rock
Peter Culshaw
A series celebrating musicians' birthdays. 30 December 1910: Enough of all the seasonal jollity. With any luck, yours was more real than forced. The other side of New Years is, for many of us, a certain existential panic. What happened to the last year? How did we do? How the hell did it go so fast? And, more scarily, though hopefully invigoratingly, how many more do we have left? Paul Bowles, best known as author of The Sheltering Sky, wasn’t a musician exactly, but was a musicologist (the peerless collections of the Moroccan music he recorded are in the Smithsonian). In 45 seconds, he Read more ...
graeme.thomson
From the moment the roadies began assembling Dave Grohl’s drum-kit in a manner that resembled the construction of the Queen Mary on Clydeside, it was clear that power was going to be the watchword of last night’s Edinburgh appearance by Them Crooked Vultures, the supergroup that’s threatening to give the term a good name.Foo Fighter Grohl, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme have just released a surprisingly decent debut album, but at times they sound constrained on record. Rooted in lengthy jams that unleash great spiralling Read more ...
joe.muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...
theartsdesk
This round-up of the freshest new music and most well-ripened classics we could find in November features everything from Miles Davis to Kraftwerk, Norah Jones to the actual Pope, via Toms Petty and Waits, Dubstep and related bass-driven electronica from Portugal, Angola, Denmark and Tanzania, and the soundtrack to Life On Earth. Our reviewers this month are Robert Sandall, Peter Culshaw, Adam Sweeting, Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Howard Male and Marcus O'Dair.
CD of the Month
Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live (Anti)
by Robert Sandall
When I saw Tom Waits at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Garrow's Law: Tales from the Old Bailey, writer Tony Marchant has turned to the real-life archives of the Old Bailey to find cases to illustrate the pioneering legal work of William Garrow. In the late 18th century, courtroom trials bore more resemblance to bear-baiting or witch-finding than to anything connected with justice or due process. Defendants couldn't speak in their own defence, and the notion of having counsel who could demolish dodgy witnesses or interrupt the prosecution's outrageous slanders hadn't yet caught on.Thus the stage was set for the redoubtable Garrow, who was so Read more ...
joe.muggs
The first signs were good. I've been to a lot of shows by “heritage bands” in my time, but I don't think I've ever seen a crowd for a band of Fleetwood Mac's vintage that had such a relatively even age distribution. Sure, it was weighted towards the greying end of the scale, but every age group down to teens – including teens there in groups under their own steam, not just with parents – was well represented, right across class boundaries too.But then Fleetwood Mac have always been a lot of things to a lot of people. From the bluesy sixties underground Peter Green era, through the spectacular Read more ...
robert.sandall
Performing your classic album as a full concert item has become a significant part of rock’s heritage culture in recent years, and the tide of potential classics is rising all the time. Last night, it was the turn of Spiritualized to re-visit their 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.One of the most critically feted releases of the Britpop era - the NME voted it Album of the Year in 1997 ahead of two competing blockbusters, OK Computer by Radiohead and The Verve’s Urban Hymns – this ambitiously styled record always carried the aura of an event, and 12 years later its Read more ...
howard.male
If Bowie, Bolan, and Roxy Music were the shimmering glam triumvirate of early 1970s British pop, then what were Mott the Hoople? Surely they don’t belong with the likes of the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and… er… Gary Glitter. In fact with their R&B and rock 'n' roll roots they’ve more in common with some of the decade’s more credible rockers such as the Faces or even the New York Dolls. It was in their ragged swagger and the stylised arrogance that vocalist Ian Hunter projected while implicitly inviting every teenager in the land to join his gang rather than that bacofoil-clad impostor’s gang.But Read more ...
robert.sandall
Reputations, it seems, can grow in ways that elude even their owners. When the original five members of Mott The Hoople finally decided to re-form, 35 years after they drifted apart, they booked two shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in October and crossed their fingers. According to their 70-year-old vocalist Ian Hunter, “we realised if we were ever going to do it, it was now or never, but we still thought we’d be lucky to fill the second night.”The response astonished them – and me. Two sold-out nights at the Apollo rapidly turned into five, with talk of an American tour to follow. A list of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dinosaur Jr never change. Formed in 1984, the trio added a heavy dose of rock classicism to the then-current sound of US hardcore, inadvertently inventing grunge in the process. Since then, members have come and gone around lead singer/guitarist J Mascis – eventually returning in 2005 to their original lineup featuring Lou Barlow (also leader of Sebadoh and Folk Implosion) on bass and “Murph” on drums – and the Mascis has calmly watched scenes come and go.Hardcore, grunge, nu-metal and emo all rose and fell, but Dinosaur Jr just kept on keeping on with their formula of Mascis's plaintively- Read more ...
robert.sandall
This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school in Brooklyn, the Stones’ death-and-glory years were over. The big career-defining moments - Brian Jones’s drowning, Altamont, the Exile On Main Street album and the orgiastic American tour which followed it – had all happened and been written up.To German’s teenage peers the Stones were yesterday’s news, eclipsed by Pink Floyd, and Saturday Night Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and despite its sometimes erratic quality control, the loss of The South Bank Show (ITV1) is going to be like having a leg sawn off TV's arts coverage.The final season got off to a thunderous start last week with Tony Palmer’s film about the Wagner family. Wives, children and grandchildren elbowed each other aside in their eagerness to accuse each other of barbaric behaviour or rabid anti-Semitism. When Richard Wagner composed Parsifal, apparently he was creating nothing less than the complete blueprint for the Third Reich. Who knew? Read more ...