Jeff Harford

Didn't we cheer when Jarvis Cocker invaded the stage at the 1996 Brit Awards, waggled his rump and took the Michael out of Jackson. No? Well, I did. It was truly a gesture for the common people....

What the world needs now is Love. Were Arthur Lee still alive, and were the finer musicians among his many one-time bandmates alongside him, the musical landscape might appear a little less...

Leonard Cohen had no firm grasp on pop music when he set about making debut album Songs Of Leonard Cohen (1968). His history was as a poet and novelist, callings that required him to insulate...

The chief criticism levelled at Rufus Wainwright is his penchant for florid embellishment. It's a brickbat that might carry some weight were it a case of the emperor not wearing any clothes. ...

For the first half of the '60s, rock bands lived or died by the 7-inch single. By the end of the decade, the boundaries had been extended to the outer edges of the long player and beyond by acts...

In a cheeky but understandable "We meant to do that" moment, the Zombies tried to pass off the misspelling of Odyssey on the cover of 1968 album Odessey And Oracle as something deep and...

Overblown, oversexed and overweight. That pretty much sums up rock's most unlikely pin-up, Meat Loaf. And if the usual laws of commercial success were applied, he'd stand as much chance of turning...

Faithfull's finest a measure of resilienceIN the years between 1964 and 1979, Marianne Faithfull lived a lifetime. Anointed by the press at age 17 as a shy, wistful, waif-like beauty, at age 32...

As one of the Prefab Four, Mike Nesmith paid a heavy price for stardom. A talented musician and proven songwriter, he had been labelled a fraudster by the press on the back of the hardly earth...

The acid pen of the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics Robert Christgau worked overtime when it came to progressive rock. The term was an oxymoron, he said, and the album that many...

AC/DC is not now, nor has it ever been, a heavy metal band. Back in 1976, Acca Dacca's no-frills take on hard-rocking blues even saw some pundits lumping the group in with the Pistols and the punks...

Where's the fun in existential angst if you can't wallow in its glorious confusion? The better acts of the post-punk era certainly weren't going to let their assorted miseries stand in the way of a...

If Roxy Music's astonishing self-titled 1972 debut album had critics shuffling the labels on the pigeonholes, 1973's follow-up, For Your Pleasure, saw them knocking out the dividing walls in the...

On the release of Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 album Pieces of a Man, African-American monthly magazine Ebony summed up the artist thus: "He is a genius and he is beautiful".  Where to from...

By mid-1968, the post-Summer of Love counterculture was beginning to fragment in the face of the sobering realities of war, civil rights abuses, political assassinations and drug excesses. The...

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?" So goes the opening lyric to Pachucho Cadaver from 1969 double album Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and...

A misfit? Harbouring a general distrust of the corporate world, parents, relationships, your fellow man? Nevermind. That's one word, a dismissive grunt that combines "You wouldn't...

Serge Gainsbourg was Pepe Le Pew incarnate. Trade the amorous skunk's funky aroma for the blue cloud of the Frenchman's smouldering Gitanes, and Pepe's lecherous pursuit of Penelope Pussycat...

Bob Dylan must have been feigning bemusement at the popularity of 15th studio album Blood On The Tracks (1975). People enjoying "that kind of pain" was hard to relate to, he said,...