Joan Littlewood’s stage production of Oh! What a Lovely War was a huge success when premiered at Stratford East in 1963. Loosely based on a documentary-style BBC radio musical, it showed the key events of World War I portrayed by a commedia dell'arte troupe taking on multiple roles, the score based on popular songs of the time. A film adaptation seemed inevitable, though Richard Attenborough’s 1969 widescreen epic (his debut as a director) was made without any input from Littlewood, understandably worried about how her pithy, low-budget creation would survive its transition to celluloid. Read more ...

This is almost too much to bear. This sprawling 37-track collection begins with the sainted 78-year-old Dolly Parton providing a jaunty spoken narration of her family’s history in music and the church. It’s old-school Disney documentary in tone, but because it’s Dolly you listen, and with her endless countrified charm she tells a story of generations of banjo players and preachers of the Appalachians – and reminds us that these, her forebears, were immigrants.She doesn’t use the word, but just how she talks about the landscapes reminding them of home in England and Wales – in a time when Read more ...

When Dolly Parton was nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she requested that her name be withdrawn.She was "flattered and grateful" for the honour but "I don't feel I have earned that right," she wrote. "It kind of would be like putting AC/DC in the Country Music Hall of Fame. That just felt a little out of place for me.” Officials responded, saying they respected the star's "thoughtful note” and saying that "in addition to her incredible talent as an artist, her humility is another reason Dolly is a beloved icon by millions of fans around the world." A few weeks Read more ...

Pete Fij’s debut solo album, Up’s the New Down is a sharp set of songs that sees the former Adorable front man back in the ring for the first time in quite a while. Hip-swinging yet laidback, self-aware but still cool, it’s a disc that may be reflective but still has plenty of zing about it. Given that it’s a good 30 years since he was being touted as a possible "Next Big Thing", he’s surprisingly better preserved than plenty of other veterans of those heady times too.Adorable were the Creation band that Noel Gallagher famously berated Alan McGee for cutting loose but Pete has never totally Read more ...

As the title of her fourth album suggests, South Carolina blues-rocker Hannah Wicklund is not happy. There’s a tangled yarn behind these songs, a tale of love, deception, and career-undermining shenanigans, followed by resentment, anger and reinvention. She inhabits a musical world that’s pure CLASSIC ROCK, but the voice, the tunes and the emotional vehemence often carry it with a convincing degree of panache.As far as I can deduce (some of the facts are murky), Wicklund had a relationship with Sam Kiszka of successful, sibling-led US rockers Greta Van Fleet. He produced her 2024 album The Read more ...

God Bless The Band feels like an unexpected encounter with your younger self. Compiling tracks from across Courteeners’ career, the collection revisits a period when British indie was less a musical category than a social world, sticky floors, packed festivals, late trains home and the optimism of believing the next weekend might be the best one yet. The nostalgia here is not simply for the music, but for the atmosphere that surrounded it.That sense of time passing gives the collection its weight. Early favourites sit alongside later material, charting how Courteeners have gradually moved Read more ...

Mastodon, to those who are unaware of these US rock behemoths, fill a similar musical space to Iron Maiden or perhaps Rush, if they had louder guitars. Their music is wholly escapist, tending towards the bombastic with a widescreen prog metal sound. Moving from monumental riffing to quiet, more orchestrated ambiances and back again, their lyrics tell dramatic stories but don’t especially engage with modern life and its trials and tribulations. They may be able to turn up the volume but Ministry, with Raging Uncle Al Jourgensen’s continued hectoring of Amerikkka or Slipknot and their dark Read more ...

At the Dot To Dot Festival in Nottingham, back in May, I noticed some of the most exciting bands I caught were marinated in grunge. One of them was Grandmas House. Their debut album now arrives and the grunge element turns out to be only part of the deal. The queer Bristol femme-punkin’ quartet try on various musical hats but, even at their poppiest, maintain a creeping sense of threat.Their lead weapon is the rasping voice of singer-guitarist Yasmin Berndt, whose vocals sound like no-one else around, a death metal growl plastered around a tone somewhere between Karen O and Scott Weiland. Yes Read more ...

Jorja Smith’s performance at the recent Radio 1 Big Weekend shebang is really worth tracking down if you want a lesson in high functioning nonchalance. Dressed down in denim, performing with only a DJ as backing, she gave very little in the way of gesture or pizazz, ran through mostly short snippets of her songs – and yet held the essentially pop crowd of thousands in the palm of her hand. From a lesser talent it wouldn’t have worked, but the vital thing here was that Smith was working with the tools of deep rooted Black London music. This was a soundsystem set, showcasing classic party Read more ...

Almost 20 years ago, Late Of The Pier were an exciting post-nu-rave band who injected synthesizer sparkiness into indie. They even had a Top 30 album. They were a breath of fresh air. One of their members, Sam Eastgate, went on to produce solo material as LA Priest. While electronically constructed, his output has often wandered into Moderat/James Blake territory. Which is to say, sensitive, falsetto-leaning singer-songwriter fare. But for album number four he’s amped up the bang factor.To assist him in this, his producer is Alex Ridha, AKA German EDM kingpin Boys Noize, a man who’s worked Read more ...

“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.Despite the next track “Fantasy” having a similar, though much more brief exposition, nothing else on Materia is so strikingly consummated. The rest of the album is more muted, foggy, out of focus, restrained. Etiolated, even.Overall, Materia is line Read more ...

Like electronica, metal is an umbrella term that contains multitudes of micro-genres. How do you fancy sludge, blackened crust or funeral doom? And that’s just scraping the surface. One of the more common ones is metalcore, a portmanteau word for the heaviest metal crashing into hardcore punk. A rising band in this category is São Paulo’s AXTY whose fourth album is as inventive as it is apoplectic.They’re a three-piece, with frontman Felipe Martins delivering hacksaw-throated, gurgle-growled lyrics. There’s also drummer Gabriel Marques and guitarist Jonathas Xavier, and one of them Read more ...