“So, who was good?” I was asked on coming back into the office after reviewing the Isle of Wight Festival for the Telegraph.
Iggy Pop, I answered immediately. I own one Stooges album, Raw Power, which hasn’t had a lot of play and probably won’t get much more. In terms of sheer spectacle, though, I [...]

What a grafter, running back and forth at his end of the Emirates Stadium for the whole night, the big screen showing veins popping on his forehead from the sheer, crowd-pleasing effort.
No, not one of those overpaid kids who play for Arsenal. I’m talking about Bruce Springsteen, who at nearly 60 can still manage a [...]

What do you make of a man who charges you 75 quid to see him and still has the decorators in when you arrive?
  Neil Young did at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on Sunday night. Throughout the first part of his set, when he was playing unplugged on his own, he did it against [...]

You’d expect to find a fan letter to Bruce Springsteen in a blog. But would you expect to find it over two pages in El País? That’s where I found one yesterday. It had appeared first in The New York Times on September 30, to mark the release of Springsteen’s new album, Magic. It’s by [...]

Prince opened his 19th London concert on Sunday night with the song 1999 — which happened to be the year in which I last visited the venue in which he was performing. Then it was the not-quite-finished Millennium Dome, and as my colleagues and I wandered its vast spaces in hard hats, those in charge [...]

In The Observer Music Monthly last weekend, Paul Morley was lamenting the “steamed-up praise” for every new act that inevitably leads to disappointment when you finally hear the band or its album: “You think, I wish I hadn’t been expecting the greatest thing ever, because compared to being the greatest thing, this is just [...]

The trailer for The Good Shepherd, the film about the formation of the CIA that opened in Britain this week, reminds me of a line from Isabel Allende’s wonderful memoir about Chile, My Invented Country, which I read recently. Allende recalls a joke popular in Latin America: Why are there no military coups in the [...]