New Music Reviews
Arena: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour Revisited, BBC TwoSunday, 07 October 2012
Being told that Magical Mystery Tour was a home movie is bit tiring. Self-evidently, The Beatles’ filmic response to the psychedelic experience was not that. They tried, and failed, to hire Shepperton Studios. Known artists like Ivor Cutler and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were brought on board. Gavrik Losey, then hot from being an assistant director on Modesty Blaise, worked on it. Masses of extras were employed. Read more...
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Reissue CDs Weekly: B B King, Steve Winwood, The Doors, Loving on the FlipsideSunday, 07 October 2012
Kieron Tyler Read more... |
Gallows, The Haunt, BrightonThursday, 04 October 2012
Midway through their set Gallows are expending a mass of energy, attacking their instruments and jerking about like possessed men in a jam-packed venue yet, unless you are one of their devotees, moshing like Bedlam or hanging from the rafters gesticulating, it’s not especially engaging. It should be, with such energy and dynamism on show but their music attempts nothing so much as to fulfill the expectations of those who already like them, possibly in an ever-diminishing manner. Read more... |
Manu Chao's La Ventura, Brixton Come Together FestivalTuesday, 02 October 2012
Manu Chao is “backstage” in a little makeshift tent on the green outside Brixton’s St Matthews Church (that’s the one opposite the Ritzy Cinema) and he’s certainly more at home than in some of the more conventional rock star places I’ve seen him in. Like Glastonbury, where he hated being in the VVIP area of the main stage with Amy Winehouse and Jay Z – all the fences and passes made him think of Palestine and he looked bored and dejected. Read more... |
Transcender Festival 2012, BarbicanMonday, 01 October 2012
The Barbican Centre’s Transcender Festival celebrated its fourth anniversary in 2012 and deserves to be recognised as one of the UK’s most culturally radical and engaging music events. Transcender grew out of the Barbican’s previous festival Ramadan Nights and aims to explore a similarly rich vein of music that is rooted both in Islamic trance music of Asia and the Middle East and Western improvised music that shares a similar sense of free exploration and wonder. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: A.R. Kane, Crime and the City Solution, ABBA, Demis RoussosSunday, 30 September 2012
Joe Muggs Read more... |
The Beach Boys, Royal Albert HallFriday, 28 September 2012
There they are! It's The Beach Boys! They're playing "Wouldn't It Be Nice", halfway through their second set of the evening and it blossoms with harmonic beauty, with pop's finest, most glorious ambition. Sure, in the shadows behind them there are a bunch of session musicians carrying them. Particularly in the first half those guys made damn sure there was such a wall of vocals it would be hard to detect any flaws in the ageing voices (mostly around 70) of the original Beach Boys. Read more... |
Ultravox, Hammersmith ApolloFriday, 28 September 2012
Now I think I've seen it all. After a storming two-hour set Ultravox returned to the stage for a celebratory twin-pronged past-meets-present encore of "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" and "Contact". At the very end, during a touching, soft-spoken moment, a female fan in an animal mask clambered onstage and appeared to drop a bowl of greeny-yellow gunk, possibly custard, on Midge Ure's head. Read more... |
Stewart Lee presents John Cage's Indeterminacy, Cafe OTOWednesday, 26 September 2012
John Cage is funny: this much we know. The deadpan prankster at the heart of 20th-century artistic experimentalism was always about the inadvertent punchline, the chuckle that comes from unexpected disjunction, the relief that comes from reminders of the absurdity of reality, as much as he was ever about any engagement with progress, technology, the transcendent. Read more... |
Let It Be, Prince of Wales TheatreTuesday, 25 September 2012
In Beatles’ lore, the Prince of Wales Theatre is totemic. Here, on 4 November 1963, the cheeky quartet played the Royal Command Performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. John Lennon quipped, “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery”. Now, 50 years on from the release of their first single, a tribute of sorts is taking place on the same stage with the arrival of Let It Be in the West End. Read more... |
B B King: Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr B.B. King
A.R. Kane: Complete Singles CollectionPages
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