2010: a look ahead at the year in pop

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">2010: a look ahead at the year in pop</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">The pop climate is becoming like the actual climate. Where you once had distinct seasons now it all happens at once</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Pete Paphides</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;line-height:10.5pt"><font face="Verdana">In 2010, there will still be a music industry of which to speak — and, much to the chagrin of discerning listeners, one of the people we might have to thank for that is the talent show oligarch, Simon Cowell. Increasingly, Cowell's vast cash cow is becoming something akin to a national lottery fund that allows record companies to keep investing in artists whose own records might bear critical scrutiny 20 years down the line. Once upon a time, U2 used to generate similar revenue to Cowell's. Announcing their appearance at the 40th Glastonbury Festival this year, though, Bono declared himself "humbled" to be appearing. He wasn't being disingenuous. The festival sold out in a day, while sales of U2's current album No Line on the Horizon have been a fraction of its predecessors. Bono's band need Glastonbury more than Glastonbury needs them. Other rumoured headliners at the festival include the Rolling Stones while, with little planned for the year save some writing and recording in the spring, Radiohead are strongly rumoured to play their first headline set at the festival in seven years.

With Blur having played the most emotionally received set at any festival this decade in 2009, Damon Albarn returned to his studio in July to apply the finishing touches to the latest instalment from his dystopian 2D band Gorillaz (www.gorillaz.com). Back then he told The Times that he was waiting to hear about possible vocal cameos from Mark E. Smith and Engelbert Humperdinck. He didn't get Humperdinck, but when Plastic Beach appears next summer see if you can spot Barry Gibb, Mos Def and the Horrors.

Some returns — new albums by Hot Chip (Feb 1), Goldfrapp (March 22) and Arcade Fire (in the spring) — warrant a fanfare. Others are tinged with sadness. Corinne Bailey Rae's forthcoming album is her first since the death of her husband Jason Rae. The Sea (Feb 1) is a palpable pendulum swing away from the carefree voice of Put Your Records On — there's a careworn resilience to new songs such as Love Is On Its Way and the album's title track.

Robbie Williams may have struggled with stage fright since his return, but with his current single You Know Me stalling at No 17, a string of unconfirmed arena dates in March and April are the singer's best chance to extend the commercial lifespan of his current album Reality Killed the Video Star.

The Mercury-winning success of The Seldom Seen Kid has transformed Elbow from a band fighting to win back an audience squandered by luckless record deals to Britain's favourite composers of thirtysomething elegies to lost friends and lovers. Described by their guitarist Mark Potter as a "musical journal of life on the road", the group's fifth album is pencilled in for a September release — which, all things being well, is when we will see Coldplay's current sessions with Brian Eno appearing in album form.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are set to record a successor to Raising Sand, the album that curtailed the most anticipated reunion of the century to just one show. Their first album together took ten days to make. You suspect that, with so much at stake, this one — another set of covers — may take a little longer.

By contrast, Mark Ronson has wisely decreed that his own covers project, which made a star of him with Version in 2007, has reached its natural close. His third album, due in May, is comprised entirely of original songs.

Almost 50 years ago, Joe Meek hit on the big idea of presenting record companies with songs at once home-made yet utterly modern when heard through the single speaker of a transistor radio. Some of the most exciting songs of the past year have been made with a similar spirit — albeit by very different artists — on labels that have then been licensed out to majors. Play recent hits by Dizzee Rascal and the new Brrrap Pack stars N-Dubz and Tinchy Stryder through a top-of-the-range stereo and they sound trebly and brittle. But, as Matthew Robson — the 15-year-old whose leaked research note on teenage cultural habits caused media-wide ripples in 2009 — pointed out, most teenagers consume their music via their phones. It's into this world that the next wave of "hip-pop" names are set to be launched.

The 15-year-old Fugative (www.myspace.com/fugativeuk) may yet turn out to be the Brrrap generation's Vanilla Ice. His recent single Jimmy Shoe garnered a million YouTube plays, but the challenge for his label is getting a demograph unused to legally downloading its music to actually pay money for his next single, Supafly (Jan 18).

