Rod Stewart
Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam Touring in the UK, Wed to Jun 15
Some rock stars, as they get older, turn into the embarrassing parent at a teenage party. Sir Rod Stewart, now 74, is the embarrassing grandad. He’s wearing a cropped leopardskin jacket, which will soon be shed to disclose the party shirt from hell.
Around his neck is a red spotted handkerchief. He seems to have come as Sir Rod Steptoe.
And yet he still hits the ground rocking. The moment the curtain rises, you can see the energy twitching through him. The opening track, Infatuation, hails from the mid-Eighties and might have been better left there, but the punch it lacks turns up four minutes later with its swaggering contemporary, Some Guys Have All The Luck.
Sir Rod Stewart, now 74, is the embarrassing grandad. He’s wearing a cropped leopardskin jacket, which will soon be shed to disclose the party shirt from hell
He doesn’t so much greet the crowd as brief them. ‘Two hours,’ he says briskly, ‘23 songs. Enjoy yourself – it’s later than you think.’ He chuckles, as if surprised to find himself quoting The Specials.
And then his band launches into Young Turks, with Rod on air guitar.
Next, it’s off to the one place where you don’t expect to find an old rocker: the present day. Hole In My Heart, from last year’s album Blood Red Roses, makes Infatuation look like pure gold.
That’s the last we hear of Blood Red Roses. In fact, it’s the last song recorded after 1991.
Not that this is a problem. Rod’s 55-year back catalogue boils down to a dozen classic tracks, mostly from the Seventies, and the only one to miss out tonight is Handbags And Gladrags.
Unusually, there’s nothing by The Faces, which may be a hint that the long-rumoured reunion with Ron Wood is happening.
Rod tours Britain twice this year, playing football grounds for the next month, then arenas before Christmas. In between he will return to Las Vegas, which has left its mark on his show.
It’s pacy and glossy, with uniforms for everyone. The five men in the band get off lightly in white jackets and black trousers. The three female backing singers somehow smile through the pain of sporting uniforms that match Rod’s wardrobe, from leopardskin to polka dots.
Some things never change. Rod still has his hair, which has now defied gravity for four decades. He still has his voice, half- velvet, half-gravel. And he still insists on kicking footballs into the crowd.
The only sign of his seniority is that he keeps disappearing for a breather, returning each time in an even louder outfit.
What has changed over the years is that a stylistic nomad, game for anything from pub rock to the Great American Songbook, has finally settled down. He can still dish up disco hits to order, but his heart seems to be in Celtic soul.
The three backing singers are joined by three more women (also in uniform) who play the fiddle, mandolin and harp. They bring a warm lilt to Tonight’s The Night, You Wear It Well and Maggie May – now the only No 1 ever to name-check two prime ministers.
These songs are old friends, but they’re trumped by Rod’s masterpiece: I Don’t Want To Talk About It, released in 1977 with The First Cut Is The Deepest, the greatest double A side since The Beatles’ Something and Come Together eight years earlier.
He sits the band down on stools, goes all-acoustic, plays both ballads back to back and pours himself into the songs rather than the showmanship.
When he’s this good, he can make your hair stand on end too.
rodstewart.com
Morrissey California Sun Out Fri
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Eccentric, outspoken, absolutely his own man, Morrissey should have been a natural for a solo career. Instead he has slipped into self-parody. In a chequered past decade, his only big hit has been his autobiography.
He insisted on going straight into Penguin Classics and somehow got away with it, despite opening with a paragraph that went on for four-and-a-half pages.
Fronting The Smiths, Morrissey made four albums and a lasting impression. On his own he has released 11 albums before this one and left barely a trace. The 12th is billed as a set of ‘12 brand new cover tracks’. Brand new? Most are from 1968-73.
Eccentric, outspoken, absolutely his own man, Morrissey should have been a natural for a solo career. Instead he has slipped into self-parody
With his distinctive air of literate dismay, Morrissey has it in him to be good at covers. One of these songs even comes with a title he could have written, Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets (originally by Dionne Warwick).
And, unlike in the book, he starts well. He pays tribute to Jobriath, the trailblazing gay singer of the Seventies, by digging out Morning Starship, a likeable glam-rock number sung with feeling.
From then on there are some curious choices: Joni Mitchell at her wordiest, Bob Dylan getting preachy and a Roy Orbison hit (It’s Over) that was covered definitively by the late Billy MacKenzie.
Morrissey pays tribute to Jobriath, the trailblazing gay singer of the Seventies, by digging out Morning Starship , a likeable glam-rock number sung with feeling
On more promising material by Warwick, Laura Nyro and Tim Hardin, Morrissey often sounds bored.
You can play the truculent teenager for a long time in pop, but not in the week you turn 60.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Thea Gilmore Small World Turning Out now
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Thea Gilmore doesn’t hang about. She tours heavily, runs a festival at home in Cheshire and raises two children with her husband and producer, Nigel Stonier. At 39, she is releasing her 16th album.
She is, or should be, a role model for younger singer-songwriters. She writes mostly by herself, occasionally with Stonier, never by committee. Her words are vividly intelligent, her folk-pop melodies infectious. Her voice rings out warm and clear.
Thea Gilmore is, or should be, a role model for younger singer-songwriters. She writes mostly by herself, occasionally with her husband, Nigel Stonier and never by committee
If you don’t know her music, begin with Ghosts And Graffiti, a classy compilation from 2015. If you do know it, head straight for a record shop and ask for Small World Turning.
Musically, it could have been made decades ago, with the mandolin and penny whistle to the fore. Lyrically, it could only have turned up today. Gilmore exposes lying populists on Blowback and highlights food banks on Cutteslowe Walls, which takes its name from a notorious attempt in Thirties Oxford to shield the rich from the mere sight of the poor.
The whole album glows with vitality, and its centrepiece, Karr’s Lament , is a piano ballad so piercingly beautiful that it may well be the song of the year
If all this sounds worthy, don’t worry: she knows how to turn fury into fun. The whole album glows with vitality, and its centrepiece, Karr’s Lament, is a piano ballad so piercingly beautiful that it may well be the song of the year.
Gilmore plays the Union Chapel, London, on Tuesday. See you there.
THIS WEEK’S CD RELEASES
By Adam Woods
Sting My Songs Out Fri
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These ‘modernised recordings’ of Sting’s best-known songs require a bit of analysis. The Police tunes have been fully rerecorded. The solo hits, meanwhile, get a different treatment, with new bits added to pep them up for contemporary ears. But as he says, they’re his songs, and the new versions are fine
The Waterboys Where The Action Is Out Fri
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Mike Scott’s Waterboys keep things pithy but diverse, throwing in some boisterous rock ’n’ roll, a bit of soul, a tribute to The Clash’s Mick Jones, some cosmic pop and, on Ladbroke Grove Symphony, an atmospheric, piano-vamping tribute to west London. It feels like being pinballed around Scott’s fertile imagination
Cate Le Bon Reward Out Fri
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Welsh singer Cate Le Bon makes reliably brilliant, subtly psychedelic folk-pop with traces of the Velvet Underground, Nico and oddballs from Bowie to Kevin Ayers. Written during a year alone in the Lake District, Reward stretches out her increasingly long run of winners, its beautiful songs surreal and mysterious
Mavis Staples We Get By Out Fri
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Mavis Staples marched with Martin Luther King and was proposed to by another young protest singer named Bob Dylan (she declined). We Get By unites her with admiring young ’un Ben Harper, who has written and produced 11 funky, bluesy, political, often joyous songs in the key of Mavis. Her performances – gutsy, warm and steely – belie her 79 years