sun 23/03/2025

New Music Features

theartsdesk in Hamburg: Reeperbahn Festival 2019 review

Kieron Tyler

Hatari’s 10th placing in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest hasn’t done them any harm. Neither did ruffling the feathers of the European Broadcasting Union and host nation Israel with their stance on Palestine.

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Bob Dylan Special - Rolling Thunder Revue, Netflix

Tim Cumming

Tomorrow, Martin Scorsese delivers, via Netflix, two hours and 22 minutes of screen time devoted to Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, following on from the release last week of the latest Bootleg Series boxed set, 14...

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Bob Dylan Special - theartsdesk Q&A: Scarlet Rivera

Tim Cumming

As Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, hits Netflix and cinemas, and a new 14 CD boxed set enters the official Bootleg Series, ...

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First Person: Sam Lee on singing with endangered nightingales

Sam Lee

Every spring for the last five years, we have gathered around a camp fire in hidden locations in a wood in Sussex, to join the nightingales and to “re-wild” ancient folk ballads. We walk in silence through the forest at night, with no torches, reawakening our aural senses. These meditative pilgrimages give people permission to be in a state of communion with nature, to be silent to hear the birds.

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theartsdesk in Zanzibar - behind the veil

Andy Morgan

Damn exotica.

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Keith Flint, 1969-2019

Thomas H Green

It is hard to absorb the news that Keith Flint of The Prodigy has been found dead at his home in Essex. Keith Flint! The guy with the double Mohican and panda eye-liner who terrified Middle America in the video for “Firestarter”.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Shirley Collins - 'There was no way I could ever sing to be popular'

Kieron Tyler

When Shirley Collins appears at The Roundhouse next week, it will be 50 years since she last played there. On 30 May 1969, she and her sister Dolly were on a bill promoting their then label Harvest Records. When she plays there on 31 January, she is the main event.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Hedvig Mollestad, Norway's bridge between heavy metal and jazz

Kieron Tyler

Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio reset the dial to what jazz fusion sought to do when it emerged, and do so in such a way that it’s initially unclear whether they are a jazz-influenced heavy metal outfit or jazzers plunging feet-first...

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10 Questions for DJ / producer Rob Smith of Smith & Mighty

joe Muggs

Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987.

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More Blood, More Tracks review - Bob Dylan opens up

Tim Cumming

You get plenty of Dylan for your buck these days, with the Mondo Scripto exhibition currently at the Halcyon Gallery in London, and a totemic and arrestingly beautiful set of Jerry Schatzberg's photographs of mid-Sixties Dylan in all his fuzzy glory just published by ACC Art Books.

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