Pop

This column does like a bargain. Indeed, it not only esteems and relishes a bargain, it has also worked long and hard to prove Milton Friedman wrong. Sometimes there really is such a thing as a free lunch. And for those of us still wedded to the notion of owning music on some kind of solid, tangible medium (vinyl, CD, dusty box of cassettes at back of cupboard), these are great, cheapskate-friendly years in which to be alive. Almost every song ever recorded can be bought for a song. And still we mothwallets can claim the moral high ground, because we’re not actually stealing it, unlike everyone under 40. As

I have been writing a book this summer, in the usual mad tearing hurry. (Much as I admire those who take four or five years to write one, I have to ask, how do you eat? This isn’t by any means a sensible way of making a living.) Intense workload, though, means music, and lots of it. Many writers simply cannot work with tunes blaring out of nearby speakers; I cannot work without them. Music masks my tinnitus and distracts the part of my brain that would otherwise be trying to distract me from my work. You know, the Facebook part. The videos-of-cats part. The Marks & Spencers chocolate-covered shortbread

It’s rare that I see a piece about music that makes me want to cheer from the rafters and shake the perpetrator by the hand, but one such appeared in these pages last week on the subject of Ringo Starr, 75 this week. James Woodall, who may or may not be a Beatles tragic of the first water, argued that Ringo was a genius and that the Beatles were lucky to have him. True Beatles fans know this to be true and are enraged when anyone suggests otherwise. For years an urban myth had it that John Lennon, when asked if Ringo was the best drummer around, said that he

Like a lot of essentially cautious people, I like my music to take some risks, play with fire and damn the consequences. In truth, of course, most musicians are every bit as conservative as the rest of us: they do whatever it is they do and if it sells, they keep on doing it until they drop. Three small cheers, then, for Mumford & Sons, who with their recently released third album took a completely unexpected swerve away from the phony banjo-intensive folk that had made their name and their fortune, into the stadium rock’n’roll they have obviously always wanted to play. As may have been gently hinted at in

Songwriting credits are, as we know, not always to be trusted. Since the dawn of music publishing, there has always been a manager or an agent or a well-connected representative of organised crime willing to take a small cut of a song’s royalties, in return for services rendered or threats not carried out. Who actually wrote any song? Well, we know that Bob Dylan wrote ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, but after that it gets a little murky. Lennon/McCartney songs, after the first couple of albums, were written by Lennon or McCartney but rarely by Lennon/McCartney. The Verve’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, notoriously, sampled more of Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of ‘The

My favourite comment about the Scottish referendum came from the eminent comedian and novelist David Baddiel. ‘What if Yes wins, but due to a typographical error, the prog-rock band gets in and Jon Anderson becomes First Minister?’ You probably had to be there to find this funny, and in this case ‘there’ is the early 1970s. Having been there myself, I too remember Yes as the most intrinsically amusing of progressive bands, along with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Genesis were quite funny in their early days, when Peter Gabriel dressed up as a flower. Pink Floyd weren’t funny, although Roger Waters is. The Beatles aren’t funny any more, but the

Every musical career has its own narrative, and most of them include at least one comeback. To come back, you first have to go away; then you have to stay away; and finally, when everyone has forgotten your name, you wander nonchalantly back under the arc-lights and wave modestly to screaming fans and waiting reporters. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. As has been discussed here before, the gaps between record releases for all but the most irresponsibly prolific artists have become so wide that simply making another album becomes a comeback in itself. Thus has the currency of the comeback been devalued. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a different

Three months until spring. Four months until the start of the cricket season. And only nine months until the radio starts playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ again. Or have you heard enough of Christmas songs by now? Many of us had heard enough of them by Christmas 1988. Every October they return. The first strains of Shakin’ Stevens emerging tentatively from high street shops. Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, still bickering. Greg Lake, possibly alone now in believing in Father Christmas. Roy Wood’s enormous beard, wishing it could be Christmas every day. And for three months of every year his wish is granted. Millions of Britons suffer the consequences. (The only

There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very expensive restaurant, for which someone else was paying.) So it’s probably inadvertently that Morrissey has added to the gaiety of nations this past fortnight with the publication of his autobiography, winningly titled Autobiography. So catastrophically bad does the book turn out to be that Morrissey-loathing critics have queued up to give it (and him) a damn good thrashing. It has been a long time coming. While it has always been clear that The Smiths were every bit as good as we thought they were at the time, it is even

First impressions always count, and they are almost always wrong. This is particularly pertinent if you review albums for a living, as I used to years ago. You would listen once, maybe twice, possibly three times if you were really being good, and then form an opinion, which was as much based on your preconceptions — and indeed taste — as on anything you had heard in the grooves. And then you would write your review. You would then forget about the record in question because there were so many others to listen to. It was essentially an industrial process, and it quickly ground my enthusiasm for music into dust.

‘I don’t really like most of the music you play,’ said the tall blonde woman with whom I share my life. ‘There are no tunes. Where are the tunes? A lot of it sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in Topshop.’ I was outraged. Admittedly, the song playing at that moment — a droll little thing called ‘Boring’ by The Pierces — didn’t exactly boast a killer melody, but even so. Like any music obsessive worth his salt, I pride myself on my ability to spot a decent tune from 40 paces, even if many of them are couched within the acoustic, minor-key, vaguely melancholy textures I tend

I am suffering, as we all do from time to time, from a shortage of decent new tunes. Of course, ‘suffering’ may be a slight exaggeration here. Very little physical pain has been involved. But research has shown that music obsessives need a constant upgrade of their personal tunebanks in order to perform at full capacity. It’s all very well going back and playing the Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue at top volume and singing along to every vocal harmony, as I might have done once or twice this past week, but a long-term solution it is not. It’s where to find these new tunes that has become