If you remember the '80s, you probably were there

Dylan Jones (centre) with the Cookie Crew’s Cookie Pryce and Susie Q
Picture: BBC/Sebastian Barfield/Plimsoll Productions

There is some dispute as to who first quipped “If you remember the ‘60s you weren’t there”, but the prevailing view is that it was American comedian Charlie Fleischer. It’s a line that stands out because the decade in which I was born is revered for its cultural earthquakes - peace, love, The Beatles and all that - which then led to another decade that embraced rock, disco, funk and punk.

The ’60s/’70s sequence is nice and neat, and comes to a full stop with the start of a decade that still seems to be treated like the uncool, oddball member of an otherwise respectable family. But were the 1980s really that bad? I became a teenager in the ’80s, which means that it, more than any other decade, should have had the greatest cultural influence on me. It’s when I really discovered music for myself, and when I passed through all the rights of passage you’d expect, starting the decade as a 13-year-old and ending it at the age of 23, in the process progressing through puberty, school and the start of my career in the media, initially writing about music. Throughout this entire time there was a lot to absorb, culturally. I’m not going to attempt to precis the 1980s in one single blog post (actually, I don’t think an an entire book could capture the decade faithfully), but music does provide a frame with which to consider the period.

It has become fashionable to rubbish the 1980s, but that may be something to with the fact that it brings back dystopian memories of the Cold War, the Reagan/Thatcher love-in, and the very real risk of someone dropping a nuclear bomb on your home. That all tempered the seemingly confected frivolity of the era’s pop music, a point not helped by those BBC Four Top Of The Pops re-runs from the time featuring  cheesy (and disinterested) Radio 1 DJs introducing badly lip-synced performances. 

This was a theme that I expanded on back in July when I interviewed the eminent force of music radio that is Gary Crowley on the occasion of his sumptuous second Lost ’80s box set coming out. “It was an exciting time,” he told me, adding that “half of those artists [in the early ’80s] were all punks, anyway.” However, as we now put a 40-year distance between now and the start of the ’80s, there is room to reconsider the decade, Crowley’s two four-CD box sets have demonstrated, though relative obscurities from some of the era’s biggest pop acts, like Wham!, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Bananarama, just how much good music came out of a period that hindsight hasn’t always been too kind to. 

This forms the central thesis of a new four-part BBC2 series commencing tomorrow night - The 80s - Music’s Greatest Decade? fronted by Dylan Jones the former editor of GQ, The Face and iD magazines, and author of several acclaimed music biographies. “Interminable television programmes still suggest the whole episode was nothing but a calamitous mistake, a cultural cul-de-sac full of rotten records by shameful individuals with orange skin and espadrilles,” Jones says of the decade. “I’m here to tell you this couldn’t be further off the mark.” 

He believes that the ‘80s were far more inventive, musically, than the tropes about drum machines and over-produced records relentlessly suggest, and in the series calls upon figures such as Nile Rodgers, Madonna, Eurythmics, Public Enemy, Gary Kemp, Jazzie B, Trevor Horn, Bronski Beat, Bananarama’s Sara and Keren Woodward, Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, UB40’s Ali Campbell and others to prove the point. 

Key to this view is Jones’ belief that, unlike other eras, the 1980s weren’t anchored to one single genre, and the notorious tags that the music press, in particular, likes to label an artist. In fact, if you think about it, what is “’80s music”? Were Culture Club a reggae band because of Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? And what were Duran Duran, with their nodding references to Chic, Roxy Music and even the prog rock they were all fans of as teenagers? Gary Kemp - now touring as vocalist and lead guitarist with Pink Floyd founder Nick Mason's outfit Saucer Full Of Secrets readily admits to being a prog fan, and has said that even a band as symbolic of the '80s like Spandau Ballet pulled on references from previous decades. “We were influenced by Floyd,” he has said.

Dylan Jones believes that the 1980s were pop’s greatest decade, when pop became more adventurous than ever. He even thinks the decade gave the ’60s and ’70s a run for their money in terms of excitement. Pop culture, he argues, became even more inventive, “a kaleidoscopic display of musical experimentation,” he wrote in The Sun, “in which genres were born and evolved with dizzying rapidity. While music continues to fascinate to this day, it will never be as varied as it was back then.” I think he has a point.

But, then, every era has its good and its bad. “Whenever anyone tried to say the ‘70s was a period of great music - ­glam rock, disco, punk, soul etc - we had Bay City Rollers, Slik and David Cassidy thrown in our face,” Jones points out. The ’80s, by contrast, offered a “wild variety” of styles, from electro to the New Romantics, rap and hip-hop, and the early shoots of Acid House and Britpop. And that was on top of creating some of the biggest and most influential pop acts of all time, from Michael Jackson to Prince, George Michael to Madonna.

Jones’ BBC2 series explains that technology played a massive part in pop’s ’80s explosion. With the bare minimum of ability, bands could buy drum machines and synthesisers and, with the help of computers, make distinct sounds. At the same time, MTV gave a platform to pop’s third dimension: image. Image played, perhaps, an even bigger part - bigger than even during the glam rock era - with how bands identified themselves. “You’d hear something and think, ‘oh that’s Bananarama, that’s Culture Club, that’s Duran Duran’,” says Bananarama’s Keren Woodward. “Everyone looked their own way as well.”

‘Promos’, as they used to be called, had been pretty cheesy inserts for shows like Top Of The Pops and Nationwide when either the band couldn’t turn up or Pan’s People couldn’t come up with a dance routine in their place. But with MTV, record companies upped their promotional budgets, sending the likes of Duran Duran off to shoot their exotic yachting videos, and even turning Texan rockers ZZ Top turned into cable TV cowboys through slick promos that didn’t take themselves too seriously. And, then, right smack in the middle of the decade, pop reached its zenith with the “global jukebox” - Live Aid. 

Nile Rodgers, whose work on Bowie’s Let’s Dance made The Dame - and that album - one of the biggest things to happen in the 1980s - tells Jones in the series that the decade was, for many of his peers, the summit of a lot of work that had gone on before. “The ’80s was the pinnacle for a lot of us musicians who had come from the ’60s and the ’70s,” he says. “Reaching that place, you had this great explosion of artistry in the Eighties that ran the gamut.”

Jones says that one of the most surprising interviewees for the series was Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson (who also doubles as a fully qualified airline pilot, when he’s not hanging out with the band’s gruesome zombie mascot Eddie). Asked how the headbanging band became so popular in the ’80s, Dickinson explains, simply: “We were very good at our job, the audience knew that we also had a sense of humour about what we did. We were proud of our music but we tried to keep our feet on the ground.” 

As with any era there were plenty who didn’t. As a journalist in the second half of the decade I encountered some of the more highfalutin’ aspects of ’80s pop stardom, which is why Smash Hits magazine did such a wonderful job in bursting any bubbles that became over-inflated (and do read my interview with “ver Hits”’ David Hepworth and Mark Ellen for their thoughts on this).

We are quick to jump on easy assumptions about anything, and the shorthand about the 1980s was that the decade was a bit naff. That, view, though is informed more by the frivolity, the shoulder pads, the lip gloss, the…er…drug taking (not me, but I can tell you a story or two…) the “gender-bending” and all the other cheap tropes that regularly get trotted out. More objectively, the decade should be regarded for its music. Gary Crowley’s characteristically effervescent curation of the decade has repeatedly underlined that there was plenty of truly great pop. Jones’s series, I hope, will expand on this further by reminding us that amid the puffball skirts and jackets with their sleeves pushed up to the elbows, there was a lot more breadth to the decade’s music than you and I faithfully remember.

