New music
The Unthanks, Songs from the Shipyards, Purcell RoomSaturday, 27 October 2012
When The Unthanks staggered into the spotlight with their haunting and beguiling Mercury Award-nominated 2007 album The Bairns, with bracing songs about infant mortality and child abuse, they became a folk band adored by people who don’t even like... Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Rebecca FergusonSaturday, 27 October 2012
Pop music has always been a cynical business. And yet, sometimes, I like to imagine an alternative universe somewhere before Simon Cowell made his millions and the reality television behemoth become the industry that it has become. The televised... Read more... |
Chas & Dave: Last Orders, BBC FourSaturday, 27 October 2012
Chas & Dave’s run of hits up the mid Eighties made them an alternative to the gloss of Wham!, Duran Duran and Culture Club. They had three chart albums in 1983. But was there more to their “rockney” music than a first take suggests? Were they... Read more... |
CD: Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Psychedelic PillSaturday, 27 October 2012
We last heard from Young and Crazy Horse as recently as June, when they released the bizarre covers album, Americana. By contrast, Psychedelic Pill is a gargantuan helping of new material - the first released by Young with the band since... Read more... |
Tampere Nights: Lost in Music Festival 2012Friday, 26 October 2012
Nightclub Tähti is on the seventh floor of an anonymous-looking building along Tampere’s main shopping street, Hämeenkatu. Black-suited security wave you into a lift which zips straight up there. After surrendering your coat at the cloakroom –... Read more... |
CD: Madness – Oui, Oui, Si, Si, Ja, Ja, Da, DaThursday, 25 October 2012
Pop is a cruel mistress. Watching numerous BBC4 rockumentaries, such as the recent one on Squeeze, a pattern emerges. You make it, go through an imperial phase when you can do no wrong, then the honeymoon ends. The records are still great but the... Read more... |
CD: Martha Tilston - Machines of Love and GraceWednesday, 24 October 2012
To the first-time listener of Martha Tilston’s work, the “folk” tag seems like a tremendous over-simplification. Right from its opening track, “Stags Bellow”, the songwriter experiments with novel percussion and call-and-response choruses to create... Read more... |
Grizzly Bear, O2 Academy BrixtonTuesday, 23 October 2012
If Grizzly Bear’s name is unfamiliar to you, you’ll certainly know some of the indie-folk bands they’ve influenced. These include Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, two of music’s more unlikely recent successes. Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear never seemed to want... Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Diana KrallMonday, 22 October 2012
Jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall has won two Grammys and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide. Born in 1964 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, she attended Berklee College of Music in the early 1980s and had her major breakthrough with... Read more... |
Hello QuoMonday, 22 October 2012
We currently seem to be awash with rockumentaries. The Rolling Stones have yet another retrospective out, while Friday night on BBC Four would not be complete without dusting off the back catalogue of some mid-table band once adored by some nice... Read more... |
CD: Calvin Harris - 18 MonthsMonday, 22 October 2012
Pop is a silly business in so many ways, but even so I don't think I ever imagined that when the year 2012 came, the globe's charts would be dominated by a dopey-looking middle-aged Frenchman and a lanky grouch from Dundee. But here we are, with a... Read more... |
Chilly Gonzales, BBCSO, Barbican HallSunday, 21 October 2012
Chilly Gonzales is a self-mythologising huckster, a throwback to a vaudevillian tradition of entertainer. He’s had enormous success producing the likes of Feist, is in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest solo piano concert (over 27 hours),... Read more... |
