Category: Music

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to see Hubert Blanc-Francard, better known as Boombass, during the Paralympics closing ceremony. It promised “an odyssey through French electronic music” and Blanc-Francard was behind some of the country’s most celebrated dance records of the last 30 years, as a key figure in the scene that became known as French touch. The surprise was that he billed himself as Cassius, which was the name of the duo he formed in 1996 with Philippe Zdar, but that he had very firmly announced was over after Zdar fell to his death from a Paris building in 2019, two days before Cassius were due to release their fifth album Dreems.

He and Zdar had been best friends for 40 years and, after Zdar’s death, Blanc-Francard said: “If you even said the name Cassius, it was like someone stuck a knife in my body. I couldn’t even listen to a note of the music.” Cassius only released five albums, because the two prioritised their friendship over their career: if things became strained, they’d take a break rather than fall out. “I had my kids, my friend and the music, the three most important things in my life,” says Blanc-Francard. “I lost my friend and I lost the music, so I fell into a big depression.”

Then, one day, he overheard their 2006 single Toop Toop playing in a Normandy supermarket and felt, “it was like Philippe saying hello to me. It was the beginning of the sun coming back.” He started dreaming about Zdar. “We were in my kitchen in Paris and he was dressed like 30 years ago – we were in the same room but never spoke. I had four or five dreams like this and then the last dream, he shook my hand. For me, it was like: ‘OK, go, my friend – do what you want to do.’ My mind needed time to be clean, to be at peace, and when he shook my hand, I was at peace. It was beautiful.”

Blanc-Francard and Zdar first met as teenagers while working as assistants in a Paris studio: they were introduced by Blanc-Francard’s father, a famed producer. Their break came with French rapper MC Solaar’s debut album: Blanc-Francard scored a handful of co-writing credits and Zdar worked on the mixing, despite the fact that both were, as Black-Francard puts it, “still learning”. Among the album’s fans was James Lavelle, who asked the pair if they could produce some tracks for his fledgling label Mo’ Wax. The result was La Funk Mob’s Tribulations Extra Sensorielles, an attempt, Blanc-Francard says, “to have the EPMD, Pete Rock [hip-hop] sound but with no voice and slow, because I was smoking like a crazy man”. The album became an early trip-hop classic.

After its release, Blanc-Francard moved to New York, erroneously convinced he could make it as a hip-hop producer. When he returned, he discovered that Zdar had made a house album under the name Motorbass, and that the underground dance scene in Paris was exploding.

A gush of incredible records suddenly started appearing from France – by Daft Punk, Air, Étienne de Crécy’s Super Discount, Dimitri from Paris and then Cassius. Their debut single Foxxy came about when Blanc-Francard played Zdar some samples he’d made from a Willie Hutch soundtrack and Zdar convinced him to speed them up to house tempo. “A few people like Laurent Garnier had opened doors,” says Blanc-Francard. “He was the first French DJ to play the Haçienda, so that said, ‘Wow, it’s possible.’ In a year, 10 or 20 projects arrived. There were new record shops in Paris with 23-year-old sellers talking about house and techno, not an old man selling you Rolling Stones records. Thomas and Guy-Man [of Daft Punk], they’re geniuses, and that helped a lot: it was the first time we could meet French guys at the level of anybody else in music. It was like we had the same capacity – not the genius, but the possibility to be in the competition.”

He says he loves the name French touch – “it’s like UK garage, it feels like you’re part of a family” – even though the disco-sampling filtered house it became shorthand for only really applied to a fraction of Cassius’s output. Their breakthrough debut album 1999 was audibly more influenced by 80s electro, while the intense, chaotic Au Rêve seems to presage maximalist the Paris dance label Ed Banger, which launched Justice and others.

