New Music Features
Audio Exclusive: Green Gartside Sings Nick DrakeTuesday, 09 April 2013
One of the great British singer-songwriters of the past half-century, Nick Drake is the subject of a new tribute album, Way to Blue, released next Monday on Navigator Records. A companion piece to the concerts staged worldwide over the last four years, the artists involved include Teddy Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews and Danny Thompson. Read more...
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theartsdesk in Lahore: Music, mysticism and fistfightsSaturday, 06 April 2013
On Wednesday I will strap on a guitar and take the stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the opening night of this year's Alchemy Festival. I am the musical director and happy accompanist to a line-up of spectacularly talented musicians, all with roots in different parts of the Indian subcontinent. As I write, visas are being stamped and air tickets finalised for 11 musicians flying in from India and Pakistan. Read more... |
Interview: Stephan Micus, the world's largest one-man bandWednesday, 03 April 2013
"Multi-instrumentalist" is a catch-all phrase that usually means somebody who plays flute, clarinet, sax and perhaps a bit of guitar. When it comes to Stephan Micus, he’s a multi-instrumentalist of an altogether different calibre. He plays hundreds of instruments – he doesn’t know how many – which he’s collected and commissioned from all over the world. Read more... |
theartsdesk in New Zealand: WOMAD TaranakiSunday, 24 March 2013
I've been to countless UK Womads yet have never before made it WOMAD Taranaki. Which is almost something to be ashamed about considering I'm a Kiwi. But this expat is never in the South Pacific mid-March. Until, that is, this year. The 11th New Zealand Womad is held in the small city of New Plymouth in Taranaki, a gorgeous West Coast hump in the central North Island. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Zanzibar: The Nightingale Still SingsSunday, 10 March 2013
A crowd of men and younger women in full burkahs gathers, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in West African “Mumu” (khaftan) and a covered head, playing Ghazals (Islamic calls to prayer). Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, a clear voice, sitting on a café terrazza, Nawal transports us: until it is broken. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?!” cries out a dishevelled street vendor, visibly upset. “But you use keyboards in your praise of Allah” she retorts calmly. Read more... |
Farewell Kenny Ball, 1930-2013Thursday, 07 March 2013
The death today at age 82 of trumpeter Kenny Ball makes him the first of the big three chart regulars of Britain’s trad jazz boom to pass away. Both Acker Bilk and Chris Barber are still with us. It’s easily forgotten, but trad actually was bigger than The Beatles. In January 1963, just as the Liverpool quartet were issuing their second single, “Please Please Me”, Ball was on a sell-out bill at north London’s massive Alexandra Palace. Read more... |
10 Questions for Suede's Brett Anderson & Mat OsmanMonday, 04 March 2013
Suede, led by the arrestingly beautiful Brett Anderson, was one of the finest bands to come out of the UK in the first half of the 1990s. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1992, won the Mercury Music Prize. Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: Prog’s Gleaming PeakSaturday, 02 March 2013
Let us go now to a foreign country. To the foreboding concrete tunnels and rooms of an RAF early-warning facility under the Sussex Downs in the early summer of 1973.The Lower Sixth has somehow procured the space for an epic late-night party. Cheap beer and cheaper cider is drunk. Cigarettes are smoked, self-consciously. Flared jeans and cheesecloth shirts are worn under Afghan coats, not with panache. Read more... |
Manchester International Festival 2013 PreviewFriday, 01 March 2013
Yesterday Kenneth Branagh was thanking Manchester – saying that he felt he had “come of age” the previous time he had performed Shakespeare in the city 25 years ago, the audience being so “generous, quick-witted and lively". Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: Clare Torry's Great Gig in the SkyFriday, 01 March 2013
The Dark Side of the Moon and Frankie Howerd’s Roman-era television farce Up Pompeii! aren’t as unlikely bedfellows as it first seems. The link comes from Clare Torry, whose voice opened the show each week. She also provided the unrestrained vocal on The Dark Side of the Moon’s Rick Wright-penned “The Great Gig in the Sky.” Read more... |
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