A couple of days ago, I gave you my top three albums of the summer. It’s not all I’ve been listening to, and this too has hardly left my virtual turntable. A confession - I was initially only drawn to this EP by its peculiar title, which appears to celebrate one of my favourite animals. Even when it became clear that it hadn’t much to do with those sweet little creatures, I stayed for a very varied 13 minutes of music — and the raw talent of a young jazz musician.

What does BabyGoated mean, I wondered? It hinges on the term ‘goated’ (which, in my old bloke’s ignorance, I didn’t know). But it apparently means Greatest of All Time. Baby means, well, baby, as in junior: a small person who is still developing. These two words turn out to be important to Amy Gadiaga’s sense of self: a combination of vulnerability and boldness, cuteness and arrogance.

The artist, who describes herself simply as a “jazz princess” on her Spotify profile, certainly doesn’t lack confidence. She’s moved from being primarily a double bass player to putting composing and singing at the forefront.

Her liner notes say: “The title reflects the dualities that shape the record: between humility and pride, softness and strength, divine energy and human imperfection. The whole project is a constant struggle between baby and goated, between confident and lost — but always gracious.”

I instantly loved the title track, BabyGoated: fresh, poppy, happy, Neo-Soul tinged jazz, with a tremendous trumpet solo by Joseph Oti.

Amy sings in English and her native French:

Chaque jours bébé élégance

Dans le quartier on se moquait de mes pompes

Mais la t’as vu ouais je suis nonchalante

Bébé chaque jour arrogance

(Every day, baby — elegance.

Round my ends, they used to rinse my kicks.

But look at me now — effortlessly cool.

Baby, every day — pure arrogance.)

She writes that here she’s hit on using slangy French rather than the poetic style she says she previously aimed at. Perhaps she’s thinking of the next track, Brunheau reine des francs, which opens with a rumble of piano before Amy sings a nightclub-style ode about the sixth-century queen, featuring lines like:

même moi je m’en irai avec toute l’énergie une fois acquise à quoi servent mes membres sinon à démontrer qu’ils peuvent aussi briser

(“I too will depart, with all the strength I have gained. What purpose do my limbs serve, if not to prove that they too can break?”)

The final track, who knows, has Amy harmonising with herself before moving into a semi-spoken style: Do you remember the city your dreams went to die? The saxophone, played by Christopher James Edmondson, reminds me of David Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, and the sax work of Donny McCaslin, whom I’ve just discovered is well worth listening to in his own right.

All in all, her EP is like a tasting menu from a very high-class chef trying to show off their mastery of different cuisines, from French to Korean to Mexican to sushi. You’re not quite sure whether they’re meant to go together. While the skill is undeniable, the question is: do they hang together? Which brings me back to the first track on the album.

(Intro) imma pick you up opens with a bold blaring of horns and an explanation in the liner notes: “I am specifically in the verse addressing both my younger brother and my troubled lover. I’m taking on the role of a warm feminine presence to guide them out of their dark moments.”

Unfortunately, we do not have a record of how her younger brother or her troubled lover feel about this guidance from a warm female presence, or her softness, strength and divine energy. It’s some years since I last personally encountered a baby goat, but I still remember it vividly: the charm and enthusiasm are undeniable, but all that headbutting and those attempts to chew your clothes can get a bit wearing.

But I’m just being a bit cynical about the blurb and the blah — there’s huge musical promise here. She moved to London from the outskirts of Paris when she was 18 to study at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Many of the greats, including Fela Kuti, studied there. Gadiaga was born to parents of Senegalese, Gambian and Malian descent, so her roots are West African, and she describes herself as French-Afropean.

But if this smorgasbord of an EP demonstrates the breadth of her talent, the previous one — her 2024 debut EP, All Black Everything — shows off the depth of her jazz chops and while more conventional also feels more substantial.

Taken together they suggest she isn’t merely good: something exceptional is brewing here. One more worth watching. More recent faves soon.

Best ? I dunno really but these are the three that I’ve been listening to on repeat. There are three others, that I've been listening to pretty constantly but they'll have to wait for another day. For that you can blame Brazilian super star Anitta.

Regular readers may realise that my latest obsession is with Brazilian Music in general and in particular with Anitta’s EQUILIBRIVM which came out in April. I was terribly excited when I learned the follow-up was going to be released in July, a month ago now. The rumour was after EQUILIBRIVM she had intended to do a more internationally focused album. And I fully expected ‘2’ to be one of those supposedly deluxe albums with maybe a couple of new songs, a few remixes, a few alternative versions, and as such I was really looking forward to it. ; but I think every fan was surprised to find it was much, much more than that: not only are there 17 brand-new songs but she has doubled down on the exploration of afro Brazilian religion and the country’s unique musical heritage.

I was so besotted that it rather snookered this blog: it has stopped me writing about anything else. Over the next few days I hope to put that right to an extent at least. I say “to an extent” because I’m still not ready to write in depth about the triumph that is EQUILIBRIVM 2 - there’s a lot of material to translate, plus a great deal of cultural digging I want to do before I feel secure in writing about it -but a triumph it is. Musically, culturally, and in the scale of its ambition.

It lives up to its name too, attempting to achieve the equilibrium, the balance, between:

the many genres of Brazilian music, but also many different strands of Brazilian culture

the sacred and the profane

her Afro-Brazilian religion and the sensuality that flows through her music

Anitta the bold global pop star and Larissa (her real name) the insecure, shy (she claims) Brazilian woman returning to her roots.

What is really remarkable is how a hugely ambitious idea, which could sound pretentious or worthy, in the end, plays second fiddle to some very sweet music. Her voice brings together melodies allowing this album to contain a multitude. Of course you can’t really translate a very deliberately Brazilian project into other tongues. But let me try to give you a feel for the scale of what’s going on here : imagine Beyoncé deciding to make an album that somehow contained Kendrick Lamar, Willie Nelson, Appalachian folk, New Orleans brass, Native American music, Miami rap and mariachi — and still unmistakably remained a Beyoncé album. You would call the ambition breathtaking, possibly absurd, and almost certainly hubristic.

But Anitta seems almost humble about what she’s doing and it works. It works so well.

I have been listening to other stuff, and now it’s time to unsnooker myself, and here are my top two ‘stuck on repeat’ albums - there’ll be several more of my recent favourites over the next few days.

Charli XCX has come up with the best post-punk goth electro album you never knew you needed — but you are now being told now that you really do. Really.

It’s all hard angles and sharp, jagged edges. Music,Fashion,Film is a tremendously bracing album.

Those blokes on the cover ? John Cale,(music) Marc Jacobs (fashion), and Martin Scorsese (film)I was genuinely very glad to hear her tell Radio 1 that it was about joy, specifically the joy of creation.

Because it doesn’t at first read like that. The music is certainly fun, but the lyrics distinctly suggest that Charli is weary of this whole ‘life’ business. Maybe her mood has changed. Maybe her publicist told her to say something more cheerful, because you do end up thinking the poor woman’s got a bit of a problem as the album ends

with the Canadian film director David Cronenberg intoning ‘ “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.” On repeat. For one minute and thirty four seconds. Even the album’s undeniably catchy opener ‘rock music’ has it:

I’m really banging my head
I’m really hurting my neck
The nerve damage is real
But it’s the only way to feel something -
Hurt yourself

This could be taken as an ironic reflection on rock music itself if it wasn’t followed by the sublime SS26,

which has Charli declaring she’s walking on a runway that goes straight to hell (Fashion). And the world is going to end in Spring/Summer ’26. This doesn’t mean the album is gloomy -it is not – nor are these tilts at the zeitgeist much more than nihilistic mood music. A background for Charli’s intense frustration about her own internal contradictions. This song, she says is really about the positions and personas the internet forces people to adopt.

Similarly, ‘card declined’ is less an attack on late-stage capitalism for encouraging people to define themselves through purchase than Charli’s annoyance with herself for thinking that you can buy a smile along with a hand bag, a back story with a Mah Jong Sofa. As one of my non-musical obsessions, is cruising ‘sofa porn’ on Vimteriors, this had me intrigued.

II digress (I do -you’ve been warned).

f this wasn’t enough the song ends in a marvellous cacophony which sounds like bagpipes but almost certainly isn’t, and a sudden new chorus.

A couple of things propel this a million miles from the downbeat whines of your average singer song writer. The sheer sense of energy her self-doubt generates would probably do the trick all on its own, but in every song she deploys her core talent -the ability to combining serious introspection, killer tunes and on point witty lyrics.

Can’t believe the things I’ve done, I don’t do ‘em now
But I didn’t do it
Even if I did
No, it’s not my fault, I wasn’t there

I was hacked
It got taken out of context, obviously
But I didn’t do it, even if I did
Wrote a really good notes app apology

And it is about creativity too, not so much the joy of, but the constant turmoil it dictates. wink wink .

Charli doesn’t give a fig for the thing that made her a superstar (music) -she only feels alive when on set, these days (film).

Despite her declaration that only being in the films makes her feel real -’cause it’s the only way to feel I’m not actually me’ - my fingers are crossed that she doesn’t give up on the music -not only because this a worthy follow-up to Brat, which is still very hard to beat. Much better than Wuthering Heights, certainly. While film and fashion may allow her not to feel like herself it is music that allows her to talk with devsestating honesty about the messy, complex, and I suspect rather wonderful person that is Charli XCX.

The other album that’s been stuck to the virtual turntable is another kettle of weird fish entirely – a purposefully strange debut from Mary in the Junkyard, role model hermit. It is a keeper for sure: a brilliant and very unusual offering from this South London trio.

The lead singer, Clari Freeman-Taylor, has an extraordinary, slightly fractured voice. Sometimes whispered, sometimes spoken, breathy, often cracked, before she sings in a higher register. Sometimes she sounds like a broken little girl; at other times, exultant. If this wasn’t enough, she is also lead guitarist, producing a sound that is usually fuzzy, mostly shoegaze-comforting, occasionally harsh. But this is no one-woman outfit: bass player Saya Barbaglia’sviola and cello are integral to the dense, atonal sound, softened only by David Addison’s light-touch percussion.

I was first drawn to this band by the exceptional single Crash Landing,

which begins with a harmonium so droney that you are shivering – in a good way – even before Clari’s voice comes in with great clarity and slowness, as though she is picking her way through a landscape filled with broken glass. Shivering even before you realise this is the story of a devastating break-up:

“You came in like you were done pretending.”

The oddness is compounded by the strange, vivid line:

“You opened up like a coconut.”

Then come ethereal backing vocals – and we aren’t even two minutes in. It is a work of such perfection, such maturity, that I must admit I was at first disappointed by the rest of the album. As so often, first impressions were wrong.

Every track has something special going on, from the bouncy energy and catchy riff of Blood, not to mention the strange love story told in the video – “there is nothing to see here except sweetness”

– to the Velvet Underground tribute guitars of Myrtle, recalling Lou Reed’s squall of sound on Sister Ray.

My current favourite is Thou Shall Sprout.

It’s a creepy story masquerading as an old English folk song, a tale of a man who steals from the market to provide for his pregnant wife. The traders threaten to cut off his hands should he return, which gives him bad dreams – “he could no longer play the piano” – so his partner tells him to take from the field instead. But he’s murdered by the farmer, who then buries him. From his body grows the bounty of the earth – “his head was a beetroot” – which his wife uses to feed his newly born daughter. The grimness of the tale is undercut by the jaunty tune and tom-toms – but bolstered by that harmonium.

As with the whole album, one gets the impression this is not some sudden, impulsive, off-the-wall wackiness, but a deeply pondered, deliberate, dedicated weirdness: a strategy of surrealism.

Take the cover – apparently a rather wild-looking, bearded bloke, at first glance clearly the titular role model hermit. What you really won’t guess is that the bearded hermit is a heavily disguised Clari, the shot taken on a visit to Iceland, where she apparently became convinced that she was the reincarnation of a drowned fisherman.

As for the title, it refers to one of those slightly kooky personality-classification things and means someone who “combines long-term maturation with natural inwardness”. Like Obama and Maya Angelou. And Clari too, according to a friend’s auntie who did an astrology reading for her.

At any rate, the fisher-hermit-now-rebodied-in-Clari has a mouse in his pocket, who gets a whole song to itself:

“Mouse, I’m so sorry we drowned
The sea swallowed us
And then spat us out”

Again, it could almost be an authentic folk song, given a contemporary treatment. And so what about the band’s name itself? Clari is pretty dismissive: no, she’s not Mary. She just liked it because it sounded poetic. It doesn’t have any deep meaning. The drummer is rather more reflective, saying it reflects two sides of the band: “the cleanness and beauty, and the grime and noise”.

He’s describing a duality that certainly does exist, but the band is a multitude of tensions.

It’s the nature of pop music that bands come and go, in and out of favour, on and off the turntable, virtual or otherwise. I think this one will be staying for a long while yet.

The Rewind

This is the second in an occasional series, The Rewind — a look at albums I’ve missed over the last couple of months while otherwise engaged. Some will be odd and obscure, others just firm favourites I haven’t had time to write about until now. The first was Outtanational by Pigeon.

Another album which has not left my virtual turntable is Kacey Musgraves’ Middle of Nowhere, which, like Outtanational, came out on the first of May and has been a constant companion now for almost three months.

In Kacey country, the sonic space of these songs is as wide open as Texas itself filled with her wonderful voice, sly, funny lyrics and shimmering, liquid guitars.

Kacey Musgraves has long been my favourite country singer. By a country mile, in fact. For her alt-country approach, her humour and, of course, the tunes.

But I rather veered off after the last album. A bit too serious, a bit too yoga and om mani padme hum, a bit too celebratory of her newfound sobriety, which seems to have been rather overdone.

Welcome back: to the Kacey we love, and the guitars that make this album extra special.

She’s never entirely abandoned her country roots for pure pop, but here she’s leaning harder into country, exploring various different styles and, above all, featuring some really gorgeous guitar playing.

Each of these songs is a little gem.

I know I overuse that image. It’s how I see them, though: brilliant, jewel-like and carefully polished to a state of perfection. There’s a formula, in a sense, behind these near-perfect country-pop songs: her distinctive, expressive voice, a great melody, sly, funny lyrics, excellent guitar breaks and the like. Deceptively simple, with much deeper intent than is first apparent.

This album finds Kacey in the middle of nowhere — not just geographically, in rural Texas, “this great state of confusion”, but also emotionally.

The whole album is her declaration: “I don’t need a man. No, siree! I do not!”

The tease and the fun, amid the very genuine heartbreak, lie in how much we believe her protestations.

Just about every song is a different iteration of her rejection of the need for a lover in her life. Some seem almost genuinely happy about this lack; others carry varying degrees of disappointment, disillusion and even distress. Oh, and let’s not forget frustration. Her character dips in and out of self-delusion from every angle.

In the opener, she finds herself out “way past common sense”, with no phone signal. But if HE tried to call, she wouldn’t call HIM even if she could:

The thing that I love about the place that I’m in
There’s no reckless men who don’t know what they want
I’m trying to lean in to the in-between
It’s just me and me, and that’s all I need

This simple country tune is decorated by the lovely, fresh and fluid sound of the pedal-steel guitar of 77-year-old Dan Dugmore

.

I told you not to forget frustration. On the second track on the album, Kacey bemoans her plight:

I’m so lonely
Lonely with a capital “H”
If you know what I mean
I’ve been sitting on the washing machine

Which is why, in the song’s video, she’s lasciviously caressing Swiss rolls and melons, and eyeing up unsuitable shelf-stackers during her weekly supermarket shop.

Ain’t nobody’s tool up in my shed
Ain’t nobody’s boots under my bed
Ain’t nobody’s truck up in my drive
For a late-night call, for a real good time
Ain’t no new notches on my belt
And I’m tired of keeping my hands to myself
911, it’s officially a cry for help
Y’all, I’m going through a dry spell

To underline the mock-heroic nature of Kacey’s quest, there’s a spaghetti-western feel to the music: two Spanish guitars and two acoustics, plus a restrained bit of electric. They make for a gorgeous sound.

Just before the album ends, Kacey finds her cry for help adequately answered by going down south. In the recently released video for Mexico Honey, she gets pretty raunchy:

Take my heart, take all my money
I want you so badly it isn’t even funny
I mean, for real, what the hell
You’ve got me shaking my ass in my hot-pink shorts

And she does. Even those shorts come off when she takes a dip in the river while handling a large snake, as you do.

