New Music Features
Analogue - Rock Portraits by Tom Sheehan, Lomography Gallery Store EastWednesday, 13 November 2013
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. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Reykjavík: Iceland Airwaves 2013Sunday, 10 November 2013
Kraftwerk closing a festival is a big deal. It’s an even bigger honour when the seminal German outfit reconfigure their set to acknowledge where they’re playing. Last Sunday, Kraftwerk performed the rarely heard “Airwaves”, from 1975’s Radioactivity album, within the honeycomb-windowed Harpa concert hall. They were paying tribute to Iceland Airwaves, the remarkable festival which was drawing to a close Read more... |
Listed: The Best of Joni MitchellSaturday, 09 November 2013
Of all the rock pantheon, Joni is the one who has evaded definition and over-determination better than anyone. Read more... |
Mystery Dance: On filming Elvis CostelloWednesday, 06 November 2013
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others. Read more... |
Lou Reed, High Priest of Rock: 1942-2013Sunday, 27 October 2013
We had heard he was ill, and had a recent liver transplant, but then he always seemed to be off colour. When Lester Bangs interviewed him in 1973 for Let It Rock he seemed ill then. When Bangs met him he had just had his greatest hit album Transformer, and seemed to be immediately blowing his new-found fame. Bangs talked of a “vaguely unpleasant fat man” who said "I can create a vibe without saying anything, just by being in the room." Read more... |
theartsdesk in Amsterdam: Club Culture OverdoseSunday, 27 October 2013
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. Read more... |
Listed: Linda Thompson's Top 10 Traditional SongsSunday, 20 October 2013
"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published today on theartsdesk. When she talked to me she also discussed her early adventures in traditional folk music. "I was already interested in folk singing in Glasgow," she said. "Great people like Archie Fisher. Read more... |
Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked DoorSaturday, 12 October 2013
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country. Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album,... Read more... |
Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story, BBC FourThursday, 10 October 2013
Tubular Bells stands alone in the history of late 20th-century music: a rock album without vocals. But it turns out as well to have been a kind of one-hit wonder for multi-instrumentalist and composer Mike Oldfield. The piece apparently came out of the blue – at least that is how it felt in 1973, when Virgin Records adventurously made it their first-ever LP release. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Oslo: Pushing folk’s frontiersSunday, 06 October 2013
Four days in Norway’s capital attending Folkelarm, the festival of Nordic folk music, raises the perennial and always knotty question of how far music can move beyond the traditional yet still be labelled as folk? With the charming and reassuringly old-fashioned accordion- and string-driven dance band the P. A. Røstads Orkester there’s no such problem. Read more... |
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