All we need is music, sweet music. There'll be music everywhere.

Picture: Apple

A recent Saturday afternoon visit to one of the last remaining proper record shops in Paris brought me to a startling and disturbing reality: I was surrounded by, well, me.

To a man (and I mean that literally: this was an exclusively XY environment) almost every other punter appeared to be displaying identical physical and social attributes: ill-advised ponytails, paunches (yeah, guilty), fading tour T-shirts, age-inappropriate board shorts (guilty again) and footwear (yup, as charged). This was a parade of the pallid and the varyingly socially inadequate, approaching, in or past their fifth decades, and in one or two cases, getting out only once a week for an intense trawl through the racks of CD and resurgent vinyl.

This is - and I suppose I should accept that I'm a member - a dying breed. Like gatherings of D-Day veterans, its number grows thinner with each year (unlike our midsections). Proud, resillient, stubborn old heads who treat music fairs like archaeological digs, Record Store Day like a religious festival, and dusty, dingy, Championship Vinyl-like emporia for their companionship and matching obsessiveness.

Contrasting with this diasporic scene, earlier this week Apple promised to change "forever" the way we experience music. And they pledged to do so by doing what Apple does best: cloning and apparently improving on other people's ideas.

Monday's opening keynote of the 2015 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference provided a degree of self-serving entertainment for Apple fanboys who enjoy lengthy presentations of "really great" (ad nauseum) and "cool" new features for Macs, iPhones and iPads. On a certain level, it was impressive - there isn't another company in any industry I can think of who can get millions of people to tune in to a webcast to hear about new tech that won't be available for some months yet. More importantly, it demonstrated the might that it can bring to bear on just how we consume our music.

As the finale to the keynote, CEO Tim Cook and his dad-dancing lieutenants (many of whom are in the same age group as the record shop brethren) presented Apple's big new music play, Apple Music, breaking with the Jobs the tradition of  'i'-prefixed things, and also bringing to an end the name iTunes which has been part and parcel of Apple's journey in sound and vision.

In its place came breakthroughs such as...er...24-hour radio, music streaming and an "ecosystem" allowing musicians to communicate directly with their fans. All of which we've seen and heard before (including, in the case of the latter, from Apple themselves - iTunes Ping failed to really take off).

Being Apple, however, it will all be fabulous. This was underlined by the scale of resources it brought to bear to say so - a slickly-produced promo film, endorsements from Trent Reznor, Jimmy Iovine and Drake, and the hiring of former BBC Radio 1 'name' DJ, Zane Lowe. But as last September's similar smoke-and-mirrors production for the new iPhone demonstrated (and surreptitiously snuck a new U2 album into our iTunes accounts), Apple can overstretch the normally unquestioning loyalty of its fanbase. Apple Music may be the tipping point. After all, iTunes couldn't get any worse.

It is true that Apple has enjoyed a long relationship with the music industry. Until 2001, that relationship had manifested itself discreetly as Macs in recording studios (and they're still the computer of choice for musicians in the studio and on tour - hardly a tour goes by where you won't see that illuminated Apple logo shining out from keyboards and mixing desks). But the launch of iTunes on January 9, 2001 changed the relationship altogether between Apple, the music industry and us consumers.

1998's iMac 'Appleized' the concept of a digital home hub and iTunes provided those iMac owners with an easy to use means of organising all those ripped CDs and less then legal downloads; the iPod, launched the following October, formally launched Apple into the world of consumer electronics, eventually leading to the iPhone and subsequently the company becoming the most valuable enterprise in human history.

But in doing so, the constant retooling of iTunes has made it something Apple consumers put up with, rather than love, even though owning Apple hardware is, partly, an emotional communion, a joyous embrace of stunning industrial design and intuitive simplicity. This is no sycophancy: iMacs and iPhones just work. iTunes, increasingly less so.

