at the literary arena, veteran performance poet John Cooper Clarke described Latitude as “the festival for rock fans with library cards.” Over in a packed comedy marquee, proudly working-class comedian Micky Flanagan joked that the middle classes were out in force because “they’ve heard about the falafels”.
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Robbie Williams & Take That reunion won’t last
July 16th, 2010
Take That Mark II: Back For Good, bad or indifferent?
Yesterday, the media was put on alert that a major announcement would be made by a pop band.
Oh no, I thought, Jedward have split up.
Well, it would have been more newsworthy than Robbie Williams rejoining Take That. The reunion of the original line up of Britain’s best-loved overgrown boy band is not so much a surprise as an inevitability. It is the merger of two best-selling brands, a blockbusting money-spinner at a time when the moribund music industry needs all the blockbusters it can lay its grubby fingers on.
With Williams stellar solo career at last showing inevitable signs of decline (last year’s ‘Reality’ was his first studio album not to reach number one in the UK), a reunion with his commercially revived former bandmates provides both a respite from the intense demands of solo stardom and the possibility of rejuvenation.
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