Album of the week Coming round

Jake Bugg – Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Jake Bugg seems to have been around a long time, but he’s still only 27 and is releasing his fifth album since starting out as a guitarslinging teenager. His songs have been constant earworms via TV and film in the past decade, including the theme to BBC show Happy Valley, beer ads, and Lightning Bolt, which soundtracked a Mini car ad.

That track remains his biggest hit despite being released almost ten years ago, at a time when Bugg was dismissive of the pop world, but he’s embraced it on Saturday Night,

Sunday Morning, making it his most enjoyable album in years.

He’s not lost his knack for coming up with melodies you seem to have known forever the first time you hear them, as with

gospel-tinged opening track All I Need and the ridiculously catchy About Last Night.

Bugg embraces his pop sensibilities fully on the single Rabbit Hole, while Lonely Hours and Screaming both have 1970s influences including soft rock stadium fillers Supertramp.

Lost is made for the dancefloor and shows his new-found appreciation of Abba and the Bee Gees in their disco heyday, and Kiss Like The Sun is built on a driving rockabilly riff reminiscent of his early records.

Then there’s Downtown, a poignant piano-led ballad about going raving on summer nights as he promises “you’ll never be alone”; Scene, made for waving phone torches at gigs; and the gentle acoustic guitar final track Hold Tight.

Bugg is from Nottingham, and the album title pays homage to Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel, which is set in the city, while many of the songs are about late nights merging into early mornings.

Although his coming round to the ways of the music industry he used to disparage may irk the purists among his fans, the result is a pleasant surprise for those prepared to listen.