Picture Apple

In trying to make it work across and serve different hardware platforms and devices, while adding in the nightmare of digital rights management, iTunes has become, to quote one reporter this week, "a bloated mess". Once, you plugged in your iPod and dragged-and-dropped music onto it. Now, you don't know where to find your music, or how to transfer it, or even how to order it (see Mashable's The 6 Worst Things About iTunes).

In a way, iTunes' evolution from problem-solving simplicity to bloated mess is indicative of Apple's efforts to manage the entertainment industry without actually being in it. The iTunes Store turned music management software for computers into a serious threat to the way the music, film and television industries sell and distribute their wares. Apple - without being a player in content (Steve Jobs got out of that when he sold Pixar to Disney) became agent provocateur, embracing the music and film business while at the same time challenging and even provoking it.

The trouble is that, with music in particular, Apple is simply trying too hard. It's one thing for Jimmy Iovine to call the current state of music "a fragmented mess", and for Trent Reznor to say the world needs "a place where music can be treated less like digital bits and more like the art it is, with a sense of respect and discovery", but it wasn't always this way.

In simpler times, you went to a record shop and bought your music on vinyl, cassette, CD or whatever format was in vogue at the time. You created and curated your collection, enjoying it as much for the tactility of ownership as the self-gratitude of building up a library to reflect and project you.

I agree that squeezing all of that onto cloud servers and hard drives has brought immeasurable convenience, not to mention reducing domestic harmony-threatening "bloke clutter". But that still, to me, feels like closing down a library to make way for a park.

But let's park middle-aged obsession with physical media for now and focus on whether Apple will make any meaningful contribution to the music experience with their new approach, or whether they are just repackaging existing technology - again - and tying it with a bright, shiny bow.

Monday's renaming of all Apple music products under the banner Apple Music, which also launched the long-awaited streaming service to rival Spotify (and finally make use of its acquisition of Dr Dre's Beats Music), plus the radio station and Connect, met with a mixed response.

Internet radio has been in existence for well over 15 years, and premium streaming services have become well established. Spotify now has 20 million people paying $9.99 to access its 30 million-plus library of music, even if very little of that money ends up in the pockets of the artists supplying the music.

After a three-month free trial, Apple Music will come at the same price as Spotify, with much the same size of library, and much the same level of accessibility across different devices and platforms. $9.99 does represent decent value - indeed, a CD a month. Where one might find reason to gripe is that the 9.99 price point applies in all markets - even if that means Britons end up paying $5 more at current exchange rates, and Europeans an extra dollar. But Apple Music's connectivity with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube is a nice, if not exactly essential fan feature, but one notional improvement over Spotify.

Spotify, on the other hand, offers its advertising-supported 'free' service, which is currently the preference of some 55 million subscribers. For casual users, that is more preferable to getting locked in to Apple Music after its 'try before you buy' three-month trial. There are also concerns that Apple Music will offer inferior sound quality to Spotify, and that in customary Apple fashion, it will be the default music system on all iOS devices, opening the door to more U2 stunts. But to this Luddite, the biggest concern is that Apple driving its market weight behind its own streaming service will cannibalise sales of physical-media albums even further.

Time will tell whether Apple's apparent schmoozing of the record industry over the last 15 years will pay off by attracting artists to its Music world who had previously rejected Spotify or given Tidal a swerve. The extent and breadth of artist agreements Apple can win over its competition will stand it in greater stead with the coin-paying public, which means its claim of offering "the largest and most diverse collection of music on the planet" had better stand up.

I know I'm tilting at windmills over records, films and even books becoming digitised and compressed into slim digital devices, and I know the difference between listening, watching or reading digitally versus the old 'analogue' way is marginal. But what price progress?

Back at the record shop, vinyl is doing well. The old heads are buying it again, hipsters - with their fashion victim sense of irony - are buying them probably for the first time, along with their Klondike miner beards and Penny Farthings.

