If Damon Albarn was telling the truth, and Saturday’s Coachella performance was Blur’s “last gig”, it was a miserable swansong. A field of influencers (some of whom appeared to not know who Blur are) crowded into the most corporatised festival …
Why we need more Kurt Cobains
It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain blew his own head off with a shotgun. It’s impossible to imagine mainstream rock success in bed with that kind of despondency in this day and age. Rap might harbour that kind of …
Taylor Swift, America’s national hero
A record number of Americans are likely to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl, probably only half of whom will be following the actual game. The other half will be scanning the luxury boxes for tantalising glimpses of Taylor Swift, the …
How Britain killed off its musical tribes
When the Teddy boys burst onto the scene at the start of the drab Fifties, they established the template for all subcultures to follow. There have always been ultra-loyal music fans of individual artists, but this was something else: a …
Searching for Shane MacGowan
Other than a dissection of abject narcissism, I’m no longer sure poetry has much to offer us. I think we’re losing our capacity to look outwards. The writing that interests me most now is about this crisis, this prolapsing of …
Shane MacGowan: Ireland’s punk poet
One Christmas on the train home to see my parents, Shane MacGowan was on the same carriage. The children in the carriage were drawn to him like he was Santa Claus, and they broke out into excited giggling every time …
Why Snoop Dogg should quit weed
Last week, the world awoke to a new status quo, a shifted paradigm, the end of an era. Where getting high was concerned, the Pope had just given up on Catholicism: Snoop Dogg had retired from the smoke. Leaderless, rudderless …
Punk’s spirit is broken
Turns out I’m still hated in Liverpool, even though I’m actually a fan of the Scouse. Wandering around Blue Dot Festival a month ago, I stopped to poach a fag off of a gaggle of Liverpudlians sat around the main …
Burning Man will rise again
Obviously one’s first reaction to hearing about the rain and mud at Burning Man this year was very similar to learning about the glitch that led to all those flights to and from British airports being cancelled last week: thank …
Why we need Oliver Anthony
It can be a little bit embarrassing admitting that you are a Country music fan when you’re a middle-class journalist living in London. It carries a certain stigma: “Isn’t that just music for rednecks?” someone asked me recently, somewhat baffled. …
Taylor Swift’s tragic appeal
The scene at the ship’s bow in Titanic is so iconic it has spawned innumerable homages and pastiches. But would the fictionalised love story between Jack and Rose carry the same iconic power, had their relationship not been doomed? Would …
Hip-hop: the last bastion of American freedom
On 11 August 1973, there was a party at an apartment building at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in the Bronx. The host, Cindy Campbell, was a black immigrant teenager from Jamaica who wanted to earn some extra cash to buy back-to-school …
Lana Del Rey’s dissident femininity
It’s been quite a fortnight for Lana Del Rey. Last week, she was lauded as a “singer-songwriter laureate” and “the great American poet of the 21st century”. This week, she closed the Lollapalooza festival in the US by being physically …
Where is our lexicon of love?
I remember the first time I heard The Lexicon of Love. Aged 22 in a no-horse town, more terrified by the day that I had made a mistake in marrying the first man I had sex with, I couldn’t stand …
Kylie Minogue’s glorious artifice
George Orwell once said that, by 50, everyone has the face he deserves. These days, most 50-something female celebrities seem to have exactly the same face, which they paid for. Cheeks are stuffed like upholstery. Foreheads are stretched taut as …