Features
Peter Culshaw
As someone detached from pop music (more a world, classical, jazz kind of guy) I conducted an unscientific experiment during the past few months to try and discover what the really big tunes out there were. Travelling in Paris, Mumbai, Morocco and elsewhere, I found songs that have gone global in a massive way. I kept hearing them everywhere – in clubs, by the hotel pool, in bars and taxis, blaring out of shops. The process was made easier by Shazam, the app which allows you to identify a piece of music by pointing your phone at the source (better, admittedly, for Daft Punk than for Read more ...
fisun.guner
Leonard Cohen sang, somewhat indiscreetly, about Janis Joplin “giving head” on his unmade bed, Bob Dylan penned a song to his hero Woody Guthrie, and Don McLean famously sang “the day the music died” about Buddy Holly. The list of pop tributes to pop icons – whether the subject is a distant hero, a dead lover or a good friend – is long. If one were to compile a list of all the songs written about Elvis that list alone would exceed the number below (as it is, I’ve pushed the boat out by including 4 Elvis-inspired songs among the 14, including one penned by Clive James during his folk music Read more ...
Adrian Dannatt
The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has been sometimes dubbed the "Glyndebourne of America" due to the charming garden picnics enjoyed by patrons during the sizzling Missouri summer season. But that title also suggests the company's daring international programming. Since 1976 Opera Theatre has hosted 22 world premieres and 23 American premieres, almost certainly the highest percentage of new work of any American company. The bold strategy reaches its apotheosis with the global debut of Champion, a specially commissioned new work from jazz maestro Terence Blanchard.Champion is the first of a Read more ...
Hadley Fraser
The Machine by Matt Charman is about the famous chess match between the then world champion Garry Kasparov and the chess computer, Deep Blue, which took place in New York City in 1997. The match captured the imagination of the general public at the time as perhaps no other chess match has before or since. Kasparov's face was hanging in Times Square and the New York Stock Exchange had the match on its screens.Our play uses this iconic moment to look at the stories of the main protagonists of the match, Kasparov and Deep Blue's inventor Feng-Hsiung Hsu. Both, it would be fair to say, are Read more ...
fisun.guner
I’m watching someone with a mic pacing the linking bridge on the second floor of the Arndale Shopping Centre. He’s repeating the same phrase over and over again, which he’ll do for the next 20 or so minutes. “We’re souls refreshed,” I think it is. Nearby, sitting cross-legged, Lotus fashion, is a girl who, like the man with the mic, is wearing white cotton gloves. In front of her are three stones, painted white, on a white handkerchief, and two hymnals. These props play a small part in the action, such as it is.Watching him, pacing, intoning imperfectly, catching his breath and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s just before midnight on Friday. A few hundred couples circle the floor of a school gym. On stage, violinists play a rhythmic music which cycles repetitively. Coloured with sad, minor notes, it sounds like a stately ancestor to bluegrass. Hands joined, the couples raise their arms above their heads. The woman spins. Breaking the link, the man suddenly bobs downwards, hops up and spreads his arms apart in a come-hither gesture. His partner’s raised hands say no. Linking arms at the waist, they resume the circuit.But he doesn't give up. He’ll try again and again to entice her. This is the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone somewhere is plotting the movie. Currently the story of the man who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency looks like it could still play out as farce, but it may yet turn to tragedy.Whistleblowers are bad news for governments and major corporations but, as this week’s Listed demonstrates, gold-dust for storytellers. The narrative arc is more or less the same: hero or heroine of lowly status takes on big bad villain and gets to be heard, at some personal cost. Works every time. It Read more ...
Christopher Monks
“Without music, life would be a mistake”: Nietzsche. Sadly for many – indeed tragically, Nietzsche would say – music education in the UK has become so inconsistent that now, music barely features in some children’s lives at all. For years, county music services have been tied in to long contracts with services and teachers, some of whom have consistently delivered outstanding musical education, while others are tired and disconnected from the needs of the pupils they are teaching. It is detrimental enough not to have a musical education, but potentially even more damaging to a child to Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Fly into Morocco on Royal Air Maroc, and as in-flight entertainment on the overhead screens you’re treated to Charlie Chaplin shorts from the 1910s, still sharp as a tack, the little guy goosing authority, the law, the rich, the powerful. The Little Tramp must remain a figure with resonance in Morocco: the base of operations for legendary band Nass El Ghiwane was the back room of a tailor’s shop in Casablanca dominated by a poster of Chaplin.Their songs were about the same "little guys" that Chaplin’s comedy immortalises, the struggle of poor Moroccans and the search for poetry in a new urban Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“The boy looked at Johnny – he was surrounded by white and blue tiles, in the medina.” Patti Smith was improvising on her classic album Horses in her first, compelling, gig in Morocco. Smith has a history of Moroccan connections: she knew the Tangier-based writer Paul Bowles and plugged into that pre-punk Beat generation, but there were some raised eyebrows as to what exactly she was doing at a “sacred” music festival. “Birdsong is sacred,” she said when challenged on this, surrounded by the twitter of birds at the open courtyard of the Riad Sheherazade where she gave her press conference the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“It’s a good way of letting of steam,” said Reda Allali, the lead signer from Morocco’s leading rock band Hoba Hoba Spirit, referring to the the Timitar Festival. “It’s a step in the right direction anyway – although there are many steps ahead.” The Timitar Festival in Agadir, which finished last night, is at the root a celebration of Berber culture, a culture that has been historically undervalued in these parts, even though the majority of Moroccans are Berbers and are the indigenous population, the origins of their music and artistic expression going back millennia. There have been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's four years almost to the day since The Duckworth Lewis Method released their first album, a whimsical batch of songs about the myths and mysteries of cricket. It earned them a kind of nichey notoriety among cricket fans and was an eccentric treat for devotees of the duo behind the project, The Divine Comedy's mastermind Neil Hannon and Thomas Walsh of Dublin-based pop band Pugwash.Their debut was released to coincide with 2009's Ashes series against the Australians. This summer the Australians are back, and so are The Duckworth Lewis Method - named, as you will doubtless already know, Read more ...