VINYL OF THE MONTH

Martel Zaire (Evil Ideas)

During a false start to “Billy Don’t Fall”, on Sunday night at Birmingham’s iconic Town Hall, Sananda Maitreya took the opportunity to address the packed house before him. He noted that there’s now a King on the throne of England, an American Pope and that “all the white ladies have got big lips and big asses – so, it’s a long time since we were here last.”

Three of last year’s finest singles were by Luvcat, a classy-but-naughty Eartha Kitt-style bad girl steeped in burlesque-rock’n’roll spirit. In fact, she’s the wanton basque’n’fishnets persona that, during a decadent sojourn in Paris, possessed the soul of Liverpudlian singer Sophie Morgan.

The question is, can she engagingly maintain this wordy, filmic conceit for a whole album? The answer is… yes.

The first words are spoken after “Worldwide Epiphany,” the 20th song. “Thank you” is all Todd Rundgren says. With this, the set ends.

It wasn’t that he was inscrutable or failing to acknowledge the audience during the previous hour and 50 minutes. A couple of lower-level sections like a catwalk parallel the stage before the front row of the stalls. Rundgren often paced this space, breaching the barrier between those who were there to see him and the performance. But, still, there are no introductions, no badinage.

Anxiety and self-doubt have been constant themes for Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who now finds himself among the highest echelons of modern music. With his project Tame Impala, these themes have provided an almost unending source of inspiration, even while musically the project has transitioned from pyschedelic/Indie rock, and into a pop and a dance-oriented sound.

Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money.

Warren Ellis is Nick Cave’s wild-maned Bad Seeds right-hand man and The Dirty Three’s frenzied violinist. Justin Kurzel’s Australian film subjects meanwhile exist on the malign edge, from Snowtown’s suburban serial killer and Nitram’s mass shooter to Ned Kelly.

Ellis is the contrastingly loving renegade subject of Kurzel’s debut documentary Ellis Park, an escapee from suburban Ballarat who here journeys further out to the titular Sumatran wildlife sanctuary he helps fund, where he plays to animals like a shaman Dolittle in jungle mist.

Pop Will Eat Itself deserve to be more celebrated. The Stourbridge outfit were one of the first 1980s bands to realise the potential of smashing punky indie-rockin’ into hip hop and electronic dance.