WAS 2014 the year pop music grew up? From Sia to Taylor Swift and our very own 5 Seconds of Summer, pop artists demanded their genre back from the pre-fabbed posers.
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It was a year when you could enjoy a One Direction song without (too much) ridicule and see that in Ed Sheeran, gingers too could be cool and talented (not to mention get a gig singing alongside Victoria’s Secret models).
While narcissism worked for Miley Cyrus last year, this year Sia Furler took an entirely different approach to her marketing.
The Adelaide-raised singer-songwriter had a huge hit in March with Chandelier, accompanied by a stunning interpretive dance video featuring young Maddie Ziegler from the reality series Dance Moms.
The song’s massive worldwide success proved a blessing and a curse for Furler, who consistently shuns her fame.
She took to performing it with her back turned to the audience and told Graham Norton during a post-song, and yes, faceless, interview: “I don’t really want to be famous, or recognisable … It’s a hard life, and I have some famous friends, and I see how difficult their lives are because of it. I’m ambitious, and I wanna be successful, but I don’t wanna be famous.”
Furler went on to win four ARIA awards last month: Album of the Year, Best Pop
Album, Best Female Artist and Best Video. She promptly gave all four away to lucky Twitter followers the next day.
And with five Grammy nominations for early next year, who knows, Sia fans could find themselves with even more discarded silverware.
Playing in front of 50,000 screaming fans at Wembley Stadium might not be Sia’s cup of tea but it certainly was a reality for Sydney’s 5 Seconds of Summer.
Unfairly labelled a boy band, due to their affiliation with One Direction, the quartet walked the Wembley walk, which only a few Aussie bands have done. INXS, AC/DC, 5SOS.
In an age of record execs, and TV “mentors” piecing groups together like jigsaw puzzles, 5SOS was a breath of fresh air.
They write their songs, they play their instruments, they perform live and loud. Quite simply: they rock.
Their self-titled debut album debuted at No.1 on home soil and, impressively, at the top spot on the Billboard charts in the US.
This was thanks to hits like Don’t Stop, She Looks So Perfect, Good Girls and the ballad Amnesia, co-written by Joel and Benji Madden.
The Madden twins also took the time this year to re-introduce themselves as a duo, breaking away from their successful Good Charlotte guise.
Joel in particular continued his “honorary Aussie” role as a coach on The Voice and The Voice Kids (with Benji).
They released the anthemic retro-styled We Are Done in May, topping the charts and in New Zealand and here but the song was only a minor hit back home in the US.
Proving that big label backing can be overrated was Brisbane band Sheppard.
The act, made up of three siblings — George, Amy and Emma Sheppard (along with Michael Butler, Jason Bovino and Dean Gordon) —
delivered an intoxicating brand of indie-pop.
In truth, Sheppard were sing-along central.
From their first release Let Me Down Easy to Something’s Missing and the addictive Geronimo, it was hard to avoid tapping a toe to these guys in 2014.
The group finished the year with an ARIA for Best Group and a lucrative deal with sandwich maker Subway for the use of Geronimo in their summer marketing.
Chet Faker first came to our
attention with a genre-bending cover of Blackstreet’s 1996 R&B hit No Diggity in 2011 but rose to prominence over the past 12 months, thanks to the lo-fi stylings of his debut album Built On Glass.
The ginger-bearded wonder, born Nick Murphy, topped the charts in April with Built On Glass and also had some surprising US chart success with peaks positions of 2 and 6 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers Album and Dance/Electronic Albums, respectively.
He took home Best Independent Release, Best Male Artist, Producer of the Year and Best Cover Art at the recent ARIAs, commenting: “Oh, best male artist, OK. My high school counsellor said I shouldn’t pursue music as a career, so, yeah. Thanks.”
ARIA also took time to induct Molly Meldrum and Countdown into the Hall Of Fame. A frail Meldrum, still suffering the effects of a fall at his home in 2011, took to the stage in front of hordes of fans who would never have witnessed the ground-breaking TV that Countdown was for all of us Gen-Xers in the 1980s.
Typically self-deprecating and passionate, Meldrum took a moment all about himself to send heartfelt wishes to critically-injured cricketer Phillip Hughes, who would pass away the next day.
Overseas, U2 bolted their album onto everyone’s iPhones — and there wasn’t a darn thing you could do about it.
In a marketing mastermind, Bono and the boys delivered Songs of Innocence to more than 500 million Apple customers, coinciding with the launch of the iPhone 6.
The band was paid a rumoured $100 million for the privilege but some Apple users fumed at the force-feeding.
Taylor Swift didn’t give her album away for free; she made sure music-streaming service Spotify couldn’t get their grubby hands on it either.
But it didn’t matter for the one-time country-pop starlet, with 1989 bucking the downward music-sales trend.
Swift sold almost 1.3 million copies of 1989 in the US in its first week of release, making it the fastest selling album for 12 years.
Swift will hit our shores in 2015 and treat fans to hits like Shake It Off and Blank Space and has invited Aussie folk-pop hero Vance Joy along for the ride.
A pair of UK gents also troubled the bean counters in 2014 with Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran shipping truckloads of their respective albums, The Lonely Hour and X.
Smith crooned his way into our hearts with gentle tracks like Stay With Me and I’m Not The Only One and Sheeran, who will tour Australia next year, popped over to play the AFL Grand Final (and was presented with his own custom “Sheeran Sherrin”) and nabbed a late-year No.1 with the tender ballad Thinking Out Loud, X’s third smash after Sing and Don’t.
Katy Perry, Justice Crew, Guy Sebastian and X-Factor winner Marlisa also made waves while comebacks were celebrated from The Veronicas (after seven years!), Foo Fighters, Coldplay and, of course, AC/DC, who delivered the typically Acca-Dacca Rock Or Bust last month despite various band members’ health and legal problems.
We fell back in love with INXS, thanks to a band-backed two-part mini-series televised in February.
The flow-on was massive, causing a spike in sales for the band’s back catalogue.
The week after the airing of the series, The Very Best Of and Kick re-ascended to No.1 and No.2, respectively, on the album charts and hit single Never Tear Us Apart rocketed to No.11 in the singles.
And then there was Iggy Azalea.
She’s the pretty blonde from the northern NSW town of Mullumbimby, population 2482.
She’s also the hottest female rapper in the US right now, having just picked up the American Music Award for best Rap/Hip-Hop Album.
Azalea also has the Grammys to look forward to with four nominations including Record Of The Year for Fancy and Best Rap Album for The New Classic.
Sadly we bid farewell to several stars this year with the untimely deaths of pop singers Simone Battle (G.R.L), 25, who took her own life in September, and Aussie Michael Johns (American Idol) died in August at 35 due to complications of a blood clot in a sprained ankle.
Tommy Ramone, founding drummer for The Ramones, succumbed to bile duct cancer at 65 in July. He was the lone surviving original member of the seminal punk group.
Said Tommy in 1978: “It wasn’t just music in the Ramones: it was an idea. It was bringing back a whole feel that was missing in rock music — it was a whole push outwards to say something new and different. Originally it was just an artistic type of thing; finally I felt it was something that was good enough for everybody.”