Vinyl is clearly making a welcome comeback. Thanks, in part, to the annual Record Store Day events, and canny positioning by retailers like HMV in the UK, and its counterparts in other countries, the format is booming. Vinyl sales increased by more than 200% in 2014, and is expected to grow by sales of 2 million units in 2015, with numbers growing amongst 18-to-35 year olds, the so-called sweet spot of consumerism.

Picture: AFP

In the small Czech Republic village of Lodenice, an equally small local company, GZ Media, is cleaning up having held on to old vinyl-pressing machines. Now, it is pressing millions of vinyl records for the global market. "We pressed around 14 million records last year, the most in the world," sales and marketing director Michal Nemec told the AFP news agency. "Despite the CD boom in the 1980s and 90s, someone with foresight decided to save the old vinyl record presses and store them in a warehouse. A good decision."

Vinyl still represents a fraction of music sales - just 2% - but it's worth noting that few bands these days release new albums without including vinyl in their plans. And it is truly heartwarming to hear how this is holding up. Because even if old heads like me only represent 2%, or whatever percentage of the music-buying public still choosing packaged tunes over streamed bits, it means there are still places in the world where the browsing, choosing, handling and buying of records on a Saturday afternoon as much a part of the reward as getting them home and listening to them.

So much more than a monster: Sir Christopher Lee - 1922-2015

Getty Images

There are actors, and then there are actors that make you stand back and simply admire. But not for their Shakespearean delivery, or their interpretation of the Stanislavski Method. No, these are actors who, through luck, design, a bit of both, and some other elements besides, inhabit their characters and brand them their own.

Sir Christopher Lee was one such actor. He was, of course, best known for his turns as fiendish monsters - Hammer's Dracula, Saruman in the Lord Of The Rings, Count Dooku of the Star Wars universe, Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, and Francisco Scaramanga in The Man With The Golden Gun. And while these will never place him in the same regard as Britain's more celebrated thespian knights, or indeed the greats of American cinema, Lee was one of the grandest character actors to have ever graced celluloid. And much of that has to do with Lee, himself and his background.

To contextualise the career of an actor who made more than 200 films in his lifetime by just these roles alone should not be sneered at. True, like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum or even Michael Caine, you could say he played the same character - himself - over and over again. But it wouldn't be a slur to say so, because in all of the lordly villains Lee portrayed, he applied his own rich heritage to incredible effect. That and his deep, sonorous voice and imposing 6ft 4in height.

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born into semi-aristocracy on May 27 May, 1922, the son of a British army officer and an Italian noblewoman, Contessa Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano. Echoing the childhood of James Bond - the creation of his step-cousin Ian Fleming - Lee grew up in Switzerland with his mother following the collapse of his parents' marriage.

During the Second World War he served in military intelligence - like Fleming - reportedly carrying out special operations behind enemy lines. After the war, Lee became an actor, using connections on the Italian side of his family to land a movie contract with Rank. After several years of bit parts, Lee signed to the studio with which he would make his name - Hammer Films, appearing first opposite his friend Peter Cushing in The Curse of Frankenstein, and then in 1958 making his debut in his seminal role: Count Dracula.

All would agree that Hammer put the ham in horror, but as camp as Lee's nine appearances as the Transylvanian bloodsucker were, he set the mould for every characterisation and caricature thereafter, from Sesame Street's Count right through to Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

If Live and Let Die, with the appointment of Roger Moore and his eyebrows as Sean Connery's replacement, reinvented the James Bond franchise as a hipper, camper, flared trousers-and-wide-lapelled version affair, its follow-up, The Man With The Golden Gun provided Christopher Lee with an opportunity to shed the cape and fangs of his most famous character (despite having been rejected for the role of Dr. No in the very first Bond film 12 years before).

The literary Scaramanga was typical of Fleming's characters with a richly detailed back story: Catalonian circus child, trick-shot artist, hitman for the Naples mafia and, latterly, Fidel Castro. Lee, with his upbringing and war background, added enigma of his own to the screen version - the world's highest-paid assassin, with KGB kills to his name, and a reputation for dispatching his victims with custom-made golden bullets.

