sun 15/06/2025

New music

CD: Django Bates' Belovèd - Confirmation

Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd...

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Lady Gaga, Twickenham Stadium

After Lady Gaga's concert at Twickenham last night, I asked some of the Little Monsters scurrying back to the station the name of the last song she had sung. The song she sang right after declaring that she had to bring the evening to an early end....

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CD: Bob Dylan - Tempest

Like Orpheus, Bob Dylan is familiar with the underworld. As he gets closer to meeting his maker, the tone of his work has become less baroque, increasingly stripped down and almost naïve in its simplicity. His latest album marks another episode,...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Lee "Scratch" Perry, Cud, Taj Mahal, David Cassidy

Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends: Disco Devil - The Jamaican DiscomixesThomas H GreenAs bass culture conquers the musical universe, with even Justin Bieber diving into dubstep waters and gnarly electro-goth Skrillex one of the biggest earning new...

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Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard, The Haunt, Brighton

Astonishment is the emotion that creeps up most often when watching 36-year-old New York singer-songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. The term singer-songwriter does him an injustice, in fact, for these days it summons notions of strummed predictability,...

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Lady Gaga: Back to the Future

Lady Gaga arrives in the UK this weekend to play two huge shows at Twickenham Stadium, before moving on to Manchester. Today, she is the biggest pop star in the world. Three years ago she was in the final stages of a highly orchestrated campaign...

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CD: Pet Shop Boys - Elysium

Pet Shop Boys eleventh album leaps sideways into smooth, opulent US FM radio production in a way that will initially give long term fans palpitations. The duo sound… different. They recorded Elysium in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning Kanye West...

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CD: The xx – Coexist

One of the current tropes in stand-up comedy is the way that television appropriates music to manipulate emotions. Sean Hughes employs a flurry of Snow Patrol when he acts out buying some bread, while newcomer David Trent has Sigur Rós on his...

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CD: David Byrne & St. Vincent - Love This Giant

There's a lot that's right with this album. Love This Giant sounds like Talking Heads for one, suggesting that David Byrne has made his peace with what made him great in the first place, and has seemingly stopped his slide into becoming a...

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theartsdesk at the End of the Road Festival

“There’re a lot of turds out there, ladies and gentlemen. But they’re not one of them.” It’s Friday afternoon in Larmer Tree Gardens, a wood-rimmed, laurel-trimmed, urn-decorated corner of Dorset, and thank yous are coming thick and fast for Bella...

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The Arts Desk Radio Show 7

The seventh radio show from theartsdesk features a wealth of eclectic music, from grime to Bach, while Joe Muggs and Peter Culshaw discuss everything from French café culture of the Fifties to sub-Saharan politics in the Sudan and northern Mali....

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10 Questions for Ian Hunter

Ian Hunter’s new album, When I’m President, is an almost obscenely vibrant piece of work for a man who – despite that impossibly golden mop of hair – is now 73 years old. But then Hunter has always been a rock'n'roll survivor. Born in Shropshire in...

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