The 80s – Music’s Greatest Decade? With Dylan Jones begins on BBC2 at 8.55pm on Saturday 23 October

Raiding the lost Ark

The trouble with posthumous albums is one of suspicion. There’s an inherent fear that material of any merit would have been released by the deceased during their living years, and that anything issued post-mortem is only ever going to be a cynical money grab by the expired’s estate. 

Legacy album deluxe box sets frequently fall into this category, promising all sorts of “previously unreleased” baubles which are invariably outtakes left off the original record for good reason. Too often they’re no more than pointless souvenirs, the gift shop T-shirt you see on the way out of the museum. These are curiosities for completists who feel their collections of a given artist’s work are lacking the alternate versions that you would probably only listen to the once in exchange for that hefty wheelbarrow of cash left behind for the privilege.

Posthumous releases, on the other hand, fall into a category of their own. In some cases they are grave digging exercises or, at least, examples of poor editorial decisions by surviving family members, lawyers or both claiming to represent the dead artist’s interests and enduring legacy. Occasionally, however, a genuine gem will be uncovered, such as Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Joy Division’s Closer or John Martyn’s Heaven And Earth. In other cases the estate finds a way to fulfil the artist’s previously unrequited wishes, such as Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All The Rest, which was released last year as the full double 1984 album Petty had intended (before record company types chopped it in half), along with a complete live performance and acoustic demos. It is a wonderful document of a much-missed musician at his creative best.

So this brings me to Prince. When he died in April 2016 he left behind two legacies: firstly, the extraordinary body of work committed to record after signing to Warner Bros at the age of 19 - around 40 albums in all - and secondly, the even more extraordinary body of work rumoured to be lying in a supposed vault. Like the Lost Ark, the Paisley Park archive became the subject of myth, but also, it is alleged, wrangling amongst those closest to Prince over how to open it up and access the supposed riches within. But now it has, with the release today of Welcome 2 America, the first ‘proper’ posthumous Princ release (in so far as 2019’s Originals compiled demos written and then given away, and 2018’s Piano And A Microphone, lifted from a single cassette tape, and comprising 35 minutes of - you guessed it - vocals and piano takes of more unreleased demos, with the exception of one of Nothing Compares 2 U). 

Prince was a restless creator. Complete albums were recorded and then abandoned, often on a whim. Thus, it’s believed that the Paisley Park vault contains at least ten completed albums committed to tape between the early 1980s and 2000. Among them are two albums recorded (but not released) from each of 1986, 1987 and 1989, and all titled - though no one really knows whether these are working names or not. Welcome 2 America was recorded - and abandoned - in 2010, four years before Prince’s death, but it remains unclear as to why, beyond the belief that he just didn’t want to release it. Certainly quality wasn’t the issue as it is, frankly, divine. 

If there are any questions about it, it’s to try and figure out what Prince was aiming at, with a record owing more to the Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder or Curtis Mayfield soul of his youth. Actually, it probably owes even more to Gil Scott-Heron, such is the central theme of social conscience that runs through the 12 tracks, making statements on the country’s racial and political divisions a full seven years before Donald Trump moved into the White House, and four years of recriminative madness ensued, much of which can be looked upon as prophesied by Prince on this album. “Land of the free, home of the slave. Get down on Ur knees. Hit me” he says on the partly spoken title track. “Hope and change, everything takes forever. And truth is a new minority”. If it had been written and recorded a day after 6 January this year, it wouldn’t have been a better fit.

Prince's estate has called the album a "powerful creative statement that documents his concerns, hopes and visions for a shifting society”, in fact drawing on reflections of the issues facing black Americans during Barack Obama’s first term as present. Morris Hayes, one of Prince’s longest-serving musical collaborators (and something of a creative consigliere) recently revealed that, musically, the album’s origins came from a challenge. After seeing a speech by activist and thinker Cornel West, in which he professed the view that, as much as he loved his “brother” Prince, “he’s no Curtis Mayfield”. So, Hayes recently told BBC 6 Music, Prince set about proving West wrong.

Picture: Prince Estate

While there is plenty of Mayfield-style R&B on Welcome 2 America (Born 2 Die, with its falsetto vocal and synth grooves being a prime example) it is in stark contrast to his late career dalliances with a variety of genres (and not always satisfyingly so). As a result, it feels more complete, more consistent, and while musically incongruous to contemporary music in 2010, feels like the Prince album you would have wanted to hear in any era. 

Jazz-funk mixes with playful pop fare like Hot Summer, and more contemplative, sombre pieces like Stand Up And B Strong, which features the New Power Generation’s Shelby J as co-vocalist. It’s one of several tracks that Shelby likens to Broadway numbers, with theatrical lyrics and a sense of ensemble performance. Imagine a show like Hamilton, but written and composed by Prince. There are traces of pure soul on 1000 Light Years, and nods to hip-hop with Running Game (Son Of A Slave Master), but the overall vibe is more of an easy-going stroll through urban American styles, peppered with statements that are clearly (but sometimes subtly) designed to make a point.

Prince, as I think we all know, was an enigma. Even now, five years after his death, we probably know as little about him as we have any pop star since Elvis Presley. We think we know him: he cultured an image that partly allowed him to hide behind character - the “Purple Perv”, as Smash Hits once styled him. But right from the get-go, from that 1977 signing to Warners, we were clearly dealing with a talent of outrageous proportions. The much-shared video of him performing the solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps in an all-star line-up showed just what a precocious gift he had. It was a preposterous performance that also reminded the world that Prince was more than just a flamboyant eccentric who once changed his name to a symbol out of protest.

Here is what maintains our fascination in Prince, or at least, what maintains mine. Musically he was derivative, as all pop stars were, but also he was pure original. Like all good progressive artists he never stood still, which is why he built this vast collection of unreleased material. 

Picture © Marc Ducrest

I only ever saw Prince live twice: the first, at Wembley Stadium in the 1990s, in which he rattled through the hits, was, frankly, underwhelming. The second was all the more different: an exhausting (for me) three-hour funkiest in 2013 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in which he hardly touched the hits, 1999 and an encore of Purple Rain notwithstanding. And it was fantastic - easily one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever been to. This was brought home by the fact that I’d got my Stravinsky Auditorium strategy right that Saturday night, planting myself for the full 30-track extended set right up against the stage, with Prince himself performing a matter of feet in front of me. It was a schooling in catalogue depth, but also the extent of his musical references, inventively covering relative obscurities by Aretha Franklin, The Impressions, James Brown, Mary J. Blige and even Rufus & Chaka Khan’s Ain.’t Nobody. 

Three years previously Prince had the foresight to see where the country of his birth, the country that produced these same musicians, was going. Some have said he’d always had that vision, and that Welcome 2 America is merely a sequel to Sign O’ The Times, but I would disagree. After a period in which he was every bit as prolific but nowhere near as commercially successful, largely due to a restlessness in finding a defining new identity for his music, on Welcome 2 America he seemed to find it.

Come on feel the noise - Laura Mvula is back

I have, over the years, enjoyed many a happy evening in the Stravinsky Auditorium, the principle venue of the Montreux Jazz Festival. There was the encounter, in 2013, with Prince, a three-hour funkathon during which I was mostly crushed against the front of the stage, drenched in sweat and cramp-contorted like a figure in Picasso’s Guernica. But - man alive! - it was worth it. 

