New music
bruce.dessau
Can a septuagenarian wear skinny trousers? It is not a question that I ask myself very often, but it was my first thought on seeing the frighteningly fit 73-year-old Ian Hunter stroll onstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night. Life in America clearly suits the Shropshire-born former frontman of Mott the Hoople, as he led a band young enough to be his children through a storming, age-defying 110-minute set.Ian Hunter has been around long enough to know what the fans want and he was happy to give them plenty of it, with a show that mixed tracks from his latest album, When I'm President, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The Gaslight Anthem’s star has been in the ascendant for some time now - arguably since the release of their 2008 breakthrough record, The ’59 Sound. But nowhere has that change been more dramatic than in the evolution of their live shows. The Gaslight Anthem that commanded the stage in Glasgow last night was an altogether more confident, self-assured beast than the band that played the same venue in the summer of 2010.There’s a certain weariness that sits on Brian Fallon as a songwriter nowOne thing that hadn’t changed since then, however, was the somewhat eclectic choice of support band. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Year after year Kate Rusby, one of the undisputed stars of the British folk revival, turns out quality albums and even better live performances. Ten years ago she celebrated a decade in the business with a collection of re-recordings and unreleased material. Ten years on, she has put together a double CD that features a number of star collaborators and less well-known but equally talented friends and contains new versions of her favourite songs.The magic Rusby touch is characterised by a sweet and soft-toned vocal style and a heart-warming melancholy. It’s not by accident that the family Read more ...
peter.quinn
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses.“Seven Minute Mind” mines the trio’s characteristic embracing of minimalism, with piano and bass pounding out an aggressive, slightly crazed, ostinato before pianist Ethan Iverson peels Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This year it’s been all about 50th anniversaries. If 1962 was a cultural foundation stone, it’s unlikely that 1987 will inspire quite so much in the way of plaques and bunting. It is, however, 25 years since Suzanne Vega released her definitive second album, the platinum-selling Solitude Standing, and last night at the Barbican she completed a short series of concerts – the others were in Boston and two in her native New York – to mark its birthday. This being Vega, it was a wry, modest, sideways type of celebration.The main business of the night was a complete performance of Solitude Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This film, promised Imagine's host Alan Yentob, would be "the nearest we'll get to the real Freddie Mercury, a shy man in search of love and a driven artist living behind the protection of his stage persona". Probably true, but the shyness and the protective persona, coupled with vigorous policing by the Queen organisation, meant that film-maker Rhys Thomas couldn't add a great deal to what's already known about Mercury.This looked very much like an addendum to last year's Queen - Days of our Lives, a two-part history of the band which was inevitably dominated by Mercury, yet which also Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The songs are instantly recognisable. Bacharach & David’s “Don’t Make Me Over” “There's Always Something There to Remind me”, “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” will always be evocative. So will Dionne Warwick’s voice, though it’s huskier these days. Now sits the old alongside a brace of new songs, two by Burt Bacharach and one with a lyric by Hal David, the last he wrote.Another of the 50th anniversaries washing up right now was the impetus for Now. In this case, it’s been a half-century since the release of Warwick’s first single, “Don’t Make Me Over”. It must have Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Royal Albert Hall is pretty big. It's a prestige venue, but everything is relative. For the overwhelmingly French audience, the first British headlining show by Johnny Hallyday was the equivalent of seeing Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard sharing a bill at the back room of the Dog & Duck.Hallyday is a stadium-packer in France and the French-registered cars and coaches parked around Kensington Gore testified that this was an international draw. He sang mostly in French, spoke in French and was, well, French, even though his music is very firmly a blues, soul and rock'n’roll Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Natasha “Bat for Lashes” Khan is a 32-year-old indie singer-songwriter who, mysteriously, often gets compared to Florence Welch. But unlike Welch’s sledgehammer Eighties-pop Khan makes subtle and rather magical albums with connoisseur appeal. Today she releases her third album in six years. Her previous Fur and Gold (2006) and Two Suns (2009) have also drawn comparisons with PJ Harvey, Björk and Siouxie Sioux, and that's still a stretch (if less so than Florence). Khan’s is music that eludes categories: in places it may be danceable but, for the most part, it's dreamy art-pop.I am Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Almost a month after the end of the iTunes Download festival its artier cousin, The Barclaycard Mercury Prize Albums of the Year Live gig series is going strong. A special concert on Wednesday 24 October will see performances from The Maccabees, Michael Kiwanuka and Alt-J. The event will take place at at LSO St Luke’s in London and will help raise money for War Child, which helps children affected by conflict around the world.Tickets for the event, other than those won through competitions, will become available from a special ballot open for 48 hours from 10am today, Monday 15 October. Entry Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Poetry has a habit of colliding with rock'n'roll. Mick Jagger read some Shelley when the Stones played in Hyde Park in 1969. John Cooper Clarke's speedball delivery lit up the late Seventies and helped to inspire comedy poet John Hegley and the ranting punk scene of the Eighties. Lest we forget there was also the cod-Byronic Murray Lachlan Young who, legend has it, signed to EMI for a million-pound advance in 1996, but if he did he hardly shifted the units to justify the cheque. Poetry and rock can clearly be cosy bedfellows, but unmitigated successes are rarer than rhymes for the word " Read more ...
howard.male
For several years now this Swiss trio have been combining their love of old Cajun and Zydeco tunes with an arthouse-meets-punk aesthetic strongly influenced by the Velvet Underground and The Clash. But it’s only with their new album Bye Bye Bayou (released this week) that they’ve landed upon a sound that fully celebrates both their love of scratchy, trashy old records and their need also to be adventurously 21st-century. But the album is a sonic balancing act that relies somewhat on production by the Blues Explosion’s Jon Spencer to make sure that, although envelopes are stretched, they are Read more ...