But she’s told NPR that Mexico means a great deal to her.

“Texas is not Texas without Mexico, in many ways. Other people don’t know this about me, but I spend half my life living in Mexico. That’s where I go to decompress, to reconnect with the physical world.”

Perhaps we should have guessed from that last single before this album.

But is a lot more than horses and hot blokes. In a thoughtful interview with NPR she talks about a land of borders and fences, that informs the music I

“Texas is not Texas without Mexico, in many ways. I’ve always been drawn to it. It’s really important to get to experience that first-hand myself, seeing how far it goes back.

“Whenever you listen to traditional mariachi music and traditional country, they seem the same. The instrumentation is largely the same. They’ve got the same heart in the same place — just slightly different regions. I wanted to explore that kinship.”

Once more, the guitars make this song lush: electric, acoustic and mandolin. But once again, it’s the outstanding sound of the steel guitar that makes this album. Eight of the album’s 13 songs feature pedal steel.

The first, eponymous track features the lovely, liquid sound of the pedal-steel guitar of 77-year-old Dan Dugmore, a veteran of Nashville’s A-list session musicians who has been around the block a few times. As a youngster, he was fascinated by the instrument but couldn’t get his hands on one until he went to a Flying Burrito Brothers gig in 1968 and their steel player, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, sold him one.

Another Nashville A-lister, Justin Schipper, plays on Loneliest Girl and Russ Pahl does the honours on Mexico Honey:

But 72-year-old Paul Franklin, winner of the Country Music Association’s Musician of the Year last year, who played with Dire Straits for four years, plays on six tracks. I always get confused about the various types of steel so I've called on 花 to help

The Mexican influence is strong on Horses and Divorces, a very funny duet between Kacey and her one-time rival, the country star from small-town Texas, Miranda Lambert.

The two apparently fell out long ago over a song written by Kacey for Miranda, which Kacey then decided she wanted to keep: Mama’s Broken Heart.

Now they are talking again, apparently bonding as frenemies over their shared interests.

There were chips on our shoulders, but now that we’re older
It’s all whiskey under the bridge

Hell just froze over
’Cause we’re both at the bottom of the bottle and we’re findin’
We’ve got a few things in common
Like horses and divorces and we both like to drink
Maybe we’re more alike than we think

It’s a jolly, singalong sort of romp. A country waltz takes on a distinctly norteño vibe — a Mexican genre which is popular in Texas too.

The word simply means “northern”, but it is another of those Latin styles which has its roots in the 19th century. The hapless Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, the younger brother of the Habsburg ruler, imported military bands from his Austrian homeland, while other, less noble European immigrants favoured polkas, waltzes and accordion music.

Rather like Brazilian samba but, critically, without the rhythmic dexterity brought by the influence of enslaved people from West Africa.

There’s certainly an accordion in the mix here, but once again it is the guitars that make the sound special. Kacey herself plays one of three acoustics, adding to the Spanish guitar and, of course, pedal steel.

It is a fun song, and a rare one in that it isn’t about Kacey’s romantic entanglements, or lack of them, but a clear-eyed evaluation of her past “shit-talking” and where that led.

On the third track, Back on the Wagon, her character seems more deluded as she sings of her hopeless drunk of a boyfriend and his long string of betrayals:

He spent all our money and he thought it was funny
When he came home with nothing to show
Oh my God, it hurt me, that time at the Derby
When I found him passed out on the floor

But this time history cannot, will not, repeat itself:

I know he’s caused so much pain, but this time he’s changed
So don’t try and drag him
’Cause we’ve got big plans
And no one understands him like me

You say he’ll fuck it up, but we’re so in love
There’s no way that’ll happen
’Cause he’s back on the wagon

It’s a difficult proposition. We don’t really believe her — or do we? The rather plaintive, almost tearful sound of Paul Franklin’s pedal-steel guitar suggests perhaps we shouldn’t.

There is a place for blind faith.

Not, perhaps, in Abilene — a small city in Texas, population 125,182, about the size of Norwich — where we get a third-party view of the song’s central character, her:

Hands always gettin’ cut from pickin’ up the pieces

And the town gossips wonder why she’s leaving:

All we could ever really do is speculate
What was in her head when she up and hit the interstate
Guess the pills didn’t help, couldn’t kill all the pain
And nothing good ever happens anyway in Abilene

Although it’s not too hard to speculate that getting away from both her latest lover and her daddy might be worthwhile:

Around the time that she met him, he was out of work
And her daddy said, “You couldn’t clean off the dirt”
Even if you hose him down, put him in a collared shirt
Is it really worth all your dreams?

Here the song is—

All these songs shine like gems, and I haven’t said anything about some of the harder, sadder songs, like Coyote, with its slide guitar and another man frightened of commitment, or Ghosts: more tears and a ripping ’70s-style guitar solo.

Two more terrific songs feature special guests: Billy Strings on Everybody Wants to Be a Cowboy and Willie Nelson on Uncertain, TX.

Both putting the “special” into “special guest” with some fancy picking.

So I’m hard-pushed to choose a favourite, but it is probably The Loneliest Girl in the World, where Kacey celebrates her singledom against a shimmering background created by not just one but two pedal-steel guitars.

I don’t have to navigate nobody’s drama
I don’t have to act like I like all your friends or your mama
I don’t have to take on your childhood trauma
I’m happy to be the loneliest girl in the world

Y’all don’t need to worry ’bout what I might be missing
Put me on a poster of somebody who’s living the life
Yeah, I’m alright
I ain’t even mad at all the people in love
I can pour whatever I want in my cup
Give it up for the loneliest girl in the world

I gotta be careful of who I let in
I’m not sure I can stand my heart getting broken again
No more anything that’s taking my energy
If I’m only doing it for company
I’d rather be the loneliest girl in the world

Genuine? Hard to say. But in an interview with NPR she suggests she means it

“It was the longest period in my adult life where I was on my own, and I had gone through a break-up. I was taking stock of my relationships and what I wanted in my life, and really learning how to lean into being alone. I started really loving my singledom.

“It was a long time without any intimacy with anyone else, and I had always feared that before I experienced it — just having this notion that I needed someone to be happy, which I found to be completely untrue.”

Good for her : this album glitters with the sound of steel but its good to know that despite the heartache she can still “get a little sparkle on” -and although she is determined to have a good time the honesty and vulnerability shines through too. Give that girl a big hug.

As I said this time last week, my favourite singer had dropped a new single overnight, rather to my surprise, and I would write about it soon. I had intended to do that today and review Loco, her collaboration with Greek singer Anastasia.

But Anitta had another, bigger, better, bolder surprise. She’s only gone and dropp…

Read more

It all kicked off a week ago yesterday — last Friday — and it has been a rollercoaster of great new music ever since. On 10 July, my favourite singer and favourite band both released new singles; then there were deluxe versions of two albums I love; and, best of all, the 25th studio album by The Rolling Stones dropped. Plus loads of great stuff from some other old favourites and people I’d never heard of before.

Time enough for much of that over the next few days. But today:

The real surprise is the Rolling Stones’ new album. It’s so ballsy, so bluesy, so Stonesy.

It is so good that I would have believed it if I’d been told these songs came off some ancientreel-to-reel tapes discovered while rooting around the cellar of an old pile in the south of France, hidden behind several bottles of very dusty 1921 Château d’Yquem and a few almost-empty baggies of brown powder. For this has the feel of a band messing around after the serious business of recording Exile on Main St. or Sticky Fingers.

It is not, of course, but Foreign Tongues is the best Stones album for many a long year.

The opening track, aptly titled “Rough and Twisted”, sets the bluesy pace, from the first classic opening chord to the final cacophony, which is allowed to fade to a buzz. It opens with a classic guitar chord before the driving thump of the bass drum comes in and carries on throughout the track, driving the rhythm as each element unfolds.

First Mick’s voice comes in, hard and strong. Then the blues harp. Then the guitar. Then honky-tonk piano. Then some more furious harp, and Mick is going wild, stomping out his best Chicago blues.

Stones Trinity

At first, I thought the cover of Foreign Tongues, was simply a grotesque caricature of Mick Jagger. But it turns out to be a composite, a collage. In Stones Trinity, by Chicago artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn, the faces of Mick, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are scrunched into one ugly mug.

What used to be called jolie laide, but which the French these days might call mignon-moche, the Swedes fulsnygg, or pug lovers on the internet “scrunkly”.

In any language, this image fits the album perfectly. These guys have gone beyond being elder statesmen of rock or national treasures and are once more revelling in their rough edges: ragged and louche. It feels like they’re celebrating going beyond mere longevity, well into extra time, by not giving a tuppency damn.

As Mick sings on the second track, “In the Stars”:

“Do you wanna dance ’til the roof caves in?”

Ooh yeah. I, for one, do.

The Age of Trump

But what about that roof that is going to cave in? This isn’t just the realism of a couple of 83-year-olds and their 79-year-old mate, although the joyously anarchic video for the lead single,

involving more than 100 musicians and dancers, does hint at mortality and legacy in a paradoxical way by “de-ageing” the trio using AI, with body doubles taking them back to their twenties.

But the apocalyptic tone is not about their age. It is about the Age of Trump.

Jagger and co have never been overtly political — indeed, I can’t think of Stones songs, ever, that I’d describe as political. But now “Star” has lyrics about the “sickness in the land” and talks of:

“All the judges in their robes got their rubber stamps.”

The infectious country blues of “Mr Charm” name-checks one of the President’s pals: “Mad mogul Mr Musk”.

To be sure, Trump doesn’t get called out by name, but by The Stones’ standards the boot goes in on “Ringing Hollow”. It is one of those world-weary country blues which The Stones do better than anyone else, including the inventor of alt-country, their old mate Gram Parsons.

It begins as a love song to the USA:

“I was madly in love with you before we even met.

I saw all your movies, smoked your cigarettes.”

But:

“There’s always a scoundrel

Trying to whip up the crowd.

What do you think about that?

The clock’s never gonna turn back.

Lady Liberty don’t look so good

When she’s wearing a frown.”

And it continues:

“And there’s always a king

Trying to pick up the crown.

But what do you think about that?

They took away the welcome mat.

Lady Liberty don’t look so good

When there’s a tear in her gown.”

By The Stones’ admittedly low bar, that’s fairly heavy stuff.

Earworms and Echoes

It is inevitable, really, that some of the songs here echo previous riffs and tunes. That’s very Stones, too. This reminds me of “Doom and Gloom” from 2012, just as the leading earworm, “Jealous Lover”, recalls Mick’s falsetto on songs like “Miss You” and “Fool to Cry”.

And — this is the earworm — “Jealous Lover”

has been piping up in my mind’s ear for the last week. Now even the line “You’re praying like a mantis”, which at first jarred, just seems funny.

One of the most intriguing songs on the album is their cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”. The lyrics force Jagger to sound unusually English, singing about pitta, chips and Stella, but he also sounds smokier, bluesier, than even Amy herself managed.

He really shows off his extraordinary vocal versatility, cramming himself into every inch of the song, every nook and cranny.

Recently, Ronnie Wood recalled Winehouse asking him about her addictions:

“She would go: ‘Oh Ronnie, what am I going to do?’ I said: ‘Look, everyone knows you’ve got vodka in the water bottle. Get it together and get on stage.’ But if you could get her up there and she stayed there, it’d be great. I’m sad because she didn’t do her full span. It was like saying goodbye to Billie Holiday again.”

Jagger had offered his own warning later in 2007, Speaking to The Sun, he praised her brilliance but said:

“She has class. I am worried she might die if she goes down the road that she has taken.”

This was after Winehouse joined The Stones at the Isle of Wight Festival, and sadly Mick was right.

Full Circle

The album concludes, appropriately enough, with another harp-heavy blues, acoustic this time: a version of the Chuck Berry hit “Beautiful Delilah”,

one of the songs on which they built their reputation more than 60 years ago.

In many ways, they have come full circle. But the circle is still wide open : if 1964 was about youthful energy, 2026 is soaked in the mastery that years of experience bring.

However, I have to admit that my enthusiastic romanticism — claiming this could have been a post-session jam after those two great albums of the early seventies — was rather misplaced. I listened to them both again last night. They are much deeper, much swampier, both much more tense

and much looser

than anything here. Amazing.

And this album doesn’t come close to touching them.

Jagger has said there was a bulldozer approach to this album -bang, get on with it don’t take the songs a part. Which makes it sound very much like lesser musicians of a certain age do: turn to the music they really love, have fun and just jam. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But in the hands of musicians of such calibre, it becomes something glorious.

Listen on this final track to the skill with which Ronnie and Keef weave around each other, even combining classic guitar riffs with the washboard energy of skiffle, as Mick sings about how they want to “fool around all night”.

The album comes to a ragged climax as Keith scrubs his acoustic guitar before a burst of harp and electric guitar brings a deliberately messy ending, as Mick allows himself a satisfied “Yeah” and a little chuckle.

As well he might. We should all celebrate the ugly beauty of a band who have provided they are still the greatest rock-and-roll band on the planet.

As promised, here’s a Wednesday update.

I’ve been so busy since my holiday in Brazil, and with an obsession with the music of that country – and Latin America more generally – that I have not really been keeping up with many releases but there are a few outstanding albums which I still want to talk about. This one was released just over two months ago, but it’s never left my virtual turntable.

Pigeon are the hottest band to fly out of Margate, and they’ve got me all of a flap and a flutter. It may seem odd to name a band after that most maligned of urban creatures, but apparently pigeons are deeply loved by the band’s frontman, Falle Nioke and were his favourite pets when he was growing up as a kid in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa.

Nioke’s mesmeric musical power comes partly from that distance: he sees the same things as his bandmates, but through a different lens. You can sense their awe when they describe how they’ll come up with a musical idea and wait to see what Falle will do with it, like passing a ball to the one player on the pitch who might do something impossible with it. Like this, the lead single, Miami.

The band use one word continuously in interviews: “energy”. They use it to describe the 40-minute jam sessions that became these tight songs; the wonder of watching their lead singer react to their ideas; and the early gigs where he ended up dancing with a chair. Elvis got there first, of course: “If you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair.” Falle danced with a chair -on his head.

So “NRG” is an appropriate opening track to Pigeon’s brilliant new album, Outtanational. It starts with the steady, insistent beat of West African hand drums and Falle’s trademark ululating holler before he starts arguing for “positivity”. “Juju, you can’t catch me,” he sings, like some old-time “conscious” reggae toaster of the 70s, before dancehall lowered the tone. In fact, the way he stretches the word “critical” into four syllables, it sounds like he’s channelling Lee “Scratch” Perry. The feeling that the ghost of Scratch’s old Black Ark Studios is hovering nearby is reinforced by the crazy church organ, which surprises us halfway through the song.

It all makes for a delicious, entrancing entrance, and sets the standard for the rest of the album.

Asked to describe their music in one word, Graham Godfrey, their drummer, said simply: “Cheeky.”

That’s important. It signals a change in tone for their multitalented frontman. “Cheeky” is not a word you’d use, for instance, about last year’s stunning solo album, Love from the Sea.

That record is serious, noble and luminous: his trademark falsetto confidently handling melodies enhanced by light-touch electronics. It is magnificent, but not cheeky.

He first blipped onto my radar screen when the first single from that album came out. I wasn’t aware then of his previous work with Ghost Culture and the Swedish producer sir Was. They are good, especially the EP Badiare

produced by James Greenwood ( aka Ghost Culture), which exploits his vocal range, from that falsetto to something gruff and deep, set against dense, woozy electronics. But again: not cheeky.

With Pigeon, something has been released. All Falle’s seriousness as an artist is still there, but now he has decided to have fun — and, boy, what fun it is. The first three tracks burn with a singular intensity of energy. “I Am the Black James Dean” and “Miami” are extraordinary: wildfire. Do watch the videos.

Falle’s music feels future-facing, but its, and his, backstory reaches deep into older traditions. Like many artists’ tales, it is a story of breaking free of strict parents to pursue his dreams. Like many an immigrant’s story, it is also one of love and nostalgic self-exile. But it has elements that, if not unique, are far less usual. They help explain his deep commitment to traditional African music, his multilingualism and the breadth of his musical imagination.

