Easy come, easy go? Think again ...
easy listening is set to stay. Leo
Sayer in February 2006. Photograph: PA
There's never been a better time to be a 50-something pop star. Veteran musicians are having a grand old time of it at the moment, with Leo Sayer, Barry Manilow and Rod Stewart making significant comebacks. And they're soon to be joined by Neil Diamond, whose new album - produced by hip-hop emir Rick Rubin - is getting rave reviews. The upshot is that Mor, aka "middle of the road", is becoming a familiar sound again. But if you think it's a micro-fad that will end as soon as Leo and Baz drop out of the chart, prepare for a shock.
Mor - think Tony Bennett not Lady Sov - is set to be one of the spring's major directions. Here's the unexpected selling point: the perpetrators aren't the likes of Bennett (mind you, he's also got a new album on the way) but young acts who deliberately want to sound like him. The watchword for bands such as the Feeling, Orson, Kubb and the Storys is "mainstream". Their tunes are tuneful, their soft rock emphasizes the "soft" and they sound as if they've been excavated from a 70s Radio 2 playlist.
Bizarrely, one of their main advocates is Xfm, the indie station that would rather surrender its licence than play music that grandparents might enjoy. It has put the Feeling's debut single, Sewn (released February 27), on heavy rotation, and is also diligently hammering Orson's No Tomorrow (March 6) into listeners' brains. So, affirmation that easy listening is officially acceptable. And if it takes off in the charts, watch out for its rebranding as "E-Zee", which will alienate old people and rope in the under-25s, just what the genre needs if it's to be properly regenerated.
This championing of a sound that was last fashionable when Fleetwood Mac were at their cocaine-addled height does make a kind of sense. The concept of the "guilty pleasure" has been much talked about since DJ Sean Rowley released an album of that title and induced people to admit to the pop skeletons in their closets. Leo and Baz probably figure prominently on such lists, but Orson and the Feeling just take the idea a step further, turning the guilty pleasure on its head by making it - gulp - fashionable. Surely it can't work? But it just might.