On another occasion, my mate Klaus and I found ourselves in the bar across the road, with Quincy Jones and his entourage floating about behind a roped off area (we weren’t), with George Benson sat at the end of the bar we were sat at. It felt like a stroll down Switzerland’s very own Stella Street, especially when Grace Jones came over, ominously, and merely asked if we were having a good time. Contrary to reputation, she was delightful. Only things like this happen in Montreux.

Another thing that happened was a magical night in a magical week of shows. In 2014 I went the whole hog and made the Jazz Festival my summer holiday, resulting in seeing Massive Attack, Everlast, Pharrel Williams, the Susan Tedeschi/Derek Trucks band, Buddy Guy and Robert Plant on different nights. In the midst of all that was a double-bill featuring Laura Mvula and everyone’s favourite hobbit-sized ivory-tinkler, Jamie Cullum. Mvula was, frankly, enchanting (Cullum was a blast, too). 

The summer of 2014 found Mvula in her ascendancy, having experienced her breakthrough the year before, during which she was copiously feted for her debut album Sing To The Moon. “Classically-trained former receptionist” was the media refrain, along with endless references to Amy Winehouse, Adele, Corinne Bailey Rae, Joss Stone, Mica Parris and the entire cabal of British female singers to take soul, jazz, nu-soul, nu-jazz and the like into the mainstream. Mvula, though, was anything but pedestrian that evening on the Swiss Riviera, performing with a small band comprising a harpist, her sister Dionne on violin, her brother James on cello, and Winehouse-veteran musical director Troy Miller on drums. And it was sublime. Mvula’s sophomore release, The Dreaming Room, garnered acclaim equal to its predecessor but then, at the beginning of 2017, she was abruptly dropped by Sony Music, something communicated to her in a seven-line email. Ever since, she has laid relatively low, but clearly not allowing her prodigious talent to be diminished or even extinguished. 

I say laid low, but that period did include supporting David Byrne on his American Utopia tour, a “pivotal” experience that invigorated her world view. The former Talking Head’s shows were, she says, like black church spiritual gatherings in terms of how audiences responded. It was, Mvula says, liberating and euphoric, and all the result of rhythm and movement. Because her support slot was stripped down - just her and Miller - she found herself generating noise with synths, seeding in the process the album she’s just released - Pink Noise.

Now signed to the legendary home of soul music, Atlantic Records, it’s a full-on dancefest that dares to abandon the dreamy orchestration of her first two releases, instead tapping into the R’n’B vibe of 1980s pop. Thus, you will hear in the mix the ghost of the aforementioned Prince (who, coincidentally, was a noted fan) or the rhythmic signatures of producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. If ever there was an example of dancing away your blues, then, Pink Noise is a clear catharsis. Her sudden departure from Sony clearly still wrankles, although she admitted to The Times recently that she had to bite her lip: “Plain speaking in this line of work can be tricky,” she told Dan Cairns. “Everyone else was getting angry on my behalf, but it seemed as if it was dodgy if I voiced it. An angry black woman? That’s a no-no. You know, let’s not go there, please, nobody wants that — that’s what it felt like. So to hear myself speak about it in these songs felt amazing.”

Thus, a sense of liberation runs through the entire album, though liberation from what is up for debate. Mvula’s upbringing in a conservative Christian family in Birmingham might be seeping through in the line “How can you dance with the devil on your back?” on the lead single, Church Girl, but it is probably, in reality, more of the dancing queen in her breaking out. Clearly, in her own explanation of the direction Pink Noise takes, she’s looking to let the real Laura Mvula out. While the album overall is a colourful riot of rhythm, with electronic drums and synth bass infectiously parping away, there are shades of light and space, too. But for the most part, it’s an enjoyable return to quintessential ’80s pop, as if you’ve come in from the pub on a Friday night and found a vintage edition of Top Of The Pops on BBC Four, all party streamers and ra-ra skirts, and Janet Jackson or even Prince himself in their prime. In fact, name an ’80s chart reference point, and if you were alive then, Mvula brings it all come flooding back. Even Phil Collins doing Sussudio.

When she was thinking about a return to recording, Mvula sought the advice her people. “The best thing my manager said to me was, ‘What do you want to make?’,” she told The Times. “I said, ‘Something I can move to.’ ” And that is exactly what she did.

Pink Noise is out now on Atlantic Records

Vinyl demand - again

It’s hard to comprehend that, over the last year or so, I’ve only been inside a record shop twice. I say “in” as I’ve done plenty of record shopping, it’s just that it’s been mostly via a browser. The two occasions in which I have crossed a physical threshold have been, respectively, for a private, rule-of-six-compliant gathering (when it was legal to do so), the other for a proper splurge, during last September’s Record Store Day ‘drop’, at the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham. On that occasion, it was a blessed reminder of the pleasure of rummaging through the racks of a well-curated music shop. 

Nothing wrong with Amazon, of course (and without mail order, life would have been extremely dull over the last 15 months), but there is, really, nothing to beat the admittedly fetishistic tactility of bringing home fresh vinyl. Traditionally it’s been depicted as the preserve of punters of a certain gender and, indeed, age group: when I lived in Paris I regularly spent Saturday afternoons in Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel, gorging on new vinyl releases amid a predominantly male, middle-aged clientele. But according to figures released this week, ahead of the first of two Record Store Day drops this summer, record buyers - and I mean of the mostly black, 12-inch variety - are getting significantly younger. 

A Record Store Day survey of more than 140 participating independent record shops recently revealed a “considerable rise” in the number of younger people buying vinyl. This doesn’t come as a great surprise: for the last two Christmases, both my step-daughters - 20 and 16 respectively - have asked for vinyl - a right old mix including The Vaccines, The Smiths, Rex Orange County, The 1975, Royal Blood, Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey. Their age is one thing, their gender is another - 60% of record store owners reported in the survey a growing number of women coming in to buy vinyl. 

“Record shops have had a history of being fairly male dominated spaces,” said Ashlie Green from David’s Music in Letchworth. “But the High Fidelity-esque days are definitely over as more and more women are enjoying vinyl. Not only are there more women behind the counter but the spaces themselves are much more welcoming to all people of all ages.” Green sees Record Store Day is a great way to open up shops to a more diverse clientele. “That list of releases is so eclectic and brings in music lovers from every background for what is normally a big party!”.

Jack LeFeuvre of Dundee’s Le Freak Records has also noted the trend towards younger vinyl buyers. “Nearly every artist will release a special vinyl edition as part of their album campaign and that is something that many music fans don’t want to miss out on.” LeFeuvre even thinks that younger consumers are driving a digital backlash: “If you love an artist there’s nothing more exciting than being able to hold the artwork, read the liner notes and enjoy the experience of listening to an album from start to finish. When we first opened we were always asked if it was a fad but it’s popularity has only continued to rise and proved the naysayers wrong”.

There’s no escaping the fact that streaming and digital music formats are here to stay, but the figures show that vinyl continues to grow, year on year. When then first Record Store Day took place in 2007, the UK was selling only 75,000 vinyl albums. Last year that number stood at more than five million, representing over £110 million in value. It’s something this year’s Record Store Day ‘ambassador’ Noel Gallager wants to see continue, and not just for his own sales (well, a bit): “I think if we can keep record shops open for as long as possible, we owe it to the young people of this country,” he says, plugging a compilation (Back The Way We Came: Vol 1) of his solo career so far, which is amongst today’s releases. “I’ll be getting involved,” Gallager says. “I’ve got something unique coming out. Hopefully the fans will like it and they’ll keep the flame burning for your local record shop.”