His parents wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer, but growing up in Conakry, Guinea, in an army camp — his dad was a soldier — he made lots of friends from lots of different traditions. That, he says, accounts for his linguistic dexterity. He sings not only in English, French and his own native tongue, Coniagui, but also in three other languages common in Guinea.

From the age of eight, he wanted to be a singer, and so aghast were his parents at this plan that they sent him from the city to his strict uncle in the countryside, who wouldn’t let him sing or play music at all. He did manage to sing when he could sneak out and escape down to the river, which became his happy place.Eventually, he tired of the uncle-dodging deception and took off with a bunch of nomadic musicians from Senegal, playing instruments like the gongoma, a thumb piano from Guinea; the bolon, a West African bass harp; and the djembe, a West African hand drum. And, of course, singing. All the time singing.

photo by Charlotte Player

They travelled north from Guinea, eventually up to Gambia, busking all the way, relying on the generosity of both locals and tourists to earn enough money to eat. When times got hard, Falle made soap and sold it in the market.

In Gambia, he briefly ended up in jail for not having the proper visa, because he couldn’t afford it. It was also in Gambia that he first met an English photographer, Charlotte Player, on a beach. Five years later they met again on the same beach. They fell in love got married in Conakry but eventually moved back to London. From there to Margate “love from the sea” indeed.

photo by Charlotte Player

Of course, Margate has long swapped its previous image of faded gentility and depression for that of a quirky, slightly down-at-heel bohemian outpost of London, neither as posh as Brighton nor as genuinely tattered around the edges as Hastings. First came Turner Contemporary, its magnificent windows framing the raging sea, then came Tracey Emin and the Libertines, and in their wake some pretty decent restaurants popped up. Now there’s Pigeon.

Falle Nioke may yet become Margate’s most thrilling musical resident — his latest venture proving his versatility and range. I suspect we’ve seen a future superstar and one of the sexiest lead singers around.

You can feel that loosening-up in the daft, self-directed videos for lead single “Miami” and “I Am the Black James Dean”. You can feel it in their live performance on Jools Holland.

And you can feel it in their attempts to pin down their own sound.

Pigeon are both very of-the-day cutting-edge and unashamedly retro. On their own sleeve notes they namecheck the mysterious Nigerian electric disco pioneer William Onyeabor and ask us to imagine their sound as “early Hot Chip making motorik Afrobeat in a 70s New York loft”.

I was going to call on the familiar spirit of the Department of Desire to bring you that thought experiment, but it turns out that even with 花’s magic powers of manipulating time and space in search of new music and expensive guitars, it is beyond her

.

You’ll have to use your imagination to conjure the sound of the seminal English dance-pop band combining Kraftwerk with downtown Lagos in the Big Apple, years before they were born. But in one of our deep dives we did stumble across this.

And even their detailed and imaginative sleeve notes don’t quite capture the whole story. I catch more than a whiff of Lee /Scratch” Perry, and the glory days of Jamaican reggae plus the spirit, if not actually the musical style of Sun Ra and, of course, the pioneer of modern African music, Fela Kuti.

Fela is inescapable for any African musician, and Pigeon don’t want to escape his legacy. Running through their hypnotic, red-hot funk is their concern for the politics of African modernity. By the way, anybody who is even slightly interested in Fela’s music should lend an ear to the magnificent podcast series on Audible, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

This 13-part series by Jad Abumrad is essential listening for anyone fascinated by the history and politics of Africa, Black America, the African diaspora, and the interplay between them. It is one of the best radio documentaries I’ve ever heard.

The rest of the album is equally good, but I just wanted to mention two more tracks.

The last, and longest, track, “Carmel”, nearing the six-minute mark, sounds different to everything else on the album. It has an almost ambient feel, which reminds me of one of my all-time favourites, Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s Possible Musics.

The song is one of dignified, solemn praise to the creator and the ancestors.

Touchingly, right at the end, amid the swirl of echoed voice and chorus, Falle gives thanks to his mum and dad. A one-off? Or a potential new direction?

Then there is “Future Country”, which I’ve singled out not for its jangly, hand-percussion-led tune and the insistent chorus — “Hey! Stop it!” — but for the video that goes with it. It encapsulates everything I love about this band : from the percussion driven rhythms to the silly, but profound vibe. It is a very funny, effective parody of a news piece, à la The Day Today, complete with vox pops.

None of this is on the album track: it is all just on the video, apparently directed by guitarist Tom Dream, who may also play the news anchor (Trying to check) Why don’t other artists give us similar add-ons, when they work so well?

The conceit, very timey-wimey, is that musicians are having to travel into the future to find gigs, and find themselves as welcome as one people in small boats receive on this side of the time line. To make points about immigration, the arts economy and the nature of time in three minutes and 38 seconds is quite a coup.

And, of course, it says something about Pigeon’s music itself, which really does make such a journey. What makes Pigeon so thrilling is not simply the collision of influences, but the sense of liberation. Falle Nioke’s solo work was serious, noble and luminous. Pigeon lets that nobility dance, sweat, flirt, laugh, shout and misbehave

They are dedicated Afronauts, journeying from a deep past into a future full of cheeky energy.

Pigeon must fly.

Just a quick one —I was delighted to see this extraordinary performance at the Jazz Cafe on Thursday by Barbatuques -this Brazilian body percussion group, who not only clapped, sung and but also slapped, shouted ,squealed, whistled, whooped and screamed

their way through an exuberant performance, delighting the audience in a way that only squelching noises can.

I first heard about them a few weeks ago through this enchanting single

The band was formed by Fernando Barba, who has been slapping himself around since 1988.

According to Womex Barba “first became interested in extracting sounds from his own body as mere amusement, and later as research”. This academic research turned into a band into 1998.

What fun this would be as a festival workshop!

:::

Love Supreme is a weird festival. Two festivals in one, really.

It is advertised as the biggest jazz festival in Europe. I think it’s a thin veneer of top-notch jazz wrapped around what is probably the biggest nostalgia- fest on our continent, with a golden thread of real concern and investment in bringing on younger, unknown jazz musicians running through the middle.

And that is all to the good.

It’s my first visit to this festival, which is nestled in the little Sussex village of Glynde, also home to the opera house, of black tie and posh picnic fame, Glyndebourne. Strangely, I’ve never been there, and this is my first visit to Love Supreme.

One friend said we should definitely see Jalen Ngonda. I replied ‘absolutely’ adding rather sniffily: he’s rather too high sugar-content for everyday use. Gorgeous voice, of course, but too derivative. Too trying to be Motown. Not even a modern-day update of Motown — just trying to be Motown.

However, I continued, if it is a sunny day and if there is a jazz cigarette to be had, it should hit the spot nicely.

And lo, it came to pass, and the prophecy was fulfilled.

But this shows why you should always try to see bands live. At first, listening from sofas in a separate area to the side of the stage, I worried he sounded a little thin. So I owed it to him at least to drag myself to the accessibility platform, and on the way discovered the deep, rich resonance of his sound from within the confines of a plastic portaloo.

Then, actually watching, I was proved dead right about the mood in the sunshine. So very 70s Motown you could almost hear the gold medallion catching on the purple silk sheets. But then some delightful twiddly jazzy bits in one song. Then I was shocked and delighted by this.

Hard hitting blues, so different to his usual style. Again, the virtues of watching live music: I am now convinced Jalen has not only a great voice but the versatility to make him more than a. minor talent, and I will eagerly follow him to see what he does next. At the end of the set he said something like: “I can’t believe The Four Tops and The Temptations are playing live here. I am here because of them.”

An inspiration to him -fun for the rest of us.

But The Four Tops do prompt a question -how can you watch a band live when all of them are dead ?

It’s not that surprising -after all the Four Tops were formed in 1953, four years before even I was born. Duke Fakir, the last surviving original member, died two years ago this month. Yet the guys in the sparkly salmon pink jackets look reasonably sprightly and their voices are lush and full, even though not exactly in their first flush -the son of one of the originals, Lawrence Payton Jr., is probably in his 60s and the oldest member is 74. They are what is called a ‘legacy act’ having rights to the, name material and the blessing of the founding members families.

To deliberately misquote The Clash ‘It was Four Tops all night, with no encores from stage right. There were plenty of grey hairs here to listen’.

And then The Temptations. Almost the real thing, with one surviving member. Of Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks and Elbridge “Al” Bryant, only Otis is still alive and still performing — pretty amazing at the age of 83.

It’s like Theseus’s ship. The question being: is it still Theseus’s ship if you’ve replaced every last floorboard, every last mast? Or more simply, the axe: replace the handle and replace the head. Is it still the same axe?

I cannot be sure about the axe, but it is the same act in many ways. Footwork perfect, even if they do look a bit creaky close up.

To my mind, they are the tougher, better band of the two.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit I first knew of them, really, because of the Stones covers: “Just My Imagination”

and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”.

Once upon a time I think I’d have been sniffy about this sort of music. Certainly back in the day I would have ludicrously dismissed it as too poppy. No more. The songs and the performance are fantastic. It feels like watching a slice of history come alive before your eyes. Even if it’s your own history, it’s still pretty wonderful.

And as they went into another complex dance routine, I thought of both as a continuation of the vaudeville tradition, even, dare I say, the minstrel tradition. We won’t see their like again, but perhaps those Korean boy bands are their natural heirs.

Regular readers, or anybody who knows me well, will know I despair of those who have little time for any music produced after their teenage years. I’ve no time for those who think all modern music is rubbish.

Nevertheless, it’s quite understandable that people have an affection for the music of their youth, and a festival like this is a good place to indulge that sort of nostalgia.

The next day it was the turn of the Philly sound and even 花 had lightened up a little

Kathy Sledge is still at the heart of Sister Sledge, a sprightly 67-year-old. It’s her birthday today. Happy birthday, Kathy.

And she introduces two of her sisters and several other blood relations. It’s still true, what they sang in their 1979 hit: in Sister Sledge, we are family.

Love Supreme is a weird festival. Two festivals in one, really.

It is advertised as the biggest jazz festival in Europe. I think it’s a thin veneer of top-notch jazz wrapped around what is probably the biggest nostalgia- fest on our continent, with a golden thread of real concern and investment in bringing on younger, unknown jazz musicians running through the middle.

And that is all to the good.

It’s my first visit to this festival, which is nestled in the little Sussex village of Glynde, also home to the opera house, of black tie and posh picnic fame, Glyndebourne. Strangely, I’ve never been there, and this is my first visit to Love Supreme.

One friend said we should definitely see Jalen Ngonda. I replied ‘absolutely’ adding rather sniffily: he’s rather too high sugar-content for everyday use. Gorgeous voice, of course, but too derivative. Too trying to be Motown. Not even a modern-day update of Motown — just trying to be Motown.

However, I continued, if it is a sunny day and if there is a jazz cigarette to be had, it should hit the spot nicely.

And lo, it came to pass, and the prophecy was fulfilled.

But this shows why you should always try to see bands live. At first, listening from sofas in a separate area to the side of the stage, I worried he sounded a little thin. So I owed it to him at least to drag myself to the accessibility platform, and on the way discovered the deep, rich resonance of his sound from within the confines of a plastic portaloo.

Then, actually watching, I was proved dead right about the mood in the sunshine. So very 70s Motown you could almost hear the gold medallion catching on the purple silk sheets. But then some delightful twiddly jazzy bits in one song. Then I was shocked and delighted by this.

Hard hitting blues, so different to his usual style. Again, the virtues of watching live music: I am now convinced Jalen has not only a great voice but the versatility to make him more than a. minor talent, and I will eagerly follow him to see what he does next. At the end of the set he said something like: “I can’t believe The Four Tops and The Temptations are playing live here. I am here because of them.”

An inspiration to him -fun for the rest of us.

But The Four Tops do prompt a question -how can you watch a band live when all of them are dead ?

It’s not that surprising -after all the Four Tops were formed in 1953, four years before even I was born. Duke Fakir, the last surviving original member, died two years ago this month. Yet the guys in the sparkly salmon pink jackets look reasonably sprightly and their voices are lush and full, even though not exactly in their first flush -the son of one of the originals, Lawrence Payton Jr., is probably in his 60s and the oldest member is 74. They are what is called a ‘legacy act’ having rights to the, name material and the blessing of the founding members families.

To deliberately misquote The Clash ‘It was Four Tops all night, with no encores from stage right. There were plenty of grey hairs here to listen’.

And then The Temptations. Almost the real thing, with one surviving member. Of Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams, Eddie Kendricks and Elbridge “Al” Bryant, only Otis is still alive and still performing — pretty amazing at the age of 83.

It’s like Theseus’s ship. The question being: is it still Theseus’s ship if you’ve replaced every last floorboard, every last mast? Or more simply, the axe: replace the handle and replace the head. Is it still the same axe?

I cannot be sure about the axe, but it is the same act in many ways. Footwork perfect, even if they do look a bit creaky close up.

To my mind, they are the tougher, better band of the two.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit I first knew of them, really, because of the Stones covers: “Just My Imagination”

and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”.

Once upon a time I think I’d have been sniffy about this sort of music. Certainly back in the day I would have ludicrously dismissed it as too poppy. No more. The songs and the performance are fantastic. It feels like watching a slice of history come alive before your eyes. Even if it’s your own history, it’s still pretty wonderful.

And as they went into another complex dance routine, I thought of both as a continuation of the vaudeville tradition, even, dare I say, the minstrel tradition. We won’t see their like again, but perhaps those Korean boy bands are their natural heirs.

Regular readers, or anybody who knows me well, will know I despair of those who have little time for any music produced after their teenage years. I’ve no time for those who think all modern music is rubbish.

Nevertheless, it’s quite understandable that people have an affection for the music of their youth, and a festival like this is a good place to indulge that sort of nostalgia.

The next day it was the turn of the Philly sound and even 花 had lightened up a little

Kathy Sledge is still at the heart of Sister Sledge, a sprightly 67-year-old. It’s her birthday today. Happy birthday, Kathy.

And she introduces two of her sisters and several other blood relations. It’s still true, what they sang in their 1979 hit: in Sister Sledge, we are family.

I’m entranced watching the reactions of the families in the crowd. one young Mum, who can’t have been more than a twinkle in her mum’s eye in 1979, is dancing ecstatically with her daughter. Then there’s the woman who has put her crutches to one side to shake her booty.

But it’s Jo, my wife, who has a gleam of joy in her eye as she recaptures her days as a disco diva.

Music festivals generally are a paradoxical but salutary reminder that most people don’t consume music the way us obsessives do.

My own pointless, and I’m afraid rather blokish, habits are: scouring who’s playing where, making lists, planning what to see for days and even weeks before hand. I should know by now — this is a lesson for life, not just music and war — that no plan survives contact with the enemy. The enemy in this case being reality.

Certainly a lesson I’ve learned, is lean hard into serendipity. Rather than rush from one stage to the next, or in my case hobble slowly, it’s better just to sit where you are, get in place where you actually really want to see someone, and stay there and soak it all in. And if like one crowd of friends of friends I met up with, you haven’t been to see a single band and are just enjoying drinking in the sunshine with mates, then that’s good too.

But I certainly didn’t get to see as much jazz as I wanted to. And it seemed strange: such a big jazz festival with only two big-ish names, Ezra Collective and Courtney Pine. Ezra, as always, were fabulous. Courtney was pretty good too.

This is because of one of those horrors of festivals — admittedly, a very first-world problem, and admittedly not a real horror. But I was so looking forward to the massage.

See, on the Saturday I was booked in for a massage. Booked in well in advance. And through no fault of the person doing the massage, but because of a chaotic team on the front desk, it was double-booked.

So, obviously, not a huge problem. But being careful not to miss it, I had arrived an hour early. And they couldn’t tell me exactly what had happened. So I spent two hours on their plush sofa, rather than listening to music.

In the end, it was rescheduled for the next day. And was excellent. Thanks, Katharine.

But t took another chunk out of my day. I did see the excellent Luke Purbeck Octet

and my clear, new, favourite -a stunningly good set from Olivia Cuttill.

It’s clear from the first note that she’s a superb trumpeter, (yes, yes ignore the grass, and my shoes, my stick,and flapping shorts -just listen)

but it’s interesting that, in a recent interview (hat tip to The Boar and Arebella Grace - for some reason I can’t link to it), she said she has become more and more keen on storytelling, lyrics and working with singers.

