New Music Features
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... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: The Dark Side of the RainbowWednesday, 27 February 2013
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour once commented that whoever had the idea of synchronizing the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz (with the sound turned down) to his own band’s The Dark Side of the Moon was “some guy with too much time on his hands”. The hippy culture of the Seventies contained many who fitted that description, as well as multiple baggies of what they then called “pot” to help. Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: Dub Side of the MoonTuesday, 26 February 2013
There's a lot about stoner culture that smacks of earnestness, and The Dark Side of the Moon has been at the heart of a good deal of that. The number of long, dreary, late-night conversations that must have taken place over “doobs” and “munchies” about its themes of life, death, madness, desperation and all the rest doesn't even bear thinking about. Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: the Amazon Surf versionTuesday, 26 February 2013
There are numerous tribute versions of The Dark Side of the Moon, by everybody from jazzers to electronica merchants, but the Amazon Surf version must be the most esoteric. Amazon Surf music is one of the more curious music phenomenona I've stumbled on. Read more... |
The Dark Side of the Moon: A CounterblastMonday, 25 February 2013
In March 1973, John Lennon was 33. Elvis was 38. There was barely a musician, in the sense we understand it, over 40. No one with a mortgage – or hardly anyone – was into rock’n’roll. The Dark Side of the Moon changed all that. It made rock middle-aged. Read more... |
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