Features
CD Special: The Basement Tapes CompleteWednesday, 29 October 2014
Earlier this year, bobdylan.com posted “Full Moon & Empty Arms”, a song associated with Sinatra and the popular music of America before rock'n'roll. Dylan’s new version seemed to presage an album of tunes of similar vintage titled Shadows in the... Read more... |
First Person: The lure of the lost playMonday, 27 October 2014
About a year ago, Alan Brodie, who is the agent for the estate of Terence Rattigan, sent me a handful of his more obscure plays. I had worked with Alan before on a revival of Graham Greene’s first play, The Living Room, so he knew I had a penchant... Read more... |
Annie Lennox: The Jazz SingerSunday, 26 October 2014
Annie Lennox is a far more fascinating artist than she’s often given credit for. Perhaps because she has been around for decades (she’s now 59) and hasn’t self-destructed like her friend Amy Winehouse or gone into exile for ages like Kate Bush, or... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Stockholm: A Nobel Prize for Musical ExcellenceSunday, 12 October 2014
Should you not have caught one of the 20th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung... Read more... |
Robert Wyatt: Different Every TimeTuesday, 07 October 2014
As the presenter of a regular music podcast for a national newspaper, I used to be in the happy position of interviewing one or two artists of my choice per month, provided they were signed to an independent label. So when Domino released a Robert... Read more... |
RIP Stephen Samuel Gordon aka The SpaceapeThursday, 02 October 2014
It has been announced by the Hyperdub label that Stephen Samuel Gordon, better known as The Spaceape, vocalist, poet and live performer, passed away peacefully after a 5 year struggle with a rare form of cancer. Gordon was the constant recording and... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bamberg: Top Town, Top OrchestraSunday, 28 September 2014
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s... Read more... |
Remembering Christopher Hogwood (1941-2014)Saturday, 27 September 2014
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Singer-songwriter Vashti BunyanSaturday, 27 September 2014
The story of Vashti Bunyan is a compelling one. The urbane Sixties would-be popstrel who gave it all up to ride up to a hippie community in a horse-drawn caravan, writing an exquisite album on the way, Just Another Diamond Day, which then became a... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Cadaqués: Inside DalíSunday, 21 September 2014
In 1959, the walk to Salvador Dalí’s house in Portlligat seemed very long. I was on holiday with my parents in Cadaqués, staying in our friends’ house high on a hillside with a view of the blue bay and the white houses surrounding it. Not that I... Read more... |
First Person: From Insolence to DefianceWednesday, 17 September 2014
Not that long ago, certainly when I was old enough to know better, I managed to get myself mugged by a gang of teenage street girls down by Lisbon docks. I had been following a long chain of beer and whisky glasses from the end of one bar to the... Read more... |
Opinion: What's the point of short film?Tuesday, 16 September 2014
The emergence of digital both as a technology and a culture has fundamentally changed the world in which short film now exists. Now short film has public, industry and social value and its role and routes have fundamentally changed.Short film is one... Read more... |