Living on his own Tracy Island somewhere in the South China Sea, and served by the diminutive Nick-Nack, Lee brought a brutish and under-stated charm to the role, playing Scaramanga as urbane and lacking the more freakish traits of Bond villains thus far (though three nipples was a character trait never again repeated until Friends' Chandler Bing came along). Even his duel with Bond in the house of mirrors carried a ring of gentlemanly arts, and none of the pyrotechnics for which the 007 films had become renown.

By the late 70s, Lee moved to Los Angeles in the hope of shedding his villainous reputation. Character parts in episodes of Charlie's Angels, sci-fi and fantasy series, however, hardly removed him from the shadow of typecasting. Even playing Prince Philip in the dreadful 1982 TV movie Charles & Diana: A Royal Love Story didn't improve things. Still, he remained solidly in work, averaging four or five films a year throughout the 80s and 90s.

Prince meets Knight

In 2001, Peter Jackson cast Lee in his 176th film role - Saruman, the malignant wizard doing the dark lord Sauron's bidding in The Lord Of The Rings. Despite having hankered to play Gandalf for years, Lee played Saruman to malevolent perfection throughout the first two LOTR films (controversially being left out of the third) and then returned in Jackson's first instalment of The Hobbit.

In the same year as his first appearance as Saruman, Lee played another duplicitous patrician. Count Dooku in George Lucas's second and third Star Wars chapters, Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith. Though "Count Dooku" wasn't meant to be a joke reference to Count Dracula (there was, let's face it, little amusement at all in the first three Star Wars prequels) there was a serendipitous nature to playing such similar super villains in the same year.

Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars didn't so much revive Christopher Lee's career - it didn't need reviving - as reminded cinema audiences what a towering presence he could still give to a film. And, remarkably, continued to do so, right up until his death on Sunday at the age of 93 (his final film, the comedy-drama Angels In Notting Hill is due for release later this year).

Long after many of his acting peers had either retired or dropped off this mortal coil altogether, Lee developed an unlikely second career as a recording artist. Not only that, a heavy metal act. Having once supplemented acting jobs after the war by putting his distinctive baritone to good use as a singer (he even sang on the soundtrack to The Wicker Man), at the age of 88 - insanely - Lee recorded the concept album Charlemagne: By the Sword And The Cross, which even received a 'Spirit of Metal' in Metal Hammer's 2010 Golden Gods awards.

This was no ironic, eccentric one-off. Three years later he followed it up with Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, and even recorded heavy metal Christmas EPs for 2012 and 2013! "He’s amazing. He’s incredible. He’s got this incredible charisma," complemented Rob Halford, the lead singer of Judas Priest, whose  guitarist Richie Faulkner actually recorded music for Lee's albums, saying "He’s a very metal guy, he embodies the whole spirit of metal." Last year, at the age of 92, he released another EP, this time of covers of standards set to heavy metal.

And that is why we must take our hats off to Sir Christopher Lee. He may have been best known for portraying malevolence, but there was something truly amazing about him, his Boy's Own heritage and his incredible work ethic, right up until the end. Aristocratic, secret agent, film star supreme, quintessential baddie, heavy metal icon.  You couldn't make it up. RIP.

Wizards of Oz: The Church - Further/Deeper

The very first fleet of British convicts sent to Australia to populate the first penal colonies took around 250 days to sail there. Today, a modern cruise liner will take just 25 days, though the overwhelming majority of Europeans travelling Down Under will fly there in just under 24 hours.

I mention this largely irrelevant travel-related trivia for no other reason than to point out that it has taken a whole seven months for Further/Deeper, the 21st album proper from The Church, one of Oceania's most loved, but most inconsistently recognised bands, to reach European shores.