Arriving five months later is a far more exciting proposition in the rapper Giggs (www.myspace.com/trapstargiggs). Managed by the team behind Tinchy Stryder, the dank, downbeat backdrops over which the spoken serenades of Let 'em 'ave it (due out in May) are played out place him closer to the South London precinct pop of the XX than Dizzee and Tinchy.

Where major record labels are concerned, the trick is to strike the right balance between moderately selling credible acts and mainstream bankers. Having worked with the likes of Alicia Keys, Britney Spears and Shakira, the first fruits of Jack Splash's (www.myspace.com/jacksplash) new album Technology and Love Might Save Us All — especially the Missy Elliott-abetted first single I Could've Loved You — showcase a musical vision that finishes off the job started by Prince at his late-Eighties zenith.

No less assured of eliciting a Pavlovian reaction among fans of punchy modern pop are the sometime Mike Skinner protégé Example (www.myspace.com/leadingbyexample) — surely guaranteed a winter No 1 with Won't Go Quietly (Jan 11) — and the 18-year-old Scotsman Alex Gardner (www.myspace.com/alexgardnermusic). Assisted by the Girls Aloud hit factory Xenomania, Gardner is no less assured of two monster hits with his March debut single Yesterday's News and Heartbreak.

A welcome follow-on from the Eighties sensibilities of La Roux and Little Boots are Delphic and the male duo Hurts (www.myspace.com/ithurts). The latter's imminent debut single Wonderful Life (Jan 11) is a perfect microcosm of their moody monochrome pop noir. By contrast, Delphic's debut album Acolyte (Jan 11) takes its sonic cues from the chemical Factory funk of fellow Mancunians New Order and A Certain Ratio.

But, as the underperforming 2009 tip Frankmusik ruefully told The Times this year, a pop career is far easier for girls these days. Of the breakthrough artists such as Pixie Lott, Lady Gaga, Florence and the Machine and Little Boots some made better records than others, but all benefited from appearances on magazine covers. As a self-proclaimed "left-field musician with pop aspirations" it isn't hard to see Marina & the Diamonds (www.marinaandthediamonds.com) following a similar trajectory to that of Florence & the Machine — and with her single Hollywood (Feb 1), the part-Greek, part-Welsh singer has the song to propel her further. "I'm obsessed with the mess that's America," goes the hook.

We could do worse, though, than shower Brit-love on the coterie of American bands descending on these shores in the next few months. By the time the festival season has run its course, expect the otherworldly harmonic rock of New York's Yeasayer (www.yeasayer.net) — poised to return with Odd Blood (Feb 8) — to have propelled them to crossover success. Less well-known at the moment, but perhaps capable of greater things still, are the LA quartet Fool's Gold (www.myspace.com/foolsgold). They're not the first band in recent years to have taken their inspiration from Afrobeat rhythms and Nigerian highlife guitars, but none have finessed the sound with Fool's Gold's inhibition-trouncing joie de vivre.

By being a year about something — about Eighties revivalism, about the Brrrap pack's takeover of pop, about the British public's continuing willingness to pay money to vote for acts whose records they want Simon Cowell to sell them — 2009 was a blip. But you'd be hard pushed to recall another year this decade that was so easily summed up. Increasingly, the pop climate is becoming rather like the actual climate. Where you once had distinct seasons, the pick'n'mix nature of music consumption in an iPod age means that it's all happening at once, in one perpetually self-replenishing playlist.

What it all means is that 2010 is an open field. With so many A-list arena-packers lying low for the year — Amy Winehouse, Take That, Paul McCartney, Britney, Madonna, Beyoncé, David Bowie and Kings of Leon among them — the vacancies for new stars are manifold. Jedward had perhaps best not get their hopes up.

Watch out for: Hurts

The immaculately coutured Mancunian duo Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson have cheekbones on which you could rest Sartre's Nausea — a book with which, to judge by their lyrics, one suspects they are both intimate. Early Talk Talk is almost certainly a key influence, possibly late Roxy Music, too — all alchemised into the yearning, pop noir of the debut single Wonderful Life and Silver Lining.</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6971687.ece</font></b></span></p>

Edited January 1, 201015 yr by Sylph