Synth-pop veterans Alphaville begin their 40th anniversary celebrations with a new album of symphonic recordings with the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg. … More Review of Alphaville, Eternally Yours (2022)
This restrained return for the princes of piano pop is easy to like but harder to love. … More Review of Keane, Cause and Effect (2019)
Alphaville’s two-night extravanganza at the Whisky a Go Go makes a late but compelling case that they are much more than a synth-pop band. … More Review of Alphaville: Live at the Whisky a Go Go. From Hollywood with Love (2018)
2017 had a bit of everything – old, new, borrowed and blue. In the end, it left me in a much better place. … More Arrows of Peace: An Epilogue, 2017
Keane frontman Tom Chaplin provides a warm and thought-provoking approach to Christmas. … More Tom Chaplin, Royal Festival Hall, 12 December
“A committed attempt to add something different to the pop landscape.” A review of Alphaville’s latest album, Strange Attractor (Universal, 2017). … More Review of Alphaville, Strange Attractor (2017)
A review of the British Academy sponsored Early Modern Career event at the University of Birmingham on 2nd May 2014. … More The Early Modern Career
These end-of-year epilogues have become invariably sad affairs. Of course, I would prefer that it was different, but I still believe that they help me channel energies in a better way. Last year – in what I still believe to be my best ever contribution here – I said that structural positives had been offset by surface negatives. Now, the poles have changed. … More An Eye to Every Storm: An Epilogue, 2012
More people than ever are still looking for a philosophy on life that offers any comfort. During the New Year, a time when we deliberately parse our minds for retrospection and hope, I thought about the paradox of interconnectedness: how, by superficially feeling closer together than ever before, we might never feel further apart. … More Mortal Longing
Should Keane top the charts with Strangeland later today, they will swiftly follow Coldplay (and another of my dear charges, Erasure) into an exclusive list of British bands to have achieved a fifth consecutive number one album. … More Sovereign Lights: Keane’s Strangeland
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