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Britney Spears: where to start in her back catalogue

Our Listeners Digest series continues with the bold and experimental stylings of the pop princess turned showstopping star The album to start with Blackout (2007) Britney Spears sang on the title track of her 2008 album, Circus. The ones that entertain and the ones that observe / Well, baby, Im a put-on-a-show kinda girl. Quite right: her DNA was encoded with the drive to perform, and each successive album Blackout was her fifth took putting on a show to another level, as she grew away from chaste small-town beginnings toward…

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Kim Wilde: I look miserable, but I was having the time of my life

The singer on pouting like Lauren Bacall, DIY hairdos, gardening in nightwear and discovering the joys of colour This was taken in 1981 or 1982, right at the beginning of my career. All my clothes at that time were secondhand a hangover from being at art college. The top that I wore in the Lauren Bacall I really loved that she didnt smile for the camera. When I first started having my photograph taken, lots of male photographers would say: Come on Kim, give us a smile! and it used…

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Code Orange: Underneath review a thrilling new form of molten metal

The Pittsburgh quintet marry technical mastery with genre-fusing risk in a record of poetry and spectacular potency Despite its reputation as the satanic scourge of curtain-twitching suburbia, metal can be prone to the kind of squabbling you might see at a parish council meeting, with endless taxonomic arguments about whether something is death or thrash or black metal. Such petty bloviating is silenced by Grammy-nominated Pittsburgh quintet Code Orange, whose fourth album throws thrash, hardcore punk, math rock, sludge, metalcore, industrial, screamo, grunge, nu-metal and classic rock into a centrifuge,…

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Billie Eilish: No Time to Die review a Bond theme befitting the Craig era

The pop sensation sidelines her trademarks for a tasteful track that matches the haunted solitude of its leading man the Beatles without earmuffs. The Beatles had the last laugh 007 presumably had to reach for hearing protection when Paul McCartney was commissioned to write the theme song for Live and Let Die but for years, the Bond themes pandered to their heros tastes, invariably coming from artists who were more likely to be found playing the Talk of the Town than the Marquee club. That changed dramatically in the 80s.…

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The Clash’s 40 greatest songs ranked!

Forty years on from the London Calling album, we rate the best tracks by the genre-hopping punks 40. 1977 (1977) A historical artefact, not for the proto-punk music, but because the lyrics epitomise the new waves perceived threat to the old guard. No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones / In 1977, sang Joe Strummer, hardly about to let his love of such pop greats get in the way of punks declaration of year zero. 39. White Riot (1977) Guitarist Mick Jones now dislikes the first Clash single, its lyrics…

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