Take that situation: Nick Heyward - live at The Water Rats

© Simon Poulter 2017

I'll get this out of the way from the off: Nick Heyward is infuriatingly ageless. Save for the glasses, he doesn't appear any different from the boyish Haircut 100 frontman of - staggeringly - 36 years ago, adorned in cable-knit sweater with a guitar thrust, circulation-endangeringly under his armpit, plying perfect funk and '60s-infused pop hits like Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) and Fantastic Day. Almost four decades on, these are now nailed-on classics, as is Love Plus One: even now I can't sit in a business meeting when someone says "So, where do we go from here?" without replying (in my head, Homer Simpson-style) "Is it down to the lake I fear?".

To see Heyward last night looking nothing like his 56 years was itself a welcome journey back in time. Better still was to hear those peerless songs again, performed with a vigour that made them sound as crisp in 2017 as they were when they first appeared between 1981 and 1982.

It's incredible to think, now, that the Heyward-fronted Haircuts only produced the one album, Pelican West, but that perennially sunny trio of successive hits - released between the autumn of 1981 and the following spring - launched the young seven-piece into the kind of success bands starting out today can still only dream of with their debut release, creating Smash Hits cover staples in the process and driving them to the inevitable push to break America.

This, though, ultimately led to Heyward's departure: "We were playing in America and not enjoying it, there was lots of pressure," he explained to the Metro a couple of years ago, as the band was coming back together for a reunion. The highs (an audience with Paul McCartney at his daughters' request) and lows (suicidal feelings...) of new-found fame at such a young age bore heavily on the-then 21-year-old, and he left the band just as it was working on a follow-up to Pelican West. It wasn't long before he produced a solo album, North Of A Miracle, every bit as infectious as the Haircuts' sole release, and rolling out four more perfect pop hits, Whistle Down The Wind, Take That Situation, Blue Hat For A Blue Day and On A Sunday.

But what is less clear is what happened between then - 1983 - and now. True, there have been albums, but nowhere near that early success...or indeed the recognition deserved (even for a record as excellent as From Monday to Sunday, released at the height of Britpop, and containing another British pop gem in Kite, which reached only as high as 44 in the UK Singles Chart in 1993). So, then, news of a crowd-funded new solo album - Woodland Echoes and the steamingly good double-A side, Baby Blue Sky/Mountaintop, all due out next month - has brought about a sudden pique of interest in me, which was richly rewarded last night at the storied Water Rats pub venue in London's Gray's Inn Road.

The show, being recorded for a forthcoming special on the music lovers' channel Vintage TV (tune in at 8pm on 18 July), perfectly framed Heyward's brilliance as a songwriter and a funny, engaging performer, happily delving back into the "heritage" archive of those early Haircut 100 and solo hits, but also showcasing some of the invigorating new material. If the rest of Woodland Echoes is anywhere near as good as the single's two tracks, it's release in mid-August will be a welcome addition to the tail end of summer.

As a primer, on my way out of The Water Rats I bought reissues of North Of A Miracle and last year's Pelican West deluxe edition, which includes extras such as the supreme and often forgotten single Nobody's Fool. A little rockier than the record's bigger hits, it presciently points to Heyward's brand new material, almost 40 years on, which, I hope, will re-cement his credentials as one of the finest pop songwriters Britain has produced post-Beatles.

People talk reverently - quite rightly - about McCartney's unique gift with melody, Squeeze and their 'South London poetry', Ian Dury & The Blockheads' witty funk, Paul Weller's sense of soul and The Smiths' poppy jangle mixed with indie obtuseness. If so, then Nick Heyward deserves re-examination. I've got a feeling, based on last night's taster, that Woodland Echoes will be the catalyst.

JC - Superstar

The irony was not lost: a JC preaching to a rapturous crowd of recent converts about a fairer society and being kind to one another. But, then, irony is something the Glastonbury Festival does well.

For all the cool headliners that Worthy Farm has hosted down the years, the mischievous, subversive hippy in Michael Eavis (with the same traits inherited by his co-organiser daughter Emily) has always found space for acts that the largely student-age audience will treat with good-natured bonne humeur. Today we had Barry Gibb, and in the past the likes of ELO, Tom Jones, Tony Christie and, notoriously, Rolf Harris - long before Her Majesty's Prison Service caught up with him - taking the stage with his wobbleboard to do Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport. Ho and, indeed, ho.

Jeremy Corbyn's appearance on the Pyramid Stage yesterday was as contrived a piece of Glastonbury wink-wink as it was a smart booking by Clan Eavis, tapping into arguably the coolest British politician of the moment. Not that politicians are cool. Ever. But here was the 68-year-old trenchant left-winger - later described by Katy Perry (who played before a smaller crowd, it must be noted) as "the Bernie Sanders of the UK" - wearing a shirt of undeterminable vintage (but clearly right-on origin), still resembling a Haringey geography teacher at a Fair Trade rally. And yet, in front of a crowd eagerly awaiting the day's headline performance from the Foo Fighters, was a politician who might possibly have thought the Foo Fighters were a south-east Asian guerilla cause he should get behind, generating the sort of crowd reaction normally reserved for headline performers like the Foos themselves.