Their biggest track of all, 2011’s I <3 U So, was initially commissioned by Coca-Cola, which was launching a rival to Red Bull, but it was rejected because its somnambulant mood didn’t fit with an energy drink. “We didn’t want to do the advert anyway – the drink tasted horrible. But when it came out, it was like a rebirth for us. At the time we were from the first French touch generation. Ed Banger was exploding and we were the old men from the 2000s, but we received so much love from the new generation.” It was subsequently sampled on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Why I Love You.

Cassius had a habit of attracting big names – Madonna performed Into the Groove live as a mashup with Toop Toop, and their later albums were studded with guest appearances from Pharrell Williams, Ryan Tedder, Mike D and Cat Power among others. It’s a big legacy to continue, and Blanc-Francard says he hasn’t actually started making new Cassius music yet. He feels he needs collaborators, because that’s the way Cassius always worked. While Zdar pursued a hugely successful career as a producer – for Phoenix, Franz Ferdinand and Hot Chip – Blanc-Francard tended to work quietly at home on music. “I always needed Philippe to say, ‘We have to do music now.’ I was making music at home every day, but he was the hurry man and I was the slow man.”

Whatever happens, the Paralympics were quite a way to make a comeback – “80,000 people in the Stade de France, 8 million watching on television” – but he says his appearance was really aimed at one viewer, who wasn’t there in person. “Really, I was saying, ‘OK, Philippe, look at this: we are back.’ I still feel we are two, you know? I don’t come back into this story alone, even though I am alone: there’s a brother there. I’ve read this a lot: when you lose someone really close, that person is still inside you. And the music is still here. It will always be here.”

Piotr Anderszewski is one of the leading pianists of our time, but it seems that these days that is not enough to guarantee a respectable audience; the Barbican was less than half full for his latest recital. Perhaps the prospect of a programme made up largely of miniatures kept some away, but if so they missed a rare treat, for even by Anderszewski’s meticulous standards it was an exceptional event.

The miniatures were shaped into a glowing sequence – bagatelles by Beethoven and Bartók framed late intermezzi by Brahms, and in every one of those pieces Anderszewski’s ability to crystallise a whole expressive world in microcosm was extraordinary. The first of Beethoven’s Bagatelles Op 126 seemed to be conjured out of silence before our ears, the hymn-like third in the same set made to melt away equally magically. The Brahms pieces were a selection of six from the sets of Op 116 to 119, played without noticeable breaks, their tone set by the first piece of Op 119, which Clara Schumann described as “grey, pearl-veiled and very precious”. Anderszewski treated each intermezzo as if it was a jewel, with not a note out of place, nor a chord not perfectly balanced.

The 14 Bartók Bagatelles were composed in 1908, and each in its varied way is a fiercely compressed experiment in modernism, with shards of folk music woven into the chromatic mix; they were presented as vivid snapshots, glistening and utterly clear. Music by JS Bach almost always features somewhere in an Anderszewski recital, and here it came at the very end, in the shape of the first of the keyboard partitas, the B flat, BWV825. His approach is a model of how to play these pieces on a modern concert grand, with no unnecessary frills or spurious rubato, every rhythm perfectly articulated. The Chopin mazurka that followed as an encore, Op 59 no 2, might have belonged to another world altogether, yet in its own way it was just as remarkable.

When poet of the pillowcase Leon Bridges was promoting his Gold-Diggers Sound album in 2021, he told the Guardian he wanted to become one of the few black artists making country music. “All I need is time,” he said. Well, time is always running away, and black country has since gone mainstream without Bridges’s input.

Black country star Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) was the American song of the summer. Still No 1 in the US singles charts after 12 weeks, it’s also topped Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart for the past four months. Shaboozey is the only black man allowed to head the country chart in its 80-year history – Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road was excluded for reasons too racist to list here – and only the second black artist, after Beyoncé took Texas Hold ‘Em top in February.

