New Music Interviews
Q&A Special: Musician Ben Drew, aka Plan BMonday, 12 April 2010
Ben Drew, who records as Plan B, is busy on the promotional rounds. He has spent the day at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios being interviewed by Fearne Cotton and others for TV and radio, and performed his new single "She Said" as well as an ebullient cover of Charles & Eddie's "Would I Lie to You?" He's accompanied by a nine-piece band, including three gospel backing singers, and is as sharp-suited as the promo photos you see here. Read more...
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theartsdesk Q&A: Mariza, Diva of FadoSaturday, 23 January 2010
Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Tim LawrenceSaturday, 12 December 2009
Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: DJ Mary Anne HobbsSaturday, 21 November 2009
Immediately following the death of radio DJ John Peel in 2004, it became clear very rapidly that there was no obvious heir apparent. With so many specialist shows on the station, nobody ran the full gamut of leftfield and underground music in the same way that Peel had. But if anyone comes close, it is Mary Anne Hobbs. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Guitarist Wilko JohnsonSaturday, 17 October 2009
In Oil City Confidential, Julien Temple’s exhilarating new documentary on Dr Feelgood, the first thing you’ll see is the spidery, alien movements of the band’s guitarist Wilko Johnson, as he looks out over their Essex heartland, Canvey Island. The film is a sort of prequel to Temple’s Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, digging into the early 1970s pub rock scene the Feelgoods ruled with their hard, sharp R’n’B before punk, lessons learned, stole the stage. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: DJ Kode 9Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Glasgow-born, south London resident Steve Goodman – better known to discerning lovers of modern music as Kode 9 – has a unique and privileged position in relation to the ever-shifting UK dance music underground. In the mid 90s he formed part of the slightly cultish Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) founded by Sadie Plant and Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where he gained a PhD in philosophy. Read more... |
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