1970s
theartsdesk
One of the great British singer-songwriters of the past half-century, Nick Drake is the subject of a new tribute album, Way to Blue, released next Monday on Navigator Records. A companion piece to the concerts staged worldwide over the last four years, the artists involved include Teddy Thompson, Vashti Bunyan, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews and Danny Thompson. We are a delighted to have an exclusive preview from the album, of Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside performing “Fruit Tree”.According to Joe Boyd, Drake’s producer and the man who coordinated the album and the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"Noel. Noel." Damon Albarn had to shout twice before Noel Gallagher joined him onstage to strum his guitar during Blur's neo-bluesy "Tender". Maybe Albarn's former Britpop rival wanted their historic musical union to take just a little bit longer. Maybe he wanted Albarn to wait just to assert himself. Or maybe after all these years of standing between very loud bands and very loud audiences he is a little deaf. But it happened. At around 8.30pm on Saturday March 23 the Britpop War was officially over. Churchill and Stalin at Yalta was maybe a more significant alliance, but only just.Albarn Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Sympathy vote time is over. After Edwyn Collins suffered two cerebral haemorrhages in 2005 his comeback album, 2007’s Losing Sleep, was greeted with ecstatic reviews. It was a certainly pretty good, but maybe critics, being the old softies we are at heart, were slightly swayed by our unbridled joy at the fact that the former Orange Juice frontman was simply back in the game. So the new album, Understated, is the real test of whether Collins can still cut the musical mustard.The verdict was hardly ever in doubt. From the opening Northern Soul stomp of "Dilemma" to the unashamedly sentimental Read more ...
howard.male
How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. However, metaphorically speaking, the title would have still held since Bowie's influence as a multifaceted creation is still everywhere in our culture. There is much – in fact almost too much – to enjoy in this show. But let’s get a couple of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Glam. Were you there? If so, what was it all about? You might come up with a list: Roxy Music, Ziggy Stardust, shiny flares, Sweet, shaggy hair, the ubiquitous platform boot, T-Rex, glittery eye-shadow, lip-gloss pouts (on men). It was the era of dressing up and gender-bending as fashion statement, though it’s also true that the glamour in Glam Rock was more glitter paste than gold. Some of it remains pretty cool, but unlike the Sixties you probably wouldn’t want to go back there, or at least for no longer than it takes to get round this exhibition, though Glam! The Performance of Style is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Five years,” said former Mott the Hoople fan club president Kris Needs of the band’s lifespan. “That’s how long the Kaiser Chiefs have been around, but who cares?” It seemed an unfair measure. Mott split 39 years ago and the Leeds quirksters are still going strong. But in terms of stitches in rock’s rich tapestry, Mott’s, like the Kaiser Chiefs’, probably wouldn’t darn a sock.That’s not to say Mott the Hoople didn’t merit this documentary, or that their best records weren’t among the greatest of the early Seventies. But it did take David Bowie to write their first hit and boot them into the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Suede, led by the arrestingly beautiful Brett Anderson, was one of the finest bands to come out of the UK in the first half of the 1990s. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1992, won the Mercury Music Prize. During the recording of the 1994 sequel Dog Man Star guitarist Bernard Butler left and the remaining members – Anderson, Mat Osman (bass) and Simon Gilbert (drums) and new recruits Richard Oakes (guitar) and Neil Codling (keyboards) never quite received the same critical acclaim, although 1996's Coming Up was their biggest selling album worldwide.The group disbanded in 2003 but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Blue Öyster Cult: The Columbia Albums CollectionBlue Öyster Cult were about more than the music. They seemingly arrived fully formed with a ready-made mythos and mystery. Their first two albums had no pictures of the band and weird, Escher-esque art. Their symbol, an inverted hybrid question mark and cross, suggested they were in thrall to a shadowy cult. Song titles like “Cities on Flame With Rock ‘n’ Roll”, “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” and “Career of Evil” fostered the impression they were zeal-filled revolutionaries. Their third album, issued in 1974, included a track called “ME 262” and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Let us go now to a foreign country. To the foreboding concrete tunnels and rooms of an RAF early-warning facility under the Sussex Downs in the early summer of 1973.The Lower Sixth has somehow procured the space for an epic late-night party. Cheap beer and cheaper cider is drunk. Cigarettes are smoked, self-consciously. Flared jeans and cheesecloth shirts are worn under Afghan coats, not with panache.There’s no dancing because there’s no DJ and no one has thought to bring any pop singles. Instead, there’s a pile of gatefold-sleeved albums beside the record player, each of which gets played to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Dark Side of the Moon and Frankie Howerd’s Roman-era television farce Up Pompeii! aren’t as unlikely bedfellows as it first seems. The link comes from Clare Torry, whose voice opened the show each week. She also provided the unrestrained vocal on The Dark Side of the Moon’s Rick Wright-penned “The Great Gig in the Sky.”As one of the most in-demand British session singers from 1970 to her retirement in 1996, Clare sang on ads for British Caledonian airlines and Glenrick pilchards. She appeared on French iconoclast Serge Gainsbourg’s Rock Around the Bunker album and sang the gentle Read more ...