So, to the uninformed, Bridges’s detour down country roads on Leon could look like galloping after a runaway bandwagon. That would be untrue and unfair. Born in Atlanta, raised in Fort Worth, Bridges has this music in his marrow as much as soul or R&B. Over the years he’s earned some spurs, creating songs that could be called country to varying degree, in collaboration with fellow Texan icons like Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert, as well as Khruangbin on the lovely Texas Sun.

On Leon, Bridges has hardened his wings. It’s a majestic confection that borrows promiscuously from soul, country and folk but doesn’t owe any of them anything. He blends it all into what he calls his “gumbo”, a simmering mix of southern sounds, using music as a path to connect his past to his present, letting lost loves and home town nostalgia suffuse the stew.

So much great pop is about escape, or transformation. It promises that who you were yesterday – or who you were a few minutes ago, before you heard that song – can be completely different to the person you are tomorrow. Leon is an excellent collection that pictures a man approaching middle age, driving round his old ’hoods, reflecting on those feelings, after the escape. It’s a butterfly remembering how it felt to be a caterpillar.

Appropriately for songs composed around summer-maddened memories, there are inconsistencies. We get at least three “first love” songs, and they all appear to be different girls, one of whom he may not even have met. It doesn’t matter. In his vivid, fractured vignettes, Bridges nestles among the notes where other singers would hurtle through them, trying to finish their stories.

Curfews recur throughout, reminding us that summer is never as endless as its promise. Still, That’s What I Love (“Louisiana funk, second line jumping / Umbrellas in the air when there’s no rain falling”) positively wriggles with the pleasures of the season. Panther City proves it’s not all about soft life soundtracks, as Bridges audaciously hooks up country with new wave while singing about crackheads, sex workers and Nintendo 64.

Perhaps through maturity, or maybe because he’s recalling chaster days, Bridges is less horny than usual (although Ghetto Honeybee kindly offers “let me whisper freaky things on the phone”). As always with religious soul singers, it’s never quite clear how this side of Bridges is supposed to reconcile with the comparative pieties of songs like When a Man Cries and God Loves Everyone. And it’s a shame that his ruminations on the heartland don’t find more time to weigh the politics of our times, having sung so gracefully about George Floyd on 2020’s Sweeter.

But Leon isn’t a puzzle to be figured out. It is, more than most, just a suite of exquisitely expressed feelings, and the way Bridges sings makes everything feel unassailably real and true. It doesn’t have to add up. His songs are gorgeous, neither too obviously in debt to the past nor distractingly future-focused, all transported heavenwards by that beguiling, church-shivering voice.

Fourteen years ago Julianna Avdeeva became the first woman since Martha Argerich 45 years earlier to take first prize in the prestigious International Chopin Competition, which is held every five years in Warsaw. Since that success however Avdeeva has left a rather mixed impression, both in her infrequent recitals in the UK and on disc, though those recordings have included a fascinating coupling of the two Chopin concertos on which she plays an Erard instrument of Chopin’s time.

The piano that Avdeeva uses for this collection of Chopin’s late works, from the B minor Sonata Op 58 to the three nocturnes of Op 62, is an historic instrument too. It’s the Steinway CD-18 that was Vladimir Horowitz’s personal piano, now in the collection of Steinways at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, where the recording was made. As Avdeeva’s fleet, lean treatment of the first movement of the sonata immediately shows, it’s a piano with a light action, and a slightly shallow, metallic edge to its tone, which brings great clarity to her playing,

She is not an especially affectionate Chopin interpreter, and even in the nocturnes Opp 59 and 62, there’s a slightly steely objectivity about her playing; perhaps it’s significant that her selection does not include the late sets of mazurkas and waltzes. But in both the sonata and the magnificent Polonaise-Fantaisie Op 61 there’s a real sense of authority and purpose; Avdeeva may sometimes keep listeners a bit too much at arms’ length, but there’s never doubting her sincerity.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify

Robbie Williams fans have been given the first proper glimpse of one of history’s strangest biopics: a retelling of his rise to fame with the Stoke pop singer portrayed by a CGI monkey.