Throughout the day, and even during the previous evening's Radiohead set, the chant "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" had been sung as passionately as any I've ever heard from a football crowd. There was a kind of crossover and not just the ultra-ironic "Wenger out!" flag being waved incongruously in front of the Arsenal-supporting Labour leader. Glastonbury has always had its political edge, but more to do with either the artists and their agendas, or associations with worthy causes. But not even during Tony Blair's messianic rise to power, or in the Kinnock era that paved the way for Blair, has the daddy/mummy/parent-of-no-distinct-gender of all music festivals allowed a politician on The Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury's main event platform.

Corbyn's appearance was a strange - if brief - snapshot of cultism. Go back to April when the General Election was announced and you wouldn't have to go far, even within the Labour Party, to find those who felt that Corbyn was dead in the water and would be gone by June 9. But on June 24, even having failed to win the election, he appeared more popular than ever, a position emboldened by Theresa May's abject public persona which itself was worsened by her disastrous election campaign and then her shoddy initial response to the Grenfell fire.

Even I was surprised by the clamour that grew around Corbyn as the election campaign unfolded, with crowd sizes at rallies from Reading to Birmingham, and from Gateshead to his native Islington growing bigger and bigger. In fact, his 20 minute 'set' at Glastonbury felt like just another date on a national tour, delivering a rousing speech on poverty and several pet isms as part of his "for the many, not the few" agenda.

For the latter-day Glastonbury crowd, Corbyn's words fell neatly. "Politics is actually about everyday life," he declared. "It’s about all of us, what we dream, what we want, and what we want for everybody else." He thundered on about how the elites (including media commentators) "got it wrong" and spoke directly to "the number of young people who got involved for the first time. Because they were fed up with being denigrated, fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they never participate, and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in education, in health, in housing, in pensions and everything else."

This was the greatest hits package, cleverly tailored to the audience. It was hardly a recreation of the punk spirit and all that "no future" nihilism, but 'ver kids' lapped it up, demonstrating an accommodation that clearly had no intention of questioning what Corbyn's lukewarm approach to Brexit did for their future chances of experiencing life outside of the UK.

That, then, is the truly remarkable - and baffling - thing about Jezza: how he could have been a no-hoper to win the election, regarded as well-meaning and principled, but with associations in his past and convictions in his present that many felt made him unelectable. Regardless, he still gets mobbed pulling pints and generating a roaring trade in T-shirts bearing his own image at a music festival.

Fair play to him, though. Clearly it would have been an irony-stretch to have invited May (who doesn't, apparently, do public gatherings larger than Cabinet meetings) or, worse, Farage who wouldn't have even been able to say "Good afternoon Glastonbury!" without getting bottled off. Nor would departing LibDem leader Tim Farron have fared much better following his botched positioning on gay marriage. Maybe the Greens co-leader, Caroline Lucas, might have endured, but not on the main stage.

And so, in a Glastobury nominally dominated by Radiohead's excellent (but somewhat Marmite...) performance on Friday, and by the Foo Fighters' storming closing set 24 hours later, the main talking point has been about a somewhat scruffy grandfather, once regarded as a member of the Labour Party's awkward squad, quoting peace, love and Shelley, and who just lost an election. Politics, eh?

Tribal extinction - the demise of the rock star

There is a widely-held belief that rock stardom ended a long time ago, even if the prefix "rock star" continues to be applied liberally, from questionable media descriptions of anyone who can hold a guitar (er..."rock star Ed Sheeran") to politicians ("rock star French president, Emmanuel Macron") and even business people (Branson, Jobs, et al).

For those of us of a generation, the term "rock star" still conjures a certain image. Indeed, simply Google the term and a generic picture appears that conforms perfectly to the stereotype. But, says David Hepworth in his tremendous new book, Uncommon People: The Rise And Fall Of The Rock Stars, the rock star as a concept has grown diluted.

"There are still people who dress like rock stars," he writes, "and do their best to act as they think rock stars would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral." But, he says, in essence, the time of the rock star has now gone.

Plenty of acts still trade legitimately under the luminous rock star moniker - the Stones, The Who, Neil Young, take your pick. U2 and Coldplay retain the bombast, even if Bono and Chris Martin have become more irritants than icons. But there is definitely a case that proper rock stardom has gone the way of the dinosaur, leaded petrol and daytime telly closing down after the lunchtime news. Indeed, the original form of the species has been reduced to rare glimpses such as last weekend, amid the joyous rebuttal of extremism that was Manchester's One Love concert, Liam Gallagher - resplendent in a £400 orange coat, hands customarily behind his back, declaring "Tonight, I'm a rock'n'roll star" with requisite aura and swagger.

