wed 28/05/2025

New music

10 Questions for Musician Yoko Ono

Normally we introduce these interviews with a few biographical details about the subject. With Yoko Ono, however, there hardly seems any point: she’s as much a part of late 20th-century history as an musician. But if the whole world knows who she is...

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CD: Moby - Innocents

It’s one of the delightful incongruities of pop that Moby continues to be a presence. This 5’7”, bespectacled, bald, 48-year-old New York intellectual hardly seems frontline material in a world where One Direction and Jessie J rule the roost. Even...

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Darbar Festival: The ancient art of Dhrupad

This is a key weekend for lovers of Indian classical music or the merely sonically adventurous – the Darbar Festival in the Southbank has some of the most extraordinary practioners of the art from both the Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (...

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CD: Mazzy Star - Seasons of Your Day

Some people are lucky enough to have the sort of friends that, no matter how rarely you see them, you can call them up and instantly pick up right back where you left off. Some people are even luckier, and have the sort of friends that they see even...

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CD: Elton John - The Diving Board

A new album from Elton John is also a window into the world of Bernie Taupin. For four decades the lyricist, like a golfer who has always just won the previous hole, has had the honour of going first. It’s easy to forget that with songs from Elton’s...

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Kings Place Festival

Hungarian composer Bela Bartók’s analytical rigour and folk-inspired voice have established his position as one of the most original voices of the twentieth century, but he still represented a bold choice for the opening event of the 2013 Kings...

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Listed: The 20 best movie songs

Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled character reminded me of the power often exerted by songs explicitly or implicitly germane to a movie's narrative. They tend to have far greater...

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John Etheridge and the Soft Machine Legacy with Keith Tippett, Pizza Express

Some people have all the luck. Listening to John Etheridge’s self-deprecating description of how his career has progressed (in interviews such as Radio 3‘s Jazz Library, or at a gig, when he is a disarmingly open host), you would think he had...

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CD: Manic Street Preachers - Rewind the Film

The punchline about angry upstarts journeying to po-faced middle-aged is an easy enough one for a band to make, but over the past few years the Manic Street Preachers have managed something far harder: they’ve started to make good records again....

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Classroom Projects, Good Vibrations Records, Darrow Fletcher

 Various Artists: Classroom ProjectsIt starts with a plummy voice: “The poems, the words and the music on this record all come from children at primary schools, boys and girls of eight, nine, 10 and 11 years old.” Although the introduction to...

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CD: Placebo - Loud Like Love

Back when Placebo were the androgynous face of late period Brit-pop, back when singer Brian Molko’s every sneered utterance was snapped up by a lapdog music media desperate to fuel their retro-guitar addiction, they were supremely annoying. They...

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Cutty Cargo presents Jessie Ware, Ely's Yard

It was a bittersweet kind of evening. Walking down Brick Lane, it was striking how Caucasian, tanned and healthy most people we passed were, and we couldn't help wondering if the Bangladeshi locals were starting to get priced out of their own...

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