Better Man, due for release on Christmas Day before a wider release on 17 January, is directed by Michael Gracey, who helmed The Greatest Showman and turned it into a $435m-grossing, pop chart-topping hit.

His new film follows Williams – played by actor Jonno Davies via motion capture technology – as he goes from a fractious childhood to boy-band success with Take That and then solo superstardom: 11 of his 12 studio albums topped the UK charts, as did three greatest hits compilations, and he holds the record for the most Brit awards, with 13. Along the way the film reportedly doesn’t flinch from depicting his animal side, including drug problems and repellent star behaviour.

Better Man has played at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, with the Guardian’s Benjamin Lee giving it a positive review at the latter. “From afar, it sounded like an intensely annoying gimmick, perhaps fitting for an entertainer who can often be intensely annoying himself, but the film … is a surprising winner,” he wrote. “It’s not only Gracey’s electric style and the central gimmick that make Better Man feel like an upgrade, it’s the disarming honesty of Williams and how he’s allowed himself to be portrayed.”

With Williams speaking in voiceover, the trailer shows off Gracey’s knack for a song-and-dance number with shots of a vast sequence under Christmas lights in London’s Regent Street – as well as a breezy, very Williams-ish attitude to bad language.

Other reviews have also been positive, with Variety writing: “Against all odds, that gimmick works, distinguishing the project from so many other cookie-cutter pop-star hagiographies … if you want to see a chimp doing coke with Oasis, or getting a fateful hand job in front of manager Nigel Martin Smith [played by Damon Herriman], this is your movie.”

Concert programmes don’t come much more Nordic than this, the first in the Philharmonia’s series of Nordic Soundscapes. Nor would many pieces so aptly fit the subtitle, “music crafted from nature”, as Oceans, a 2018 piece by the Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir. Beginning with icy violins, then layering up notes and harmonies underneath, it conveys first the wide horizons at sea and then, when the deeper brass kicks in, the vastness of water underneath. It’s the kind of music that would go very well with some impressive nature photography – Sigfúsdóttir has orchestrated for Sigur Rós – and, indeed, later on it seems to zoom in or out like a camera shot, but it’s evocative enough to stand on its own.

Next, a Nordic warhorse: Grieg’s Piano Concerto, in which the pianist Stephen Hough made the solo instrument into an agent of disruption, always challenging the more measured, elegant lines of the orchestra, even pushing a little against the silky muted strings in the deceptively calm slow movement. For an encore, Hough gave us Christian Sinding’s piece Rustles of Spring, a Norwegian piano solo favourite of a century ago, its restlessly rippling accompaniment and hopeful melody fitting its title perfectly.

This series is, of course, the brainchild of the Philharmonia’s principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, and the big piece here was one that even Finns don’t often get to programme: Kullervo, Sibelius’s first symphony in all but name, based on a tale of incest and doom from the Finnish national epic. It was written when he had mastered the art of large-scale movement in music more convincingly than that of concision, yet its 75 minutes never dragged here. In the third movement, in which Sibelius introduces voices, we had the Ylioppilaskunnan Laulajat Male Voice Choir, all the way from Helsinki, declaiming the story syllabically like four dozen bards, while the soprano Johanna Rusanen and baritone Tommi Hakala wrung every bit of drama out of the roles of Kullervo and his sister. Perhaps the fourth movement could have been snappier – it felt overly jolly in context – but the fifth was a properly dramatic conclusion, setting the seal on an evening of epic music.

The story of one of Britain’s biggest bands of the past 30 years didn’t begin with rowdy rehearsal rooms or rock’n’roll lore. It started with five school friends in drafty village halls in rural Oxfordshire, paying £1.50 per band member to the keeper of the keys, moving rubber crash mats and plywood chairs to set up their equipment. In barely more than a decade, they were headlining arenas and festivals.

