rock
Barney Harsent
BBC4’s The Life of Rock with Brian Pern introduced us to the former frontman of Thotch and creator of world music. With a promotion to BBC2 for Brian Pern: A Life in Rock, it seems that Pern, the comic creation of The Fast Show’s Simon Day and Rhys Thomas, has switched from object to subject. This is both a blessing and a (slight) curse for the character’s reprisal – familiarity hasn’t bred contempt, but it has made it slightly harder for the conceit to work.There were clear nods to 1984 film This Is Spinal Tap in the success of the first series, and the best parts of this spoof-documentary Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
“I have quit smoking!” the rock star exclaims to rapturous applause, taking a luxurious drag on an e-cigarette. And the artificial smoke dissipates across the stage, revealing a 67-year-old Marianne Faithfull perched on an antique leather chair, shoulder raised and pouting as if caricaturing her own youth. It is a subtle and triumphant reference to her past of destructive drug abuse and yet tonight quite clearly shows that for Faithfull the stage (alongside nicotine replacement and a wooden walking stick) is now her crucial crutch for rehabilitation. Though she fills many a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1) – Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966–1985America’s music could be jazz, gospel, blues or rock ’n’ roll. Or all of them. Each has black roots. Then there’s the white-rooted country, which also informed rock ’n’ roll. Taking the simplistic line has its problems and doesn’t allow for blurred boundaries, nuance and the fact that history is never neat, but it is clear that all these musical forms generally and initially proliferated amongst communities that are not native to the American continent. What about the music of native North Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The future's uncertain and the end is always near, as Jim Morrison put it, and you wonder how long Oz's antique rockers can keep cranking it up. After 41 years, most of them vastly successful, they're now missing guitarist and riff-creator Malcolm Young (who's suffering from dementia), while it's not clear whether drummer Phil Rudd is still on board after a drugs bust and allegations that he was trying to get somebody killed.Despite all that, Rock or Bust, their 16th studio album, manages to deliver a few jolts of the old megaton swagger. Angus Young is still there on lead guitar, and judging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If there's one commonly-known fact about Jackson Browne, it's that (with a bit of help from Glenn Frey) he wrote "Take It Easy" for the Eagles. The first track off their first album, and their first hit single, it remained a trademark for the band despite all the changes they subsequently went through. The following year, 1973, Browne released his own recording of "Take It Easy" on his second album, For Everyman. While the Eagles' version was harmony-packed and radio-friendly, Jackson's version was more introspective and philosophical, as much of his work tends to be.It epitomised the way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The bittersweet career of The Kinks is portrayed to surprisingly potent effect in this fast, funny and sometimes poignant musical, now transferring to the West End from the Hampstead Theatre. No mere "jukebox musical" – though it's crammed with songs – it finds space for some kitchen-sink drama, a bit of psychotherapy and a few smart insights into the Sixties pop business.Ray Davies wrote all the music as well as the original story, from which playwright Joe Penhall has spun a pacey and eminently performable script. The stage-show format has to skate briskly over issues like dubious Read more ...
Tim Cumming
At the end of last year, The Fall released an EP, The Remainderer, one of their more refreshing studio tonics of recent years, a madly diverse range of songs and sonic attacks with Mark E. Smith’s vocals thick with phlegm and gleeful, gristly exuberance. Among the EP’s tracks was "Amorator", a spindly, crooked 3 and a half minutes of intense weirdness, which reappears in even wilder, woolier form here alongside a second studio track, "Auto (1914) Chip Replace", a fantastically bonkers, multilayered fixture of this year’s live sets, with the line-up expanded to accommodate a second drummer Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’ve ever found the idea of “cock rock” to be unnecessarily gendered, then the debut album from Ex Hex – an all-female trio who, between them, have created the best 35 minutes of ballsy rock 'n' roll I’ve heard since Sleater-Kinney’s “The Fox” – is for you. If you haven’t, and you’re just looking for something new to listen to that’s uncomplicated and up-front that will blow the cobwebs out from between your ears, then Ex Hex is also for you. And if you’ve been struggling to find a record that would match the giddy girl-rock high you got the first time you listened to Wild Flag’s first Read more ...
David Nice
Like Ibsen’s titanic character in search of a self, the Barbican’s theatre programme globetrots to find the richest and rarest. Yet it certainly doesn’t reach Peer Gynt's conclusion that home's best. In this case London’s finest and, for most of the year, only showcase for the most innovative of world theatre looked as if it might be hoist with its own international petard: I doubt I’ll ever see a production of Ibsen’s epic masterpiece as shatteringly great as Baltasur Kormakur's pared-down vision for the National Theatre of Iceland in the Pit back in 2007. In the event, while Irina Brook’s Read more ...
Russ Coffey
According to Johnny Marr people with gigantic egos are generally miserable. Jokes about Morrissey aside, it follows Marr must be a pretty contented guy. For what other guitarist with his reputation would have put vanity aside to spend 20-odd years as a gun for hire? Now, however, it seems the affable muso finally wants to be a solo artist. Last year he released the interesting, if patchy, The Messenger. Now he’s back with Playland. So what’s it like?In interview, Marr says it sounds just like “where he’s from”, and it’s true that some of the album feels like rain on gray Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite a 47-year history which has taken them from pomp to pop and established them as a top-selling global institution, there's still a lingering sense that Genesis don't think they've been taken seriously enough. This was detectable in Phil Collins's comment included here that "we're just popular and there's nothing wrong with that... I won't take the credit and I won't take the blame."This "it's not my fault, guv" approach seemed curiously defensive in the light of their colossal string of successful albums and hit singles. Genesis have been one of a bare handful of major bands who Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jackson Browne's output has slowed since the mid-Nineties, and this arrives six years after Time the Conqueror. The latter was much preoccupied with the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and Standing in the Breach – with a sleeve depicting a war-ravaged African village – is still stamped with Browne's social and political concerns. "Take the money out of politics and maybe we might see /This country turn back into something more like democracy," he rages in "Which Side", an extended tirade about greed and political corruption he first played at the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012. As Read more ...