New music
Barney Harsent
In 1974, a saggy old cloth cat and his rag-tag bunch of friends managed, in just 13 episodes, to influence a generation. Ask pretty much anyone who watched Bagpuss what their first experience of traditional folk music was and the answer is unlikely to be Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The music of Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, multi-instrumentalists with links to Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the London Critics Group, earwormed its way into a nation’s consciousness via a cloth cat, a rag doll, a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker and colony of mice who were more Read more ...
peter.quinn
After failing to make the charts on its release 50 years ago this month, Astral Weeks has long since passed into pop mythology, its unique amalgam of jazz, folk and soul influences inspiring musicians, writers and filmmakers alike.Martin Scorsese said that he based the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver on the album, Rickie Lee Jones has called it “still daring, still innovative”, Bruce Springsteen, who chose “Madame George” when he was a guest on Desert Island Discs, stated that the album “made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine”, while in the 1979 anthology Stranded: Rock and Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The penultimate concert in the eclectic and impressive K-Music Festival of contemporary Korean music on Monday at the Purcell Room featured some of the most exquisite and affecting performances of the season, with the traditional Gayageum stringed instrument paired with an effects-laden, ambient-cum-exploratory jazz quartet featuring one of the most distinctive and arresting drummers anywhere, making remarkable music from her kit (shimmering cymbal solos, anyone?). K-Music tends towards surprising as well as enthralling its audiences, and that was certainly the case here.In 2016, solo Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Was anyone prepared for the fact that Ed Harcourt's new album would be fully instrumental? He's known as a songwriter – hailed for his Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Here Be Monsters in 2001, then swapping solo work for song-writing, working with Paloma Faith, Sophie Ellis Bextor, James Bay and Lana Del Ray, among others. So it comes as a surprise to hear Ed’s eighth studio album, Beyond The End, is a very personal journey of heartfelt, melodic piano pieces accompanied by his wife Gita Langley’s violin and Amy Langley’s cello.He offers the album up as an antidote to the noise and demand Read more ...
Chris Harvey
There was barely a black-clothed, white-faced Numanoid in sight in the packed auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall as Gary Numan made his first ever appearance at the Victorian concert hall. His fans appear to have left that kohl-eyed look behind them as they’ve aged over the four decades since he first broke into the charts with Tubeway Army, but their love for him seems undimmed.Black might have looked a little out of place anyway as the electronic pop pioneer and his band loped on stage looking like a cross between extras from Mad Max: Fury Road and refugees from the desert planet of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The choice of what to go and hear in the London Jazz Festival can be bewildering: this first weekend of its 10-day run presented over 120 events. I managed to attend eight, of them at least in part, including some of the show that has predictably soaked up most of the media attention: the first of Jeff Goldblum’s two concerts on Saturday at a packed Cadogan Hall.Goldblum’s credentials as an A-List celebrity, as an entertainer, as a stage presence, as a charmer, as a quick-witted comic improviser are in no doubt. He can turn literally anything into part of a highly entertaining show and have Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Many established artists, when out on tour, can get all a bit bashful about their new material. In fact, it’s not unusual for bands to hide a couple of new tunes in the middle of their live set with embarrassed mumbling about “you don’t really want to hear the new stuff anyway” before launching into a note-perfect rendition of a tune that was a hit several years previously. This is not the way of Florence + The Machine, whose High as Hope tour features a set that pulls almost half of its material from their recent, Mercury-nominated album.Without even a “hello”, Florence Welch and her eight- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Faithful Fairy Harmony is in the tradition of The Beatles’ White Album, Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star and The Clash’s London Calling, all double albums because an outpouring of songs couldn’t be stemmed. Also like these, Josephine Foster’s 18-track double-set plays with listener expectations. Though she doesn’t tackle musique concrète like The Beatles, soul like Rundgren or jazz like The Clash, Foster disrupts notions of how she is perceived: in her case as a country-folk stylist. The pedal-steel-driven country flow of “Force Divine” is subverted by twangy surf guitar and some string Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Cliff Richard has been the butt of many jokes down the years, but he’s always looked the other way, true to himself. But he couldn’t look the other way when BBC TV conspired to air live coverage of a police raid on his home. Vindicated in court (through all he wanted was an apology), Sir Cliff has now emerged from that dark period with his first album of new material in 14 years.It’s an appropriate way to mark the sixtieth anniversary of “Move It”, which established the bequiffed Richard as Britain’s Elvis. And how extraordinary is it to think that his own career has been three times as long Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s fair to assume that the current state of American politics has US underground punker Justin Pearson and hip-hop producer Luke Henshaw somewhat riled. Planet B’s debut album is a 35-minute rant in the form of a relentless anti-love letter to Donald J Trump. So, while it is a set that doesn’t rely on lazy sloganeering, its subject matter is bound to turn some listeners off straight away. For the rest of us, however, Planet B picks up the sonic torch from 90s politico-industrial hip-hoppers Consolidated and high-octane punks The Death Set and rocks and grooves while skewering President Tiny Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What adjectives best describe a performance of The Ballads of Child Migration? None of those you’d normally expect to see applied to an evening of superlative music-making, for the song cycle chronicles the deprivations suffered by child migrants sent from Britain over the course of one hundred years. Mostly they were sent to Australia, poor children in need of a loving home and an education who were used as slave farm labour. Some were also sent to New Zealand, others to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and a smaller number to Canada, where they fared somewhat better. More than 100,000 Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Wow, can it really be 10 years since Mumford & Sons blazed their trail across the musical world with Sigh No More? The release of Delta, the band’s fourth album, marks the start of a 60-date world tour, which will keep them on the road – first in the UK and Ireland – until mid-May.Recorded in London and produced by Paul Epworth (Adele, Coldplay, Florence and The Machine), it’s generously filled (around an hour of music) and immediately engaging, even if the material is preoccupied with “the four Ds: death, divorce, drugs and depression,” as keyboardist Ben Lovett told Rolling Stone. One Read more ...