New music
mark.kidel
Capturing a "shape-shifter" – as the Irish musician Liam Clancy described Bob Dylan – is not a simple task. The object of the hunt is by definition elusive. Sean Wilentz’s multi-dimensional series of essays on Bob Dylan chases its prey with a deftness and broad-ranging sweep that mirrors Zimmy’s mercurial nature without losing overall coherence. Dylanology is a discipline that has produced brilliant commentators, not least Greil Marcus, Michael Gray and Christopher Ricks, and historian Wilentz is a worthy addition to this learned and sometimes brilliantly inspired cohort. In a book Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In the 1960s Des McAnuff played guitar and wrote songs to meet girls. Subsequently life became a little more complicated for the multi-talented writer/ director. His long-standing commitment to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at the other Stratford - in Ontario, Canada - has won him many plaudits and he is now director emeritus of the La Jolla Playhouse in California where so many important projects have germinated, including his Tony Award-winning production of The Who's Tommy and the forthcoming musical adaptation of Doctor Zhivago with a score by Lucy Simon.
Zhivago opens in Sydney, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Following the recent UK premiere of his Symphony No 4 ("Los Angeles") at the Proms, Arvo Pärt's 75th birthday celebrations continue with a two-day conference on 24-25 September hosted at London's Southbank Centre. Presented in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music, with the composer in residence, academics from the UK, USA and Canada will give a total of 13 papers on various aspects of Pärt's music over the two days.Long-standing Pärt collaborators The Hilliard Ensemble are set to enliven proceedings with a daytime performance on the Friday (before giving the world premiere Read more ...
david.cheal
Some years ago I saw Muse playing at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Towards the end of the show, at a climactic moment (I think it might have been during their proggy epic, “New Born”), singer and guitarist Matt Bellamy reached into a bag attached to his microphone stand, pulled out a handful of shiny golden confetti and flung it into the air. It fluttered downwards most attractively. It was a terrific show, with some truly powerful music, but as far as visuals were concerned, the confetti moment was about as good as it got.Compare and contrast that little affair with last night, the first Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at the Bargehouse in the Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank for just three days ending on Sunday. It’s also a tribute to the genial genius behind the troupe, Pierre Bidon, who died earlier this year, at the age of 56.The exhibition features all sorts of memorabilia (and press cuts, including some by me from the not-very-lamented Blitz magazine - I went Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next to tell us about her recent reading habits is singer and songwriter Martha Wainwright, who since the arrival of son Arcangelo last November has been juggling music with motherhood. Born in Montreal in 1976, Wainwright is part of one of North America's greatest musical dynasties: her father is folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and her mother is the late Kate McGarrigle, who died early in 2010 having performed and recorded with her sister Anna as a revered duo for almost half a century.Her brother, Rufus, is an acclaimed singer and composer, and her half-sister Lucy Wainwright-Roche has Read more ...
howard.male
The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that such a curiosity would get people talking and therefore watching - and she was right: it’s had over a quarter of a million hits so far.Or perhaps she just thought it was time to augment her cold robotic persona Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A drop of menstrual blood spatters the ground in the opening shot of The Runaways, an insolent enough metaphor for the unstaunchable female energy that drives writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s bracing biopic of the pioneering all-girl teenage 1970s rock band until it heads up a narrative cul-de-sac. The blood is leaked by future lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), experiencing her first period while scampering to a club with her less innocent twin sister Marie (Riley Keough), who’ll soon be left in the slipstream of Cherie’s fame to become a drudge. The evening later finds them Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Arts Desk has been in two minds about Mercury Award winners The xx, who picked up the £20,000 cheque last night. Joe Muggs loved them, Bruce Dessau was sceptical. Singer and bass player Oliver Sim told the audience at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London that they weren't expecting to win."Wow," he said. "Thank you so much. We've had the most incredible year and it has just felt like every day we've just woken up to something incredible we just weren't expecting." Everyone else rather did expect them to win, including the bookies, although grizzled ex-mod Paul Weller made a late run. Watch Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Shea Seger is a woman with a story. A story of a career interrupted. At the age of 20, the fragile and slightly dangerous-looking blonde from Texas came over here and made a record which sent ripples across the pond of the Americana scene. Shortly after, her father became crippled after a botched operation on an old Vietnam injury and she returned to Texas to care for him. During those 10 years she also brought up a little girl, Luna, and lived in a trailer. Now she’s back in the UK; and she’s pumped all the frustration, disappointments and anger from that decade into a new record, simply Read more ...
howard.male
Last night was the third and probably last time this 21-year-old Nashville songstress will grace the humble Windmill pub in Brixton with her charismatic yet down-to-earth presence. Not because the gig wasn’t a sell-out and an unqualified success, but because of the radio airplay and unanimous critical praise she has received for her debut album Own Side Now from everyone from the Daily Mail to the Independent. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if by this time next year she’s performing at the Union Chapel or even the Barbican.I’ve never seen a Windmill crowd so attentive to an act before. Read more ...
iris.brooks
The group Pingasan’k “calls for good spirits”. The name refers to “a bucket to put rice in, tied with the bark of a tree”. Regardless of rice or spirits, this band touched my heart. The gentle, haunting sounds come from the bamboo tube zithers (pratuon’k) made from giant mountain bamboo, which is only cut down when they see the moon. “We do not want our instrument to smell sweet or our insects will bite it,” explains leader Arthur Kanying.But the hypnotic groove of the music does sound sweet (Pingasan’k pictured right). Who would expect that these gentle sonic waves include pieces for Read more ...