Record Store Day may be a momentary occasion - even if spread over the first drop today and a second on 17 July - but there’s no doubt that they stimulate interest in shopping for music in a traditional record shop (and, in these COVID-impacted times, locally, too). The challenge will be, as last year, getting the footfall amid continuing social distancing requirements. In pre-pandemic times, Record Store Day would be marked by packed shops and queues snaking around the block from dawn. 

Picture: Twitter/Banquet Records

This year’s drops will require shops to be somewhat limited, despite ‘general’ retailing being allowed to open up, but not everyone will be able to even do that. My local shop, Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, has reluctantly reverted to last year’s online model due to our borough having a surge of coronavirus infections (and, indeed, the highest infection rate in London). It’s not ideal, and last year’s online experience was fraught by technical issues caused by high demand for releases - great for business, but like trying to book an Ocado slot during the first weeks of lockdown last year. 

Once inside a shop - whether physically or virtually - this year’s drops offer something for everyone, with 340 special editions in the first one, including releases from Fontaines D.C., the Beastie Boys, Lady Gaga and Wolf Alice, and a further 200 in July, including the likes of Small Faces, The Clash and St. Vincent. The full list of releases for both drops can be found here. As for me, I’ve got my eye on a green vinyl 12-inch single of Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Steven Wilson’s 40th anniversary remix of Ultravox’s Vienna, new coloured pressings of Marc Bolan & T. Rex’s Star King and Mark Lanegan’s Here Comes That Weird Chill, and a couple of live albums by The Police. 

If, however, push comes to shove, and I can have only one album from this first round, it’ll be The Truth by Prince. Originally only available as part of the Crystal Ball CD box-set, Record Store Day sees the first ever vinyl release of what has generally been described as one of the Purple One’s lost gems. Much of his work has been defined by relentless funk with a rock and pop edge, but on this recording Prince applied his bluesier instincts, with a more organic, acoustic sound that many felt, when it originally appeared in 1998, provided a fascinating insight into the late genius’s songwriting skills. 

The Truth also whets the appetite for the release, at the end of July, of Welcome 2 America, an apparently “lost” studio album recorded in 2010 and then shelved. Five years after Prince’s death, it will be a point of curiosity, especially amongst fans, but also from sceptics who feel that such posthumous releases were held back to begin with for a good reason. We shall see. Certainly won’t stop me buying it, however. Because that’s how we record buyers roll.

The future is here, finally, and it bites

In a week in which the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths, pretty much all other bets are off. Least of which, any carping about being denied life's simpler pleasures. You could, I suppose, measure the COVID timeline in terms of what has been curtailed and when.Take, for example, No Time To Die, the new Bond film: originally scheduled for November 2019, then shunted by reshoots to February last year, it was then kiboshed altogether by the emerging pandemic. The latest date, we're told, is this October. 

But whereas the Bond producers will easily earn their investment back, the music industry has been faring less well. There’s been no shortage of releases over the last ten months - many recorded stoically in home studio lockdown - but it’s live performance that artists seem to make their money from these days. Which means that if you’ve got an ambitious album and tour concept, these last few months will have been frustrating. 

Take, then, Steven Wilson, whose sixth solo album, The Future Bites, is finally released today. When I first spoke to him about it, it was the autumn of 2019, and the album was, by then, mostly ‘in the can’, bar some final tweaks. The next Christmas, when we met, he was justifiably excited by the concept being developed for the album, which would roughly follow a theme of commenting on the trappings of modernity (including online shopping - ironically before it became such a lifeline), and the ambitious, multimedia approach that would accompany its release. And then the virus struck, pushing back, first, the album's release, and then an extravagant tour that would see him headline London’s O2 Arena. 

That, in itself, was a massive milestone in his solo career. Because, let’s face it, you don’t just get to play the O2 if you don’t have the chops - or the audience - to fill it. Sadly, rescheduling has forced the O2 gig to be cancelled altogether, but a new tour will commence in September that will see Wilson play major cities, including a date at the legendary Hammersmith Apollo. It is, though, heartbreaking, as The Future Bites represents, without doubt, Wilson’s most adventurous breakthrough to date - in a more-than 30-year career that has seen him responsible for more albums than I can actually count, what with his Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man and numerous, relentless other projects. That’s a big claim, I know, but hear me out.

First, though, the history lesson, because I realise that I’ve been prattling away about someone you may not have even heard of. Which is, Wilson admits with heavy reluctance, par for the course. As a piece in The Times today points out, he may well be the most successful British rock star who can go shopping at his local Waitrose without being asked to pose for a selfie. And, yet, I’ve witnessed punters camped outside Parisian theatres hoping for a glimpse of him, or standing en masse in restaurants to raise their wine glasses in adulation. 

Despite this, however, and despite his last album, To The Bone, reaching number three in the UK (kept off the top by two blokes named Ed Sheeran and Elvis Presley…), and despite even selling out the Royal Albert Hall three nights running on the album’s tour, Steven Wilson is still the rock star you’ve never heard of. Mainstream radio even gives him a giant swerve, which I find baffling. To The Bone represented a change of direction, not only with a new record company (Universal offshoot Caroline International) and better promotion (which even saw him appearing in an extended live interview on BBC Breakfast), but with a record that blatantly embraced Wilson’s love of 80s pop. There was even an ABBA-esque single, Permanating, which delightfully confounded the fans that had followed him from the era of his proto-prog band Porcupine Tree, which had sort of evolved from an at-home bedroom project and into one of the more sizeable touring forces of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

However, that P-word - “prog” - may well be the sprig of garlic that keeps radio programmers at bay. He is unashamed of his association with the form (the oft-told story of his upbringing is that his first two musical influences were the Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby, gifts exchanged by his parents, Maureen and Mike, one Christmas). As an adult, his professional sideline remixing albums for King Crimson and Yes has maintained further links to the genre. However, he has also produced multichannel versions of albums by Roxy Music, XTC, Ultravox and Tears For Fears, revealing more than just an ear for more expansive pop.

Which brings us, kind of, to The Future Bites. Before getting into its thematic concept, it is a markedly different album to much of what Wilson has been known for. But not all. While Porcupine Tree may have been born out of a teenage soup of long hair and Home Counties rock guitar, Wilson’s own interests were being spread across an eclectic range of styles, some of which manifested themselves in the No-Man group with long-term friend and collaborator Tim Bowness. On his adolescent bedroom wall in Hemel Hempstead there was a poster of Prince who, along with David Bowie, has been a constant figure in his musical DNA. While his professional music direction would take a somewhat avant-garde rock route, electronic music would always be in his listening palette. Which is why the first thing you notice about The Future Bites is just how unlike a rock album it is. Throughout, it delivers atmosphere over bombast, restrained drum machine beats over epic tom-tom crashes, and while Wilson has always been quite deft at melodic songwriting, melodicism drives the textures of all nine tracks.

