rock
graeme.thomson
Ian Hunter’s new album, When I’m President, is an almost obscenely vibrant piece of work for a man who – despite that impossibly golden mop of hair – is now 73 years old. But then Hunter has always been a rock'n'roll survivor. Born in Shropshire in 1939, he was a 30-something industry veteran by the time his band Mott The Hoople, four albums into a career that had failed to scale even the nursery slopes of fame and fortune, scored their breakthrough hit in 1972 with David Bowie’s glam anthem “All the Young Dudes”.After enjoying three years of superstardom with Mott, whose run of irrepressible Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Bloc Party's fourth album comes after a lengthy break during which various members did various things with varying degrees of success. Most notably vocalist Kele Okereke pursued a more synth-based, dance-flavoured direction with mixed results. There was no messy fallout so it is no surprise to see these nice, polite chaps back together again. What would be really nice, however, would be if they had taken a leaf out of Britrock contemporaries Maccabees' book and shown some red-blooded beefy maturity this time round.Four is a terrific, traffic-stopping album. But only if you are already a Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Those familiar with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant political feature Il Divo (2008), or perhaps the beautiful, cynical The Consequences of Love (2004) may find themselves struck (pleasantly) dumb by the direction of his latest. Inspired by Lynch’s The Straight Story, This Must Be the Place takes its name from the Talking Heads track (with David Byrne providing original songs and popping up for a cameo). This curio sees Sean Penn’s mischievous goth rocker turn Nazi hunter, taking up his dead father’s mantle of revenge.Penn plays retired rock star Cheyenne, the sartorial twin of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the E Street Band’s charismatic saxophone player, died of stroke-related complications this time last year, there were those among us who wondered if we’d ever see the band together again. His on-stage interplay with Bruce Springsteen seemed to have become even more central to the greatest rock'n'roll show on earth since the band reformed proper in 1999, even if the knees that supported that magnificent frame could no longer hold out the length of shows that regularly topped the three-hour mark. That this year’s Wrecking Ball tour proudly bore the E Street Read more ...
Andrew Perry
The suspicion that Jack White is a humourless plank-spanker, harboured by certain members of the media at least, has been thrown into deeper conjecture this past month, with the news that he’s entered into a war of words with the compilers of The Guinness Book Of Records.With his first band, The White Stripes, he’d secured an entry in the trusty annual’s 2009 edition for performing the shortest-ever concert – a one-note affair in Newfoundland, Canada in 2007, which may or may not have been a spontaneous gag for the benefit of a rockumentary being shot at the time. Since then, numerous rival Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back in Britain for the first time in 13 years, Tom Petty and his indestructible crew seemed delighted to be playing at the Albert Hall, and taken aback by the frenzied reception from the audience. They have a soft spot for Blighty, since this was where their debut album first started making waves in 1977 after being initially ignored in the States, but their long absence seemed to have had the effect of turning them into long-lost legends. Peter Bogdanovich's epic documentary about the band, Runnin' Down a Dream, has probably played its part too.Petty himself, now bearded and almost Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form Public Image Ltd. Taking on the task of tracing what happened next was a challenge. Nothing was neat. Loose ends, new strands and evolution of the existing meant it couldn’t be. If this programme succeeded, it was in portraying the turmoil that came in punk’s wake.Bringing order where there is chaos is always difficult. As an overview of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ever since their original collaboration on 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have made music that sounded as old as the hills. Primitive and funky, they reduce rock to its raw materials, without flash or frills or any chords more complicated than a G7. For this new project (their first together since Greendale in 2003), Young has assembled a batch of elderly folk songs and traditional ballads and processed their simple chord structures through the Crazy Horse blender.Folk music connoisseurs will recognise several of these, even if Young has given himself Read more ...
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As a teenager in the 1990s, there were two female-fronted bands that occupied my heart and my attention. Although I’d never have called Garbage my favourites, thanks to flame-haired Scottish frontwoman Shirley Manson it was fair to say that I felt more of a kinship towards them than many of their grungy contemporaries, so now Courtney Love’s blasphemous resurrection of the Hole name for Nobody’s Daughter in 2010 is a distant memory I’ll confess to having approached Not Your Kind Of People with far more enthusiasm than cynicism.“Blood For Poppies”, the first song to emerge from what amounts to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George Osborne dreams of. This culminated in the Night Train EP which not only contained guitars but managed the improbable feat of mixing in rap in a non-embarrassing way. Artistically, things were looking good. And when they announced with this year's follow up, the consensus was that their main problem would simply be the lingering issue of brand image.But Read more ...