New music
Barney Harsent
Over the past two decades, Brighton’s Fujiya & Miyagi have managed, without fanfare or fuss, to amass an enviable back catalogue of linear, krautrock driven grooves dresses in slinky, drop-shouldered pop melodies. It’s a formula that has served them well and has proved elastic enough for them to grow without it ever seeming to give at the seams. This is, in part, due to an admirable sense of simplicity that reached a peak on 2017’s self-titled near-masterpiece (in fact a compilation of three EPs). On Flashback, however, there is a distinctly different cut to their cloth. Certain Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Neneh Cherry’s matchless bohemian life has perversely secured her pop position. The crowd tonight is maybe three-quarters female, and as unconcerned by a setlist almost wholly drawn from new album Broken Politics as Cherry is by the long lacuna in what you could hardly call a career.From a Swedish commune childhood to an adolescence collaborating with the Slits, from helping start the Nineties with 1989’s Raw Like Sushi to lending Massive Attack a room to make Blue Lines, from taking time to bring children into the world, ease parents out of it and grow a 29-year marriage to co-writer Cameron Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s been a couple of years since Peter Perrett, the former frontman and creative force behind the much loved but commercially under-performing Only Ones decided that he’d had enough of being a mere legend and got back into the musical ring. He had made a brief reappearance in the mid-1990s under the guise of The One, but that was all very fleeting, and Perrett’s infamous bad habits soon reasserted themselves until a short Only Ones’ reformation tour 10 years ago. Again, that was followed by a period of silence. Now, however, Perrett has put together Humanworld, a second solo album in as many Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Nothing brings home the difference between sequencing an album and sequencing a live show like going to see a classic album played in its entirety. And Manic Street Preachers’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – described by frontman James Dean Bradfield in Edinburgh as “a curious mixture of dancing and thinking” – is a stranger choice than most for the live treatment. The five-million-plus selling, multi-award winning album, the 20th anniversary of which the band are currently celebrating, is objectively their biggest release. Look beyond the singles, though, and its songs are arguably Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The sheer scale of the Mariah Carey phenomenon is truly astounding. Since the release of her first album in 1990, she has now clocked up worldwide album sales of over 200 million, and had 18 US Number One singles. Also – and far less frequently mentioned – she is actually third in the list of songwriters with the most chart-topping singles, and sixth in the list of producers. In other words, she is right up there contending with Lennon and McCartney in the first case, and she’s not that far behind George Martin in the second.In this live show, the first of three nights of the “Caution” Read more ...
Chris Harvey
Back in 2001, after the release of their debut album This Is It, The Strokes weren’t just the most fashionable band in the world, they were also regarded as the group that could “save rock”. That was asking quite a lot.This Is It was 36 minutes of near-perfect guitar pop, delivered with New York cool, insouciance and sex appeal, but it was also as retro as their East Village thrift-store threads. It seemed to contain echoes of every guitar riff you’d ever loved. Didn’t "Alone, Together" sound like the Undertones? "Last Nite" like Tom Petty? "Someday" like the Buzzcocks?It didn’t matter. These Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Richard Hawley’s eighth solo album, Further is, like so many of his previous discs, a masterclass in good taste and relaxed easy listening vibes – but it’s one which manages to steer well clear of the middle of the road. In fact, there’s much here that is reminiscent of that other cool Northerner in a suit, Barry Adamson, who spent a fair few albums wrestling the Easy Listening genre from the '70s cardigan-wearing hell of Val Doonican and his pals. For much of Further, Hawley is on a similar track with a groove that suggests Roy Orbison fronting Phil Spector’s famous Wall of Sound.Further Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Debates about whether 1964’s Marnie presaged Alfred Hitchcock’s downslide as a force will run and run. It is however certain that it was the director’s last film scored by Bernard Herrmann, who had worked on 1963’s The Birds, 1960’s Psycho, 1959’s North by Northwest and, before that, a run of Hitchcock’s films back to 1955. After Marnie, the affiliation continued – for a while. Herrmann’s music was heard in the TV show the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and he provided a score for Torn Curtain which the director neither liked or used. The professional relationship was over.Although the music for Read more ...
mark.kidel
Yousou N’Dour has come a long way from his cassettes with Super Etoile de Dakar, that wild mbalax energy, fed by the clatter of the high-pitched sabar drums, with vocals that soared and fizzed with emotion and soul. Today’s Youssou is air-brushed and smooth, world music for global tastes, with a slickness that almost - but not quite – submerges the unique quality of the heart-stirring voice that made him famous.Salif Keita, that other super-charged West African voice, led the way back in the late 80s, with rock-flavoured productions by Ibrahim Sylla. As with Youssou’s more recent Read more ...
Owen Richards
Blessed with a red sunset and an adoring crowd, Noel Gallagher brought life to the ruins of Cardiff Castle. With support from fellow 90s alumnus Gaz Coombes, and Wales’s next-gen prodigies Boy Azooga and Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, the evening provided a winning mini-festival affair.From first striding onto the stage, there was no denying that Gallagher is at home on stages this size. He possessed a knowing confidence as he broke into recent rock-pop single “Holy Mountain”, throwing cheeky shapes at opportune moments and always half a minute away from pointing a finger toward the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
They’re back and they’re looking and sounding good – and Spice Girls mania took over Dublin’s city centre for several hours before their concert yesterday. Hotels were booked out, every other woman I passed in the street was wearing a Spice Girls T-shirt or hat, and by mid-afternoon the whole city appeared to be moving as one towards Croke Park. Yet despite the fans’ enthusiasm, there’s always a worry that recreating a brand – as the Spice Girls became – from their mid-1990s heyday may make them seem dated or an irrelevance to a generation well versed in feminism and their own versions Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Was it imagination or did The Waterboys’ audience at London’s Roundhouse, invited to sing along to “The Nearest Thing to Hip”, really sing extra-loud and lustily on the line “in this shithole”? On a momentous day that seemed to push Britain further toward the perilous unknown, Mike Scott’s energetic performance of the song from the band’s 2015 album Modern Blues certainly struck a chord, and his recollections of youthful visits to London and lament of now long-gone delights surely resonated with many.There was the record store in Westbourne Grove where the teenaged Scott was invariably told Read more ...