What also drives them is the underlying theme: the modern world. Wilson is, like me, 53 (we were actually born a week apart), but don’t mistake that statement for some prematurely aged fellow railing at things. The theme is more a reflection on the Internet age and how online behaviour pervades every aspect of life, from our perception of news to our absorption of information, how we relate to culture and even our addiction to online consumerism. Such a premise could sound dystopian, I agree, but the narrative Wilson puts forward is wry and observational. And it blends seamlessly with a musical approach that surely - surely - must place him more than ever onto the mainstream radar. In this regard, one track stands out for its employment of one Elton Hercules John, arguably pop’s most extravagant consumer, who Wilson arranged - through a friend of a friend - to have intone a series of consumer durables for Personal Shopper, a pulsing EDM track that offers a delightfully cynical take on online impulse buying. “Buy for comfort, buy for kicks/Buy and buy until it makes you sick”, Wilson sings, before Sir Elt kicks in with a shopping list that includes sunglasses, teeth whitener and even - cheekily - deluxe edition box sets…of which I confess to being guilty of…

Purist fans might baulk at the apparent absence of guitars on the album (there are, in fact, plenty, it’s just that they’re not turned all the way up to 11), but you get a sense that in being more atmospheric - and electronic - Wilson has given himself more room to move within. Thus, King Ghost is lush and reflective. On the other hand, 12 Things I Forgot chimes in with a snappy line in acoustic guitar accompaniment to a beautiful, strident pop song about regretful reminiscence. 

Both, however, bring out the best in co-producer David Kosten (aka Faultline), whose own solo work as well as production for Bat For Lashes and Everything Everything has accentuated a gift for texture. There are shades here, too, and in the background, of some of the myriad influences that play on Wilson’s ear, perhaps, labelmate Tame Impala on the scintillating Man Of The People (which, add Neil Tennant, could give the Pet Shop Boys a serious run for their money) or, at a squint, the funk of Wilson’s teenage hero, Prince, on Self IQ.

I may, in this review, have given the impression that The Future Bites is some wild departure from Wilson’s usual fare, and it is indeed another tonal shift. Some of his hardcore fans might rankle at that, but anyone who’s been paying close attention to his career will have noticed that change has been constant. Some changes, he’ll admit, have been more subtle than others, but he has never accepted the view that he is beholden to any one form of music, even if that dreaded ‘P’ word follows him everywhere. 

If there is any sort of compromise, it’s on the closing song, Count Of Unease. It’s what I call a proper closing song. I used to have this theory that, when putting albums together, artists would always programme them so that the final track of the record provides a sunset, a touch of autumnal melancholy. As a teenager, I would hear that final track fading out and feel sad that the whole experience was over. I later found out that, in the pre-digital days, how a vinyl record was sequenced owed more to the physics of certain types of songs requiring more plastic to accommodate bass and rhythm. I still don’t understand the science, so I will gladly settle for the notion that the closing song is indeed a farewell. Count Of Unease is that song, and to bridge to my previous point, is eminent of both the electronica throughout The Future Bites, but also the aural clues that have been there in Wilson’s music, right from the beginning. For all Porcupine Tree’s flights of prog-meets-metal grandeur, there were also lighter-touch moments of atmos and grace. 

Here is just that. But, rather than representing closure, it sets Wilson up for the next record (work of which is, I gather, already in progress), and the first strokes on a blank canvas that remind those just coming to his music that there are no rules to hit. He will always do whatever he damn well likes, and is all the more interesting for it.

Tales from the other end of the planet: Steve Kilbey's Eleven Women

Music will do strange things to a fellow. In normal times, it’s what turfed me out of bed at Rude O'Clock to queue for a must-have “exclusive” on Record Store Day that would, quite probably, be freely available later in the year. And at a more sensible price, too. It’s the same mild insanity that once sent me on a 12-hour road trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album (for context, I was on holiday in Mammoth Lakes, California, and the nearest Tower Records was in Fresno. To me, a 750-mile round trip seemed a logical use of free time). 

By similar token, I once went to Montreux for the day just to see Prince. The lengthy return train journey, plus two days off work, was totally worth being crammed into the Jazz Festival's Stravinsky Auditorium, wedged against the stage edge with a heaving crowd of 4,000 behind me, just to see Prince deliver three sweaty, cramp-inducing hours of funk, with hardly any hits. It will always be one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

My last marathon music trip was again in California: in May 2019 I found myself in Los Angeles for work and discovered that legendary Aussie wooze merchants The Church were playing up the road. The fact that "up the road” was Santa Cruz, a six-hour, 380-mile yomp up Interstate 5, was somewhat immaterial. What was important was that The Church were playing, in its entirety, Starfish, the record that introduced me to them. With the luscious Under The Milky Way and Reptile, it was an album of the moment, produced as so many were in that period with an emphasis on mood and jangly guitars. It was the band's deserved breakthrough, placing them in the pantheon of global Antipodean rock exports in the 1980s, like INXS, Crowded House and Midnight Oil. Until 2015 I’d somewhat lost touch with The Church, until I was alerted to them playing the poky New Morning club in Paris, where I was living at the time, and in promotion of a new album, Further Deeper. It was, however, something of a disappointment, largely down to frontman Steve Kilbey appearing somewhat worse for wear. Thankfully, the Santa Cruz experience four years later was a wholesale improvement, making the drive up from LA, the overnight stay and the glorious trip back down California's more scenic Highway 101 all worth it. You can read my recollections of that gig here.

Kilbey has, however, been a fascinating character to follow, from afar. An enigmatic frontman, his dabblings in music, poetry, painting and even acting, are not the symptoms of a dilettante character but, simply, manifestations of one of those people who just have an abundance of creativity about them. Thus, his latest solo album, Eleven Women, is the product of a prolific output over the last 30-odd years, being his 12th solo release (in 2014 it was reported that British-born Kilbey had 750 original songs registered with Australia’s copyright agency, the APRA). In fact, Eleven Woman was the fourth new record Kilbey had been involved in last year, like so many others in his profession, applying himself creatively during the lockdown at home in Sydney. Kilbey, however, hadn’t even planned to make a solo album, having expected to spend 2020 touring and recording with The Church.

Picture © Naomi Dryden-Smith

The result is an album that is at turns heartwarming and enjoyably baffling. Loosely, it’s a series of 11 sketches about women, similar in premise, I suppose, to Eleanor Rigby, but with a lens distinctly similar to that which Kilbey applies in his painting. You could - at risk of a convoluted metaphor - look at Eleven Women as pencil sketches with dabs of paint on some, full colour washes on others, and more intricate brushwork elsewhere. There is psychedelia, such as opener Poppy Byron, with its mesh of guitars - some jangly, some Balearic - and 60s-vibe congas. Or Where Gloria Meets Rachel, which purrs along with a beautiful 12-string and mandolin shimmer. Kilbey’s post-punk sensibilities show through on Woman Number 9, which has echoes of Bowie’s Berlin period, although the vocal owes more to Syd Barrett’s whimsy as much as anything else. 

Over the 11 tracks there is a driving curiosity to Eleven Women, as it takes subtle left and right turns, the music and Kilbey’s at-times obscure lyrics combining to maintain constant interest from start to finish.  Some, like Shiba Chiba and Queen Of Spades veer into pure pop, while the moody Lillian In Cerulean Blue takes Kilbey’s bassy vocal into Ian McCulloch territory, a clear contemporary of The Church's breakthrough early alt-rock era. Kilbey’s vocals are, it has to be said, never the surest, but then there are plenty out there (or were out there) who were never exactly pure, either, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Mark E. Smith and even Morrissey. It depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose. On a track like Josephine (no, not a cover of Chris Rea’s AOR staple), a rustic, folky ballad, Kilbey’s singing weaknesses are highlighted, but on the quirky Birdeen, it reaches a similar tone to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett (yeah, yeah - lazy Australian trope, I know), which fits the song with perfection.

