Chi-Lites: (For God’s Sake) Give More Power to The People
Org Music

Pearl Charles: Magic Mirror
Kanine

Cerys Matthews: We Come From The Sun
Decca

Two skinny pop stars died recently and the music mags grew fat with appreciations and reassessments notable for their ambivalence. Producer Phil Spector – notorious for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson, as well as famous for his music – and New York Dolls guitarist Sylvain Sylvain represented, if you like, radically opposite tendencies. Spector’s famous “Wall of Sound” is pop maximalism at its lushest, while the Dolls didn’t so much lack virtuosity as basic competence. All pop music probably exists between those two poles.

In the music industry’s favourite ­creation myth, a bunch of kids are singing on a street corner, tapping on cans and slashing at a five-string out-of-tune ­guitar when a limo window whispers down and a fat hand with a lot of gold on it hands over a card. Six months later, the kids have perms, shiny outfits, synthesisers and Mellotrons, with a jumbo jet parked outside. And someone always spoils it by saying it was much more fun back on the street corner.