At least, though, in the months since its October 17 release in Australia, appetites have been well and truly whetted by the positive reviews garnered by the album in its homeland and in the United States (where it was released as "recently" as February).

If you are not familiar with The Church, you probably weren't alive or paying much attention to music in the late 1980s. Because if you had been, you would have been drawn like moths to the proverbial flame by the band's shimmering indie rock - a combination of ethereal guitars, singer/bassist Steve Kilbey's sonorous baritone and a stream of wonderfully melifluous music.

Formed in Australia in the early 80s, The Church emerged during a purple patch for Southern Cross bands - think the Divinyls, Icehouse, The Anyones, Split Enz/Crowded House, INXS and Midnight Oil - each showing bold individualism while still managing to draw influence from the post-punk and post-rock movements. The Church shared much with other purveyors of New Wave janglynes: Kilbey's vocals were frequently compared with Ian McCulloch and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis, while the heavily delayed and chorused guitars of Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper fitted the period's production values with perfection.

© Simon Poulter 2015
An Arista Records original freebie

But it was, arguably, The Church's fifth album - 1988's Starfish - that built their following globally, largely thanks to the singles Under The Milky Way (which found it's way into a 1989 episode of Miami Vice and eventually onto the Donnie Darko soundtrack) and Reptile, both still firm crowd-pleasers live.

Starfish was my lasting introduction, thanks to a generous Arista Records press office who included it in a bundle of review albums that also featured an awful gospel LP by Aretha Franklin (sorry, HRH QoS) and the debut of Taylor Dane. Yes, me neither. Perhaps, then, it was the intention of Arista's PR people to package Starfish with some genuine dross. It certainly stood out.

28 years on, incredibly, and The Church have been through plenty. The 60-year-old, Welwyn Garden City-born Kilbey, in particular. He has, he told the Sydney Morning Herald last October, been through an "...insular, confused, sulky stage, which preceded my arrogant and blasé stage, which gave way to my junkie phase [a ten-year heroin addiction], which in turn begat my eccentric uncle phase – the one I'm currently in."

That appears to manifest itself as an enthusiasm for Mother Nature's more interesting herbs (the effects of which were in plentiful evidence last week at The Church's gig in Paris, witnessed by WWDBD?). But despite that, or in spite of that, Kilbey's creativity has not dimmed.

He is, after all, a musician who can claim to have penned and registered over 750 songs. Nor has the band suffered the long term effects of personnel ups and downs, the most recent of which being Willson-Piper moving on, to Stockholm apparently, to be replaced by Ian Haug, a onetime teenage Church fan, now promoted to lead guitarist.

© Simon Poulter 2015

Framed by their latest line-up, Further/Deeper delivers, quite simply, unlimited magic. Kilbey's voice may have lost some rigidity, but in doing so, it has taken on a more haunting, Syd Barrett/See Emily Play quality, also being mixed further back and blended into layers of guitar from Haug and Peter Koppes.

For that, a hats-off must go to the collective band production effort. It feels like a band collaborating, no one person trying to outshine the other, and the overall effect being that every member acts like a musical instrument in their own right. And, yet, it sounds so reassuringly familiar, like an album by The Church should.

Many often confuse this with a absence of invention and hoary old jokes about Status Quo's lack of chords. But sometimes you want a band to sound like it should always sound. The Church is such a band. And, in that, Further/Deeper is unmistakably a Church album, and all the better for it.

Though it may sound comfortingly familiar, this album is far from predictable. It opens with Vanishing Man, a track as quizzical as its title suggests. It carries an immediate sense of foreboding,  borne of guitars that grind and glisten in equal measure, and confirmed by Kilbey's demonic introductory line: "Sinister bastard, your casket groans from sins". The second track, Delirious demonstrates this further, bringing together chord changes reminiscent of Radiohead's Street Spirit (Fade Out) with a chorus that comes somewhere between manic and choppy-pop at its best.

