New music
joe.muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
People go on about how many members have been in The Fall, but I reckon even more have passed through Hawkwind. The Notting Hill counter-culture of 1969 in which they formed is a lifetime away, on another planet, and only Dave Brock remains from those wild, formative years under the Westway with Lemmy, Bob Calvert and co. But they still travel with that aura of proper rock'n'roll mythology – extreme, even insane, too far out, uncompromising and sometimes brutally overpowering.On this typically peculiar new album of old songs refreshed, new mixes, and new tracks, intimations of their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the term “world music” became a category in record stores, it’s doubtful that triple harps, cerdd dant and canu plygain would have been thought to belong under the umbrella. And yet here they were on display at WOMEX. The annual world music expo has put down roots in Cardiff this year, and to bid welcome to the delegates Cerys Matthews hosted a celebration of traditional Welsh music under the title Gwlad y Gân/Land of Song. Bar the odd burst of Under Milk Wood and a version of "Men of Harlech", very little of it was, for obvious reasons, in English.If Welsh folk music is less widely Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Still only a year out of college, the diversely gifted trumpeter, composer and bandleader Laura Jurd has risen rapidly to prominence, enterprisingly bypassing the ritual of hanging around to be noticed by creating her own scene and ensembles. One of these, the Chaos Collective, this week curated a small festival in which another, the Chaos Orchestra, last night performed a range of new work. Most hotly anticipated were the arrangements of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, celebrating the centenary of its first performance. Django Bates tells the story of Charlie Parker’s spontaneous Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Union J are a boy band consisting of George Shelley, Josh Cuthbert, JJ Hamblett and Jaymi Hensley. They finished fourth in last year’s X Factor.In November 2012, after being voted off the talent contest, teen competitor Ella Henderson revealed to Look magazine that she had actually been hoping for romance with Union J’s Josh Cuthbert, not George Shelley as everyone had previously assumed. Jaymo Hensley, meanwhile, revealed to the Sun on Sunday the same month that he was gay and also growing close to Katie Price.Twenty-five-year-old JJ Hamblett’s girlfriend, model Caterina Lopez, recently Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It had to finish with “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”, the commentary on a building block of British life which marks the passing of time more acutely than anything explicitly counting the minutes which precede leaving the field, whether in sport or life. Roy Harper originally released this elegy in 1975, when he was in his 30s. As last night’s encore, it was even more poignant. Harper is now 72. There were moments when he explicitly said he might not see an audience again. He was in fine form: alive, joking, scatty and, at times, on fire. It didn’t feel like a final bow, but with a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Phil Campbell (b 1961) has been guitarist with Motörhead since 1983. That’s four fifths of the band’s 38 year existence. His have been the dirty great riffs at the core of classics such as “Killed by Death”, “Flying to Brazil”, “Eat the Rich", “Stone Deaf in the USA”, “Rock’n’Roll” and multiple others. He has appeared on 15 of their 21 studio albums, including Aftershock, their latest, which initially comes cover-mounted on a special edition of Classic Rock magazine, but receives a full release in late November.First turned onto the guitar by listening to Jimi Hendrix, Campbell grew up in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone familiar with the hermetic sound-world of Argentina’s Juana Molina is not going to be surprised by WED 21, her first album in five years. Despite an added rhythmic pulse, a new use of squelchy and clanking electronics and a more spare approach, she hasn’t arrived in a new territory. More one where some fresh outsiders have been welcomed.That’s not to say WED 21 isn’t good – it is. It’s more that her vision remains so singular she has stepped beyond the boundary of self to become the presiding authority for a genre for which she has set the template. Her sound is rooted in rotating Read more ...
James Williams
Walking into London’s cavernous O2 Arena for Peter Gabriel’s So 25 show last night felt like stumbling onto the set of some David Lean epic: Peter of Surrey, if you will. With a number of imposing lighting and camera rigs framing the already roomy stage, the show’s chroniclers sat perched perilously in suspended chairs with their equipment focused on the band setting up before us.If it was not already clear, last night’s concert was filmed for posterity, or more likely a DVD. To explain the situation the film’s director appeared onstage to guide the audience through the night’s proceedings. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Of the many challenges facing a contemporary jazz quartet, there are, perhaps, several more pressing than becoming a gentleman. For this extraordinary band, their conviction derives from the affection, respect and detail with which they synthesise such a breadth of jazz tradition. Just arrived in London for the final leg of a tour to launch their second album Internationally Recognised Aliens, this first night of four at Pizza Express was an utterly compelling statement of that identity, spanning several genres of the contemporary jazz guitar. The gentlemen’s variety is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.Tucked just inside the north-west Read more ...