It was only after listening to Eleven Women that I discovered it was a classic lockdown production, recorded in just three days. That might suggest an artist in a hurry, but my reading was that Kilbey wanted to create immediacy. Albums can, if the people behind them are so inclined, take an inordinate amount of time to produce: just look at the decades between Peter Gabriel’s output, or the 18 months Bruce Springsteen laboured for to create Born To Run. Eleven Women doesn’t suffer from rapidity at all, even if Kilbey only recorded a couple of takes for each song. Rather than produce something slapdash, he’s created something warm, quirky, at times humorous, always genuine and quite unique.

Gone in 60 seconds - Record Store Day comes...and goes

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is something clearly perverse about standing in a queue at seven in the morning for a shop that doesn’t open until 10am, purely to get your hands on some plastic that, probably exists in some other form or another. Actually, let me correct that statement: there is something clearly perverse about sitting on a pavement still stinking of unidentified Friday night detritus, queuing for a shop that doesn’t open for at another two hours at least.

But then buying and owning records is one of those pastimes that teases out the obsessive. Not quite as bad as standing at the end of a Clapham Junction platform all weekend, I grant you, and compared with buying comic books or football stickers, relatively tame. But the return of vinyl record ownership has, I’ll admit, reawoken a certain “fetishism”, to quote a particularly lively Twitter rant the other evening from Danny Baker - arguably Blackheath's leading record collection owner - on the subject of this year’s Record Store Day.

The main source of Baker’s ire was his belief that artists and their labels use RSD cynically to lure in punters to buy limited edition, available-for-one-day-only, copies of records which then get sold on for profit. “Record Store Day is a racket,” he opened with. “Just press up hundreds of copies for these stores you vampires. What's with this stupid treasure hunt? Its [sic] so much less about indy stores than creepy eBay limited editions. Fuck off Record Store Day.”

So, at least we know where he stands on the topic. But he went on: “Having a record only pressed up for Record Store Day is like owning one of those commemorative dinner plates offered in the back of Sunday supplements. ‘To honour Lady Diana, this once in a lifetime...’” And, inevitably, Baker was not done there: “Hey kids! Does Record Store Day raise your awareness of that little shop around the corner that you'd never seen before?  Or is it for a load of old boys to grab cynically limited, but basically worthless, stock for later profit on eBay?”.

© Simon Poulter 2018

On this last point, he may have something. Most of the individuals ahead and behind me in the queue at Greenwich's excellent Casbah Records this morning were men, well into middle age, and clearly the type who take RSD seriously. Whether they were indeed planning to make a fast buck on eBay, I couldn’t tell and wasn’t that bothered to ask.

Record Store Day may, ultimately, be a marketing gimmick, and even if Baker argues that most of those in the queues are discovering their local music emporium for the very first time, that is largely the point. Independent record shops - the intended beneficiaries of the entire exercise - will make more money on this one day than they do in the traditionally impoverished first three months of the year.

However, while the vinyl revival is going great guns (an £88 million business), with LPs continuing to sell relatively well in the face of other physical and digital formats, the humble record shop is still an endangered species, and for that reason alone, Record Store Day is a great way to show support, although consistent, year-round custom would be even better. So, Danny, call me a fetishist if you want, but I’m more than happy to join in the absurdity of dossing on the pavement for three hours in the hope of landing a Bowie album that inevitably will be on sale later in the year as a CD. Because it is about supporting my local record shop, one I actually visit throughout the year.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve spent many a happy Saturday afternoon browsing in record shops and, at the age of 50 - cliche as this might sound - I still do. I still enjoy the discovery of new music, just as I enjoy relistening to familiar music on new formats. Vinyl has given me an excuse to hear anew things I’d previously only heard on cassette, or on early-issue, poorly mastered CD. Record Store Day is part of that curation.

There are those - girlfriends and wives, mostly (emitting disdainful grunts as the front door slams at Stupid O'Clock) - who will think of us as suckers, victims of a gimmick designed to entrap the weak-willed desperate to own some obscure reissue purely because it's a) now on coloured vinyl and b) because it will give them an air of Nick Hornbyesque cultural superiority (may I hear quote John Cusack's Rob Gordon, proprietor of Championship Vinyl in the film adaption of High Fidelity: "I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not rereleased - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I'd feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn't... well... kinda one of them."). These are experiences you don’t get from Spotify.

Record Store Day is a glorious celebration of the absurdity of record buying. The exclusive releases are hardly rare Picassos at Sotheby’s, but that’s not why they’re bought. In fact I'm not entirely sure why they’re bought but, speaking from trouser-emptying experience, there is a distinct, momentary pleasure about buying something unique, taking it home and - yes, here comes the 'tactile vinyl experience trope' - desleeving that new purchase to stick it on the turntable in order to find out what all the fuss was about.

© Simon Poulter 2018

If you do it right, you’ll walk into your local emporium armed with a carefully compiled list in the hope that at least some of it has been stocked (RSD is a tricky business for record shop proprietors, who have to take a punt on what will sell on the day out from the 500 artists releasing albums and singles as part of the programme). Inevitably that means some disappointment, but if you’re prepared to be in that queue early, and have organised your wishlist, you'll usually come away happy. And broke.

Like Christmas Dinner, it’s over in a matter minutes after a lengthy build up. And worth it. This year I walked out of Casbah Records with pretty much what was on my shopping list - including a reissue of Prince's 1999, Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), The Who's Kids Are Alright soundtrack and Steven Wilson's RSD exclusive 12" single How Big The Space. A tidy haul. Was any of it essential? No, but again, that wasn't the point. And if you don't understand that, you probably never will.

© Simon Poulter 2018

Blowin' a fuse: Bruce Springsteen at the AccorHotels Arena, Paris

Somebody recently asked me an impossible question: "what's your favourite gig of all time?". I was stumped. And for a number of reasons, too. I've been to many, many concerts over the last 36 years, some for fun, some for work, and in that time I've seen the stellar, the obscure, the legendary, the unfashionable, the overhyped and the just plain brilliant.

I've seen the Rolling Stones four times, and The Who and Prince twice; in seeing Robert Plant (twice in the space of a month) and Paul McCartney just the once I have at least experienced some linkage to two of the greatest bands of all time. Sadly, though, I only saw Bowie once, and that was on the awful Glass Spider Tour. Thank God for the live recordings.

My brief career as a music journalist began with the first and, possibly, last review of a Phil Collins gig in the NME. I was at the legendary Madstock festival which, so the apocryphal tale goes, was measured on the Richter Scale, such was the mass pogo triggered by Madness playing Baggy Trousers. At the same gig I finally got to see Ian Dury & The Blockheads, a long-held ambition and richly rewarded, and I also saw Morrissey get booed, which was harsh but funny. I've also enjoyed some of the most brilliant evenings of live music at the Montreux Jazz Festival, often ending up sitting next to the same performers at the remarkably informal Harry's Bar across the road (an encounter with Grace Jones unnerves me still - she was just so damned nice).

Gig-going has been intrinsic to my life here in Paris over the last five and a half years: it reunited me with my childhood friend Steven Wilson, having last seen him in 1974, and now a bona fide rock star, playing Le Bataclan; the city's smaller, intimate venues have brought me into close proximity with Johnny Marr, the Stone Roses, Paul Weller, Richard Hawley, The Church, Popa Chubby, Seasick Steve and the Kaiser Chiefs - to name a few, and not a bad haul either; and, perhaps most poignant of all, I was privileged to be at the emotional return to Paris by the Eagles Of Death Metal in February.

