Wolf Alice are a band who consistently over-deliver. Their presentation is so staid, their cited influences so safe (The Beatles! Blur!), their politics so “bad things are bad, m’kay?”, that they give every impression they’re going to be bland and generic.
The history of popular music is littered with bands who fulfilled everything needed to make it. Then fate kicked them in the teeth. Goofin’ good time Brit heavy rockers Dinosaur Pile-Up have had some rubbish luck.
For a band who started by entirely self-producing their own records and performing in basements, it has ended up being a long and storied career so far for The Black Keys. The blues-rock group, consisting of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, began their career with their first five albums, from 2001 debut The Big Come Up through to 2008’s Thickfreakness, all playing in a modern blues rock wheelhouse.
This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year.
The default setting for Brighton indie quartet Black Honey is pop-grunge. There are plenty of moments during their fourth album when Nineties femme-rockers L7 spring to mind. But Black Honey also spread their wings and fly in other directions. The latter songs tend to be Soak’s most noticeable, although whatever style the band chose, they know enough about hooks to keep listeners onside.
Cian Ducrot cut his teeth on a blend of intimate singer-songwriter balladry and lowkey alt-pop, most of his debut album Victory sounding like a less personable Lewis Capaldi.
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.
Paul Weller occupies a strange place in the cultural sphere. Especially since he was adopted as an elder statesman of Britpop in the mid 1990s, he’s been particularly beloved of a core audience whose tastes are extremely conservative. So much so, in fact, that middle-aged men who ape his classic mod haircuts are now a shorthand for meat-and-potatoes, Brexity, red-faced, pub-coke bloke-rock. Yet Weller himself is anything but conservative.
Tami Neilson’s career is long and storied. The short version is that she began with a 1990s Canadian family band (opening for Kitty Wells, aged 10!), moved to New Zealand and became a country star there, then, over the last decade, has been “discovered by" and worked with all manner of US artists, ranging from Ashley McBryde to Willie Nelson. Her latest album is named in honour of the signage on Nashville Broadway, “the patron saint of heartbreak in downtown”, as she puts it.
I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” – and we talked on and off down to Southampton. He was hilarious, half scholar and gentleman, half lively uncle at a family function loudly telling old-school “blue” jokes, all in the thickest West Country burr this side of The Wurzels.