Her second album is out at the end of August. It’s quite an achievement for somebody who is still only 24 years old. Her first album came out when she was still at university — Leeds Conservatoire.

She is exactly why you need to see music live : listening to that first album it feels flat by comparison to her performance. I’m determined to see her when she’s next on, which is at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, at the beginning of next month.

So, Temple of Joy? Yep, despite missing o Annie and the Caudwells and Kokoroko due to transport horrors. Despite mangled massage booking, despite some disoranisation too tedious to detail, Festivals like thus are a crucial part of the British summer - Triumphant, exuberant celebration of the past and the future, and all while not having to touch a single tent pole all across the weekend.

Joy indeed.

This is an admission of guilt and of new purpose. Not really guilt, perhaps — more the way life turns out.

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Brazilian music, going deep into that, which led on, inevitably, to Latin music from the rest of the continent. And then back to Spain, via Picasso and flamenco, and of course circling back to West Africa. So a lot of it takes me back to my old haunts, really: world music.

It also means I haven’t had much time to listen to new stuff. I’ve been so busy I haven’t even listened to Mary in the Junkyard’s album more than twice, but I’m sure it’s a corker. So what I’m going to do, by way of recompense, is go back over the last few months, pick albums that I think are vitally important, or interesting, or whatever, and single them out.

First up is Pigeon, which dropped on 1 May. So, two months later, there’ll be a review next Wednesday. Call it slow, low blogging.

Early on I  identified one of the main horrors: camping. That, and the vagaries of English weather. So last year I decided the answer was to stay well away from a tent. Not even glamping was glamorous enough for me.

Instead: stay near a small festival, somewhere pleasant — a hotel or a pub — and commute in. That, surely, is the only sensible thing to do.

Turns out this plan has its horrors too.

This year, the horror turned out to be a two-hour bus journey from Brighton, where we were staying, which shouldn’t take much more than half an hour. A crash or something had slowed all traffic to a crawl. So we missed two band. I really wanted to see. But I did catch Moses Boyd, and then Ezra Collective, who promised a Temple of Joy and gave us one.

They are a brilliant band, with a brilliant ethos. They say they love Love Supreme for encouraging young jazz musicians like themselves eight years ago. They’re still doing it today. And so are Ezra Collective, huge in giving that a big push.

Hope to check out some of those acts today. More will follow.

I’ve held a torch for Yazz Ahmed ever since the single “Paradise in the Hold” appeared in the autumn of 2024, before the brilliant album of the same name came out a few months later.. So I leapt upon this EP, Forest Bathing, as soon as it appeared.

It’s not exactly a sea change, but it’s different: more cosmic, more spiritual than her other work. Further investigation suggests it was largely recorded during lockdown in 2020, so perhaps not a certain new direction but a curve in the past which might point towards a possible future path.

As ever the artwork, by Sophie Bass, is as fine as the music

The first track is “Dawn Patrol”: all insistent drums and hypnotically looped trumpet until about halfway through its seven-minute length, when it becomes much gentler and quietly ethereal before returning for a funky climax.

What is it all about ?

It’s right there on Yazz’s Substack blog — which is generally well worth reading — that she imagines “riding the waves at dawn, then swimming underwater, represented in the middle section of the piece, then rising to the surface, noticing that the sun is out, and getting back on my board to surf some more.” Then she confesses she’s never been surfing so far.

Next up is the title track, “Forest Bathing (森林浴)”. The name comes from a Japanese term meaning to immerse yourself in nature, which is something more profound than simply donning a Barbour and taking the dog for a walk. It means slow treks between the trees, relishing the sights and sounds, thinking about the dew on the leaves and the sound of an animal in the undergrowth.

One might have hoped “shinrin-yoku” had its origin in some ancient gnostic cult within Shinto which secretly developed rituals to create mindfulness. But the truth is rather more prosaic: the term was coined in the 1980s for a public health campaign by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Be that as it may, the music is tremendous: introspective, with Yazz’s mournful trumpet creating a sense of inner peace

.

“A Moment to Be Thankful” begins with birdsong recorded in Yazz’s garden during lockdown — so no traffic sounds — which she then manipulated in the studio and took inspiration to create motifs on her specialist instrument - a quarter tone flugelhorn.

I’ve said this was more spiritual, cosmic — but what does that mean? Both have specific meanings within jazz terminology, but they’re both to do with mood and intent rather than just the sound. And, I think, a good journalistic yardstick is: insert the opposite words and see whether it makes some sort of sense.

Let’s see — yes, jazz can be corporeal and earthy, and this isn’t. This certainly fits here: meditative, modal, ecstatic, full of stars. Or in this department’s vernacular, “more floaty”.

“Questions, No Answers” is the most rewarding track of all : a duet with her sometime producer and fellow experimental trumpeter Noel Langley, which, she writes, “includes live sampling” and is “a wholly improvised conversation or meditation”. Indeed, it is almost the definition of what I mean by “floaty”. Yazz continues: “I now offer it as a prayer of hope, longing for more peaceful times ahead in our troubled world.”

Amen to that.

Seeing her at Ronnie’s last year convinced me that one of my New Year’s resolutions had to be to listen to more live jazz. It is something I’ve been quietly achieving, quietly in the sense that I don’t often write about it here, because I don’t always feel I have the right words for it, or the right way to describe the jazz and why I like it.

The first gig of the year was in a Chelsea basement, with a school-dinner sort of Sunday lunch to celebrate the end of dry January, in the company of an enthusiastic professor of scat and a youthful jazz orchestra.

Then there was Theo Croker celebrating Miles’ 100th birthday early at his Miles Mixtape gig at the Festival Hall. It brought together the marvellous South London singer Ego Ella May and the great saxophonist Gary Bartz.

Ego Ella May lent her soft, intimate, neo-soul gravity; Bartz, who actually played with Miles in the early seventies, brought the stonking, steaming authority of someone for whom this music can never be trapped in the archive but is still living memory. Croker was less a curator than an excited schoolboy bringing together friends who he knows will get along.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for many of us, Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is the pivot point. So, between the album’s 50th anniversary and Miles’ 100th birthday, what an amazing focus for material about the greatest musician of the last century.

There’s a wonderful series on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Legend: The Miles Davis Story, which understands the scale of him: the restless reinventions, the cold beauty, the danger, the arrogance, the tenderness, the way he kept dragging music into futures it hadn’t yet imagined.

But I also stumbled across this tribute recorded by French television — Emma-Jean Thackray taking on Miles in ways that are in one sense unexpected, but then totally expected from those who really love Miles - They are not reverential. They don’t embalm him. They treat him as material, as voltage, as a set of provocations still fizzing away in the wires.

And then this magnificent contribution from Yazz herself., who also understands this anniversary is an opportunity not for a museum-piece tribute to Miles, but something looser and more alive: a way of treating the past as material to be remixed, worried at, loved and pushed forward. And Yazz really does push it forward, carrying further along the path embarked on in ‘forest bathing’, giving the music not just a melancholic vibe but quite an eerie one too. For all Miles’ brilliance, for all his genius in conjuring previously unthought of emotions she fills a void and adds a welcome a human scale warmth to his the music. . Dead for 35 years and yet he is still very much a live wire.

Again this was on French TV. Why is BBC TV and Sky missing this trick.?

This is exactly the sort of thing that ought to be everywhere: on television, on radio, online, cut into clips, talked about, argued over. Not because jazz needs to be preserved in aspic, but because Miles Davis remains one of the great routes into understanding modern music — hip-hop, soul, funk, electronica, ambient music, spiritual jazz, cosmic jazz, all of it.

If you want a map of where so much of the last half-century came from, you could do a lot worse than start with Miles, and particularly with Bitches Brew.

But don’t stop there -recently I’ve been diving back into the big band sound.

I’ve been so busy recently, overwhelmed by planning my visits to Brazil and then Phoenix, Arizona, that my usual obsessive gig planning had been abandoned. I was quizzing our eldest son Jake — equally overworked, equally beset by FOMO, equally good at burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, but of course without Parkinson’s disease to make him even slower — about the plans for their wedding in late January. He told me, rather testily, “I’ve only got a 72-hour horizon.”

My 72-hour horizon is now expanding. I’ve been frantically booking stuff, from Love Supreme Festival next month to Yard Act in January.

The first thing that caught my eye was the Battersea Jazz Festival. I was wondering about what used to be my old stomping ground of South London. This was the festival’s opening night but you’ve got until the 16th July 2026 to see several other gigs.

The swing version of Romeo and Juliet seemed enticing, particularly because it was at a venue I’d already wanted to try out: The Grand in Clapham. Not, as I thought, on the high street, but pretty close to Clapham Junction station.

It’s a magnificent old building, music-hall style. Seating was fine, although a table of four would have been better. It’s a shame they didn’t have beer on tap, just cans and bottles. DICTATE

What I hadn’t expected was a mini ballet to go with it.

I like my dance, on the whole, abstract. I tend to shy away from tutus and swordplay, but this was a treat, and the troupe, E33 Dance Company, had worked hard to create something special.

But for my money, Hugo Jennings’ Big Band — no disrespect to the dancers — is in a different league altogether: fluid, sophisticated and powerful. Not a bit floaty. It’s a very sophisticated territory.

I think it’s safe to say the guy behind both the interpretation and the festival itself, Hugo Jennings, must have an even shorter event horizon than mine and Jake’s. Teaching in the morning, performing in the evening, and somehow trying to find space to write out a jazz score and orchestration based on Prokofiev’s ballet. I don’t know where he finds the time, but I’m glad he does.

.

His pleas for more venues such as The Grand — which welcome experimentation without charging artists the earth —were heartfelt and are really important. More such venues are desperately needed.

For this came together after just four live rehearsals — but before that think of all the people-hours piled into it. And then realise that this is just a one-off: the only performance planned so far.

This can’t be right. It must get another airing. I’ll be at the front of the queue for tickets when it does.

Anitta — two t’s — is more than Brazil’s biggest pop star. She is a household name at home, the queen of favela funk, huge across Latin America, and, increasingly, a serious global presence. At 33, she has already lived several pop lives: six albums before the latest one, two Grammy nominations, ten Latin Grammy nominations, Coachella, the VMAs, Spotify records and Saturday Night Live. And yet it is entirely possible — quite likely even — that you have never heard of her.

Anitta’s new album EQUILIBRIVM

stands as a worthy symbol of Brazil’s newfound confidence — and the confidence to assert the hugely important part played by the descendants of those who were once enslaved.

I hadn’t heard of her until last year, and she deserves far wider recognition in the rest of the world.

On first listen, the album is exactly what I have felt generally about Brazilian music: bright and cheerful without a lot of depth. It just goes to show how wrong first impressions can be.

If you’ll excuse me a digression -why did I ever feel that, in general about Brazilian music ? I suspect it was hearing, without really listening to, MPB - Música Popular Brasileira. This odd phrase means both very much more and very much less than what it says on the tin. Less because it doesn’t include much of contemporary Brazilian pop music, more because it is a very specific genre. It emerged in the 60s and drew on the traditions of samba and Bossa nova and then mixed in foreign rock and jazz, added sophisticated poetic lyrics laden with social commentary . But even when protesting against the brutal military dictatorship it sounded bright and breezy, rather than filled with fury. This from the very wonderful Gilberto Gil, who’ll be 84 next month and is one of the very few pop stars who’ve combined their craft with being in a radical cabinet (as minister of culture)

Both urban and urbane, by and for a left wing elite it is possibly one of the reason’s Anitta feels the need to assert her identity. The older middle classes think she’s crude, common and smutty.

They’re wrong. And they are right -clearly Anitta’s quest for balance has got to me !I now adore this album and since it dropped have listened to it at least once a day and often more -it has become my latest touchstone - and no, not my latest obsession for, for all of her strengths, Anitta is merely mortal. My latest obsession is -well you’ll meet her in a moment.

Once you decode it, it shows how wrong was my first reading of this musically sophisticated and intellectually satisfying piece of work. She demonstrates her confidence by a defiant, in-your-face embrace of Afro-Brazilian religion, especially Candomblé.

It’s interesting that two of the most important women in Latin music, Rosalía and Anitta, have both come up with recent albums about their religion and their relationship to God. I can’t puzzle out exactly what Rosalía means to say about God in Lux, beyond the general appeal to female mystics in the Catholic tradition.

But Anitta’s faith in Candomblé is, to my mind, less an intellectual exercise and more a vibrant attempt to explain her roots to herself and to the world.

Nor is her search for balance in EQUILIBRIVM some milksop hippy desire for balance at all costs. This is deliberate and defiant. Her embrace of Candomblé is defiant because of the reaction to the video for her single “Aceita” — “Accept” — released in May 2024. She has said she lost 300,000 Instagram followers because of “religious intolerance”

”, and wrote at the time: “I have faith, not fear.”

From the very first track on the new album, she is defiant. On “Desgraça” — which means something stronger than just disgrace : disaster, shame, misery and bad luck — she is channelling one of the spirits the orixá, who, in her religion and in the similar faith of Quimbanda, mediates between the supreme being and humans.

Pombagira is an ancient spirit, of course, but with a bang-up-to-date modern twist. She is the spirit of crossroads and liminal spaces; the incarnation of dark female energy; rebellious, sexualised, talkative, vulgar, and bent on shattering traditional morality. She provokes desire and provokes change, setting things alight — the quintessential femme fatale or “dangerous” woman. She naughty, girl!

.

She hangs around crossroads, midnight streets and nightclubs. She is patron saint to transvestites, effeminate men and female empowerment. She is the enemy of the patriarchy.

In many ways, she’s the anti-Virgin Mary: loud, promiscuous, vengeful, talkative and vulgar. To my mind, she more than has the edge over Hildegard von Bingen or Jeanne d’Arc.

There are seemingly as many iterations of Pombagira as there are Brazilian musical genres, with Wikipedia citing 30 different incarnations, from Maria Mulambo das Cavaleiras de Vassoura da Meia-Noite, which it translates as Filthy Mary of the Midnight Broom-Riders, to Rainha Sete Encruzilhadas — Queen of the Seven Crossroads.

Pombagira is central to two standout tracks: the opening track and the powerful “Meia Noite” — “Midnight”. In that song, Anitta channels the spirit’s magnificent energy: after midnight, the street is her place; she passes through smoke and fire; anyone who blocks her will regret it.

Some of the heat for this fiery track comes from Los Brasileiros, the Brazilian production trio who collaborate with Anitta on “Meia Noite”. They are not exactly a band but a hit-making writer-producer collective. They certainly turn this into a hit, and have said they always thought of Anitta as the embodiment of Pombagira. Watch some older videos and you’ll see why.

Anitta herself has said she sings it “as if it were Pombagira herself speaking about herself”: the force of feminine energy in the night, presenting and identifying itself.

‘After midnight I’ll go out
Because the street is right there, my place is there
(Let her pass!)

I disappear in the smoke
It’s because there’s fire at the hem of my skirt”

A calmer but equally superb track invokes another orixá, Nanã. Nanã is ancient, maternal, grave, associated with wisdom, mud, still waters, swamps, rain, death, rebirth and the threshold between life and death. She is often imagined as the oldest of the orixás — an ancestral grandmother figure, not a light flirtatious goddess. Watch the great double video here -which starts with Mandinga (spell)

So when the song repeats the idea of being “of Nanã”, it is saying: I belong to Nanã’s lineage, force, protection, memory, mud, ancestry. It’s an identity claim. A spiritual affiliation. A way of saying: I come from something older and deeper than you can see.

The track also clearly nicks the tune from “Cordeiro de Nanã” by Os Tincoãs, the great Bahian vocal group whose music is deeply tied to Candomblé, Afro-Brazilian sacred song and orixá devotion.

“Cordeiro de Nanã” is a samba-prayer to an ancestral goddess, with a defiant undercurrent against forced Christianisation: silence is not surrender; ancestral faith remains intact.

This is all very deliberate as are Anitta’s choice of collaborators who represent a wide range of Braziian music from the gentle, spiritual reggae of Ponto de Equilíbrio to the samba soul of the trans artist Liniker,

to the harder edge of rappers like Ebony

She’s demonstrating both that her palate is wide and rooted. you might say
I come from old mud, old water, old mothers, old gods.
My protection is ancestral.
My song is a prayer.
My identity is sacred.