In Uncommon People, a follow-up of sorts to last year's equally good 1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year (featured on this blog here), Hepworth traces an anthropological arc from rock stardom's primordial root - when Little Richard's Tutti Frutti brought sexual innuendo to the previously anodyne 'hit parade' in the 1950s - to its nominal extinction at the hands of the Internet, around the time of Kurt Cobain's death.

"I wanted to write something about rock stars as a tribe," explains Hepworth, whose long career in music journalism encompasses the NME and Smash Hits, launching the magazines Q, Empire, Mojo, The Word and others, as well as co-fronting the BBC's Whistle Test with frequent partner-in-crime Mark Ellen. "This tribe came along in the mid-'50s and by the mid-'90s had passed away. That meant I could write the story of their rise and fall." Moreover, he says, there was a new angle to explore: "I've always been just as interested in the personal side of it as the musical side, and it struck me that nobody had taken that approach."

That approach is an incredibly well researched piece of work, presenting - almost like forensic evidence for a murder trial - 40 examples from as many years of what contributed to the arc. Hepworth refreshingly avoids some of the well-trodden tales and subjects in favour of more insightful examinations of what contributed to stars' rise to rock stardom (the influence of Hank Marvin, for example, often forgotten as the inspiration for many of our Stratocaster-wielding stage gods) and in some cases unpicking what they finally became, such as Elvis Presley.

When I were a lad, the aspiration to be a rock star was fulfilled quite easily by a tennis racquet and a full-length mirror. You appropriated the attitude, struck a pose and you were done: you'd become whoever it was you'd just seen on Top Of The Pops, doing, apparently, much the same thing. Those who took it to the next stage - applying actual musical talent, amongst other ingredients - wound up as cultural icons, "uncommon people", as Hepworth writes in the book, "...from the masses who got to the top without the help of education, training, family ties, money or other conventional ladders."

Now, Hepworth says, "The game has changed". Rock stars emerged when there was a cultism about rock music, either owning it or seeing it being performed. Today, the competition for attention is myriad, and for all the self-importance we musos still apply to the form, it - and its practitioners - are no longer kings of the hill. That Kurt Cobain came to be viewed as the last rock star might have more to do with his suicide coming in the same timeframe as the Internet's arrival. "The technology revolution was pretty significant," says Hepworth. "I don't think there will be anything quite like rock and roll again because now we've got so many choices. People formed all those groups because they were bored. Nobody's bored any more. Just distracted."

© Simon Poulter 2017

On top of that, the Internet has also impacted what we see of those stars: during a recent recording of a Word In Your Ear podcast, the terrific online discussion shows fronted by Hepworth and Ellen, an audience member pointed out that there is just less mystique surrounding pop stars, thanks to social media enabling them to share everything in minute, unfettered detail. The old days, when access was controlled by a fearsome record company press officer and photography would be just an official 10x8 black and white handout, have long gone.

Hepworth agrees: "The music papers were part of the star maker machinery. It was a business driven by hunches and personal preferences. Now it's a business driven by data. I know which I preferred...".   On top of that, Hepworth adds, rock stardom has lost its impact. "It used to be enormous fun to go and meet Keith Richards and find out what he had to say. Nowadays I can't believe anybody's really interested. It's years since anybody said to me, 'Have you seem what so-and-so said in Q?'. Nowadays they just say it themselves on social media."

"The point of [this] book," Hepworth adds, "is that rock stars didn't have to be anything. The only thing they had to be was stars." So what, then, does Hepworth himself consider to be the model rock star? "I'd have to say Bruce Springsteen. He tells the entire story of rock and roll on stage every night and gives you a glimpse of what he got from The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Bob Dylan and everything else. I like that about him."

Anger management: Roger Waters' Is This The Life We Really Want?

We've seen it coming for more than forty years. Roger Waters has never been the happiest of souls, even when he was in Pink Floyd. He has often said that the success of The Dark Side Of The Moon marked the beginning of the end of the band, though it was a slow demise. But with their subsequent albums, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, and the virtual Waters solo album The Final Cut, his lyrics became increasingly dour, ranging from the mere cynical tone of Have A Cigar? and its satire on the music industry, to the unshackled anger about war on the Final Cut and its references to the Falklands and the Second World War that painfully robbed the infant Waters of his father.

