– Frank McNally on a gloomy trend in half a century of pop music

Nicole Kidman: perhaps the gloominess of modern pop music has taken a toll on her too. Photograph: John Nacion/Getty Images

I’ll leave modern songs aside for now, now being an expert. But, right enough, when I tried to recall the big hits from my early-1970s childhood, it was mostly happy ones – like sunny days – that sprang to mind. Amazingly, Jacks rewrote the original to be more cheerful, although the result ranked at number five in a 2006 CNN poll to find “the worst pop songs ever recorded” .

And yet I’m also reminded of the career trajectory of Leonard Cohen, a master of gloom in the 1970s who seemed to become progressively happier as he aged, especially after a lucky break in which his manager stole his life savings in 2005, propelling him back in the road in his mid-70s for one of the greatest comebacks in music history.

Whatever about the phrase being pseudointellectual – the usual qualification for inclusion in that slot, I must admit it forced me to look up not just one word, but two, in the dictionary.

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