And yet identity is mutable. Not only does Shakira sing Portuguese on the magnificent banger “Choka Choka”, but Anitta also sings in Spanish on a couple of songs, most notably on one that was originally in Portuguese and later recorded in Spanish. The Spanish version was the first one Anitta encountered, so she said she wanted to recreate that experience.

The point seems to be about the lively interchange among languages and cultures across Latin America, which feels very different from what is happening in the United States at the moment. I call it the “Bunroe doctrine”

The album ends with “Ouro” — “Gold” — which at first sounds like the sort of thing played at you in an upmarket spa before your massage. But somehow it develops in a better direction with the chorus. Perhaps a nice spa treatment it is what is called for after all that sweaty midnight dancing at crossroads. Lyrically, it is important too.

The song’s closing meditation is about returning to the middle path: not abandoning what weighs you down, but finding the perfect balance between opposites

The goodbye is only to the excesses
From today on, only the ideal dose
That keeps you human and divine enough, at the same time
Between lack and excess, lust and chastity
Hate and unconditional love
Self-denial and greed
The scream and the silence
Control and apathy
And so many other paradoxes of life
There is a space
Try to inhabit that space

Ask for understanding --

Perhaps that is where the whole journey through Brazilian music has been heading: not towards the abolition of sorrow, or the denial of history, or some naïve insistence that everything is sunshine, sequins and song. The darkness is there. The violence is there. The old crimes are there. The inherited grief is there.

But so are those polyrhythms - which are at the heart of the lure of this music.

So is carnival, in the past and in the future bringing with it crowds , bodies,

So is Pomba Gira : head thrown back in raucous laughter our lady of the seven cross refusing to be silenced.

Brazilian music does not murder saudade because it has no sadness. It murders saudade because it refuses to let sadness have the final word.

That, I think, is why Brazil is cool -so cool it should be illegal.

I’ve hugely enjoyed getting over my holiday by writing these pieces. I think I’ve driven my family mad with how much time I’ve spent on it, and how much attention I’ve paid to research.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. But let’s face it: you were an excuse to allow me to indulge myself and do what I like. I love writing and researching. It feels a bit weird without any audience, so thank you to everybody who subscribed.

Do let me know if I’ve made any mistakes — or, indeed, if you simply have thoughts about my views.

I’d like to talk about the idea of Brazil and the US a bit more, but I’m going to run out of time.

I hope nobody from any of the three main Brazilian Afro-Brazilian religions is offended by anything I have portrayed here. Do let me know if you are, but also understand that it’s done in the spirit of huge admiration for your culture, and particularly for your legends, myths, beliefs, and ancestors. I want to learn more -and I will be back !

Brazil is cool II

On another night, the drums lead us somewhere else entirely: into the old centre of São Paulo, through a much rougher part of town, and into one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen in Brazil.

The venue is now known as Casa de Francisca. It was originally called the Palacete Tereza Toledo Lara, and was commissioned by Count Antônio de Toledo Lara and named for his daughter, who was seven at the time.

Built by this aristocratic fizzy-drinks mogul and property tycoon as a commercial hub, providing office space for lawyers, doctors and dentists, it soon became associated with music as the home of the city’s first record store and then a popular radio station.

We make our way down to this magnificent mansion, complete with stained-glass windows, carved statues and ornate balconies, through a bad part of town. Ragged people line the road, standing or squatting individually, almost inanimate, certainly not talking to each other. The ornate palace is at the end of a pedestrianised street, and after we are dropped off by the Uber driver, a wheelchair is summoned for me and I am pushed between the security guards dotted along the way.

Inside Casa de Francisca, in the historic city centre, Bella Ciavatta’s music has that typically Brazilian feel, bright and light — to my mind, pop-jazz. We are all lucky to catch her: it is her first time in São Paulo. But clearly, as in the samba club, much of the material is very well known to the audience who are delighted when she hops off stage tp dance with them.

Something else rather interesting is exposed when she talks about her new material and the up-and-coming album. She uses a Brazilian Portuguese expression, something like, “when you’ve got to take your fish to market” — a bashful and apologetic way of saying that sometimes you have to blow your own trumpet. And that trumpet deserves a toot - the latest single is pretty good.

This is not the attitude of most musicians with a new album, who are often slow to acknowledge that the audience are here to hear the oldies and standards rather than the new material.

But this isn’t about modesty : it’s about roots.

Her background suggests she’s something more serious than simply a good singer with some fine old tunes and some good new ones. She came out of Rio’s carnival culture. The connection to carnival is critical. For a start, it explains her connection with the audience: why they know the songs, why they sing along with such gusto and enthusiasm, and why she seems to downplay her own talents as a singer.

She has a very good voice. But her own notes on her music almost suggest this is incidental. They stress that she is a percussionist first and foremost — director of one of the most prestigious samba schools, whose slogan is “Tem que Respeitar Meu Tamborim” — “You Must Respect My Tambourine”.

For ten years, she was a conductor — or regent — of a troupe which combines samba performance with something less like a conventional carnival band than a street-performance collective, using music, theatre and circus energy to ‘take over and reimagine public spaces’.

The percussionist in her own band is Ana Maga, who isn’t just any old drummer. She is described on public profiles as a percussionist, music therapist and producer, with work exploring polyrhythms, African sounds and diaspora influences.

So my son’s future sogra’s answer comes back to me. What is special about Brazilian music?

Percussion.

Because percussion is not just a sound in Brazil; it is a history lesson. It takes you straight to carnival, to samba, and to the African inheritance at the heart of the country’s music.

For another key to the music is also a key to the country’s identity: two continents’ worth of people, mixed, shaken, stirred.

There is, of course, a European component: the original Portuguese colonisers and settlers, then waves of other Europeans, especially Italians. Later came Lebanese, Japanese and Korean communities

.

But the deepest rhythmic inheritance came from West and Central Africa. Millions of enslaved people were dragged to Brazil and forcibly mixed, their cultures partly broken, partly mingled, partly transformed. What survived most powerfully were religious and musical traditions involving rhythm, dance and drums.

You only have to look at the history of samba to understand that. Samba’s origins are Afro-Brazilian, urban and hybrid.

Musically, samba is rhythm with a spring in its heel. There is usually a clear two-step pulse underneath it — one-two, one-two — but the percussion keeps teasing that pulse, pushing accents just before or just after where you expect them. That syncopation is what gives samba its lift: the feeling that the music is walking, swaying and dancing all at once.

The word itself appears to come from an Angolan dance, semba, which rather charmingly means to bump bellies, or touch belly buttons. It is still very popular today.

Samba itself emerged in Rio after Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, when many of the newly free people moved to the city from the north-eastern state of Bahia, which had been a centre of the slave trade.

The comparison with the Great Migration in the United States is tempting: the movement that brought so many brilliant bluesmen out of the Deep South and to Chicago. The difference is they weren’t fleeing a sullen South, vengeful in defeat, demanding as if of right racist laws that allowed it to behave as though it had been victorious. Perhaps another difference was that at the time of emancipation, the US had many more enslaved people than Brazil — roughly 4 million versus about 700,000. But Brazil had a far larger Black and mixed-race population overall: about 8 million, compared with about 4.4 million in the US.

That was one reason why Rio already had a lively musical tradition. The European heritage of polka had been transformed into something more Brazilian by choro and modinha, both derived from Portuguese salon songs. Even before the great migration from Bahia, there was lundu: a sensual, flirtatious couple’s dance characterised by syncopated footwork and swaying hips, blending African percussion with European instruments like the guitar or piano. The lyrics were often humorous, satirical, or slightly scandalous for the time.

Then, when internal migration brought more musical, religious and dance practices into Rio’s poorer and Black communities, samba was born.

Women like Hilária Batista de Almeida — Tia (aunt) Ciata — were the lynchpin of the movement. She moved to Rio at the age of 22, settling in Little Africa and becoming a Candomblé priestess. She and the other Bahian aunties, the Tias Baianas, supported themselves by cooking and selling Bahian food to local people. They used their financial independence to create safe spaces for their religion and the developing music scene. The house itself becomes a strategy of survival: a place deliberately arranged to confuse the authorities and protect what mattered most.

At the front, visible from the street, the entrance hall offers respectability. Here there is choro: brass, strings, polished melody, music the police might regard as refined, civilised, acceptable. Tea is served. Conversation flows. Nothing, at first glance, seems threatening.

But deeper inside, away from public view, the house changes character. In the backyard and back rooms. Drums answer one another. African-derived rhythms gather force. Bodies move. Voices rise. What the authorities fear is not simply music, but a social and spiritual world continuing to exist beyond their permission.

The house is therefore more than a home. It is a layered map of evasion, faith, resistance and invention. Choro at the entrance, samba and Candomblé at the heart of it all. A domestic space turned into a cultural fortress.

Her home became one of the great seedbeds of samba. Musicians including the two greats of early samba Donga and Pixinguinha

frequented her house. Supposedly it was where “Pelo Telefone”, often described as the first recorded samba, was first concived.

Perhaps we can imagine the scene

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What began as something policed and stigmatised as Black, poor and disorderly was later promoted as a symbol of national identity. That transformation — from suspect street culture to national emblem — tells you a great deal about Brazil.

And I decide on what at the time seems to me a witty headline for this piece: something like, “Why Brazilian doesn’t have a word for saudade.”

It’s a joke on several levels. It is untrue because there’s no Brazilian language, and as Brazilians speak Portuguese, they obviously share that language’s famously hard-to-translate word.

In Portugal, the sense of the word — meaning something between longing and nostalgia — is central to fado, their mournful guitar-based folk music. Poet Fernando Pessoa described it as “a presença da ausência” — the presence of absence — meaning an intense sense of longing and loss.

Why this rather laboured joke doesn’t work is that the term saudade is also used extensively in Brazilian songs too.

Indeed, “Chega de Saudade” — “No More Longing” — by João Gilberto, is said to have given birth to bossa nova by blending traditional samba rhythms with modern jazz harmonies. And Martinho da Vila’s “Saudade e Samba” is a classic which directly addresses the memory of past dances and lost nights of celebration.

In that song, the parade does not abolish sadness so much as dance with it. The big bass drum drives the grief away, the dancer’s steps rouse the crowd, and the memory of carnival love is never quite let go.

But then I seized on something I read which suggested the concept of saudade differs vastly in Brazil and Portugal. In the language’s first home, it is always mournful: a bittersweet ache because you miss and love and celebrate that which has departed for ever. Fado has always been connected to the sea, and drowned fishermen and shipwrecked sailors who, whether sons or lovers, do not return.

But in Brazilian Portuguese, this bittersweet feeling may be a lighter thing altogether. You may feel it for a lover who has departed — but you can “murder saudade” by seeing them again tomorrow. It may be a nostalgic longing for the past, but it can also be a yearning for a brighter tomorrow, where the bitterness is assuaged by a new sweetness. The intense bittersweet longing can even be for a past dream that never coalesced into reality. This is an ideal that the Department of Desire takes very much to heart.

Now, this linguistic speculation of mine may be utter rubbish, but there is a truth here about the appeal of Brazilian music: carnival is central to its appeal, across time, across generations. Music is both a shared memory of good times and an anticipation of future joy, when yet again saudade will be murdered. Carnival both pushes and pulls.

Indeed Martinho da Vila’s “Saudade e Samba” is a classic which directly addresses this very point -the dancer mourns a lost love and the haunting memory of past dances -.

But the big bass drum beats loud in the parade,
Scattering the dancer’s grief —
Majestic.

It is samba driving sadness away.
It is her steps, so skilful,
Rousing the crowd.
And she sings, and she enchants,
Feeling all the joy
Of the grand parade,
Never quite letting go
Of the memory
Of a carnival love.

Basically, this is the point: Brazilian music is cool precisely because of carnival, percussion, song and dance create a relationship between audience and performers which is, if not unique, unusual. This has smoothed the way for a growing pride in the country and its African roots.Tomorrow, this is much more than just a history lesson: picking up the banging, up-to-date brilliance of Anitta’s latest album, EQUILIBRIVM -and we introduce Pomba Gira.

The artwork of the hand in Africa and Brazil is by Moses Patrício. If you own the copyright please let me know. I have been diligent about the research; I hope I’ve been both enthusiastic and careful. If I’ve got anything wrong, forgive me — and please tell me.

“Brasil é legal!”

“Brazil is cool!” shout the boys, as they bring the weekend traffic in São Paulo to a halt outside a café with their energetic breakdancing/street theatre.

Brazil is indeed cool, and fun, and nice — to give other possible translations of the slang word, which also means “legal”. It is particularly cool when it comes to music. So much so that it is quite difficult for a musical glutton like myself to know how best to feast on this all-you-can-hear buffet, and the snacks in between. I’m just back from a wonderful three week holiday in that country and this the first part of a three part reflection on the music there. I’ve tried to educate myself, but I am far from an expert so please forgive me for any howlers or crass interpretations.

Music is everywhere: from Shakira’s recent concert for two million people on Copacabana beach

to this gig, where rather fewer people enjoyed an impromptu performance on the way to another of the world’s most iconic beaches, Ipanema. Or this

dance in the town square of the Glória area of Rio.

There’s no doubt there’s a lot of music. Which begs the question: is it any good? And what does it say about the country?

There are scores of different streams of Brazilian music. This last was forró — a northern country dance music, one of the few genres that isn’t a tributary into samba, pretty much the national music, itself as wide and vast as the Amazon.

It is Saturday afternoon in Vila Madalena, a well-heeled area of São Paulo. The music is vibrant, lively, gentle and joyous. We’re in the Samba Café, where the house band are playing with gusto to an extremely appreciative crowd.

There’s a big guy with a cavaquinho — a sort of electric ukulele — a trombonist, several vocalists, and more percussionists. The music is as light as the food was not. In our case, a vast steak with chips

. But for most people here, as for most people in Brazil, if it’s Saturday, it must be feijoada: a heavy pork-and-bean stew, which is de rigueur on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Most Brazilians seem to love it with the same patriotic fervour otherwise reserved for their music. I’ve long enjoyed Brazilian music, but often found the more traditional stuff too soft for my tastes. Even though I like my music joyous, in the past I have found too little bite in Brazil.

And at first glance, what is happening here is entirely appropriate for a Saturday afternoon after a substantial lunch. People seem to be swaying gently to light, familiar tunes. Until, that is, you look up and then down: at the feet and the faces. There is really some fancy footwork going on down there, and the faces are so full of joy.

Well, that’s not uncommon at gigs when people are seeing their favourite bands. But this is a different sort of crowd, a mix of ages from very young to very old. It’s wonderful to see middle-aged women on a day out, celebrating a birthday or just the end of the working week, looking so happy.

There are a couple of older guys in the crowd who really catch my attention. Both men are Black, in their 50s or 60s, beaming so widely, almost in ecstasy, lifting their hands to the air. It’s clear this isn’t music you just like. You love it with a passion.

Still, that softness does mean I can sway gently on my stick without feeling out of place. And this crowd are really friendly. The guy whose table I’m standing in front of keeps offering me a chair and filling my cup with beer.

Indeed, Brazilians generally are very warm and welcoming. It’s paradoxical: a country with a reputation for street crime and violence, where Paulistanos — people from São Paulo — vie with Cariocas — people from Rio — to warn you how dangerous their city is, and how you must never take your phone out outside, and yet their nature seems so open and generous.

During the band’s second set, things move up another notch. A samba composer they spot in the audience comes up and sings with them.

Then boys with drums strapped to their fronts come in, followed by two very tall and extremely glamorous dancers dressed in sequins, with huge feathers on their heads. They shimmy in carefully, not approaching any of the guys in the audience — doubtless too much experience of pinches and slapped bums.

This is an invocation of carnival — a medieval Catholic European institution that Brazil inherited, added polyrhythms to, anointed with glistening oil and glitter, and turbocharged with joy and sensuality. Then it gave it back, Brazil’s gift to the globe, making the old world’s version appear pallid and tame beside it.

The room’s joy quotient climbs.

My three weeks in Brazil were a marvel, and I know that while I’ve been there I’ve ignored some of the brilliant releases at home. So here’s a playlist of those that stood out from 6,000 miles away

-including the best yet from TLDP channeling the 70s, to the delightful 1000 Rabbits (who used to be Rabbit Foot) with their first releases, channeling the 2030’s. But forgive me if my mind was else where.

