mon 06/05/2024

New Music Interviews

theartsdesk Q&A: Producer/DJ Carl Craig

joe Muggs

Carl Craig is extraordinarily easygoing. Most dance producers of his seniority and level of achievement would come with at least a publicist in tow, but when we meet him in his London hotel, his only entourage is his nine-year-old son, playing happily with an iPad or chatting to the photographer as we talk, and Craig is very easy and engaging company.

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Q&A Special: Musician Lee Hazlewood

Kieron Tyler

Forty-five years ago today, Nancy Sinatra’s risqué “These Boots Are Made For Walking” entered the British charts, beginning its rise to Number One. This country-slanted ode to sex and domination, sung by Frank’s daughter, hasn’t had its impact blunted by repeated exposure on nostalgia radio.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Simon Raymonde

joe Muggs

Simon Raymonde's Bella Union label occupies an enviable position within the music world. Successfully (although, as you'll see below, only just) weathering the travails of an industry beset by downloading and market fragmentation, it enters the 14th year of its existence strong and confident, with an impressive roster of maverick artists with actual or potential mainstream appeal.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Bruce Springsteen

Adam Sweeting

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.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Producer/DJ Richie Hawtin

joe Muggs 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...

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Interview: Anton Corbijn on making The American

Nick Hasted 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.

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Q&A Special: Musician Femi Kuti

Nick Hasted

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.

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

Thomas H Green

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.

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theartsdesk Q&A: Musicians Robert Plant and Jimmy Page

james Woodall

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

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Q&A Special: Composer Scanner

Ismene Brown

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.

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