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It's difficult to say what story the strictly sensational Kylie Minogue might be telling as she performs the third night of a week's season at the O2 Arena. To go [...]

Those who have spent a luxurious and pretty weird pounds 75 and pounds 95 and managed to get tickets to see the professionally peculiar audio illusionist and 'livid' legend Tom [...]

The 67-year-old Neil Diamond plays three nights at the O2 Arena as a bona fide successful modern pop star, not just a weary nostalgia act on a couple of sad […]

Massive Attack's Meltdown Bristol's revered trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack have released just four mellow, menacing albums in their 20 or so years together, but despite regular line-up changes and various […]

The List 1. 50 Cent at the Reading Festival American rapper Jay Z's love for celebrating his own diamond-encrusted wealth will be at odds with traditional Glastonbury values when he [...]

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have to start their second show at Arsenal's vast, red and concrete Emirates Stadium somewhere, and they never like to repeat the song […]

Liza Minelli One of the many things that Liza Minnelli tells the audience during her absurdly emotional London Coliseum performance is that she once shaved off her eyebrows for a […]

The irresistibly indiscreet, indecently entertaining Martha Wainwright is determined to have fun at the Royal Festival Hall. She's dressed for the occasion, in a very tight and short polka-dot ra-ra […]

The audience isn't quite sure what to do at the end of the near-excruciating, near-transcendent Mogwai performance at the elegant Queen Elizabeth Hall. The scruffy five-piece Scottish band had lurked [...]

It's not possible to talk about Edwyn Collins's confident, charismatic and pretty audacious 90-minute performance at the Shepherds Bush Empire without mentioning that, in many ways, he is slowly learning [...]

Blonde Redhead As you might expect, if you know enough about Blonde Redhead's enthralling 15-year, seven-album career to know what to expect, their mysteriously neat and elegantly untidy performance at [...]

Elbow easily sell out the vast Brixton Academy; it's hard to find an indifferent review of their latest album, 'The Seldom Seen Kid', which enters the album charts at number […]

Montreal's uncompromising and diabolically dramatic Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-La-La Band played at The Scala between 9 and 10.30. This gave them enough time to play five [...]

You may or may not have noticed, but it has taken the tardy, tentative English trio Portishead about a decade to finish their third studio album. This is both a [...]

It's safe to say that we all have our favourite Kris Kristofferson. Writer, singer and actor, one quarter of the 1980s Highwayman supergroup along with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and […]

When sincere music fans R.E.M. of Athens, Georgia, released their first record in 1981 the four members ranged in ages from 21 to 24. This means that this year, back […]

The four central members of the in-their-own-world oddball pop group Guillemots, plus two sidekicks at the back on brass and vocals, line up at the Shepherd's Bush Empire to launch […]

Billy Bragg The militant romantic Billy Bragg (above) was 50 at the end of last year. Apart from anything else, this means that back in the late 1970s he was […]

At the Royal Festival Hall, Eels, a sort of non-existent cult group based around the quietly fiendish, existential crackpot Mark Oliver Everett, come across like your average half-crazed comedy group […]

If Bob Dylan hadn't suddenly invented himself as the greatest, most influential rock writer of them all, then we might consider Neil Young as the greatest rock writer of all [...]

On their magical, discreetly twisted records, the female north-east avant garde folk group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset create a sensationally graceful sound that can be epic and subdued, dreamy [...]

Cat Power 'What a band,' notes the easily distracted, highly charged Chan Marshall, performing as always as Cat Power, naturally praising, not for the first time tonight, her group, the […]

Pet Shop Boys last presented their opulent electronic/orchestral soundtrack to Sergei Eistenstein's revolutionary 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin at a free 2004 Trafalgar Square event in front of 20,000 people. [...]

Asked by BBC4 to write and present a film that answered the question 'Pop, what is it good for?', I avoided simply responding 'absolutely nothing', or, indeed, 'absolutely everything', and [...]