We were in part here to see where nosso filho mais velho e sua noiva ( our eldest son and his fiancee )live when they aren’t in Berlin, or generally being digital nomads, and in part to meet our new family. We had a superb time - and the best Feijoada I’ve ever had bu this didn’t stop my investigations, My son’s future sogra — mother-in-law — was for 20 years a dance teacher. For ten years she had her own studio, teaching dances like samba to adults, as well as gringo dances like tango. Now retired and a very youthful 70-something, she still loves music — although her current intense focus appears to be K-pop, clearly a woman after the Department’s own obsessional heart. So I take the opportunity to ask her what is so special about Brazilian music.

She replies without hesitation: percussion.

That answer is both simple and enormous. Tomorrow: why percussion is not just a sound in Brazil, but a history lesson.

Gringo, in Brazil, means any foreigner, including Spanish speakers from Latin America. It isn’t at all pejorative, nor does it mean American or white, as it can in Mexico. The word comes from a Spanish expression similar to “it’s all Greek to me”, first used in Spain about the Irish in the late 18th century.

Raye’s second studio album, This Music May Contain Hope, sees the blossoming of a prodigious talent, as she takes her art to a whole new level.

And for me it marks an important stage in what has been a rather rocky relationship.

For I’ve had my ups and downs with Raye.

In 2023, I listened to her more than any other artist — at least according to Spotify. I only know this because of one of those curious algorithmic messages that arrives in the run-up to Christmas. You must know the ones: you feel a mixture of irritation, curiosity and, it must be said, a flicker of excitement. Those little pre-recorded thank-yous: “Thanks so much for being one of my number one fans.”

Her first album, My 21st Century Blues, had come out in February.

By the time I got the message in December, it felt oddly gauche, and I felt inappropriately embarrassed. Blushing, even. It was clear to me by then that my number one artist wasn’t Raye — it wasn’t even close, given my total obsession with The Last Dinner Party and the wonderful world that trailed in the wake of my devotion. As with a real crush, I found myself head over heels in limerence with their whole rather rich cosmos. While it wouldn’t be true to say I listened to nothing else, I couldn’t for the life of me see how Raye could have been my most played. This is a playlist from around that time.

Then it struck me — there wasn’t much on Spotify to consume of The Last Dinner Party. My nightly listens were actually watches on YouTube.

So the thanks from Raye made me feel a bit of a fraud — very much, though, in keeping with her themes of betrayal by untrustworthy blokes.

But the point is this: 21st Century Blues was an astonishing thing of beauty. A brilliant concept, and even more brilliantly realised — sharp, dual-edged pop songs that manage to be both intimate and expansive.

Particularly my three favourites: Mary Jane, with its bluesy, woozy intro and clever lyrics, treating drugs like former lovers and emphasising an addict’s sense of loss while still celebrating sobriety.

Ice Cream Man sticks it to an abusive producer before turning into an anthem of such power that it makes me shiver to think about it.

Ooh, it just did again. And then there’s, above all, the single Escapism. A near-perfect pop song, a little gem of a production packed full of twists and turns, using her different vocal styles, from South London spoken to operatic purity, to maximum effect.

Going from this magnificence, I was disappointed with the next iteration of this project, 21st Century Symphony, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. Not that it wasn’t great in many ways — and not that I wouldn’t have loved to have been there, to hear her raw emotion and celebration of her hard-won triumphs after eight years of slogging uphill against an disinterested industry. But those strings added plushness and subtracted force and substance. The songs were wide open and messy — not in a good way. Just compare.

The wonderful voice remained, but it made me think the true talent lay in the production.

Which was wrong. She writes amazing songs, with funny, clever lyrics, and the many voices of Raye are at the heart of it all. But her generous, expansive spirit can lead to over-indulgence.

All this meant I missed the Live at Montreux album, with its stellar version of A Man’s World — one of my all-time favourite songs — and also missed another great cover

and only became aware of her work again when she collaborated with Mark Ronson

But then, on this album — the new album — that tendency to maximalist indulgence of each passing whim pays off in spades. It raises Raye’s artistry to a whole new level, leaning not just on her voice but on brilliant production by the sax player, Tom Richards.

It begins, and ends, in a deliberately filmic way. It’s theatrical — or rather cinematic — from the opening: spoken-word action lines from an imaginary movie. A woman in a red dress, “seven negronis deep”, stumbles through the streets of Paris in her late twenties, in the rain. The conceit is maintained until the last track, Fin, where, after the fanfare, she rolls the credits generously and extensively, naming just about every member of the London Symphony Orchestra. Yes, they do get everywhere, don’t they?

In between these two bookends there’s a lot of joyous music amid the agonised mythologising of her romantic journey. It’s maximalist in the very best sense — chucking in not just the kitchen sink, but some very pretty jazz crockery and lyrically sharp knives. Take the second track, I Will Overcome, which ends in a grand orchestral sweep — a climax before the foreplay has properly begun. The first real tune, but by then the whole album’s themes are already laid out: self-loathing marinated in far too much booze, but optimism too, after reflection on past loves, and the promise of redemption after a parade of rotten men.

Although she references both Edith Piaf and “Amy”, the singer she most reminds me of is Ella Fitzgerald, for several reasons. First, and most simply, these are modern versions of the big-band swing tunes that defined Ella’s marvellous Savoy Ballroom period.

The second track opens with her using that same pure sound, but here Raye also deploys her South London accent to great effect.

Both she and Ella have that a tone so pure it is almost neutral — clear and bright, with the occasional operatic sweep.

But Raye has additional weapons in her vocal armoury. Trademark code-switching, from the received pronunciation of her pure voice to South London, both spoken and sung, and treated so that it is speeded up.

There’s one more similarity as well. Both of them have now converted me to a musical form I’ve long detested: scat, horrible in the wrong hands, or rather wrong tonsils. But Ella and Raye, using their voice as an instrument, another horn, as it were, make it a thing of beauty.

At a sprawling 73 minutes, Raye gives herself plenty of time both to experiment and to be indulgent.

Take the tale of her rescue from reclusiveness by a bunch of girlfriends.

Click Clack Symphony uses the sound of high heels to create a marching rhythm that seems to echo flamenco — very taconeos — reinforced by the code-switching vocals and Hans Zimmer’s grand orchestral swell, which not surprisingly reinforces the cinematic feel, given that he’s had seven Oscar nominations for film scores, from Rain Man to Gladiator.

The sweet tune Goodbye Henry almost casually introduces the legendary Al Green to turn the song into an R&B classic.

The whole album sounds like a screenplay, taking inspiration from an era when films were still called the silver screen, and doing so felt neither clichéd nor ironic. And if you are lucky there’d be a real orchestra playing. Here, for your money, you get a couple of them, plus strings, a brass band and a big band.

I could go on, but take my word for it: there’s not a duff track. This album contains not only hope, but a series of jazz-pop gems.

Because there’s something about rock musicians recording with orchestras that makes me instinctively bristle.

Like a lot about my musical taste, it may be an adverse reaction to things that were done badly in the 70s. Or perhaps more precisely, things that felt wrong — aesthetically or philosophically — even when they were executed perfectly well.

For me, the original sin is Deep Purple with the London Philharmonic Orchestra — scene of the crime, once again, the Royal Albert Hall.

I remember hearing it and recoiling. Not just because it sounded overblown (which it did), but because the whole enterprise felt wrong. It seemed a particular betrayal, because this was Purple one of the handful of bands who I’d now identified as proto-punk, on some tracks at least — one of those bands playing hard and fast, with excitement bleeding out of every pore

— and now here they were trying to gentrify the music.

Rock wasn’t meant to aspire upwards. It wasn’t meant to borrow the trappings of “serious” music. The distortion, the swagger, the noise — those weren’t deficiencies to be corrected by a string section. They were the point.

So the orchestra felt like an intrusion. Or worse, a kind of apology. A quest for respectability.

And yet here we are, half a century on, and the orchestral collaboration is no longer a novelty — it’s almost a genre. St Vincent’s collaborator here, Jules Buckley has built a career out of it, working with artists as varied as Pete Tong, Tori Amos, Louis Cole, Basement Jaxx, Massive Attack, Arctic Monkeys and Dizzee Rascal.

This isn’t fringe. It’s mainstream. Institutional, even.

And — this is the uncomfortable bit — it often works.

Which forces me to admit something I’d rather not: perhaps my objection isn’t really about the music.

Perhaps I’m wrong :Two of my favourite artists, Rosalía, and The Last Dinner Party have demonstrated how strings can lend a lushness to their music.. TLdP have even had a string quartet recreate their first album. and rather lovely it is too

I also love the inspired Bridgerton concept — reverse engineering pop songs into something suitable for a grand Regency ball.

it works, because it commits fully to the conceit. It doesn’t feel like rock trying to be respectable; it feels like fun . .

And where would Raye’s magnificent new album be without the London Symphony Orchestra? (They do get around, don’t they?) Plus a separate string section, plus plus plus big band. It is a phenomenal album which takes her to another level as an artist – review coming soon, but for now just listen to Click Clack Symphony and the way the swell of the strings at the end really works with the song.

So why does my irritation persist?

It’s because I still associate the orchestra with legitimacy. With approval. With grown ups. With the idea that adding strings is a way of signalling seriousness — of crossing over into something more refined.

And that has always felt faintly suspect.

Rock ’n’ roll, doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t tidy itself up. It doesn’t seek validation from older traditions. If anything, it defines itself against them.

So when a band brings in an orchestra, part of me still wonders: is this expansion — or aspiration?

Is it about sound — or status?

Of course, that may be unfair. It may simply be that the musical vocabulary has widened, and that what once felt like a graft now feels like a continuum. The old distinctions between “high” and “low” culture look increasingly artificial.

And yet I can’t quite shake the instinct.

There are moments, even now, when the swell of strings feels like overstatement — a reaching for grandeur the material doesn’t quite justify. To see what I mean listen to the version of “violent times” here and then the album version. It is as if the orchestra is trying to convince you of the music’s importance, by bombast and dramatic swell rather than simply being important.

So I find myself in an uncomfortable position: almost intellectually persuaded, but still emotionally resistant. A convert, perhaps — but a suspicious, grudging one, with a pocket of heresy still intact.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of flamenco and jazz and, late one night, as a counter to all these strings and high seriousness, I found myself listening to some seriously unserious music – like this hyper pop from Berlin-based Angel Rider.

No excuses, no pretensions, just fun. Which is also true of Debbie Sings.

In the case of Onik’s Locker Room Load, certainly not good clean fun, in fact pretty disgustingly filthy fun.

It also features an old favourite of mine, QT, who turns out to be an art project by Hayden Dunham and the late great Sophie. So that means the porny lyrics of ‘locker room’ must be ironic and knowing. phew.

If you like that little lot, you’ll love the new album from the New York electronic duo The Fcukers –

I’m not sure how often I will listen to the whole album, but there are at least five standout tracks. This is the best.

Much heavier, but also in a similar vein, Cobrah – a Swedish singer.

Fun fact: this track followed on from a previoyus track of hers featuring ‘helicopter noises’ created from the treated sounds of farts from the producer’s dog. To round this off, what better than this collaboration between Anna Calvi and the very wonderful Iggy Pop (79)

This could almost be my theme tune. I love it.

wanna do more than just survive

I wanna light my body on fire

I wanna be somebody cause I’m God’s lonely Man

Very much what John Cale once called ‘dirty assed rock n roll”

So on to my first non-jazz gig of the year at The Blue Posts in Soho — the second band, Manchester punks, The Empty Page, captured the spirt of the night with the lead singer’s paean of praise to old-fashioned boozers with small grotty upstairs rooms with sticky carpets, where you can watch great bands for under a tenner.

The Blue Posts is not grotty, but it is an old-fashioned boozer. And a good one. And this was a good night. Very good night.

We’d come to see French Toast and the lead singer Eloise, who was there at the beginning,standing near the back, cheering on the rather wonderful surprise of the evening — Retropxsssy, pushing deep into the small audience to give us some dreamy punky hip hop

plus some hippyish squatting while we jumped into the void, and another dimension. Ok, you had to be there.

While Empty Page was on, a group of teenage Spanish punks came in clutching bags from Rough Trade and doing tequila shots. Eloise was soon in there inciting them to form a mosh pit when it was her turn on stage.

Not that she was ‘on stage’ most of the time for their wonderful set – on a chair at the front, peeling off to her bathing suit, squatting on the floor, body surfing, at the back of the stage and then looking fondly on as the mosh happened. Sadly my moshing days are over – but you could feel the gravitational waves of pure rock and roll, the raw energy. I couldn’t tell you anything specific about the tunes – although I could go on and on about the bass player – probably the coolest, and surely the tallest in town

It was very, very good. Great fun. Truly what rock and roll is all about. And not an aspirational stringed instrument in sight.

This album has also long been on my pre-save list, but my anticipation has been tinged with a degree of trepidation. I thought the single “House”, a collaboration with John Cale, was tremendous — his velvet menace, and Charli’s screaming, fit-to-burst, makes it a really, really chilling track. But that didn’t mean I was any less nervous about the album itself.

The artist who gave us that wonderful, true lime-tinged summer after Brat is now messing with that most dangerous of things — a high-art concept album filled with what she’s called “passion and pain,” having declared, “It’s tortured romantic.” I’m happy that she’s ambitious and serious about her music.But. It turns out I was right to be worried.

So how do you follow the total triumph that was Brat? Clearly with an even more daring experiment. When I heard that she had written an album based on the film, I was concerned that this sort of gothic gloom would be adored by the critics for a new, hard to deliver, conceit while turning the summery music into a wind-blasted winter of woe. I was right.

This is an album that is less than the sum of its parts, in that individual songs are okay — varying from brilliant to fair to average. I mean, it’s not the horror that is Sir Cliff’s Heathcliff.

The problem with Charli’s take is the overarching concept.

The music was made for the film, which I haven’t seen but which has been judged a not very sophisticated, modern take on anold-fashioned bodice ripper. Charli’s music is said to be much more faithful to the book. That isn’t hard, for the novel is nothing like the popular conception of it. Heathcliff is not violently romantic or violently attractive — he’s just violent, vengeful and filled with hatred. He isn’t alone in this: most of the characters are ridiculously immature and over-emotional.

Even if the 16-year-old Emily Brontë had something of a crush on her main characters and an adolescent fascination with death, she was far too good a writer to overlook the internal inconsistencies or the sheer dreadfulness of her characters’ behaviour. The contrast with the two outsiders — the narrator and his sidekick, the housekeeper — who exhibit a rather stolid bourgeois horror at the dreadful goings-on up the hill, and at how they themselves are treated, is very amusing and well observed.

The problem starts because Charli was working from an external inspiration, not an inner vision. Worse still, the spark was the film, not the novel. If she wanted this to be her lux, this is the source of her failure.

Charli has explained that the album grew from a much smaller commission for the film adaptation:

“Emerald (Fennell, the director) sent me the script and asked if I’d be interested in writing a song for the film. I read it and immediately felt inspired… I ended up writing a lot of songs and said, ‘Why don’t we just make an album for the film?’”

So the record emerged from reading the screenplay rather than directly adapting the novel.

Charli has said: “When I think of Wuthering Heights I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the moors, the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit.” And she summarised the tone she wanted in the music as:

“Raw, wild, sexual, gothic and British.”

You might think that would put it right up my strasse. After all, at the Department of Desire, obsession is our second nature, and we are mustard keen on the “raw, wild, sexual,” with a deep personal commitment to determination and grit — even if we are less enthusiastic about cold, mud and being wuthered (wind-blasted). The point, though, is that in the end it is about the vision, the music and the joy. Here, none of those are of the highest grade.

I can’t see how Charli could have achieved anything in those wastelands. So she goes, as far as I can see, pretty much straight for the horror of it.

Part of the problem is the narrative. The track listing follows the narrative, rather than the way we actually listen to music now. Liberation comes when the realisation dawns that you don’t have to listen to these tracks in order, as a piece. Once I started listening to individual tracks out of order, I enjoyed them far more.

