As much as I enjoy watching The X Factor, I have to admit that once the show is over I really don’t care about the contestants. There has been the odd exception to this rule such as Leona Lewis. And JLS aren’t bad at what they do. But otherwise it’s a TV show and not a boon to the British music scene.

If you read this blog regularly you’ll know I cover The X Factor every week but once someone has been voted off they usually disappear into obscurity. Apart from Alexandra Burke and JLS, no one from last year’s show …read more

Band reunions are a strange beast: they are a mix of doing it for the fans and doing it for the money, they rarely last very long, and they even more rarely live up to expectations. But despite all of this, millions of people want to see their favorite groups reform.
British groups seem to be making a habit of reforming. Since I’ve been writing Brit Music Scene, we have seen The Verve, Boyzone, Led Zeppelin (for a one off concert), The Police, The Sex Pistols, The Spice Girls, Blur, and Take That all get back together in some form.
Then there …read more

2009 is approaching fast and so it’s time to look back at 2008. Here we’ll see the high and lowlights of Spring, with a selection of stories we covered between April and June.
April
The month started, as it always does, with April Fool’s Day, and while Brit Music Scene didn’t hoodwink its readers, YouTube did. I detailed the prank in a post entitled The Day Rick Astley Ruled The World.
I shared my Soundtrack For A Day in the middle of the month, and was joined by other b5 Music bloggers. Meanwhile, Boyzone announced their reunion shows, an event I was ecstatic …read more

Reforming is obviously the thing to do now. We’ve already seen Take That make a successful comeback, The Spice Girls a less successful one, and The Police reforming and then splitting up again. We’ve also seen Boyzone reform even though no-one asked them to, and Led Zeppelin announce plans to tour and release new material even though Robert Plant won’t be involved.
Then, more recently we learned about The Faces making plans, and just last week, Blur announced they were reforming after Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon put their differences aside to work together again. So, who is next? Could it …read more

The Police have topped the Forbes Magazine poll to find the highest-earning musicians of 2008. The British rockers beat the likes of Beyonce Knowles and Madonna to come first in the list. Only one other British act featured in the top ten, with Genesis making it to number nine.
The Police managed to rack up income of $115 million over the past year, mainly down to the incredibly successful reunion tour which drew sell out crowds around the world and raked in $84.9 million. That’s an incredible $28.3 million each earned by each member of the group for a year’s work.

The Stone Roses are one of the best bands to have ever come out of Britain, but their musical legacy was pitifully small due to only two albums being produced before they split up. Although that was way back in 1996, there have been numerous calls for them to reunite from the public and band members alike.
The split was somewhat acrimonious, and so the chances of a reunion seemed to be as likely as The Verve or The Police getting back together, both of whom also split up due to band tension. Now those two have managed it, although The …read more

We knew it was going to happen, but now that it has, it’s kind of sad. The Police announced back in May that their last date on this current tour was going to be their final gig ever, and so it has come to pass. They played Madison Square Gardens last night, and that it is, it’s all over folks… maybe.

The Police originally split up rather acrimoniously in 1984 after the three of them got sick of arguing with each other. Tensions were said to be so bad that towards the end they hardly spoke. But last year saw the …read more

Being the offspring of a famous celebrity is a double-edged sword: it can help you forge your own career in the world of entertainment purely by people knowing your name, or it can make you subject to unfair comparisons, and accusations of getting an unfair advantage.
A high percentage of celebrities offspring choose to follow their parents choice of career, and with wildly different outcomes. One who seems to be doing well at it is Coco Sumner, real name Eliot Pauline Sumner, who is the daughter of Sting from The Police, and Trudie Styler.

She performed an intimate gig at the Boogaloo …read more

The Stone Roses remain fresh in people’s minds as one of the seminal bands of the late 80s and early 90s, and a founding member of the much-acclaimed Madchester scene. However, they split up in 1996, and have all gone their own ways, and concentrated on solo projects since.
As much as many of us would like to see them reform, the split was acrimonious, and the chances have always been very slim of a meeting of minds, and any sort of reunion. In particular, the relationship between lead singer Ian Brown, and guitarist John Squires is non-existent, with Brown angry …read more

How do you decide when the summer is finally upon us and the rain clouds are going to give way to glorious days of sunshine? Personally, being a music freak, I wait until the summer festival season kicks off in the UK, which is this weekend with both the Isle of Wight and Download festivals taking place.
The Isle of Wight Festival is one of the oldest pop and rock festivals in the UK, with some particularly memorable performance from artists such as Bob Dylan, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors when it first ran between 1968 and 1970. It …read more