rock
Guy Oddy
It’s panto time in the UK and what better way to get into the spirit than the Goth Christmas Roadshow that is The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim? Here are two bands who were part of the goth scene that sprang forth in the second half of the Eighties in black cowboy hats and blacker shades, with a mission to move things away from post-punk austerity and back towards Seventies excess.In the Eighties, Fields of the Nephilim (pictured below in their heyday) adopted a stage show that included industrial volumes of dry ice and the fierce strobe lights. The music was a loud dirge and Carl McCoy’ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s now twenty five years since the release of the Waterboys’ most popular album, Fisherman’s Blues. To mark this auspicious occasion, Mike Scott has persuaded EMI to release a six-CD expanded version, Fisherman’s Box, which has 120-odd tracks of the type of music that, let’s not forget, did not receive universal acclaim in 1988 but has significantly grown in stature since then. He’s also called in the guys who recorded these folk, gospel, country and bluegrass flavoured tunes and has hit the road for a proper celebration of their “raggle-taggle gypsy” years.The Birmingham leg of the tour Read more ...
Tim Cumming
And so Dylan’s tour of European theatres, opera houses and concert halls ended on Thursday night at the Royal Albert Hall, his first dates here in 46 years. I’ve seen him plenty of times over the past 30 years. This was the best of them. Dylan’s found a way to use his voice again, and his group is so nuanced to its needs, it’s a pure pleasure to hear. Charlie Sexton plays a warm and refined lead, not rock'n'roll at all, and there’s a quiet glow between all the players; it’s as if they’re facing the same way, looking at the same colours.Appropriately, "Things Have Changed" opens it up as the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a misconception that we have called ourselves the greatest band on earth.” Jack Black, the self-styled “lead singer” of Tenacious D, is all for dispelling a persistent rumour about a band which has, if he’s honest, done practically nothing to make him a famous name in Hollywood. “People have marketed us that way,” he explains. “You won’t find it anywhere in the albums. You won’t find it in any of our songs.”It’s true, you won’t. A semantic confusion may have initially arisen the first time the band ever performed in public, at a place called Al’s Bar in Los Angeles in 1994. The only Read more ...
mark.kidel
Dave Edmunds is one of a generation of rockers who came of age in the 1970s and excelled in channeling decades of American popular music: cue the pub rock bands, think Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello. There is a mixture of total knowingness and a nostalgic yearning for innocence that characterized the power pop of the period and a return to the three-minute single after the symphonic excesses of pomp and prog rock.Dave Edmunds channels The Beach Boys, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley and Otis Redding on this newly released album, most of which was originally available on his 1994 release Just Plugged. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.Gerrie’s interview style may have been a little more One Show than Parkinson but still he kept the singer/guitarist well at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is studio album number 10 for the seasoned Seattle-ites, and on a first listening you might feel inclined to flip it into the bin marked "solid but unexciting". Give it a bit of time to breathe though and it starts to reveal its strengths.Among these are the lead guitar playing of Mike McCready, something of an unsung hero in the annals of axemanship but a chap eminently capable of blowing the bloody doors off in a variety of styles. For instance in "Mind Your Manners", one of the disc's standouts, he unleashes a blistering riff-and-chord barrage in a bring-back-the-Dead-Kennedys style, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There has been conjecture that Motörhead’s latest album is titled in honour of frontman Lemmy Kilmister’s recent health problems, notably the insertion of an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator) in his chest after he suffered cardiac arrhythmia and other circulatory issues. However, one listen to Aftershock gives the finger to any notion that his band is slowing down. It may not be a match for 2010’s The World is Yours, a beast of an album whose fearless Götterdämmerung defiance was startling, but there’s enough solid Motörhead jolt to satisfy.Boasting the ramped-up amphetamine blues- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was much to be said for attending the third and final show of Crosby Stills & Nash's Albert Hall stint, because this was the night when they played their debut album in its entirety. Clearly much – almost everything, in fact – has changed since 1969, but though the musicians are four decades older, their original collective spirit survives remarkably intact.The addition of Neil Young turned CSN into a supergroup, but the original trio had a natural cohesiveness the four-piece version could never replicate, despite the fact that they were completely dissimilar characters with very Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This 3D film lets you see the whites of Metallica’s eyes. Filmed live last year, the band are already gurning and grinning sufficiently to project their exuberance at playing their songs of rage and pain to the biggest hall's back without video assistance (singer James Hetfield is pictured below). Nimrod Antal’s cameras anyway let you experience US metal’s biggest and most enduring band as if you’re on-stage with them. It functions like one of Elvis’s concert movies, letting Metallica get to you on-screen if you can’t get to them on tour. It also tacks on a post-apocalyptic tale outside the Read more ...