The sweet story of Radiohead’s rise is documented in How to Disappear, a new book by bassist Colin Greenwood, big brother of guitarist Jonny and lifelong friend of singer Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O’Brien and drummer Phil Selway. Ostensibly a photographic record of their working lives after 2003, when he started taking a camera with him into the studio and on stage, it also includes a beautifully written 10,000-word essay on the experiences they’ve shared.

“The perspective is uniquely my own,” Greenwood writes of his photographs. “I have spent nearly all my working life either on stage or tucked away in a recording studio, where I’ve tried to catch out my friends with my Yashica T4 Super camera, a black analogue plastic box that records light, like our vinyl does sound.” These times are also punctuated by long stretches for which the band members are apart, he adds, which he reflects on tenderly. “When we do reunite, it’s like plunging into the latest season of a long-running box set: everything essentially the same but all of us just that little bit older… coming back together at these moments is both addictive and reassuring – a communion through music.”

I meet Greenwood holed up in the book-lined snug of his publisher, just before he heads off on tour with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (as well as contributing to their new album, Wild God, he’s standing in for Bad Seed Martyn Casey, absent on grounds of ill health). A gentle, generous soul, Greenwood is touched when his writing and photography are praised, crediting two “old friends” for making it happen: editor Nicholas Pearson, who encouraged him to put pen to paper, and Charlotte Cotton, one of three saxophonists when the band were starting out in the mid-1980s (when they were called On a Friday), who became a photography curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

“She helped foster and mentor my interest in the early 1990s,” Greenwood explains, sitting in the corner of a sofa. His practice only began a decade later because “everything was so intense” for the band before then. As he struggled to work out how to frame these photographs in his words, he asked Nick Cave – an old hand at writing books – for advice. “And he said, where do these photos begin? You could write about what it felt like then, not to be at the top of your success, but not starting out either. What are you? Where are you going? So I began from there and everything else followed.”

Radiohead’s 1990s had been a whirlwind, as Greenwood goes on to capture powerfully. Signed to EMI after only a handful of gigs, their debut single, 1992’s Creep, was, in his words, a “sugar-rush success”, its video played constantly on MTV, the mixture of longing and rage in its lyrics and sound getting it lumped in, unfairly, with other grunge-era slacker anthems.

Their second album, The Bends, arrived in early 1995, a year that reached summer with Blur and Oasis battling for No 1 and Pulp headlining Glastonbury. Full of strangely beautiful songs about iron lungs, rubber men and fallen skies, it had little in common with the surrounding hubbub of Britpop and took time to take off. “I spoke to so many music writers who’d received The Bends as a promo, left it to gather dust on top of their PC tower, and hadn’t bothered to play it until word of mouth nudged them,” Greenwood writes.

Four singles with powerful videos saw them move up the charts: their last from The Bends, Street Spirit (Fade Out), got to No 5, with a video by Jonathan Glazer (later to direct Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest). Support slots with REM in the UK and Alanis Morissette in the US, and their music being used in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, also helped. “It meant that when we released OK Computer [in May 1997] nobody wanted to make the mistake of missing out on us again.”

OK Computer went five times platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US, allowing the band to buy and convert a Thameside barn and its outbuildings into a studio. This home-from-home features in this book’s earliest pictures and pops up in the years after that: we see a studio blackboard featuring potential track names from 2003’s Hail to the Thief, and a snap of artist Stanley Donwood, painting that album’s colourful cover in one of its cowsheds.

The tone is private, unpolished, unglamorous. Here is Thom scribbling lyrics, Ed shattered after a night on the tour bus, the whole band wandering on stony sand by the sea. There are plenty of pictures of Jonny, who has never minded his brother’s interventions: pushing a luggage trolley through a silent American airport, looking impish at a mixing desk, playing a viola in a bath to create an interesting sound. He has possibly the world’s most photogenic cheekbones.