Still, though, there are plenty of gigs I regret missing out on, as well as plenty of gigs I regret going to at all (The Wedding Present at a sticky-floored college refectory comes to mind). On top of this, I really have no desire to attend any outdoor festivals, unless they're within a half mile of a Tube station and have paved footpaths. And I can very easily pass on the overhyped festival of Trench Foot, chlamydia and corporate hypocrisy that is Glastonbury, preferring to watch from my sofa with all the comfort, convenience and proximity to a fridge that implies.

© Simon Poulter 2016

However, nothing upon nothing compares on any scale to Bruce Springsteen. I've now seen him twice, and both occasions in Paris, too. Quite why it has taken me to just the last five years, living here, before seeing one of the greatest live acts in music history is hard to fathom, but I have no time for regrets, as these two concerts - Wednesday night at the AccorHotels Arena and three years ago at the Stade De France - will answer, unequivocally, that question I was asked.

2016 has been a year which has forced us to rethink our notions of mortality when it comes to our music icons. It's nothing new: for as long as rock stars have been dying prematurely - Hendrix, Joplin, Presley, Lennon...take your pick - we've reluctantly accepted that some candles burn brightly for only the shortest of time. With Bowie et al this year we've started coming to terms with the realisation that the heroes of the rock era are dwindling, along with the music that propelled them to hero status in the first place.

Springsteen, however, continues to defy rock's waning. At 66 he's as energetic, engaging and as downright brilliant as any legend past or present. What he takes from his audiences he gives back in spades. The frequent trips throughout the show into the crowd might be viewed as schtick, but Springsteen never overplays it. He is for his people, and of his people. It's an unbreakable bond.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The Stones and The Who, to some extent, might still come close, and though both still excellent entertainment, the former are now something of a high-end vaudeville act and the latter are largely now trading off heritage as they consciously wind down their touring career. Springsteen, on the other hand, is still producing albums of some vitality. They may not be as ground breaking as Born To Run, Nebraska or The River which, in its entirety, forms the main act of this latest tour, but it is patently clear that The Boss has lost none of his unique ability to tell a story. Or to do so live.

Because that is what sits at the very core of the Springsteen brand. Whatever the scale of his epic, three-hour shows, or of the superlative bombast of his and the E-Street Band's sound, Springsteen at his best is the blue collar barfly, regaling you over a brew with a story about the mundanities of life. Not even Dylan can romanticise about crossing county lines, screen doors slamming and steaming engine blocks and still be as authentic or as heartworn. You may be looking at a multimillionaire rock star, but you are also looking at working class New Jersey. You are still listening to songs forged in 1950s imagery of girls in their finery at the Saturday night dance, of unrequited love affairs, marriages and the dawning of dissatisfaction and claustrophobic relationships.

Sitting in an arena just a stone's throw from the French government offices of Bercy may have been an incongruity from the 'real' America Springsteen evokes, but somehow, amongst 16,000 rapturous [mostly] French people, we were in that bar, that autoshop, that high school dance hall. To get there, though, you must allow yourself to penetrate the stagecraft of the E-Street Band - Steve Van Zandt's endearingly entertaining hamming; Nils Lofgren's guitar virtuosity; Roy Bittan's delicate touch on piano; the 65-year-old Max Weinberg's breathless, virtually uninterrupted drumming; and Jake Clemons' deft sax playing, keeping his uncle, Clarence's flame alive. Cut through that and you listen to Springsteen's words and music, in that order, absorbing and contributing to the energy of the band and of the crowd, and the overwhelming sense of being a part of something that, even 41 years since his breakthrough, is still growing.

© Simon Poulter 2016

While this magical show was devoted to The River album, it opened with an obscurity, Iceman, recorded in 1977 for the The Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions and then forgotten about. It eventually surfaced on the absorbing Tracks box set. Tonight was, evidently, the first time Springsteen and his band had played it on this tour, and it - followed by Lucky Town - worked brilliantly in getting everyone's eye in, like tennis players 'knocking up' before a match.

These were, however, just a prelude. The main premise of the evening and the entire tour is The River. Springsteen's albums are never conceptual as such, but they are certainly reflective of the times. The River, released in October 1980, held a mirror up to an America in recession, on the cusp of electing an archly-conservative president a month later, and still bearing scars of Vietnam in its heartlands, in need of both togetherness and contemplation alone. As a result, Springsteen deliberately sequenced the 20-track double album to offer shade and light, with tracks as bold and as classically Spectorish as The Ties That Bind interspersed with more frivolous material like Sherry Darling and the hit Hungry Heart (during which Springsteen conducts a full-on stage dive in this show), the pathos of Point Blank leading to the hoedown gaiety of Cadillac Ranch (complete with Patti Scialfa stand-in Soozie Tyrell going full "yee-hah!" with a fiddle solo).

But where, on the original album, The River could be accused of being a little uneven, 36 years on, with an E-Street Band as finely tuned as the smoothest-running German car engine you could imagine, there is a power to all of the album's songs in the live setting, even the quiet numbers, like Drive All Night, engineered by Weinberg's simple slowbeat, building to a compelling crescendo.

As The River's stories unfold, so does your appreciation of the palette Springsteen applied to the album's storytelling. You end up with no other conclusion that you have heard a unique canon of songs, performed by a unique collection of musicians. Yes, it may be Springsteen's music, but he never lets it be forgotten that Springsteen and the E-Street Band - a genuine band of brothers (several of them postponed personal music projects to jump on The River Tour, jumping at the opportunity to tour again for a last time before Springsteen concentrates on solo projects) - are one and the same.

© Simon Poulter 2016

It may not be fashionable anymore to sit down and listen to an album all the way through, from track-first to track-last, but the trend of touring entire records means that artists have a captive audience to hear the sequencing as intended. I'm sure the streaming era is creating a generation of dilettante music fans, missing out on the narrative of the musical novels that albums like The River are. This show is, however, a reminder of just how fulsome The River is, but even taking into account Springsteen's legend for lengthy shows, the momentum is relentless.

Anyone dropping off will have been woken back to full consciousness by Ramrod, the explosive rocker which, on Monday night, literally blew a fuse at the Paris venue. Tonight, no such worries, as it took the show into The River's fourth and final side, in old vinyl terms, a side with two of the album's many nods to automotive iconography, concluding with Wreck On The Highway.

By this stage, however, the only wrecks are us - sweaty but carefree. Springsteen and his band have no intention of stopping, or even basking in the glory of having breathlessly played through an entire 83-minute album from start to finish. Almost without pause we're into the mighty Badlands, opening what turns out to be almost another hour of extra music, and is quickly followed by a cover of Patti Smith's Because The Night, which Springsteen originally wrote before handing it over to Smith.

The hits tumbled out - The Rising (inspired by 9/11 and as poignant in France now as it would be looking across to New York City from Springsteen's New Jersey home), the ironically patriotic Born In The USA, an outstanding Born To Run, Dancing In The Dark and then Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, replete with dutiful on-screen tributes to the "the big man", the late Clarence Clemons, and original E-Street keyboard player Danny Federici, who died three years before the sax giant in 2008.

