This is a very difficult album to review. This is usually quite a good thing since initially difficult records are usually the most enduring. But Pulp were Laura’s favourite band. In the final stages of her illness one of my stock catchphrases […]

“Who has the best voice in modern music?” asked an I Love Music punter. It seemed a simple enough question and I was surprised to find myself struggling to answer it. The idea of the ‘good voice’ is central to pop music, from […]

Bran Van 3000 are a Montreal nonette known primarily for a one hit wonder. In fact I am not sure how popular “Drinking in L.A.” was outside of Canada. So when I got Discosis I was shocked by it. They have managed to make one of the most […]

I hear the music. Which is patently obvious, I suppose, give what I write about for both pleasure and for pay. Started with my youth, very very young days, Sesame Street, Free To Be, You and Me, that kind of seventies upbringing. And from those alb[…]

With their 1995 album See You on the Other Side, Mercury Rev created a world for the listener to inhabit. It was a world where adagios and allegros lived together in peace, where the boundaries of the staff were not strictly enforced, where tones wer[…]

If people needed a reminder that the music video was first envisioned as a promotional vehicle for a recording act, the MTV Video Music Awards was more than happy to provide such evidence. Macy Gray presented an award with her dress serving as a bill[…]

Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus”
How handy it all is, manufactured melancholy. Most useful, especially when the intentions are heartfelt, it’s easier to market. Of course, that need not be the intention of the creator of said melancholy,[…]

Cities of the mind: a rather poetic evocation of something many of us have experienced. It’s a peculiarly suburban, peculiarly faux-bohemian teenage phenomenon. Can there be a word more distasteful to the disaffected teenager than suburb? Ev[…]

WORDS AND MUSIC
A HISTORY OF POP IN THE SHAPE OF A CITY
BLOOMSBURY, £12.99, ISBN: 0747557780
If an ideal pop journal were to give me 1,864 words to take a tour of Paul Morley’s new ‘history of pop in the shape of a city’, there mig[…]

CLARENCE CARTER – “Making Love (At The Dark End Of The Street)”
HEFNER – “I Stole A Bride”
Something missing from pop, maybe: a sense of sin. Sins we have in multitudes, of course – red-capped anger, ice-wris[…]