Whatever you think of Radiohead - nice, the new Beatles, the new Floyd, the new Throbbing Gristle, dearly overrated, rambling prog-rock in tight punk-rock trousers, critics' darlings, well-packaged idealists, conceptual […]

Ten years after they were so famous it seemed as though they would be around for ever, and seven years after they split up as though they would never be […]

Arctic Monkeys A second night at the vast, ugly Alexandra Palace for the famed Arctic Monkeys, a group not long ago so hyped and hailed it seemed as though they […]

When 1990s literate, shady bad-lad wonders The Verve announced on Radio 1's Jo Whiley Show in June that they were putting themselves back together again and touring with their original [...]

For those needing to make a quick check on the high-street sound of young Britain, Wembley Arena presented a 1960s-style pop package in nicely noisy but oddly perfunctory 21st-century indie […]

As staged rock concepts go, the Kings of Leon is a fairly rum one, and, naturally, it may not even be a concept at all, or any kind of knowing, […]

At the Roundhouse, a show that sold out weeks ago confirms the revival of a 40-year-old idealistic bohemian impulse, something that emerges out of the strange minds, musical curiosity and […]

Those coming late to the Devendra Banhart neo-phenomenon hoping for a sign of the trippy-dippy psycho-silly fun-folk that made him the leading 21st-century nut of a sort of new scene […]

Bat For Lashes In theory, Bat For Lashes should be weirdly majestic. To give the illusion that she is a group, the keen, knowing Natasha Khan chose a nice nonsense […]

It goes without saying that the Sex Pistols playing for five nights at the Brixton Academy between 8 and 14 November and then at huge arenas in Manchester and Glasgow […]

The Philip Glass who walks onto the small stage at the intimate LSO St Luke's is the roving, relaxed Glass who likes to collaborate on spontaneous projects with other performers [...]

YOU COULD CONJURE UP A FINE, disquieting Hallowe'en soundtrack using various uncanny and unlikely versions of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's sleazy, psycho-hypnotic I Put a Spell on You. You would naturally […]

Migrating Bird: The Songs of Lal Waterson Honestjons, pounds 12.99 The idea that there might be some kind of serious folk revival is particularly disconcerting to those who think of […]

Without much ado, with no support act, and geared up to play a good three hours, the three hearty fiftysomething Rush men materialise on the Wembley Arena stage boasting enough […]

THERE'S SOMETHING FAINTLY DISTURBING about the crimson cloth-covered packaging of the deluxe three-CD Bob Dylan compilation. It looks like the kind of box that might contain some tacky tourist trinkets, [...]

It actually seems cruel not to like the vulnerable French-Canadian sweetheart Leslie Feist. Known simply as Feist, she's dabbled a little in punk, collaborated with ultra-randy sex-pop artist Peaches, and […]

If you'd bought an album in 1969, you might have chosen one of the greatest of all time - Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica - or Nick Drake's Five Leaves [...]

Those who turned their eyes and ears away from popular music about a quarter of a century ago will remember David Sylvian as the soft-voiced delicate flower who sang for […]

Elton John The Police He may have been mulish pop genius, indefatigable vulgarian, super shopper and national pleasure for almost 40 years, but Elton John has never really had much […]

The idea of your favourite group or singer coming out and playing as a complete piece one of their best albums - or perhaps their very best-loved album, or their [...]

Norah Jones/ M. Ward It's the light, decorous Norah Jones show at the Hammersmith Apollo, but first, to mess things up just a little bit, a short set from the […]

And here they are, yet again. The Rolling Stones, established in 1962, now steaming - fuelled by dollars, the sauciest, sleaziest rock songs of the 20th century, and good-natured audacity [...]

At one end of the commercially colossal O2 Arena, a faceless 58-piece New York orchestra have been warming up for a few minutes, stoically pumping out brash Broadway tunes. The […]

A friendly but austere-looking Tom Jenkinson, who usually frames himself with the deflective, moderately fashionable pseudonym Squarepusher, nervously wanders to the centre of a bare stage at the Queen Elizabeth […]

Another week, another pop festival, another rainy English summer's day. Perhaps the best way to draw attention to some cause or another would be to have a no-pop day, a […]