This isn’t a tempestuous fraternal relationship, I say – Colin laughs when I mention the Gallaghers. “Well… we’re just very English and very self-contained, really.” Then he speaks with incredible tenderness. “I love working with Jonny, and I love being on stage with him, watching him play and riff furiously.”

Influenced by photographers such as Gaylord Oscar Herron and Tim Barber’s mid-2000s website Tiny Vices, featuring “snaps of small pleasures, photos of friends, road trips documented with 35mm cameras like mine – beautifully curated with an expert eye”, much of the book is charmingly quotidian, but hints of their hugeness trickle through. It’s hard to miss the faded grandeur of the 16th-century manor house on Jane Seymour’s Marlborough estate, their recording space for 2007’s In Rainbows, the many boxes of gig gear backstage, and a lovely shot of Thom singing Spectre – a song commissioned but ultimately rejected for the 2015 Bond theme – in a booth in Air Studios, looking out at an orchestra.

The book ends with shots from mega-gigs in the US, Canada and Ireland after their last album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. Greenwood takes pictures on stage when his bass isn’t required, and also writes about touring life, enjoying reggae, beer, books and chess with the backline crew, and tea and toast as he sits and stares at the “unending deserts and prairies… feeling gloriously cut adrift until shimmering skyscrapers appeared on the horizon, our next port of call”.

Radiohead last toured together in 2018. Thom and Jonny have made two albums as the Smile with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner; O’Brien and Selway have solo projects; Colin’s now busy with the Bad Seeds. Where does Radiohead exist now? “We did some rehearsals in, I can’t remember, June or May? Let’s say early June. We just ran through some stuff this summer specifically just to see how it felt and just to reconnect. It was really good.”

He also talks touchingly about Ed’s 2020 debut album, Earth, under the name EOB, and Phil’s “amazing” gig with Portishead’s Adrian Utley a few years ago at the Union Chapel. “Everyone’s been very supportive of one another’s projects,” he says. It’s all terribly grownup behaviour.

Colin’s photographs – delicate, warm, unobtrusive – also feel supportive of his friends, but I wonder what kept him taking photographs all these years. He thinks for a while, then a theory starts to bubble up. “Maybe taking pictures is a way of celebrating and commemorating these moments that are collective – moments that are shared with all these people on stage and all the people off stage, too.”

It’s also made him reflect on the blessings of being in a band all this time – it’ll be 40 years in 2025 – of getting the opportunity to play with them, and the joy of capturing them unawares when they’re about to perform or record. “Or when they’re getting ready or meditating or yawning or doing anything, really.” Greenwood smiles. “They’re still allowing me there when the last thing they want around is an idiot with a camera.”

Puccini was only 65 when he died 100 years ago this November – but his lifetime spanned a period of astonishing change. Born before unified Italy, in what was still the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the composer died the proud owner of fast cars and speedboats.

To mark the centenary of the composer’s death, English National Opera opens its season by dusting off Jonathan Miller’s 2009 production of La bohème (two semi-staged performances of Suor Angelica also mark the anniversary). The rotating cutaway set – artist’s garret upstairs on one side, bohemian drinking hole downstairs on the other – gives us 1930s Paris in numerous shades of grey. But the interwar drabness is enlivened by some exquisite lighting, overseen in this revival by Marc Rosette: the subtle glow of pendant lamps in the garret, the cold blush of dawn at the start of Act 3, the inviting glow of an interior glimpsed through windowpanes as snow falls outside.

Above all, this gai but gritty Paris is brought to life by the antics of its inhabitants. Here, the bohemian boys are a likable bunch. There was play-fighting with baguettes and boisterousness on tap, the physical chemistry persuasive even if the acoustic properties of the upstairs space meant that balancing their ensemble numbers was a challenge. Charles Rice’s generous baritone made for a sympathetic Marcello, while Dingle Yandell’s Colline was clear and luminous as he prepared to pawn his beloved overcoat.

