New music
Guy Oddy
Is Ozzy Osbourne finally over the hill and ready to knock this rock’n’roll thing on the head? It’s a question that has been asked many times since he was unceremoniously dumped by Black Sabbath in 1979.Ozzy seems physically and artistically indestructible, even though few will remember albums like Under Cover with great affection. He’s even become an international treasure along the way and recently helped close the Commonwealth Games with “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” – and ex-Black Sabbath confederate Tony Iommi laying down the riffs.Fortunately, his first album since 2020’s Ordinary Man is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Eddie and the Hot Rods played London’s Rainbow on 19 February 1977. A big deal, the Saturday headliner was at the largest venue they’d been booked into to date. Their debut album Teenage Depression had been issued in November 1976 and this confirmed them as an on-the-up band just as punk was asserting itself.At The Rainbow, the pub rockers debuted a new line-up – former Kursaal Flyers guitarist Graeme Douglas joined them for the first time. Crucial to their future, he would co-write their summer 1977 smash single “Do Anything you Wanna Do.” Their label, Island Records, recognised this as a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Hedonism and romance still drive Greg Dulli’s rock’n’roll on his main band’s ninth album.Relationship traumas have always simmered just beneath the Whigs’ surface, most notably on Gentlemen’s 1993 autopsy of an affair. Whatever the real life skeleton of How Do You Burn?, it mostly shows love for the rock form itself, and the life it traditionally offered. The ghosts of the Nineties, when the Whigs bloomed and American rock last defined an era, haunt this record. So too the Seventies, when the Stones dropped clues to an apparently seedily splendid existence through albums of implicit Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, there’s no way for Julian Lennon to escape the longest of shadows – his parentage – so by naming this album Jude, he’s tackling it head on. Or is he? The haunting cover image and name are the only direct reference. But, of course it’s literally in his DNA. Jude is his seventh album and first since 2011. To be honest, I thought it was all over after "Too Late for Goodbyes" (1984), so this is a pleasant surprise (and I didn’t know he’d been Grammy nominated). Firstly, his voice is much less "John-like" than in those days when he troubled the charts. He’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Travis, Coldplay, Haven, Elbow, Snow Patrol, Aqualung, Embrace, Starsailor, Turin Brakes, Athlete, Elbow, Doves… and of course Keane. The turn of the millennium deluge of sincere young men opening up their feelings to the world, their voices cracking into falsettos over grandiose post-U2 rhythms, really was quite a major cultural movement, wasn’t it? Easy to mock – and indeed the target of some real hatred – but absolutely inescapable, and as defining of its time as any hipper sound.Keane in particular exemplified the ostentatious sensitivity – and Tom Chaplin’s choirboy tones were up there Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Three and a half years on from 2019’s False Alarm, Keep On Smiling comes album number five from Northern Ireland trio, Two Door Cinema Club. Known for having more bounce to the ounce than your average band, their brand of guitar-flecked electro pop has won hearts, minds and sales in roughly equal measure.Confounding expectations from the start, the new album is neatly (nearly) bookended by two instrumentals, the brooding “Messenger AD” and its penultimate partner piece “Messenger HD”. The first brings to mind heyday John Carpenter (or Stranger Things depending on your age). Clocking in at Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Academy 2 may not be the biggest venue in Birmingham, but it was packed on Friday evening for the first gig of Dope Lemon’s much delayed Rose Pink Cadillac tour – to support an album that was finally released after delays of its own back in January. In fact, such was the mass of bodies waiting in anticipation for Angus Stone’s crew to take the stage that it took the best part of half an hour just to get served at the bar before the action started.Dope Lemon eventually took to a stage that was wrapped in a fog of dry ice, illuminated by blue stage lights, dressed like the Grateful Dead in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Not every musician has friends in high places in quite the way German jazz pianist and composer Julia Hülsmann does these days.A few weeks ago she played a private concert at the invitation of the German Head of State. Bundespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a proud and self-confessed jazz fan, has started what he calls his own “little tradition” of hosting jazz concerts outdoors in the gardens of Schloss Bellevue in Berlin, the official residence of the President. Hülsmann was host/curator of the most recent of those concert evenings, in early July.To see jazz music, which is most at home Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In late August 1962, Liverpool’s Swinging Blue Genes were booked to play Hamburg’s Star-Club for the first time. At the opening show of their season, they were booed and the curtain was pulled across them. The audience took against their mix of skiffle and trad jazz. A musical rethink was needed.In mid-May 1964, The Swinging Blue Jeans, as they now were, were booed while touring the UK on a bill with Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, The Animals, King Size Taylor & The Dominoes, The Other Two and The Nashville Teens. They were pulled from the dates. The R&B and rock ’n roll fans in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just under two weeks ago, Fleet Foxes finished their US tour at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium. Now, here they are kicking off their European dates in an auditorium attached to a North London town hall. Capacity 890. Unsurprisingly, it’s sold out. And very hot. After he comments on the heat, someone shouts at head fox Robin Pecknold to take his hat off. “Never” is his response.Although the continents and venues contrast, this leg of what’s dubbed the Shore Tour 2022 after their September 2020 fourth album cleaves to what American audiences have seen. Bar a few solo Pecknold Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
It is a testament to Coldplay’s capacity for reinvention that a good portion of this stadium crowd were not even born when the band first broke through over two decades ago. Such an age range in the audience clearly caught the eye of Chris Martin, who, in a rare moment of standing still, dryly noted that he owns trousers older than some of the people singing along.That admission preceded one of the night’s deepest cuts with “Sparks”, a fragile piece of indie from their debut album Parachutes, and a track that seemed unrecognizable next to the gargantuan pop that populated the majority of this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When I first started going to music festivals in the late 80s and early 90s, they were all wild celebrations of bacchanalian excess. Children were nowhere to be seen and there was always a crustie on hand, openly plying a wide array of brain spanglers, if that was what you wanted.These days, however, kids’ entertainment is viewed as an essential part of any such knees up – and even Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival has a kids’ gig and activities each year. Top of the family-friendly music festivals, without doubt, is Camp Bestival and this year saw Rob Da Bank’s musical empire expand beyond Read more ...