Peter Kay's Car Share (2017)

 

Peter Kay's Car Share (2015)

 

Sinead O'Connor (1966-2023)

Absolutely tragic news about Sinead O'Connor. 56 is no age.

I won't pretend I was her biggest fan but I did love her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, and I admired her and her music from afar in the subsequent years. 

This performance from 1990 from The Late Show is up there with my all time favourite live performances on television. She was a unique and powerful individual.

Wham! (2023)

 

Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party by Michael Cragg (Nine Eight Books 2023)

Spoken-word intro

I’m going to start with a confession. As a closeted teenager in the early ’00s I did some things I am ashamed of. I went to see the Libertines. I was a fan of post-Kid A Radiohead. I once went to Ireland to see Travis only to be hit on the head by warm beer and, at one point, an inflatable armchair. For a while, I thought hiding in indie music would help me keep my secret for a bit longer when in fact it just fed my covert obsession; glorious, shiny, ludicrous pop. I’d secretly gorge on the Latin flavours of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ or get a delicious sugar rush from ‘Don’t Stop Movin’’. Later I’d sit with my proudly pop-obsessed uni housemate and listen to ‘hard-edged’ ladband Five and the high street R&B of Blue, before hitting the local indie club. I’d carelessly align myself with the throng of NME readers trying to justify their love of Girls Aloud or the Sugababes via the prism of credibility (‘It’s pretty good for a pop song!!!’), when in fact I owned all their albums and distinctly remember singing along to the former’s pearlescent six-minute epic ‘Untouchable’ in a full-length mirror, willing myself to be who I was.

Perhaps because I only lived this UK pure pop boom – instigated by the Buffalo boot-stomping swagger of the Spice Girls in 1996, which is where this book starts – on the periphery, when I started writing about music as a journalist years later, I immersed myself fully. As pop shifted through the gears over the following two decades, taking in post-ironic synthpop, Lady Gaga, gloom wobble dubstep, drop-obsessed EDM and Billie Eilish-adjacent mope-pop before settling on a sort of generic streaming-friendly dance-pop sound, I often found myself harking back to the weightlessness of, say, Liberty X’s ‘Just a Little’ or Five’s ‘Keep On Movin’’ or A1’s ‘Caught in the Middle’. Like most people, this rose-tinted nostalgia – hey, this book is about the late ’90s and early ’00s, get used to it – ramped up as a pandemic-ravaged world went into lockdown. Gazed upon from a modern world seemingly on fire, this prelapsarian era suddenly represented even more of a refreshing change. A time before the threat of nuclear war, climate crisis, global financial collapse, social media, culture wars, Piers Morgan’s TV career, TikTok and, of course, the pandemic.

Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop by Dave Rimmer (Faber and Faber 1985)

This is the story of Culture Club, but it’s also the story of pop music since punk. It’s the story of how a generation of New Pop stars, a generation that had come of age during punk, absorbed its methods, learnt its lessons, but ditched its ideals — setting charts ablaze and fans screaming all over the world. It’s the story of a whole new star system, of Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Wham! and many others as well as Culture Club. It’s also the story of a magazine called Smash Hits.

I’ve chosen to base this story round Culture Club because in many ways they were the perfect New Pop group. Only Michael Jackson was more famous than Boy George. Colour By Numbers was the nearest thing to a perfect pop album the decade has produced. ‘Karma Chameleon’ was the nearest thing to a perfect pop single: pretty and sickly, complex and singalong, meaningless and meaningful all at the same time, rising to number one in Britain, the USA and just about everywhere else where pop records arc bought.

The only other group I could have written this story around would have been Duran Duran. Then there would maybe have been more about video, less about the press and dressing-up, but the essential details would have remained the same. In 1983, at the height of the New Pop period, Duran Duran and Culture Club were deadly rivals, but only different sides of the same coin.

As a writer for Smash Hits over this period — one which saw its circulation soar with the rise of the New Pop to become the world’s biggest-selling pop magazine I was allowed unusually close access. Unlike Fleet Street or the old music weeklies, Smash Hits was generally trusted not to ‘slag people off without good reason. I talked to, interviewed, travelled with, got to know and usually liked most of the New Pop stars. In writing this book, I’m not attempting to pass judgement on them, just to make some sense out of it all. And, I hope, make some money too.

In that sense, I’m as much a part of the New Pop which is really the Old Pop now as any of them.

The Sound of Young (MySpace) Scotland

Since I stumbled across them accidently on MySpace about 12 months ago, I've been banging a lonely drum for the Low Miffs, but it's good to see that finally someone from the inkies, the Scotland on Sunday, has also cottoned onto their excellence as well.

I'm cut and pasting the review from the Scotland on Sunday, 'cos the mini review is buried half way down the page:

"In previous years, unsigned bands such as My Latest Novel and Popup have played this event and gone on to bigger things. Thursday's big promise was the camp, electrifying rock 'n' roll outfit the Low Miffs, who have been going since 2003 and thankfully sound completely different to anything else coming out of Glasgow at the moment. Part shambolic, part super-slick German cabaret show, the lead singer, Leo Condie, makes for a perfect master of ceremonies, like Scotland's own Scott Walker with some Jarvis, Jacques Brel and sleazy sax thrown in. In seconds, Oran Mor is transformed into a seedy underground speakeasy as the foppish Condie launches into songs with names such as 'Cressida', 'Earl Grey' and 'Also Sprach Shareholder'. There is even an ode to Kirsty Wark and a moment when Condie leaps from the stage and performs lying on his back on the dancefloor. It's all high drama and good, dirty fun.

Check out their tunes on their MySpace page. Everyone - bar the Grateful Dead fan in West Lothian - will recognise their promise.

Hat tip to Matt C for the picture. Apologies that it took 8 months for me to find an excuse to use it.