Making his ENO debut as Rodolfo, British-American tenor Joshua Blue sounded distant in his Act 1 encounter with Mimì (that garret acoustic again). But he settled gradually into an easier, heartfelt flow, the top of his voice at times a thrillingly focused gleam, the emotional intensity of his Act 3 encounter with Mimì audible if not yet matched by his dramatic presence. As Mimì, Nadine Benjamin was limpid and affecting; at her best – and most heartbreaking to watch – in the second half. Here, her singing was closer to cries of pain, her soprano’s hard edge cutting deep as she and Rodolfo struggled together, before she found almost unbearable poise and restraint in the final act. South African soprano Vuvu Mpofu’s Musetta travelled a similar trajectory: irrepressibly vivacious as the centre of attention in Act 2 (an impressive ENO debut, this) only to dial her voice back to a mere whisper as the end neared.

In the pit, Italian conductor Clelia Cafiero made her first UK appearance, drawing out luxurious richness from the strings and some elegantly shaped woodwind solos. There were occasional moments when the brass sounded disconnected from Puccini’s sumptuous orchestral fabric, but Cafiero’s sense of pace – Puccini’s phrases sculpted to accommodate the subtlest flexibility of tempo – made for an extremely compelling performance.

20. In Here the World Begins (2009)

Originally a limited-edition sold on tour, and the band’s last release before singer Trish Keenan’s death in 2011, mini-album Mother Is the Milky Way was more about fragmentary sound collages than songs. But In Here the World Begins, which floats Keenan’s vocals over a murky, slowed-down tape loop, has a strange and compelling power.

19. Where Youth and Laughter Go (2000)

Broadcast never let their quality control slip when it came to B-sides, as evidenced by The Future Crayon, a compilation of non-album tracks that’s as good as their actual albums. Originally tucked away on the Extended Play EP, Where Youth and Laughter Go slips from frosty melancholy into an extended, weirdly funky drum coda.

18. Message from Home (1996)

Unless you’d been playing close attention to a developing underground scene in Moseley, Birmingham, Broadcast appeared to come out of nowhere, bringing music that bore no relation whatsoever to mid-90s alt-rock trends. Here, jazzy drums, peculiar samples, buzzing analogue synths and what sounds like a harpsichord conspire to create an atmosphere of chilly mystery.

17. The Be Colony (2009)

A collaboration with Ghost Box label co-founder Julian House, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age remains their most experimental album. It’s best listened to in one deeply disturbing sitting, but The Be Colony – which sounds like a folk song channelled from the afterlife – gives you a flavour of its unsettling power.

16. Unchanging Window/Chord Simple (2000)

Another fantastic non-album track that melds a toughened-up take on Unchanging Window, from The Noise Made By People, with instrumental B-side Chord Simple into seven minutes that sound as if they were recorded live. The music ebbs and flows but gradually increases in impact.

15. Michael A Grammar (2005)

The stripped-down, more straightforwardly electronic sound of the Tender Buttons album, in miniature: a ping-ponging 8-bit computer-game synth, drum machine, scratchy guitar and a disarmingly sweet melody that carries some pretty baffling lyrics: “Come on your father was a teddy boy … There’s nothing written on your fingernails.”

14. Lights Out (1997)

The adjective Broadcast seem to attract most often is “eerie”. It certainly fits Lights Out, which conjures a mood of vague ominousness so pervasive that even the most conversational lyrics – “My brother’s back from holiday, he’s been chasing girls in Spain” – seem fraught with grim portent.

13. Lunch Hour Pops (2003)

Lunch Hour Pops uses none of psychedelia’s obvious sonic signifiers but listening to it is a strangely disorientating experience. The nursery-rhyme simplicity of the melody and the feverish quality of the music perfectly mirror the turmoil in the lyrics: “I wait on the stairs for a break in my mind.”

