Popular music
Mark Ellen
Fifty years ago this August, half a million undernourished, sleepless, mud-caked souls occupied a farm in upstate New York and we’ve never been allowed to forget it. Rightly so, since the music was a pivotal pop cultural moment and the stage announcements so amusingly memorable that for ages the standard response to a traffic jam on the A303 was to shout ‘New York State Thruway is closed, man!’ An intensely desirable 38-CD box set, Woodstock: The Definitive 50th Anniversary Archive, is now available, its tracks with titles like ‘Bring Jerry’s nitroglycerin pills to the Indian Pavilion’, but it comes with a withering price tag (Rhino £624.99) so head instead for the splendidly nostalgic mini-version Woodstock – Back To The Garden: 50th Anniversary Experience (Atlantic B07RKFHYVR, £91) for acts who never appeared on the original album – the Band, the Grateful Dead and Credence Clearwater Revival among them, and more of the magnificent Richie Havens.
The tireless and inventive Bruce Springsteen was still playing East Coast bars in 1969 and his latest outing, Western Stars (Columbia B07QRYG51N, £9.99), is a fascinating diversion from his traditional turf, either the barrelling rock and soul of the E Street Band or the sparse and more acoustic pasture of his solo outings. This is rich and ornate, a wondrous adventure embroidered with French horns, strings and pedal steel guitar that reminds you of the windswept melodic landscapes patrolled by Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman or Harry Nilsson’s version of Everybody’s Talkin’. It features a cast of slightly rueful characters, one of them driving by the motel of a past romantic tryst only to find the old place boarded up.
Loudly championed by Springsteen, the British songwriter Thea Gilmore cooks up literate and effortlessly tuneful modern folk music on the divine and poetic Small World Turning (Shameless B07NVV1R8C, £10.99), the lyrics quoting Chaucer and Bob Dylan and her songs, with their touches of blues and gospel, full of real-life dramas from the suburbs of Oxford to the Mexican border. You might expect folk overtones from Cate Le Bon too, a Welsh songwriter who, in a rather extreme quest for inspiration, decamped to a remote cottage in the Lake District for a year, to live and compose in complete isolation (and yes, carve wooden furniture). But Reward (Mexican Summer B07P5PT3R4, £11) is bedazzling, soft and imaginative piano-driven pop with a debt to David Bowie.
Two other storytellers made delightful records, one the Sheffield Roy Orbison, Richard Hawley, whose stage act is winningly droll – ‘I read something in the paper the other day about the perils of heavy drinking. I thought, right, from now on, no more reading.’ The stunning Further (BMG B07P6MW4J2, £7.99 MP3) is mostly resonant and smouldering, late ‘50s-style balladry, a frame for his lustrous tenor voice. American singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis offers wise reflections on past relationships in the riveting On The Line (Warner
B07MWR4425, £9.99), a colourful mix of sparkling country pop and old-school West Coast rock with echoes of Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac (in fact one of Petty’s band appears on the album, as does Ringo Starr). You get supercharged tales about everything from the Los Angeles party circuit to a moving reconciliation with her mother, all sung with a supreme and soulful gorgeousness.
Another of the year’s luminous triumphs was Father Of The Bride (Columbia, BO7PJZN7D7 £9.99) by the New York trio Vampire Weekend, whose varied and stunning 18-track song cycle is a rolling scrapbook of ideas rather like the Beatles’ White Album, in this case a joyous blend of the Rolling Stones, Pet Shop Boys, space rock, baroque pop, flamenco and even, in Rich Man, the kind of top-heavy African highlife pop that Paul Simon mined so memorably on Graceland: a movie for the ears!
But for me the year’s most companionable album, just out, is Rush Of Blood (Last Music
B07S3DDVQN, £12.50) by Geraint Watkins, the weatherbeaten keyboard master once at the heart of both Nick Lowe’s and Van Morrison’s backing bands. Some of it sounds like the gorgeous soundtracks of the great Western movies of the early ‘60s, softly propelled country-flavoured rhythm and blues conjuring images of the endless prairie. For the rest, Watkins’ smoke-stained voice cuts a path through jazz and blues and radiates a suitably seasonal sense of wellbeing – ‘Everything I touch turns to gold!’
Just add port and walnuts. Retail prices may vary