This second, hit-sprayed part ends with Shout, the Isleys' party favourite (some might think of Lulu, others, simply, "Toga!!!"), which ensures that all but the dullest, smartphone-hogging dullard (the Jeff Lynne-lookalike perched on the steps in front of me, for example) is on their feet and having, simply, the best of times.

And it is. If I never see another concert again I can and will have the satisfaction of experiencing something profound, something untouchable, akin to the Dutch notion of "total football", albeit with a travelling band of musicians who perform and behave more like a family than jobbing artists. What binds it all, of course, is Springsteen's songwriting. And thus, it is celebrated, fittingly, by the man himself, reappearing after his comrades have disappeared, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, strumming the opening chords of Thunder Road.

"The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves, like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely," he sings. We are enraptured: all of the joy, all of the emotion, all of the fist-pumping energy of the previous three hours condensed into this most beautiful of ballads.

"Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk". Damn right he did.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Party over. Oops, out of time.

When David Bowie died in January two things happened. Firstly, there was an understandable outpouring of grief. Bowie wasn't just a pop star - he'd transcended that status at the outset of his career. His music, his art, his way of life were on a totally different plane, and the impact he'd had on those who'd grown up with his music (as well as those who'd come late to the party and found out in the best way what the fuss was all about) was immeasurable. Certainly more so than any other rock star I can think of.

The second thing that happened was the abrubt realisation that musical icons who'd emerged in the '60s and '70s were beginning to pop their clogs. Well, to be fair, clogs were popping long before 2016 came knocking with its apparently unstoppable roll call of celebrity death. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Michael Jackson, et al, should still be rock and rolling, had rock and roll not got in the way. And, then, if you really want a depressing legacy, Wiki the hip-hop acts who have died in an age range of early-20s to mid-40s, with causes grimly including: "shot and killed" (numerous), "car accident", "complications from AIDS", "cancer", "complications from diabetes" and a long list of strokes and heart attacks.

If you were to transplant these deaths into the general population it's likely that you wouldn't see anything greatly different (though "shot and killed" may not be as prevelent an exit in every part of the world...). The bleedingly obvious point I'm making here is that people die all the time: 55.3 million each year, 151,600 people every day, 6,316 people each hour, 105 people each minute. Two people will have died, somewhere in the world, in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.

Unfortunately we expect our icons to be immortal. At some point - whether we like it or not, accept it or don't - we will have to bear with the news of Paul McCartney and Ringo Star reforming the Fab Four upstairs. Even the Rolling Stones can't go on forever. Not even Keith. No doubt the insurers of a special gig this October in California that will feature the Stones, Bob Dylan, McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who are sweating bullets, given the rate we're losing celebrities this year.

However, like Bowie's death, last night's news of the 57-year-old Prince moving on came from nowhere. Even if the tabloids have since been intrusively digging around reports of prevailing ill-health, here was another icon departing as unpredictably and, in a way, as eccentrically as he had conducted himself throughout life and as an integral figure of that trio of Madonna (whom Prince was older by just a couple of months) and Michael Jackson (who was just a couple of weeks younger than La Ciccone).

They were children of the first pop era, who'd learned their way in the world in the '70s to become the premiere megastars of the MTV age, mixing dance and pop with gawdiness and sexuality, to take over the very arenas rock's behemoths had occupied the decade before.

Prince, Madonna and Jackson were the undisputed pillars of the 80s in pop. Just as Bowie, glam and art rock had done for the 70s, they established put image, reputation and music to work. And while Jackson may have been the self-styled King of Pop and Madonna its Queen, Prince was by no means the errant offspring. Like Bowie, he was an innovator who took recognised forms and adapted them to his own idiosyncratic sense of artistry, crucially both in the studio and on stage.

Prince was an analogue musician in the pre-digital age who sounded like no other. His 'Paisley sound' was his own, uniquely, and unlike any other contemporary in black or white music. And, of course, with his adrogyny, he challenged what black or white musicians should sound and look like. Somehow he appeared to be overtly sexual and asexual at the same time. In his music there was a lot of funk, soul and R&B, but also a lot of rock, blues and psychedelia, and more than a lot of knowing humour. The thing is, we just knew so little of him which, actually, in this era of knowing what everyone has for breakfast thanks to social media, is fine by me.

My abiding memory of Prince was being crammed into the Stravinski Auditorium in Montreux three years ago on a hot, sweaty Saturday night. Somehow I'd managed to get down to the front of the stage, which is not my normal MO at concerts at all. The Stravinski is perfectly shaped to see artists from almost everywhere in the room, such is its pleasant intimacy, but by virtue of the fact I'd been forced to use a side entrance, I was right up against a human barrier of security people shining torches on anyone who dared to get their phones out to photograph the Purple One. By the time he was on stage, I was resembling one of the bodies in Picasso's After Guernica, deformed and bent totally out of shape by the crush.

Not exactly being the right shape or physique for such exertions, I ended the concert with cramp in both feet and both calves, gasping for the drink I'd been denied by being hemmed in down at the front. And I wouldn't have had it any other way - as Prince, backed by his muse-du-jour 3rdeyegirl, funked out for close to three hours barely 20ft in front of me. It was one of the gigs of a lifetime, coming in the midst of a long summer of concert-going. You can read my review of it here: http://whatdavidbowiewoulddo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/party-over-oops-out-of-time-prince-at.html

Instagram/Montreux Jazz Festival

I've been less effected by Prince's death than Bowie's, simply because Bowie meant much more to me, and in a way, that gave me greater licence to wallow. But, like every obituary and music fan who has thusfar commented on the Purple One's sudden demise, his genius was truly, really unparalleled, even if that does, after so many celebrity deaths, sound like hyperbole. Much of that is down to the fact you can't, really, nail down what it was that made him so innovative.

The starting point would be his starting point, the 1978 debut album For You - written almost entirely by him and performed exclusively by him. It's personnel listing reads: "Prince - all vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, Orr bass, bass synth, singing bass, fuzz bass, Fender Rhodes electric piano, acoustic piano, Minimoog, Polymoog, ARP String Ensemble, ARP Pro Soloist, Oberheim 4-voice, clavinet, drums, syndrums, water drums, slapsticks, bongos, congas, finger cymbals, wind chimes, orchestral bells, wood blocks, brush trap, tree bell, hand claps, finger snaps."

Over the next three albums - which included 1980's Dirty Mind (the one with Prince posing on the cover in, well, his underpants) - his polymathic virtuosity expanded further, along with more of his American moral sensitivity-challenging mild eroticism (Smash Hits named him The Purple Perv). In 1982, 1999 put him squarely on the map with the a whopping, 70-minute double album that featured the brilliance of its title track, along with Little Red Corvette and Delirious. Purple Rain, which followed, is arguably one of the greatest albums of the decade, removing Springsteen's Born in the USA from the top of the US charts and featuring the hits When Doves Cry, Let's Go Crazy, Purple Rain, I Would Die 4 U and Take Me With U and ending with the anthemic, nine-minute gospel-meets-blues opus of a title track, one which showcased Prince's excellence as a lead guitarist, an attribute he was rarely credited for.

These were the albums that introduced me to Prince. These were the albums that established him as an artist, really, like no other. There would be 33 more to come from Paisley Park Studios, each as confounding and as their predecessor, some without fanfare, some without even a name attached to them (), but all unmistakeably without parallel or without imitation. That may not be your definition of genius, but it certainly comes close to mine. And that is what we mourn for. Death is inevitable, that we know. But loss is something you can't allow for, especially the loss of someone as brilliant as Prince Rogers Nelson.