New music
susan.whitall
Because Little Willie John died a lonely death in a Washington state prison cell in 1968, much of the baby boom generation grew up only half-knowing who he was. You’d occasionally hear that effervescent but distant voice on the radio, buried by overdubbed strings on the 1960 pop hit “Sleep”. Or maybe you’d hear a snippet of his lovestruck tenor on the torchy 1958 ballad “Talk to Me, Talk to Me”, played as an oldie on the radio. Even by the early Sixties, less than a decade after he hit big as a teenager in 1955 with the R'n'B classic “All Around the World”, Willie’s status as one of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's been a decade since Stevie Nicks's last album of new songs, Trouble in Shangri-La, but In Your Dreams proves that there's creative life in the old girl yet. Fans of the wispy tunestrel will be pleased to hear that she hasn't strayed far from her familiar stomping grounds of melodious folk-rockism and tales of love and yearning, the focus (in fine Seventies style) fixing on the singer's emotional trials and torments. The voice that sang "Rhiannon" remains suitably ghostly, and even with an overlay of mild croakiness, it sounds pretty good for a 63-year-old.The disc is crammed with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Motown label will forever be identified with its Detroit birthplace, even though it had a Los Angeles office in the Sixties. The shift west was completed in 1972 when founder Berry Gordy Jr moved the whole concern to California. Before that though, in 1971, Gordy had launched subsidiary imprint Mowest to ostensibly showcase Los Angeles acts and as a test run for the California move. This gold-chip compilation shows Mowest is worth remembering. Motown's Mowest Story 1971-1973: Our Lives are Shaped by What we Love is the first comp to dig into this all but lost imprint. It’s terrific.Mowest Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
Russ Coffey
“If you’ve got the heart,” sang a suave Ewan Macintyre, “then you can be involved, you can be a part”. There was more heart in the room last night than you’d find in a whole tour of Mumford & Sons. And art. Nothing too flashy to begin, just lovely interwoven mandolins and fiddles, driven by guitar rhythms and their trademark bluegrass banjo. Southern Tenant Folk Union might have been playing in a boozer, but if people call these guys a jumped-up pub band, they've got it all wrong.Southern Tenant Folk Union was formed in 2006 in Edinburgh, by Pat McGarvey, who played a five-string banjo Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tickets were like gold dust for this one and the stage was lit as if some of that dust had been sprinkled on the Festival Hall in a midsummer dream of a concert. The massed ranks of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra and a backing rock band magicked up on the Southbank to pay handsome tribute to the presiding Puck and genius loci Raymond Douglas Davies, alumnus of the William Grimshaw Secondary Modern School, in the manor of Muswell Hill. As the last night of the Meltdown series, curated by Davies, was it all hopelessly OTT? Short answer: yes. But it was also Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When I put together my book Rock Shrines, about places music fans go to pay tribute to their dead heroes, I was particularly struck by the story of Ben Cauley. He was trumpet player in Otis Redding's band, The Bar Kays, and the only person to be pulled alive from the freezing waters of Lake Monona, Wisconsin, after the light aircraft crash that killed Redding and the rest of the band in December 1967.I wanted to know what happened to him and my research eventually located him at Da Blues Restaurant in Memphis International Airport where Cauley was in-house entertainment. To my mind there was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Montréal natives The Arcade Fire sing in English. Yet 65 percent of the Québec city’s population have French as their first language. Les FrancoFolies de Montréal is Francophone Canada’s annual celebration of non-Anglo Saxon music. This year, big draws include French visitors Jeanne Moreau and Etienne Daho performing Jean Genet’s Le condamné à mort with musical accompaniment. Local legend Jean-Pierre Ferland is reprising his seminal 1970 set Jaune, the first Québec album to - controversially - fuse Franco sensibilities with rock dynamics. More than a festival, FrancoFolies is also cultural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Duane Eddy will forever be identified with his deeply twangy late-Fifties/early-Sixties instrumental hits like “Rebel Rouser”, “Ramrod” and “Peter Gunn”, he’s never gone out of style. His 1958 debut album was titled Have “Twangy Guitar” – Will Travel. And he has – through time and space. He scored a British hit with “Play Me Like You Play Your Guitar” in 1975. It didn’t chart in the US. His 1986 re-recording of “Peter Gunn”, made with The Art of Noise, was Top 10 in Britain. Now, here he is again with a new album, recorded in Sheffield with big-time fan Richard Hawley. His homeland Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Sir Paul McCartney recently suggested that Ringo Starr missed out on a knighthood because the Queen was too busy dealing with Bruce Forsyth. At least Ringo got to go to the Palace though. Albeit the one in Hampton Court, where last night, as if by magic, a torrential downpour stopped just as he stepped on stage. At one point during the day it looked as if a Yellow Submarine would be needed to get this critic home. In the end my purple Volkswagen sufficed.Starr certainly looked in fine fettle. The trim, neat, black-clad 70-year-old has outlived his doppelgänger Yasser Arafat as well as two ex- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It's fair to say that The Bookhouse Boys are not one of those bands who spotted a successful trend and thought, I know what, let's adapt our sound to that. The London nine-piece are often compared to Ennio Morricone but there are really only hints of that emotive Italian film composer. Their brass flourishes and general mood of Mariachi melodrama recall the classic spaghetti westerns but particularly on this, their second album, the mood is tethered to dark, punching walls of guitar and they don't really sound like anybody else.The band are named after the masonic secret society in Read more ...
joe.muggs
“This is what Ibiza used to be like,” said the man dancing next to me. I've never been to the White Isle, so I have to take his word for it, but he presented a very convincing argument that the commercialisation of dance music's Mediterranean Mecca has led to a polarisation of its crowds towards either ostentatious spending or mindless drunkenness – whereas Barcelona's Sónar Festival attracts more diverse and discerning hedonists focused on music above all. Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar. A large number of electronica nerds mingled Read more ...