00s

And considering tech as well as the power of the internet, it seems like future generations will experience the ‘80s and other prominent decades that are so familiar to us.Ian points out that his two kids, ages 9 and 11, already know all the big music hits from the ‘70s, ‘80s, and the 90’s, all thanks to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. The short video format often includes popular music and thus the kids seem to recognize them all and even sing to many of them“It is quite amazing to hear, it is humbling. In a more…

In 1997, while the Spice Girls were busy filming their debut cinematic opus Spice World, songwriting and production duo Richard “Biff” Stannard and Matt Rowe were sat in Abbey Road studios in London twiddling their thumbs. In need of ideas for the band’s second album, but with the group themselves away on set, they started to venture outside the world of pure pop. “I’m a massive New Order fan and there’s a frog on their Low-Life album and I remember thinking: ‘I really want to put frogs on this song’,” Stannard told me…

‘Are you guys aware of the craziness you’ve created here?” a British journalist asked a dazed-looking Julian Casablancas in 2001. The exchange is included in the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom. The only words the Strokes frontman could muster were: “It’s crazy and bizarre.” When Yeah Yeah Yeahs landed on UK soil a year later, it was more of the same. “I was not prepared for it at all,” says Karen O, the lead singer, in the film. “We were drunk on the ravenous fanaticism.”Meet Me in the Bathroom is based on Lizzy…

“Take it right down to the sweet Mancunian ground,” instructs Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos. Telling the audience to drop before rocketing them back up like a firework by restarting the music is an old trick, and one that can fall flat as often as it works. But the hefty crowd at Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse dutifully obey and drop in unison. The band detonates via a stretched out and frenetic version of This Fire, and the crowd explodes along with them.The moment feels emblematic of Franz Ferdinand as a…

The effect of Covid on British pop music has proved a curious thing. The expected glut of pandemic pop – introverted music powered by loneliness, woe at the state of the world and existential dread – never materialised. Instead, pop looked outward: perhaps as a natural reaction to the privations of the times, or perhaps, more pragmatically, taking note that the big hits during lockdown suggested audiences weren’t terribly interested in wallowing in what had happened. The past few years have been dancefloors and disco…