New Music Features
Hot August Night: The Beatles at Shea StadiumSaturday, 15 August 2015![]()
Half a century ago today, on a warm August Sunday night in New York, The Beatles played a 30-minute concert in a baseball field. Home to the New York Mets the venue was called the William A Shea Municipal Stadium and had opened in spring 1964. Read more...
|
theartsdesk at Wilderness Festival 2015Thursday, 13 August 2015![]()
You wake up with the multimedia traces of a Björk gig dancing across your eyes and the flavours of soft-shell crab and pomegranate playing across your tongue. The cluster of high-end dining establishments is denser than in Mayfair, yet the scenery in which they’re set - rolling parkland scattered with bunting-strewn marquees - looks more like the stage of a medieval battle re-enactment than the scene of the gourmand or connoisseur. Read more... |
Cilla Black, 1943-2015Monday, 03 August 2015![]()
The term "beloved entertainer" might have been coined with Cilla Black in mind. Her career trajectory, from a working-class Irish Catholic background in Liverpool's Scotland Road through pop stardom under the auspices of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and thence to mainstream TV and nearly 20 years as hostess of LWT's Blind Date and Surprise Surprise, was a classic fable of determined self-betterment. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Tuscany: Musical landscapesSunday, 02 August 2015![]()
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Førdefestivalen: Music and the midnight sunSunday, 12 July 2015![]()
The first thing that strikes you at 3am is the light, that strange disembodied glow of Norway’s midsummer midnight sun casting its rays over a landscape soaked in fantasy proportions – sheer glacial drops of greenstone, sweet-water fjords cutting deep into the land, the forests of spruce and pine desending from steep mountainous peaks to the meadow grasses of the valley below. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Love Supreme: Van Morrison & Dianne ReevesWednesday, 08 July 2015![]()
Love Supreme, now in its third year, feels like the best of both worlds. Set in the spectacularly rolling scenery of Glynde Place, outside Lewes, it’s only a champagne cork’s flight from Glyndebourne opera house, and if you’re not camping you can share the train home with the penguin-suited picnickers. Yet the format and layout are every bit greenfield rock festival, albeit – how posh is this – with flushing toilets. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Orkney: St Magnus FestivalSunday, 28 June 2015![]()
Ebb of Winter felt about right. It’s one of Peter Maxwell Davies’s most recent works, a yearning for the brightness and warmth of spring at the end of an Orcadian winter, written in 2013 for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 40th anniversary. Read more... |
Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), Jazz LiberatorSaturday, 13 June 2015![]()
Like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, who died this week, was both a defining and divisive figure in jazz history. Read more... |
Arise, Sir Van, Sir Lenny and Sir Kevin. Dame who?Saturday, 13 June 2015![]()
If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page. Read more... |
Jazz FM Awards 2015Friday, 12 June 2015![]()
Hosted by self-confessed jazz nut John Thomson, a.k.a. The Fast Show's “Jazz Club” presenter Louis Balfour, the winners of this year's Jazz FM Awards were announced on Wednesday evening in the atmospheric setting of the Great Halls at Vinopolis. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where...

Documentaries about sports stars are now a dime a dozen, but you can only be as good as your subject matter. We know Andrew Flintoff (usually...

“They fuck you up your Mum and Dad; they may not mean to, but they do.” These lines from Philip Larkin’s 1975 poem, “This Be the Verse”, sum up...

Had I read the contextual blurb about Jenny Hval's latest album first, I might have assumed it was a perfume company collaboration. The album is...

It’s easy to see metaphors about the status of modern Georgia, once again threatened by the Russian boot, in its recent artistic output...

It doesn't take much to get lost in a film by Miguel Gomes. In fact, it's required. Multiple layers, timelines, and perspectives unfold in his...

There’s always been a goofy charm about Billy Idol. As an implausibly chiselled Adonis shining out from the deliberate ugliness of the original...

Greg Davies doesn’t spare himself in his new show, Full Fat Legend, his first tour in seven years after having been busy being...

In a programme note for the St John Passion at the Barbican, the Academy of Ancient Music’s chief executive called their Easter performances of...