Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...

Pål Moddi Knutsen is from Senja, an island off north Norway’s west coast. Inside the Arctic Circle, it’s so far north as to be all but adjacent to the borders with Sweden and Finland. Due east, Murmansk is less than half the distance of Oslo. It’s no surprise that Moddi’s debut album evokes solitude, the endless light, the unbroken night and the contemplation that has to come with the territory.Accordion is his lead instrument. He also plays acoustic guitar. Floriography was produced in Reykjavik by Valgeir Sigurðssun, who has filled out the sound with gentle strings, pattering percussion, Read more ...

Jet Harris was one of the architects of British rock'n'roll. His death rams home just how distant that era now seems. A former skiffler, he joined The Shadows after a spell backing Terry Dene, British rock's first bad boy. In time, Harris became a bad boy too, setting the template for the self-destructive lifestyle that would become a cliché. But his moody image will survive too. His rumbling bass guitar will forever be synonymous with those evocative Shadows' hits.The Shadows' world-changing moment came in August 1960 when they topped the British charts with “Apache”. Everything in British Read more ...

This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana to Crosby Stills & Nash and Joni Mitchell. It's his English Pastoral mode which leads off the disc in the shape of opening track "The River Song" (obviously no possible relation to Drake's "Riverman"), with its wistful acoustic guitar, strings and harmonica. It's followed by the gorgeous "Rise", a rolling elegy to memory, nostalgia and Read more ...

There are some glorious sounds to be heard in the world of music: a big band in full swing; a symphony orchestra in full flight; a gospel choir; the Hammond B3 organ. But to my mind there’s nothing quite like the sound of a line of electric guitars – not chugging along like the Quo or Lynyrd Skynyrd, but meshing, interweaving, thrumming, humming, threshing, shredding, screaming; like Mogwai.It’s more than 15 years since these five guys from Glasgow pioneered the largely instrumental form of music that’s become known as “post-rock”, a description that some may find pretentious but which seems Read more ...

There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings. Read more ...

February is guitar month in New York City. Synchronicity rules at those two giants, the MoMA and the Met. At MoMA, Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 shows his austere guitar paintings, collages and drawings - often using newspaper, wallpaper and sand - as well as constructions of guitars made of cardboard and one of sheet metal and wire. “What is it? Painting or sculpture?” asked snooty visitors to his Paris studio. “It’s nothing, it’s el guitare,” Picasso, who didn’t play an instrument, is said to have replied.(Pictured right: Still life with Guitar, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string and painted wire Read more ...

From a guitar by Matteo Sellas dating back to Germany before 1630 to one made in New York by John Monteleone in 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition is will go down as the longest guitar solo slot in history. Including one of the four surviving models by Stradivari, it monitors the guitar’s development in Italy and the instrument’s migration across the Atlantic. Angelo Mannello, born in Italy, made the mandolins seen here in America. It is clear from this gallery, which includes a bespoke instrument made for Paul Simon, that the skill exhibited by the great Read more ...

It's quite funny to hear a rock band with a reputation for sounding like the inside of an aeroplane engine making something that's just gorgeous. But, even with its grimly jokey title, and silly offhand track titles like “You're Lionel Richie”, that's exactly what this album is. Mogwai's uncompromising reputation is not entirely undeserved: they've certainly had their moments of creating music which delivered its pleasures only after something of an endurance test, and the Glaswegians remain a spikily independent, politically committed force within the music world.However, even at their Read more ...

McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock. Ship to: my private nuclear bunker.” And that title, Duets, is a bit rich. But then Frank Read more ...

It's a season of retrospection for Bruce Springsteen. New light has been thrown on his pivotal 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with the release of The Promise, a double CD of out-takes and unreleased songs, alongside an expanded box set of CDs and DVDs telling the Darkness story in sound and vision. A version of Thom Zimny's documentary about the making of the album, included in the boxed release, was shown in Imagine on BBC One. It's part of a sporadic programme of reassessment of key works from Springsteen's career, which has included a 30th-anniversary edition of Born to Run and Read more ...

I defy anyone not to be excited at the prospect of a concert featuring such numbers as “Cuckolds All Awry”, “The Queen’s Dumpe”, “The Wooing of the Baker’s Daughter” and “Tickle My Toe”. Add to these tantalising scenarios early music’s favourite rebel Philip Pickett, and a guitarist who made it into Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 20 Greatest Guitarists of All Time chart, and you have yourself quite the unlikeliest of parties.Hosting this geek-meets-groupie celebration were the Musicians of the Globe, associate ensemble of the Globe Theatre. For almost two decades, under Pickett’s direction, the Read more ...