Perhaps the thing fans of The Church - including this one - like so much is a non-conformism that doesn't resort to contrarianism. Take Pride Before A Fall, an intransigently slower piece that somehow reminded me of John Lennon's #9 Dream for its ethereality. Released as a single, and competing with all the Auto-Tune crap clogging up radio stations, I can't imagine it fared that well, but, frankly, that's not what you will buy and listen to Church music for.

No, you listen for the dark vaudeville of Toy Head ("When you take off your head/But the darkness prevails/And they loosen the screws/But that remedy fails), the sunshine-infused Laurel Canyon and the pristine combination of melody and melodic guitar on Old Coast Road.

Indeed, there is a great deal of expanse, space and top-down, open road freedom on Further/Deeper, coming from improvised band wigouts, but also through lyrical references to exploration and something few Aussies can avoid in their culture, the sea.

That manifests itself most strongly on the album's undisputed highlight, Miami, which is the final track of the regular release. Running at almost eight and a half minutes, it is epic and cinematic, descriptions that, perhaps, Kilbey & Co might baulk at, but should acknowledge and take pride in.

Closing tracks (even if followed by a slew of extras...) should be like this - distinct and journeyed. When I first started listening to albums, when they were originally 12 inches in diameter and made of black, two-sided vinyl, I always believed that an album's last song would be a curtain-lowering finale. By its end, you should have reached emotional elevation and closure, and the certain knowledge that it would be your lot until they went into the studio again. Or maybe didn't.

Here I think of The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again on Who's Next, or Telegraph Road, which opened Dire Straits' Love Over Gold - and should have ended it. All of which is a long-winded way of charging hats aloft for Miami, which traverses regret and reform, references Humphrey Bogart, Janet Leigh and the long-defunct airline BOAC, and through its breadth and depth, does for a city (one I've only recently come to enjoy) what Michael Mann does with his celluloid cityscapes (watch Manhunter, Heat, Collateral and both the TV and film versions of Miami Vice. Look how Mann shoots Miami and LA). It's something only he can. Thus The Church's Miami sounds like something only they can. A story told through their signature weave of voice, guitar and vibe.

I've never been to Australia. It's on the list, of course (though any country boasting the world's ten deadliest of anything does lose some points for appeal). But there's something about the country's uninhabited enormity that appeals to me. I've stood in and on the edge of the great American deserts knowing that, once you've traversed their arid expanse, you'll eventually come across another outcrop of high-rise skyscrapers and fast food chains.

Australia - and, in fact, Australians themselves - has always represented an unbroken horizon, an extreme of distance, a vastness, an expanse, a wilderness that excites, inspires and strikes fear all at the same time. And that's The Church right there.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need

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Going her own way: Florence & The Machine's How Big How Blue How Beautiful

One of the undoubted cultural events of 2014 was the surprise re-emergence of Kate Bush for a record-breaking residence at the Hammersmith Odeon, or whatever it is called this week.

The music press, of course, loved the comeback. Those of a certain age (i.e. me) were happy that such a progressive musician had outlived the short-term eruption of punk and was still prepared to do things on her terms, while generating sufficient artistic interest from a new and, notably, younger audience.

No article, however, could advance too many paragraphs without mentioning Florence Welch, she of Florence + The Machine. In the acres of newsprint devoted to the reclusive Bush (oh, how I wish that phrase could be applied to American politics...), it was almost impossible to avoid references to the 28-year-old.

Then again, such has been the dearth of truly interesting female British musical talent over the last thirty years - and not for want of there actually being plenty out there - that such mentions were as predictable as Bush herself being nominated for BRIT awards over successive years without much in the way of albums to show for it.

The comparisons, though, have never borne much validity: there is certainly theatricality about Welch, and, yes, from certain angles she shares a small degree of the apparent eccentricity Bush has woven into the fabric of her career. But it hardly warrants the label 'art rock', that lazy descriptive throwback to the era when journalists simply didn't know how to pigeonhole Bowie and Bolan, Roxy Music, the Floyd, David Byrne, Peter Gabriel and other flagrant contrarians.

