New Music Features
Flatshare with Bowie: what happened nextSaturday, 28 September 2013
Forty four years ago David Bowie was living in the spare room of the suburban flat I shared with my two young children. He was broke and I was only occasionally employed – so we started a Sunday night folk club in the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street – for fun and so he could pay me some rent. Read more...
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theartsdesk in Russia: WOMAD PyatigorskWednesday, 25 September 2013
“Some say that I come from Russia / Some think that I come from Africa / But I'm so exotic, I'm so erotic / 'Cos I come from the Planet Paprika...” Read more... |
Darbar Festival: The ancient art of DhrupadFriday, 20 September 2013
This is a key weekend for lovers of Indian classical music or the merely sonically adventurous – the Darbar Festival in the Southbank has some of the most extraordinary practioners of the art from both the Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (North Indian) traditions.The most fascinating aspect may be the presence of some really ancient styles notably Dhrupad. Read more... |
Listed: The 20 best movie songsSunday, 15 September 2013
Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled character reminded me of the power often exerted by songs explicitly or implicitly germane to a movie's narrative. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Katowice: On tour at Tauron Nowa Muzyka FestivalWednesday, 11 September 2013
Day 1 Read more... |
Another Self Portrait: Bob's buffed up for Bootleg Series Volume 10Monday, 26 August 2013
No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official releases. While the latter are set in stone, the Bootleg Series is more like a basement excavation, digging into the softer darker clays of epochal concerts, wildly alternate versions, and almost willfully lost treasures. Read more... |
Bob Dylan: Portrait of the ArtistTuesday, 20 August 2013
Next Monday Bob Dylan releases Another Self Portrait (1969-1971), the tenth volume of his Bootleg Series which casts new light on one of his most maligned records, 1970's Self Portrait. Two days beforehand a selection of his pastel portraits will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery. (Both events, naturally, will be reviewed on theartsdesk.) At 72, popular music's most mercurial character is still throwing curveballs. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bodø: a World of Music inside the Arctic CircleSunday, 11 August 2013
“Rock ‘n’ roll was invented in Bodø about 1922,” declares Elvis Costello before kicking into “A Slow Drag With Josephine”. “Then it crept down to Trondheim,” he continues. “Then the squares in Oslo got it about 1952.” Up here, 25km inside the Arctic Circle, it actually seems possible that anything could have developed without the outside world noticing. On the tip of a finger of land between two mountain-fringed fjords, the city of Bodø doesn’t need to shout its identity. Read more... |
Obituary: Singer-songwriter JJ CaleSunday, 28 July 2013
“JJ Cale will be onstage in three minutes.” With the house lights still full on, an old cove with tatty, silvering hair and an open untucked-in puce shirt shuffled about onstage, tinkering with equipment, before picking up a guitar and leaning into a flavoursome sliver of Okie-smoked boogie. Either JJ Cale didn’t give two hoots for the convention of the big entry, or he was enjoying a joke about his anonymity. Probably both. Read more... |
Interview: Grant Hart on Science, the Devil and DeathTuesday, 23 July 2013
In both a personal and literary sense, Grant Hart has been to hell and back. While the 52-year-old Minnesotan is still best known as the drummer and songwriting contributor behind legendary US punk band Hüsker Dü, his fourth solo album, The Argument, is a bold adaptation of John Milton's Paradise Lost that could finally see him recognised as an artist in his own right. And it's about time. Read more... |
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