12. Papercuts (2000)

Papercuts is like jazz-inflected 60s easy-listening pop through a distorting, psychedelic lens. Its tumbling drums and thickly layered vocal harmonies feel off-centre and creepy, the perfect setting for lyrics that deal with appearance and reality: “Your heart a place that no one sees / You can’t disguise your own unease.”

11. Come Back to Me (2024)

Posthumously released on the demo collection Distant Call, Come Back to Me was discovered by Cargill after Keenan’s death. With just a fingerpicked guitar and her voice sounding both doleful and direct, it’s genuinely entrancing.

10. We’ve Got Time (1996)

Broadcast’s debut single Accidentals was intriguing – it was based around a sample of an obscure Johnny Dankworth soundtrack and recorded on a home computer – but its B-side was even more striking. It’s a lovely ballad, lyrically impassioned but sung with a blank-eyed distance, beatless and backed with shivering electronics. Who were these people?

9. I Found the F (2005)

Reduced to a duo of Keenan and James Cargill, Broadcast pared back their sound on Tender Buttons. It’s still teeming with strange noises, but there’s more space around them – as on this wonderful melody that feels constantly on the verge of collapsing into silence.

8. Pendulum (2003)

A thrilling study in contrasts and contradictions, Pendulum is as musically aggressive as Broadcast got. The distorted synth riff sounds as if it’s spinning out of control and the guitar slashes and stabs, but the vocal is cool and aloof, the lyrics simultaneously sensual and sinister: “I’m in orbit, held by magnets, and the force feels so much closer than love.”

7. Follow the Light (2024)

Keenan’s tragic early death leaves a hint of “what if?” hanging over Broadcast’s story. It’s amplified by the tracks from Spell Blanket, a collection of demos for a new album they never made. With its muted synth tones and intimate, overlapping vocals, Follow the Light suggests it would have been amazing.

6. The Book Lovers (1996)

The title track from their second release, an EP on Stereolab’s Duophonic Super 45s label, was arguably the moment when Broadcast fully came into their own. The Book Lovers is enthralling, echo-drenched baroque pop, inspired by 60s electronic visionaries the United States of America.

5. Black Cat (2005)

Broadcast at their most hypnotic: a synthesiser that sounds as though it’s on the fritz plays a cyclical, octave-leaping riff; a vintage drum machine tick-tocks away; there are intermittent gusts of howling, echoing feedback. In the middle of it all, there’s Keenan’s voice, weirdly calm and detached: “Curiouser and curiouser” is about right.

4. Echo’s Answer (1999)

There’s not much to Echo’s Answer: a two-chord piano sample that’s increasingly drenched in effects, the occasional smear of strings and Keenan’s voice at its most intimate and vulnerable. But that’s all it needs to create an atmosphere that gets into your bones like cold weather.

3. Colour Me In (2003)

Cargill thought 2003’s Haha Sound album was the closest to the band’s initial vision. Certainly, its opening track is one of their most beautiful. The vocal melody feels wonderfully airy, cutting through the bursts of industrial clanking and discordant violin like a shaft of sunlight.

2. Tears in the Typing Pool (2005)

Judging by its streaming figures on Spotify, Tears in the Typing Pool is the rare Broadcast track that’s crossed over to a wider audience. It’s just Keenan’s voice, an acoustic guitar and some Mellotron-like electronics, but you can see why it’s so popular. It’s just a fantastic song – utterly gorgeous, desperately sad and hugely affecting.

1. Come On Let’s Go (2000)

Broadcast’s sound was a trawl through a dusty box of forgotten soundtrack albums, obscure electronics, psychedelic pop and acid folk that resulted in a style entirely their own. But you often hear more about their exquisite taste in influences than you do about what incredible songwriters they were. Come On Let’s Go is the perfect example. It’s awash with intriguing sounds, but the song they decorate is fabulous, the melancholy of the vocal melody at odds with the lyrics filled with empathy and support. It’s hauntingly strange, yet a total joy: so were Broadcast.

Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000-2006 is released 28 September on Warp Records