For instance, that magnificent collaboration with John Cale which opens the album, “House.” From the opening — the disconcerting, soaring cellos beneath his spoken-word monologue, as Cale evokes a bewildered narrator who knows neither his purpose nor his identity — to the ending, where Charli screams, fit to burst, over crashing electronica: “I’m going to die in this house,” repeated over and over. It creates a truly sinister, deeply strange atmosphere

.

That’s an interpretation of the book — and a clever one. The house itself — Wuthering Heights — is a brooding, oppressive, menacing presence. And the other house, Thrushcross Grange, is almost as oppressive in its own way: a stuffy trap for taming the wild, even unto death.

The song works so well because it doesn’t directly reference the book or the film. It’s not entirely clear what it’s about. Cale seems almost to invite us to guess whether he’s God or devil, two souls combined, the house, or an existential concept of obsession.

It was Charli’s intention for the whole album to take its cue from this song, summing up her sonic goal in a striking phrase:

“I wanted the sound palette to be elegant and brutal.”

That phrase actually comes from a description of the Velvet Underground by John Cale, which partly explains why she invited him to collaborate. I’ve long been a fan of Cale’s elegance,

brutality

and, indeed, spoken-word weirdness.

But the rest of the album fails to follow up on this early promise. The next track, “Wall of Sound,” also starts with an entire orchestra’s worth of scraping, atonal strings and oppressive lyrics. But it is merely a pale parody of “House,” with rather obvious gothic hysteria ladled on top.

Best to skip this and go to the second-best track on the album, “Dying for You,” which has a Brat-like pop energy. Even if it too opens with those sawing strings, it is uplifting and brash — perhaps not despite but because of the ridiculous, over-the-top lyrics such as:

“Yeah, you’re my favourite jewellery worn just like a noose ‘round my neck

I’m losing gallons of blood, the river’s turning to red

I got a smile on my face, I bleed even more

All the pain and torture that I went through

All makes sense to me now, I was dying for you”

This wasn’t intended as tongue-in-cheek camp — nevertheless, it is, and I love this addictive earworm for the light relief.

That’s it for decent tunes until “Take Me Out of Myself,” with its stuttering drums, but there isn’t really a return to form until “Altars,” with a lovely tune, a great chorus, and understated instruments. “Eyes of the World” would make a great closing track, but is stuck awkwardly mid-album.

This album was first announced at the same time as another favourite artist, Rosalía, was apparently heading for orchestral high seriousness, and this undoubtedly coloured my fears. While Lux is now a firm favourite, this is a reminder of the risks.

Of course I applaud Charli for caring enough to be bold and straying way outside her comfort zone - and I want to make it clear this isn’t bad or even that difficult to hear. But it’s also a lesson for those who wish to embrace the weird side of pop. If you do it on your own terms, within your own grandiose and liberatory, transgressive design, you can at least shape the whole thing into something that works — something that’s a good listen.

Less so when you’re working within somebody else’s vision. That’s particularly true if you’re trying to interpret a first-rate book — or, worse, a third-rate film made from a difficult, complex but fundamentally first-rate novel.

Having said all that, the album is definitely growing on me.

Still, I do think the whole thing would be better if it were shorter and better ordered.

So I’ve done my own mix.

It is still early in the year, but Help(2) is probably going to end up on a lot of ‘best of ‘26 lists in distant December. It is certainly the most important new album since Rosalía’s Lux. The latest charity project from War Child, produced by James Ford, is intriguing, unexpected and, at moments, genuinely glorious musically: a parade of indie-rock royalty acting for a good cause and clearly enjoying themselves.

The premise is simple and rather brilliant. Each act was given just a few days at Abbey Road Studios to write and record a track. Musicians drifted between rooms, occasionally appearing on one another’s sessions. There is no time for perfectionism, no endless polishing — just the pressure of the clock and the energy of the room.

I had been vaguely looking forward to Help! 2 ever since it was announced. I had it on pre-save, and even though I am behind with my listening I actually played it moments after it dropped and from the first play was simply struck by its force. Since then I’ve found myself returning to it again and again.

What fascinated me most emerged on the third listen. I actually had to check that I was still playing the album and not some predictive, algorithmic Release Radar playlist, because almost everything here sits inside that strange Venn diagram of music I either already love, or the sort of music you would reasonably expect me to love but which often leaves me oddly unmoved.

And yet the format changes something. Artists I have sometimes kept at arm’s length suddenly sound fresh, even exciting, when placed inside this constraint.

The record opens with the Arctic Monkeys, ‘opening nights’ - their first new music for four years. It was apparently written even longer ago than that, as part of the sessions for AM,

If so it has matured with age -slower and gentler than one might expect. The track begins with very distinctive chords and the even more distinctive vocals of Alex Turner. It is an instant classic and a confident curtain-raiser.

The next track is also a classic, though in a very different way — the result of the sheer energy and loose structure that comes when a triptych of unlikely collaborators are simply thrown together for a day and left to experiment.

Apparently Damon Albarn was fiddling around with a piano line in the studio when Grian Chatten, the singer from Fontaines D.C., wandered in, liked what he heard and decided to sketch some lyrics over it.

Then Kae Tempest joined in, adding a piece of spoken poetry in that strange, endearing, unmistakable voice of theirs.

Suddenly the track becomes something else — not quite indie rock, not quite spoken word, but a loose collaborative hybrid that probably couldn’t have happened in any other circumstances.

Kae has said:

“I feel honoured to be a part of this project. I loved writing this song and collaborating with the other artists — it was like a fever dream that day at Abbey Road.

Me and Grian wrote our verses responding to each other. We all worked together on Damon’s lyrics. Damon had the melody but kept the lyrics free so we could find them all together. It was a true collaboration. It’s a great album and I hope we can raise lots of funds and energy for the children.”

The result feels collaborative in the best sense: three very different musical sensibilities rubbing up against one another rather than politely staying out of each other’s way.

Then there’s Black Country, New Road, whose contribution has the feeling of a gentle summer evening — almost like standing on an English beach at sunset. It is quite a contrast with their earlier work. The track has a much lighter spirit, which is perhaps not surprising given how the band has evolved.

For many years the group revolved around the writing and voice of Isaac Wood. He had the knack of combining deep gloom with detached irony, producing music which to my ear was not immediately likeable.

He stepped away from the band in 2022 for the sake of his mental health.

The others have gradually taken on more of the songwriting and vocal duties. The atmosphere has changed as a result — different voices, different textures — but it still very much feels like their world.

Obviously we wish Isaac well with his struggle, but he needn’t worry that he has left his old band in the lurch.

Fourth up comes something really exciting: a new track from The Last Dinner Party.

On “Let’s Do It Again”, they lean into their trademark stage-set theatrics, built around Abigail Morris and that extraordinary vocal range of hers.

The song structure unfolds in several phases:

• Opening: an unexpectedly bluesy guitar line that immediately gives the whole piece a 1970s feel.

• Middle section: intensely theatrical — perhaps cinematic, even a little noir.

• Lyric tone: slightly creepy, playful, mischievous.

The line:

“We’ll go to the cinema and I’ll touch you in my car”

feels both cheeky and faintly sinister : Abi channeling Terry Thomas

,

The band have said David Bowie was a big influence here, and one astute observer suggested they are channelling “The Prettiest Star.” That compressed, clean glam-rock sound is very deliberate.

But was Emily thinking about Mick Ronson’s version on the 1973 album Aladdin Sane,

or the original 1970 single — where Marc Bolan plays that beautiful guitar?

Then the song begins to morph.

• It shifts into something almost like a sing-along musical number, which reminded me of their early live favourite “Godzilla.”

• Then it pivots again into a full rock-and-roll section, with that classic rhythmic swing.

Innovative, new, fresh — fantastic from them, as always.

There are plenty of other favourites of mine here.

Wet Leg add something of an oddity to their catalogue: “Obvious.” Despite the title, it is anything but obvious. The track is surprisingly gentle by their recent standards.

Rather than the sharp-edged surrealism we have come to expect from them, this is reflective and melodic — simple vocals over an insistently strummed acoustic guitar.

“I don’t mind — I just want to get high.
I cut through life with the back of the knife.”

Really rather beautiful.

Then there are two more favourites of mine working in a slightly different register altogether.

First, Green Tea Peng, the queen of conscious alternative soul and reggae, delivering something thoughtful and quietly political. Backing her are the wonderful Ezra Collective, the kings of righteous contemporary jazz, whose rhythmic exuberance lifts the whole track into something expansive and celebratory. Surely with this inspired collaboration Babylon must soon fall.

I’ve long been a fan of Arlo Parks, and her new track Nothing I Could Hide.”

Is a poignant, rather extraordinary song — melancholy, tender and quietly luminous.

These are all brand new tunes but there are some marvellous covers as well.

Starting with “Sunday Morning,” performed here by Beth Orton, the former singer with Portishead.

This dreamy slow motion version is faithful to the qualities of the original without becoming a slavish copy.

It is close enough that I find myself queuing up in my headg the familiar jangling chord sequence of ‘waiting for my man’ the next track on The Velvet Underground & Nico. But of course that isn’t what happens.

Instead the album moves straight into another brilliant cover: “Lilac Wine,” performed by Arooj Aftab together with Beck, who’s worked with War Child before with a feisty Dylan cover.

I actually found myself going down a small rabbit hole afterwards trying to work out where the song came from.

I knew that Jeff Buckley, was associated with it and half a dozen other well known artists had had a stab at it. But I hadn’t realised it was originally written in 1950 by James Shelton for the musical Dance Me a Song.

This new version easily stands alongside them — delicate, atmospheric and rather beautiful. Which meant I spent time down a much large,longer rabbit hole finding out more about Arooj Aftab - a Pakistani singer with a great range of fascinating material, from traditional to psychedelic jazz.

Then comes “Universal Soldier,” given here an electro pop treatment by Depeche Mode. Turning a 1960s folk protest song into something contemporary is not an obvious move, but it is gutsy and far more powerful than the original

And then another track I didn’t know before but which stopped me in my tracks: ‘oh yes’ sung here by Beabadoobe . The original is decent, but doesn’t touch her breathy, sweetness.

Now on to that awkward place in the Venn diagram: bands that I do not like as much as I feel I should do.

Take Fontaines D.C.. I’ve never entirely warmed to them. Something about the steady indie chug — the purposeful rhythm and the slightly indistinct male vocal — has often left me cold.

But their version of Black Boys on Mopeds, originally by Sinéad O’Connor, is tremendously sensitive and unexpectedly powerful. It slows the room down and reveals the emotional architecture of the song rather than simply replaying it.

That, perhaps, is the quiet success of the whole enterprise. Give musicians only a day, a legendary studio, and the knowledge that perfection is impossible, and occasionally they stop trying to sound exactly like themselves — and start sounding interesting instead. Even when it isn’t 100% successful.

I do actually really like English Teacher. I’ve seen them live twice and enjoy their music. I love Lilly Fontaine’s voice. And there are a couple of brilliant tracks on the last album.

But I rather admire them, not adore them. Something about the band just doesn’t quite gel for me. Perhaps Lily Fontaine is a little too low-key on stage. Perhaps the songs simply aren’t quite good enough.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t necessarily having your hero from Blur wandering into the session. Graham Coxon contributes here, which ought to be an intriguing ingredient, but the track still doesn’t quite land for me. The vocal sits very deep in the mix — perhaps even deeper than usual — and somehow the whole thing never quite finds its centre.

Another band on the album I’ve also seen live is Young Fathers. On paper they should be completely up my street. But, oddly enough, I’ve never quite connected with their music.

This, though, is probably the best thing I’ve heard from them. It’s certainly one of the best written — genuinely exciting in places. I just find myself wondering what it might sound like in someone else’s hands. The Nova Twins, perhaps.

It’s my least favourite track on this album -and that means it is still pretty good -there are plenty more gems here. and all in a good cause. War Child say ‘We work to protect, educate and stand up for the rights of children living through conflict and go to the hardest to reach places to support them.

We aim to be there for children who need us most, when they need us most because no child’s life should be torn apart by war.’ 10 out of 10 for the album and the sentiment.

In the first part of this post about the music I found in Malaga I wrote about how the spirit of resistance is inherent in flamenco. Today, it is the politcali potential of carnival to oppose the powers that be -and to bewilder an innocent tourist.

Blinking, a little dazed by the power of the music, we emerged from the dark, close intimacy of the club into the streets around Plaza de la Constitución, Málaga’s main square, where a stage had been erected and an impromptu bar set up beneath the lights.

I must admit I was secretly rather disappointed by what I’d seen of carnival so far in Málaga. My reading had led me to believe that I would bump into minstrel groups on every corner — raucous, plaintive, or full of passion. I didn’t know whether the music would be any good, or even what it would be like. But I did at least think there would be lots of it

.

In fact, there was very little evidence of the pre-Lenten celebration in the early part of the week, except on Plaza de la Constitución, where on some nights there were bands and interviews with drag queens and other contestants dripping with feathers and glitter.

It was obviously quite fun — but more so for those who hadn’t spent the day going round art galleries, whose feet didn’t hurt, and who could understand what was going on.

As I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, it seemed sensible to seek refuge in a bar. Any bar with a seat would do, and as luck would have it there was one a short way up a narrow alleyway. A beer downed and a tinto de verano on the way, I buried myself in a delicious tapa of soused anchovies and green peppers skewered together.

It was very crowded — so crowded I didn’t notice at first who was standing next to me: a statue of Lorca, poet and friend of Picasso.

This used to be one of their haunts, where they would drink, chat and listen to the music they both loved: flamenco. This was in fact the famous Café de Chinitas — and more about its stories and celebrated customers tomorrow.

But tonight was Carnival night. I was resigned to never bumping into the much-heralded wandering troupes of players, so I was delighted when a group of about thirty women marched into the café. They were all dressed in woodland brown, gauzy wings stuck to their backs, glass phials of white crystals, on their belts. Their drums and kazoos promised a performance — and we weren’t disappointed.

As far as I can find out, after a fair amount of digging, they were the comparsa (carnival singing group) “La Tierra Canta” — ‘The Earth Sings’. They were very spirited and having great fun. It’s always a slightly strange experience watching a performance in a language you don’t understand and it’s been hard work getting hold of a translation, so fingers crossed i’ve got it right.

The local Spanish press had praised them for addressing issues often ignored: women’s rights and women’s roles in the home, corruption, those at the bottom of society, and the housing crisis. As in London, the wealthier the centre becomes, the more people — particularly the young — are pushed out, with nowhere affordable to live.

Below is, I hope, a decent English translation of the song by Marta Fernández Verdejo and Marisol Muñoz Magdaleno.

Land of Salt

I step out through the festive streamers,
without fear of the governor’s tongue.
So much tyranny brings horror.
We are tired now of the curse.
They will not see it.

I have come with my voice
broken from exhaustion —
a battle of hypocrisy,
a president without values,
stealing as he passes down Larios
from the poor,
who bought judges and mayoralties
with reckless excess.

They drive us from the city
and make us stronger still.
And we come to the earth.
No one will silence us.
We will sing the quarantine to them,
without shame, beyond.
We are the land of salt.
We bring the earth.
Rage sings.

“Rage sings,” indeed.

This was a gutsy performance by a highly professional group, and I am itching to know more about the details and the symbolism.

Larios is the main shopping street in central Málaga, so to say that “the president without values steals from the poor as he passes down Larios” — rather like saying someone steals from the poor while driving through Mayfair. The “land of salt” is probably Málaga itself, given that it is a seaport. But what la cuarentena “the quarantine” is, I don’t know. Nor do I know whether the governor and president refer to real individuals accused of corruption, or whether this is a more general attack on those in power.

It’s frustrating. I’ve asked the songwriters on Instagram, but if you know, do tell me.

But clearly: rage sings. In carnival too, just as in flamenco. Though the nature of the resistance is different. In some ways carnival was the creation of the oppressor — made under licence, turned thrice on its head. Topsy-turvy.

Carnival in Andalucia is not simply spectacle. It is not simply about feathers and Sunday parades, nor even the tourist version of Málaga’s celebrations. At its core, it is political. Even when there is no rancour, it often takes a sideswipe at authority. As with these dancing police (or traffic wardens -carnival leaves me uncertain of anything, but that is part of its purpose.)

