New Music Interviews

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Bruce Springsteen

Adam Sweeting Saturday, 18 December 2010

It's a season of retrospection for Bruce Springsteen. New light has been thrown on his pivotal 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with the release of The Promise, a double CD of out-takes and unreleased songs, alongside an expanded box set of CDs and DVDs telling the Darkness story in sound and vision.

Comment

theartsdesk Q&A: Producer/DJ Richie Hawtin

joe Muggs Saturday, 11 December 2010

Minimal techno kingpin Richie Hawtin deals with those allegations of over-seriousness head on

It's only after hanging up the Skype connection to Richie Hawtin that I realise how effective a branding exercise he has made the interview. In conversation the English-born, Canadian-raised Berlin resident is charming and smart, but listening back I realise that he has subtly repeated the names of his projects and products over and over, with the slickness of a high-flying salesman. But then you don't sustain a 20-year career making relentlessly odd music - yet still be regularly...

Comment

Interview: Anton Corbijn on making The American

Nick Hasted Thursday, 25 November 2010

George Clooney as Jack in 'The American'; 'More brutal than Bond'

Joy Division brought Anton Corbijn to England in 1979 and, nearly 30 years later, made him a cinema director. The sleeve of the band’s album Unknown Pleasures fascinated him so deeply he felt compelled to leave Holland for the country where such mysteries were made. The photographs he took of them for the NME helped make an icon of their singer Ian Curtis even before his 1980 suicide, and were themselves icons of a school of serious, black-and-white rock photography.

Q&A Special: Musician Femi Kuti

Nick Hasted Wednesday, 24 November 2010

When the hit Broadway musical Fela! reached London last week, Femi Kuti joined the ovations on opening night with more feeling than most. The musical’s subject, his father Fela Kuti, was a government-taunting mix of James Brown and Che Guevara, a musical revolutionary who, with drummer Tony Allen, forged Afrobeat, and a polygamous, dope-smoking thorn in the side of successive corrupt Nigerian governments.

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

Thomas H Green Saturday, 23 October 2010

Andy McCluskey (b 1959) is singer and frontman of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, one of the most successful groups of the late Seventies and early Eighties electro-pop boom. They reformed five years ago but have been in no rush to dive into things, finally releasing a new album, History of Modern, this autumn.

Comment

theartsdesk Q&A: Musicians Robert Plant and Jimmy Page

james Woodall Saturday, 16 October 2010

Since December 2007, the question has been: will they or won’t they?

Q&A Special: Composer Scanner

ismene Brown Friday, 03 September 2010

Over this weekend the spaces of London's Royal Opera House will be transformed by strange sounds, vaguely operatic, vaguely foresty, thoroughly chilled. The ambient atmospheres will be made by Scanner, who calls himself a “cultural engineer” and has made sounds for morgues, dances, Philips wake-up lights and chill-out rooms in clubs, during an extraordinarily eclectic career that seems to exist somewhere on the very edge of technology.

theartsdesk Q&A: Jo Bartlett of the Green Man Festival

joe Muggs Sunday, 15 August 2010

The Green Man himself at the 2009 festival

The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Dan Treacy

Thomas H Green Sunday, 27 June 2010

It has been said that Dan Treacy (b. 1960) is the TV Personalities in the same way that Mark E Smith is The Fall. Certainly he has been the sole consistent member since they appeared in 1978 with the single "14th Floor" and subsequent cult hit "Part Time Punks".

Comment

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Gareth Campesinos!

Rose Dennen Saturday, 12 June 2010

Hold on now, youngsters: Los Campesinos! briefly stand still

Los Campesinos! are revelling in deserved notoriety on both sides of the pond. Their first two albums, Hold on Now, Youngster and We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, saw Los Campesinos! lumped in with the twee-pop tag of bands like Bearsuit, Tiger Trap and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but new release Romance is Boring sees the eight-piece delve into more lush and experimental realms. Their touch is more technical and their approach much more mature. It's as if...