New music
robert.sandall
Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the failure of the major record labels to grasp the implications of the internet seems extraordinary. As Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper explains in this pacey account of corporate greed and myopia, they certainly had enough warning.At the heart of Knopper’s story is the record industry’s longterm tendency to view technological opportunities as threats. When the recession of 1979-1982 reversed a 20-year boom which had seen record sales steadily quadruple in value, opposition to the introduction of compact disc was rife. The tech guru at Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Folk singers travel well. And it’s often as ex-pats that they best appreciate their own culture. Martin Simpson, born in Scunthorpe, lived the life of a professional English folkie for 15 years before relocating to America. Although working the clubs as a bluesman he never lost his keen ear for his own roots music.But success in Simpson's adopted home eventually gave way to homesickness, and his homecoming album, Prodigal Son, was released in 2007. If folk singers travel well, folk audiences often look more at home, at home. Folk is, after all, about people. And when folk fans Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Last night I was thinking, as I often do, of Britney, Kylie, Beyoncé, and less of Shakira, mainly because her name doesn’t end in y or e. The reason that my thoughts turned to Britney et al (incidentally we are delighted to have britneyspearsfans @BritneySpears4u site following theartsdesk on Twitter) was a list published this Saturday in the Telegraph of the best 100 songs of the Noughties.As it’s the end of the decade, so cash-poor media types can fill up acres of space not only with year best-of lists, but decade best-of lists. The Noughty Girls will, quite rightly, be all over them.It may Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Bestival was the first festival to embrace fancy dress and, five years into its career, still does it best. This year the theme was "Out of Space" and with the weather delivering gorgeous Indian summer sunshine, a welcome contrast to Bestival 2008’s deluge of wind-blown sleet, a contagious carnival of intergalactic characters extended across the site. Most attendees regarded it as mandatory to make some effort for the big Saturday dress-up and a few, such as the gent who’d carved a cargo-loading exoskeleton, as worn by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, from polystyrene, had really gone beyond the Read more ...
howard.male
OK, let’s start with a bit of icon-bashing. In some circles, to say that a current Afrobeat band might actually be better than what the originator of the style, Fela Kuti, produced in the 1970s, would be as outrageous and absurd as proclaiming that the Ruttles were better than the Beatles. Fela Kuti is untouchable and beyond criticism, just as John Lennon and Bob Marley are. But Fela’s mythological status is fed by an incongruous mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.His insatiable appetite for women and marijuana would now make spectacular tabloid fodder. But his heroic one-man war Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What an absolute joy. Two and a half hours of Abba songs performed by a (mostly) stellar line-up with Kylie Minogue topping the bill, and the songwriting duo Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus appearing on stage to take the tumultuous applause of a 35,000 crowd gathered in Hyde Park in London. Only the surprise appearance of their erstwhile musical and marital partners Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog could have turned this memorable evening into a perfect one.Thank You for the Music, a BBC Radio 2 event (broadcast live, with a television recording to follow soon), was subtitled "A Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
"There have been some legendary rock'n'roll train rides over the years", as music journalist Nigel Williamson put it, "but there has surely never been a train ride like the one Manu Chao took across Colombia in 1993." The travellers included Manu's band Manu Negra (a hugely successful band throughout Europe and Latin America at the time) and assorted other musicians, clowns, circus artists and tattooists, not to mention ice-sculptures and, a fire-breathing dragon called Roberto.The train toured, without security, from Santa Marta on the coast to Bogotá, one of the most dangerous areas in the Read more ...
robert.sandall
Speech Debelle – and she for one is not surprised. In a feisty speech accepting her nomination for the £20,000 prize, given annually to the best British album of the year, the 25-year-old rapper from South London warned the other 11 acts on the shortlist ahead of last night’s judgment that she planned “to take this one home”. By 10.20 last night the panel of judges agreed that she should, making Debelle the third female solo artist to win the Mercury in this century, following PJ Harvey in 2001 and Ms Dynamite in 2002, for her debut album Speech Therapy.Jubilant in victory, Debelle singled Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Artists who are naturally awkward in their own skin can go in a number of directions. Many, including a good number of The Pastels' 1980s “C86” indie contemporaries, are content to simply be musically awkward, shambolic and ultimately rather pathetic and self-defeating. Others like, say, Talking Heads' David Byrne, charged with hyperactivity, take their awkwardness to the Nth degree and used it as a drive towards diverse creative explorations.Then there are those like The Pastels themselves – led by Stephen McRobbie, a man so uncomfortable-looking on stage he gives the impression that even Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What exactly is the point of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies? I don't ask this with any malice or hostility, just in a tone of inquiry. It is a question that I think his new Violin Concerto, Fiddler on the Shore, raises. That is, is Davies still here to shock and annoy, or to assuage? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Davies's baton presented the British premiere of the work last night, with Daniel Hope as the soloist, in the first of two proms that celebrated the composer's 75th birthday. Within its single-movement span were representations from the two opposing camps of Davies's life and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dot Allison was one of the true idols of my late teens. As the singer for Glaswegian E-comedown country-dub balladeers One Dove, her platinum bob and ruby lips, and ability to play otherworldly waif and sussed raver at the same time, made her seem impossibly glamorous – and even more importantly, the breathy purity of her voice as she sang “and where it is dark, there are ghosts / that give me hope” (in "White Love" – perhaps the greatest lost pop song of the 1990s) soothed me through endless adolescent traumas.One Dove managed just a single, glorious album in Morning Dove White, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. The Sunday Times even managed to exhume an unpublished interview with John Lennon, in which he sabotaged the myth of the great Lennon-McCartney feud by confessing that he thought Paul McCartney was jolly good Read more ...