New music
Adam Sweeting
Not only was Channel 4's Top Boy a brilliant slice of TV drama, but it delivered a neat little pay-off over the closing credits with Charles Bradley's track "The World (Is Going Up in Flames)". An anguished chunk of classic soul, sung by Bradley in a gutsy James Brown-style rasp, it sounded at least 40 years old, but in fact it was only released in 2007 on Daptone Records' subsidiary, Dunham.Bradley's story could make a thrilling TV biopic of its own. Born in Gainesville, Florida in 1948 and raised in Brooklyn, Bradley experienced a miserably impoverished childhood, but yearned to Read more ...
matilda.battersby
“Rude boy! Rude boy! Ruuuude boooyyyy!!” The chanting from the crowd began soon after the booing subsided. The boos were in response to a picture of Margaret Thatcher which was flashed on a big screen as part of a short filmed history lesson about the late-Seventies malcontent that gave birth to the joyfully irreverent early British ska bands of which The Specials are surely kings.The crowd was made up of (and I hope they forgive me for saying this) rather sizeable blokes in their early forties, with shaved heads, a handful of whom were wearing pork pie hats. Original rude boys. The booze was Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
My most rock’n’roll moment of the last year was probably travelling 120 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road in a black Mercedes as part of Prince’s police convoy on the way out of Lisbon to the Super-Rock Festival where the diminutive star was headlining. The traffic was completely jammed on the way to the concert and it was the only way to get there on time. In the convoy also were Tim Ries, The Rolling Stones’ regular sax player, and Ana Moura - Prince’s most recent protégé and Portugal’s latest and most celebrated young fado singer.We were all slightly astonished to have arrived at Read more ...
howard.male
It’s a rare but delightful thing when a venue and an artist prove perfect partners for each other, as was the case last night with young French singer Camille and old English music-hall theatre the Hackney Empire. From up in the cosy darkness of the circle, it was clear from the moment that a ghost-like Camille stepped onto the sepia-lit stage to whisper/sing “Aujourd’hui” that there was something going on that was both steeped in vaudevillian tradition and wholly 21st century.But of course Camille has always relished attention-grabbing theatrics. When I first saw her live at the Jazz Read more ...
mark.kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the world’s greatest and best-known kora player. Plugged in deep to a musical tradition that goes back over seven centuries, this griot or jali takes his custodial role very seriously, but he is also an adventurer who has stretched the repertoire of his ancient strings by listening avidly to music from an astonishingly wide range of sources.All of this was already obvious when he first came to Bristol in 1987, to take part in a number of WOMAD-sponsored activities which were the subject of a Channel 4 film I was making at the time. Toumani, a fresh-faced 22-year-old, came Read more ...
joe.muggs
The “remix album” has a patchy history. From bodged-together cash-in collections of already-released B-sides via showcases of hipness (hello Radiohead!) to focused collaborations (Mad Professor's reworkings of Massive Attack being the best known), the range of approaches is diverse to say the least. If anyone can get it right, though, it's King Midas Sound's Kevin Martin. An inveterate compiler, collaborator and shape-shifter with many years' worth of extraordinary sound experiments behind him from industrial metal to lovers' rock, he is unquestionably adept at forcing unlikely aesthetic Read more ...
david.cheal
It’s guitar rock, but not as we know it. Anna Calvi, the Londoner in her late twenties whose debut album created a stir earlier this year and earned her a Mercury Prize nomination, makes music that has all the familiar, recognisable elements of the music that we call “rock” – guitar, vocals, drums – but her treatment of it is idiosyncratic; she exploits the spaces between the instruments as much as the instruments themselves to create a dark mood, an atmosphere of heightened sexual tension.It takes a bit of getting used to. At a sold-out Shepherds Bush Empire, on the London leg of her UK tour Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The biggest surprise with Someone to Watch Over Me might be that SuBo has actually made it to three albums. Last year’s release brought relief that the Simon Cowell machine hadn’t broken her. But with this new one Boyle actually seems to be forging a career of sorts. So, now that she no longer has the novelty value of being a current "reality TV" phenomenon, and three LPs in, how does her music stand up?Considering Boyle’s act was the stuff of a prime-time talent show, it's hardly a revelation that this record offers a few saccharine moments with a general feeling that, because of its release Read more ...
theartsdesk
Earlier this week Pete Townshend asked whether “John Peelism”, the ethos of supporting and celebrating small, independent artists at a grass-roots level, could survive the internet. His implied answer was clearly "no". Townshend levelled the accusation that Apple, the owner of iTunes, is “a digital vampire Northern Rock” which doesn’t support or invest in the musicians whose work they sell, particularly the more independently minded ones, but rather sucks them dry before moving on. Claiming that “iTunes exists in the Wild West internet land of Facebook and Twitter”, he went on to suggest that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Molly had a red shirt/ Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely/ Danny poured the beer all over Sally/ We all ran around the back yard/ It was crazy clown time/ It was real fun”. The voice is strangled, high. A treated guitar phases in and out, puncturing moaning sounds. A simple beat thuds. David Lynch’s fun might not be yours or mine, but his new album packs a punch. Crazy Clown Time is nightmarish. Seductive, too.It oughtn’t to be a surprise that Lynch has made another album. More surprising is how long it’s taken him to do it. Music has always been integral to his art. His first full- Read more ...
Russ Coffey
You may know Harry Shearer better as Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. His wife, Judith Owen, is as well known for her recent stage show with Ruby Wax, Losing It, as her own albums. But though they may have limited street recognisability, in the three cities they call home they are legendary for their hospitality. theartsdesk sampled some of this warmth in their London residence where, over tea, we discussed, amongst other things, dwarf choreography, mental illness and hanging out with Metallica.The night before Owen was giving a promotional concert for her new album, Some Kind of Comfort, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Boy, do Arctic Monkeys move fast. There were 21 songs in their set at the O2 Arena last night and at one point they were racing through them at such a breathtaking lick I thought I would be on my way home within the hour. In the end their performance clocked in at around the length of a football match thanks to some pauses to swap guitars. Plus a break for Alex Turner to stand by the drums and ostentatiously comb his elaborate quiff. Some sections of the crowd might have questioned Turner’s surprising 2011 rug-rethink, but no one would dare question his ability to pen a brilliantly infectious Read more ...