In the solo albums since, his thematic palette has swung from melancholic reflection to outright anger, while musically rarely disappearing from the chords, tempos and song structures that manifested themselves most strongly on The Wall. But while that might be considered laziness, the familiarity actually binds Waters' de facto solo work. His first album, the much under-rated Pros And Cons Of Hitchiking contained some of his best writing, as well as drawing out some of Eric Clapton's most lucid guitar work in a period of his life when lucidity wasn't particularly forthcoming. But as Waters worked through his next releases, Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused To Death, the melancholy seemed to be taken over by a bleaker, more dystopian world view. And, in the 25-year period since that last rock album and today's release of Is This The Life We Really Want?, Waters has appeared to grown even angrier.

His epic tour of a new production of The Wall added additional targets to those the original album aimed at, including Waters' increasingly vociferous position on Israel and Palestine, on top of more familiar themes of corporate greed and state brutality. Some might say that Waters has simply become a gnarly individual in his 70s, but to be honest, he has always been so (and it shouldn't be lost that the father he so often has lamented, Eric Fletcher Waters, was a diehard Communist and conscientious objector before a change of heart saw him commissioned into the Royal Fusiliers, eventually losing his life in the Battle for Anzio).

That, then, should always be remembered as the source of Waters' pain, and his inspiration. But on Is This The Life his targets have been reset, with one Donald J. Trump drawing the most fire. This won't come as any great surprise - on tour last October and before the US election, Waters performed Floyd's Pigs (Three Different Ones) in Mexico City with projections of Trump combined with the word "pendejo" ("stupid"). Here, Waters goes further, Much further. And that is both the strength and the flaw of the album.

Musically there is nothing on Is This The Life to surprise if you've listened to Waters' past output. I don't mean that in an ill-tempered way, but there is tremendous familiarity: the guitars and string arrangements of Déjà Vu bear striking similarity to cues that ran through The Pros And Cons Of Hitchiking, and its intro also harks strongly back to Animals' Pigs On The Wing Part 1, though these might be mere background to the song's vituperative narrative about the state of the world. The Last Refugee doesn't cheer things any further, casting grey-skied reflection on, presumably, the tragic death of Kurdish toddler Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach last year. In its restraint, The Last Refugee is, in fact, quite powerful, and this reminds one that Waters - for all his inner anger is also earnest in the way he approaches such subjects. Whatever your view is of wealthy rock stars railing for causes, Waters is always totally heartfelt and, as his Facebook spats over Israel have shown, unapologetic.

© Simon Poulter 2017

The ghost of Pink Floyd re-emerges on Picture That, and not just in the staccato bassline borrowed from One Of These Days or the slide guitar so effectively used by David Gilmour on numerous Floyd songs, but in the very pointed use of the phrase "Wish You Were Here" in an arcing piece about drone strikes and the distances between those they affect and those who pull the trigger.

By Broken Bones the mood hasn't lifted much, and Waters continues to drive home his frustrations at a world and its apparent need to persist with war. But it's on the album's title song that Waters gets to the nub of what ails him. Drawing on producer Nigel Godrich's subtle touches with Radiohead, Waters lays directly into Trump ("...every time a nincompoop becomes the president...") and the unsettled world climate his election has coincided with. Bird In A Gale also bears more of Godrich's textural influence, matching it to Waters' love of putting delays on key words for emphasis, as well as drawing on samples of radio broadcasts (remember the channel-tuning intro at the beginning of Wish You Were Here?).

However, this song is where Waters' lyric writing comes under scrutiny: as someone who once described his own lines to Floyd's Breathe as "a bit Lower Sixth", it would be fair to say that Waters has written better lines than appear on Is This The Life. Some come across as too simplistic for their own good, while others appear half-arsed. With that in mind, Smell The Roses is the album's most disappointing track, with words that could easily have been scribbled out on the back of a physics exercise book, and a soundscape that even includes samples of dogs barking (yes, again, heard before on Animals), as well as the very Floydian 'boogie' that had the band themselves heavily criticised for its somewhat pointless album of improvised outtakes, The Endless River.

That, though, can be considered the weak point of the album, but there are, thankfully, many high points to compensate. The Most Beautiful Girl, with is casual downbeat, reminiscent of Mick Woodmansey's Five Years intro and tapped out by seasoned session drummer Joey Waronker, is a high point, while Wait For Me and Oceans Apart - even if bearing strong resemblance to the more contemplative moments of The Wall (such as Mother) and Pros And Cons - both present the essence of Waters' ability to create mood without screaming.

There will be those who will feel that, after 25 years since Waters' last rock record, Is This The Life could have offered greater variety. But that, I suspect, is not what Waters' fans would want. There will always be those who want, effectively, another Pink Floyd album, and musically that desire is fulfilled to some degree with this album. That said, Waters - arguably from the moment he became the Floyd's creative core - has largely used the music as a canvas on which to paint the things he believes in and wants off his chest. And at 73, he is doing that once with an album which, warts-and-all, does so honestly, passionately and sincerely. And is all the better for it.