New Music Features
Global Music: The Best of 2012Sunday, 30 December 2012
For years there have been pundits predicting that just as our high street restaurants and football teams represent a much more globalised world, surely pop music would follow suit. Fifteen years ago my local high street had a Wimpy Bar, a curry house and a wine bar – now we have Vietnamese, Turkish, Keralan and Mexican eateries to name a few – and the street is much better for it. Read more... |
Lives in Music #4: The Book of Drugs by Mike DoughtyFriday, 21 December 2012
Such is the warts and all nature of the rock star biography that something as personal as the addiction memoir has become almost passé. Lucky then that Mike Doughty – one-time frontman of cult 90s alt-rockers Soul Coughing turned eclectic solo artist – didn't write an ordinary addiction memoir. Read more... |
Lives in Music #3: Who Am I by Pete TownshendThursday, 20 December 2012
Pete Townshend was always the most literate of stars, not merely a rock icon but someone who believed in Art with a capital A – he even ran his own publishing company and had an editing job in the 1980s with Faber and Faber, where he made friends with writing giants like Ted Hughes (he adapted his Iron Man) and William Golding, who he used to go boating with. Lucky Pete - except, he never thinks so, and beats himself up for not appreciating his good fortune. Read more... |
Thank You for the Days: Remembering Kirsty MacCollTuesday, 18 December 2012
On December 18, 2000, Kirsty MacColl was killed after being struck by a motorboat while scuba diving with her two sons in Cozumel, Mexico. The tragic, criminal circumstances of her death – the boat was speeding in a restricted area – and subsequent fight for justice have tended to overshadow the fact that her unique, witty, deceptively emotional pop manoeuvres have been much missed. Read more... |
Remembering Ravi Shankar, 1920-2012Thursday, 13 December 2012
While living in Bombay in the late 1940s, betrayed by a business partner and his first marriage in the midst of painful implosion, Ravi Shankar decided to commit suicide. At the eleventh hour, a holy man, who happened to be passing by, knocked on his door asking for water. The man told Shankar that he was aware of his fateful decision. This wasn’t, he went on, the right time to be renouncing life. Read more... |
Dave Brubeck, 1920-2012Wednesday, 05 December 2012
In 2009 I interviewed Jamie Cullum about Dave Brubeck, who has died today just a day before his 92nd birthday. What follows are Cullum's recollections of falling in love with Brubeck's music, and later knowing and working with a jazz legend. Read more... |
Stone Free: Andrew Loog OldhamSunday, 25 November 2012
The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Konya: Into the MysticSunday, 18 November 2012
Next month, as has been the case for centuries, lovers of the poet and mystic Jalaluludin Rumi (known simply as Mevlana - The Master - in Turkey, Iran and Persia) will come together to celebrate the day of his passing, on the 17th of December 1273. Thousands gather for a week commemorating what Rumi called his “marriage to eternity” with a grand ceremony of whirling dervishes. Read more... |
Interview: TigranTuesday, 06 November 2012
Tigran Hamasyan is a brilliant jazz pianist who is clearly on the rise – for one thing, like many a star before him, he has dropped his surname, and is now, according to his latest record The Fable, simply Tigran. When I meet him in London, he tells me one reason he became addicted to the acoustic piano as a child was that there were so many blackouts in his native Gyumri in Armenia, and it was something he could play by candlelight. Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Dave StewartThursday, 01 November 2012
Sunderland-born Dave Stewart has embraced the life of a wandering troubadour virtually since he was born. He had a record deal with folk-rockers Longdancer at the start of the Seventies, though he didn't start to enjoy commercial success until the end of the decade, when he was with The Tourists. They're possibly best remembered for their cover of the Dusty Springfield hit "I Only Want To Be With You", but more importantly, it was the band which brought Stewart together with Annie Lennox. Read more... |
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