On the evidence of Welch's alarmingly comma-free third album How Big How Blue How Beautiful, released this week, there is even less to justify art rock as a tag.

Like its compelling predecessors - 2009's Lungs and 2011's Ceremonials - it possesses plenty of big, ballsy, bombast, thanks to Welch's strident vocals and multi-tracked choruses awash with reverb so cavernous it has hardcore potholing expeditions crawling through it.

But strip away the studio production and focus on the songwriting and you arrive at the revelation that Welch isn't so much channelling Kate Bush as Stevie Nicks and the equally resurgent Fleetwood Mac. Like the Mac, whose strongest second era songs were inspired by the bed-hopping that went on amongst the band itself (and the fallout that resulted), Welch addresses - or at least hints at - some of her own romantic travails. Nowhere is this more than the exceedingly 80s-vintage Nicks/Mac What Kind Of Man ("You do such damage, how do you manage?/To have me crawling back for more").

While How Big How Blue How Beautiful does draw plentifully on the West Coast vibe (the storming opening track Ship To Wreck marries a Go Your Own Way pace to a Johnny Marr jangle, throwing in references to great white sharks and killer whales), the scope is much broader than yet another artist doffing the proverbial to cheesecloth, chambray, denim and the Laurel Canyon scene.

That said, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, the title track (mercifully with punctuation properly installed) is an energetic tribute to Los Angeles, that city much maligned by those who live there, and yet, when you're not tailgating on the Hollywood Freeway, offers so many emphatic vistas. Inspired by a show at the Hollywood Bowl, Welch intertwines imagery of lovers indulging the LA skyline ("Between a crucifix and the Hollywood sign") with an orchestral underscoring that builds to an enormous brass and woodwind crescendo.

Queen of Peace, which follows, reverses the emotional polarity, telling the story of a royal couple dealing with tragedy via a sweeping expanse of torch drama, aided by a killer bass line running right through it. Various Storms & Saints is a further reflection on a failed relationship, building to a subdued chorus of apparent hope - "You'll find a rooftop to sing from/Or find a hallway to dance/You don't need no edge to cling from/Your heart is there, it's in your hands" accompanied by an absolutely gorgeous shimmering guitar. There's a similar vibe to Long & Lost, on which Welch reigns in the vocal volume and applies an Elizabeth Fraser-like vocal over a muted, bluesy guitar and an ambient backdrop.

If Lungs didn't generate attention for Welch six years ago, the breakout single - a simply stunning cover of Candi Staton's You've Got The Love - did. On this new album, Delilah - thankfully not a retread of the swingalong Tom Jones number - goes in the same direction, with a Tamla rhythm giving it an arena-sized bounce.

Caught took a number of listens, and not because of its Adele-meets-Sam Smith-meets-Tammy Wynette cuteness, but because it appeared to have an annoying buzz throughout. Repeated, forensic examination later revealed it to be some sort of keyboard effect, rather than a crap download or, worse, defective listening equipment (i.e. ears), but had the effect of rendering the track the weakest on the record.

By the time you've reached Mother, the final track of the 'regular' release of How Big How Blue How Beautiful (a deluxe edition offers bonus tracks), you suddenly realise how much variety you've actually heard. Producer Markus Dravs has coaxed out of Welch a bigger spectrum than Lungs or Ceremonials. The irony of this is that Mother, the most distinctly different track on the album, was produced by Paul Epworth (McCartney, U2, Adele, Coldplay, myriad other A-listers), and takes Welch into uproarious psych-rock territory, of the "soaring guitars™" kind.

It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it works perfectly for me, conforming to my notion of what a last track should be: an epic, bombastic signature statement that provides satisfying closure. OK, I recognise how much of an old vinyl head's perspective that is, but go with me on this.

Picture: Facebook/Florence + The Machine