The word itself comes from the medieval Latin carne levare — or carne vale — farewell to meat before Lent. It marks the threshold before renunciation: a chance to revel in indulgence before giving up little luxuries — whether butter and eggs on Shrove Tuesday or saucier pleasures.

It was largely shaped by the medieval Church. In the 15th century, Pope Paul II deliberately harked back to the pagan era — bread and circuses — building up the games as a release valve for the poor and sundry malcontents, whilst also trying to win political approval from the masses. He invented “games”: throwing pigs off a hill and allowing the needy to collect the remains below — doubtless saving on abattoir and butchery costs — and bizarre races: young against old, horses against donkeys, naked Jewish youth against everyone else. Malaga’s clown troupe throwing kids in the air is pretty tame by comparison.

Long before Christian penitence, there was ritual inversion. it is worth remembering that the Romans had already perfected the art of sanctified misbehaviour. Not Saturnalia — the office party of antiquity — but Lupercalia, the February rite of purification and fertility.

A goat and a dog were sacrificed. Young men — the Luperci — were smeared with their blood, then set loose through the streets in various states of undress. From the goat’s hide they cut strips, called februa, and with these they lwhipped the populace as they ran. Lightly, we are told. Pregnant women were said to present their bellies for the touch; others held out their hands, hoping for easy births and general fecundity. It was purification by slap, civic renewal by goatskin.

The month of February takes its name from this business — from februare, to cleanse. A bracing thought, really: that beneath our polite calendars lies the memory of half-naked youths sprinting about with strips of animal hide, improving the birth rate.

Civilisation has always preferred its chaos ritualised..

Carnival inherits that structure. It permits what is normally forbidden: satire, naming, ridicule, denunciation. It creates a licensed space in which power can be spoken back to.

But I like to think that, like the river, it has now overflowed the boundaries set by authority.

In places like Málaga, carnival has often been sharply topical. Comparsas and murgas take aim at current politicians, corruption and civic injustice. It is democracy disguised as festivity.

What we see — the parades, the colour — is only the surface. Even the great spectacle of Brazilian Carnival, for all its scale and choreography, for all the messy excess, retains that deeper function. The Iberian carnival parade sashayed through Empires and, in Brazil, fused with Afro-Brazilian culture to produce something bigger, better bolder than its European model. Carnival may be one of the Iberian Peninsula’s most enduring exports — not merely as celebration, but as a form of sanctioned resistance. This was shot in Belo Horizonte a left wing Brazilian .city with a right wing Guvenor. It can get quite political.

But it didn’t here. As the seasoned veteran of carnival who took that video told me -’don’t over do the theory -it’s mostly about getting drunk’ In Malaga too that was true as carnival ended in outbursts of satire -like these waiters.

In part three of Malaga’s music - how the Nazis broke re malaga and how the deep song has made Spanish pop the best in Europe.

Once again I am obsessed.

We’re not long back from a glorious ten days in Málaga. For years, when the children were small, we drove straight from the airport to whatever rural retreat we had booked, bypassing the city entirely. That was a mistake. The birthplace of Picasso — the source of many of his icons: bulls, fathers, guitars — is a great city.

It is glorious for the sun, the food, the art — yes.

But above all, for the music.

I arrived excited about carnival, but I’d been thinking a lot about the politics of musical opposition. About Springsteen

channeling Dylan and Jesse Welles also grasping backwards to the 60s to find the right words. ,

Thinking how few artists had come up with anything visceral enough to grapple with the enormity of the USA’s counter-revolution — although Earth to Eve does capture some of the fear and fury.

But nothing felt significant until Bad Bunny’s glorious half-time show at the Super Bowl. A funny, generous rebuke, tweaking Trump’s nose with his Spanish-language celebration not only of Puerto Rico but of all the Americas.

The cry of “¡Viva Cuba!” must have gone down like a cold bacalaíto slapped on the counter in Magaland. The whole show was an expansive, exposition of what I think of as the ‘Bunnroe Doctrine’.

Full of such musings about music as resistance, I arrived — and outside the cathedral heard this.

It’s more than six thousand miles that separate Bad Bunny, the world’s top-selling pop star, reportedly worth $100 million, and his vast Super Bowl half-time performance from the woman singing for coins outside Málaga Cathedral.

These two performances live in different worlds. One: a defiant Spanish-language extravaganza involving four hundred dancers, so lavish that several online videos decode the symbolism of telegraph poles and figures dressed as sugar cane.

The other: a woman with a headscarf, a battered paper cup — and a voice. A searing lament.

Neither are not protest songs in the conventional sense. “Protest” suggests, organised marches, banners put away until the next demo. This is not that. Not Springsteen.

Both carry something deeper: defiance and pride, anger and sorrow.

The same is true of my latest obsession: flamenco.

“Flamenco is the music of Málaga,” said our taxi driver, enthusiastically tuning his radio to demonstrate.

Not strictly true. Flamenco’s historic birthplaces lie elsewhere across Andalucía — Seville, Córdoba, Jerez. But Málaga has adopted it with conviction. From buskers to beggars, from tourist-trap tat to serious tablaos (flamenco clubs), you hear it everywhere. And see it. It is the sort of music you have to experience live.

We arrived a few days after torrential rain in the mountains when, for a couple of rare days, Málaga’s river — the Guadalmedina — was not a dry concrete channel but a rushing torrent, carrying brown mountain water out to sea.

One street back from this sudden gush, on Pasillo del Matadero, sits the Kelipé Centre — a small tablao. Dark, intimate. Tables crammed close together. In the front row you are almost on stage.

I am a dilettante — an intermittent enthusiast, not a true aficionado. I don’t know my malagueñas from my bulerías(distinct flamenco song forms), but I try to catch flamenco whenever I’m in Spain. This performance reignited my enthusiasm and, combined with my New Year’s pledge to explore more back catalogue, has led to serious listening since I returned home.

This was probably the best flamenco I have ever seen — brimming with raw, unsentimental power. Thanks to Susana Manzano, Azukita and El Gordo for an astonishing performance.

It began sparsely.

The cantaor (singer) and tocaor (guitarist) sat aligned on straight-backed chairs, leaving a third chair empty.

The guitar was superb: confident without showiness, precise, steely, utterly assured. No flourishes. Just control.

Then the voice.

He wore a grey suit, open-necked shirt, dark trousers. Short hair, neat dark beard. Modest in bearing. Utterly conventional.

But from him came an extraordinary sound. Not conventionally beautiful. Almost an anti-voice. It broke Western melodic expectation, releasing something raw and elemental.

Yet entirely orthodox within flamenco.

Pure quejío (the piercing cry) at the heart of cante jondo (deep song).

It was already intense, but it snapped into another gear when Susana hit the floor — literally. From the moment she entered, she stamped, marched, made percussive contact with the stage.

Her zapateado (rhythmic footwork) grew urgent, bordering on transgressive as she lifted her skirts above her knees to facilitate the acceleration — like an engine gathering speed. Her taconeo (heel strikes) picked up the tempo.

Her dance is integral to the music. She smashes out the rhythm with her feet.

Supercharged. Almost unbearable.

Utterly enthralling.

She looks genial — a woman of a certain age, perhaps wearing a little too much make-up. If you passed her in the street, you might take her for an eccentric art teacher, fond of yoga.

She wears none of the traditional flamenco dress — no flounces, no lace — just dull brown satin and that slightly floral outer layer. She is making a point: real flamenco isn’t pretty or cute or sweet. The intensity of her dance could not be made more magnificent with a mantón (embroidered shawl), nor could the drabbest clothing conceal its glory.

What is striking is that the three of them seem equally enamoured of the performance and of one another, leaning in to smile and encourage. It is one of the paradoxes of flamenco that it exists within a tight formal framework, yet encourages spontaneity and improvisation.

Between pieces, the guitarist spoke rapidly, switching between English and Spanish. He told a story involving a professor, a play, pride in heritage. I did not entirely catch the argument, but the point seemed clear enough: their longest, most serious piece addressed directly the endurance of the Romani people.

You can hear all the history in that wail — that threefold echo from the East, three traditions stretching a single syllable across multiple notes.

The influence of Al-Andalus is unmistakable. The lute precedes the guitar.

The Moorish call to prayer echoes in the ornamentation.

Jews, Moors, Roma — the standard account speaks of three marginalised communities blending traditions.

Perhaps that story is too neat.

But the tonal overlap is undeniable.

After the fall of Granada in 1492 and the expulsions that followed, cultural memory did not vanish. Styles bled. Ornamentation migrated. Grief found common shapes.

The symbol is tidy. History rarely is.

But in the voice — that soaring, tearing cry — you hear something older than modern Spain.

As Picasso said: “To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”

The same is true of flamenco.

It is a living memory — a conversation between then and now, here and there. It tells of exile that made people strangers in their own land, ravaged by sorrow, overwhelmed by joy.

So when we emerged into the night we found ourselves surrounded by another tradition with a message for authority - this is another three parter - songs of rage part 2 of Malaga Music, tomorrow.

I really hadn’t intended to post this week after my marathon three-parter, but then I found myself in flames, peppered with broken glass, as The Molotovs exploded into my life. And gentle reader, if the Department of Desire exists for a reason, it is this: to sound the alarm when a new band comes along that is so hot and so cool. and this lot are on fire.

I’ll wager Matt Cartledge and his big sister Issy have a huge future ahead of them. But that’s not the point. It never is. The point is this: they’re brilliant now — such energy, such poise and confidence. Matt has a big, powerful voice, and I can’t think when I last heard a male vocalist with such verve and style. I can’t wait to catch them live.

Forget post-punk, dark-punk, slut-punk. This is pure punk — certainly with a modern edge, and better guitar solos. Much better guitar solos: solos that thrill with their blistering, driving attack. There’s a tremendous energy here, the energy of the original punk bands. It reminds me of nothing more or less than early The Jam.

Indeed, Matt at times sounds -and looks -

uncannily like a young Paul Weller

, and at other moments rather like Liam Gallagher

. There’s something, too, of the gruffness of Lee Brilleaux. His imitation of John Lydon is so good it occasionally slips into parody.

I was briefly tempted to write something patronising along the lines of “Matt shows a maturity beyond his years”. I’ll resist. What matters is that he’d be phenomenal at any age. Still, there is an apparent tension between the siblings’ declared ages and their confidence and ability. Despite their youth — 17 and 19 — they’ve already logged an extraordinary number of live shows (600, and counting) built through years of busking on the streets of London -Matt started when he was just ten years old -and constant playing together during lockdown.

And anyway: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were both 18 when they formed The Rolling Stones. Joe Strummer was an ancient 22 when he put together his first band, the 101ers. In rock’n’roll, youth is not wasted on the young.

I first clocked the Molotovs thanks to senay.at.gigs on Instagram, who posted a clip of them playing live. That was enough to convince me. When the album popped up on pre-save, I hit the button without hesitation. But when it actually dropped on Friday, I was gently drifting off to sleep, floating knee-deep in Thelonious Monk and his gloriously complex empty spaces,

and I didn’t feel like being shouted at — which is what a lot of lesser punk bands can end up sounding like.

Not this lot.

Saturday morning found me in a different mood. I was sold from the very first song.

A really successful band has to throw a few things into the mix: a good vocalist; good tunes; at least one outstanding instrumentalist; an image; and a charismatic stage presence. All of this is present in abundance.

Matt struts around the stage with extraordinary physicality — but he is almost static compared to his sister. One moment Issy is crouched low, doubled over her extra-large bass guitar; the next she unfurls, high-kicking, all sharp angles and release. There’s so much energy that even watching is exhausting — and enviable.

I’d say this: if you like early Jam, you’ll love this. If you like decent, exciting rock’n’roll, you’ll love this. That sharp intake of breath — that tight feeling in the chest that only proper rock music gives you — it’s all here.

One YouTube video describes them as “a mod-punk -garage band from London”, which isn’t exactly wrong. It isn’t exactly right either.

The mod reference is perhaps a nod to bands like The Kinks, The Who, and, above all, The Jam, all of whom loomed large in the mod revival. But it feels more stylistic than musical — a visual grammar rather than a set of influences you could hum.

From the top of Matt’s feathered, bleached-blonde hair — cropped short — to the tip of his pink socks, the powder-blue suit, complete with pocket handkerchief, the look matters. Every inch of him is presented as the very model of a modern Face. I’m not quite sure what their background but as Weller once said, defensively, you don’t stop being working class when you put on a suit. You do, however, stop being merely a punk revivalist.

They’re not frightened of taking on the classics. God Save the Queen matches Rotten sneer for sneer. Issy takes over lead vocals for a terrific version of Should I Stay or Should I Go. There’s also a cover of Suffragette City, Bowie’s fastest rock song.

The more I listen, the more excited I get. I’ve been alternating tracks by the Molotovs and The Jam (only six — I’m not that weird). There’s no question who has the most energy. Perhaps 70s punk production was deliberately thin, but this band gives it more wellie than — yes — the Modfather himself.

It’s a happy coincidence that this album has landed just as a special edition of Café Bleu has also dropped — the first album by The Style Council, Weller’s first band after the Jam.

I adored the Style Council, even though I wasn’t, at the time, a Jam fan. I was, and still am, more of a Clash man, and was instinctively suspicious of the new kids on the block — a view no doubt influenced by Strummer’s line in White Man in Hammersmith Palais:

“The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, huh, ya’ think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money”

Strummer later said it wasn’t a potshot at Weller in particular. It was about his disappointment with the commercialisation of punk — and he included his own band in that criticism. A commentary on the paradox of success; the sneer at arrival. Weller, for his part, was generous in return, merely repeating that line about not ceasing to be working class just because you put on a suit. Perhaps that marks the difference between a private-school educated diplo-brat and a man whose mum was a cleaner and dad was a builder.

And that’s perhaps the real meaning of being a mod. The original meaning. Leaving the factory. Leaving your dirty overalls behind. A wash and a shave. Putting on some new threads , looking sharp, smelling good, and out to impress.

That was dangerous thinking by the time of the Mod revival of the 80s. Dangerous because it’s aspirational — and aspiration always implies the possibility of leaving your class behind. Very Thatcherite, though Weller and Strummer both had impeccably radical credentials. But that is probably what disturbed Strummer the most about the new groups in those suits.

Weller didn’t take offence and Café Bleu finds him in an equally generous mood. He broke up a hugely successful band for the best possible reason: to pursue something genuinely new, introducing soul, R&B, hip-hop and jazz into the mix. That kind of cross-pollination is commonplace now, but at the time it was close to an innovation — certainly for a punk band, and for the former leader of a massively successful one.

What’s striking, too, is how little ego there was in it. It wasn’t a supergroup. He didn’t even insist on centre stage. Instead, he formed the band with Mick Talbot, formerly of Dexys Midnight Runners and the Merton Parkas — the latter responsible for that immortal line, “A man ain’t a man with a ticket in his hand — you need wheels.”

The drummer was Steve White, only 17 at the time. And Weller moved his future (now ex-) wife, Dee C. Lee, from backing vocals into the foreground. She’d previously been a backing singer with Wham!.

Café Bleu is a great listen, and it includes one of my all-time favourite singles, Speak Like a Child, with lyrics folornly imprinted on my heart:

“Spent all day thinking about you
Spent all night coming to terms with it”

It remains one of the most perfect pop songs I know. If those lyrics don’t quite rend my soul the way they once did, I still feel the dull ache of an old scar. And that bassline — that oh so brief funky bassline — is just as brilliant as ever.

“Time and conditions are built to tame
Nothing lasts with age, so people say
But I will always try to feel the same”

I do. I do — about the song, at least.

At the time, I remember being disappointed there weren’t more standout, obvious hits like Speak Like a Child or Long Hot Summer.

But now, with my new-year’s resolution to spend more time in the vaults, and more time listening to jazz it’s a remarkable treat.

The Special Edition is for once rather special, too, packed with jams that reward deep listening.

All of which brings me back to the Molotovs.

What you hear in the Molotovs isn’t simply clever retro styling. It’s that same generosity of spirit Weller displays even if at first glance they are heading in opposite directions. It is music that feels urgent now, made by people who instinctively understand the best of what’s gone before, while imbuing it with the spirit of the age. People who care deeply about their art. The willingness to risk sounding like yourself rather than sounding fashionable; to put energy, melody and conviction ahead of pose; to let the song lead.

Arrival is never the point.
The point is what you do while the door is still swinging open.