New music
joe.muggs
Steven Ellison is one of the most fascinating figures in modern music. Son of Motown songwriter Marylin McLeod and nephew to Alice Coltrane, he's inspired in equal part by his own musical heritage, the slow-and-low hip hop of his home state of California, and British electronica and drum and bass. His fans include Damon Albarn, Erykah Badu and Thom Yorke (the latter appearing on this year's triumphant Cosmogramma album), his Brainfeeder and Low End Theory collective of musicians and DJs are among the hippest on earth, and the world is pretty much his oyster. But can he transform his intensely Read more ...
theartsdesk
The premise of Jonathan Bate’s one-man play, directed by Tom Cairns, is simple but surprisingly effective: a trawl through the seven ages of Shakespeare, from babe to box, told through a mixture of biographical narrative illuminated by relevant scenes from Will’s work.Shakespeare – The Man From Stratford, Assembly Hall ****The aim is to fathom how a boy from an archetypal English market town became the world’s most celebrated wordsmith. We see how his life and work entwined; how the rhetoric and wordplay he learned in the schoolroom grounded him in the language of power and politics; how the Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.As well as reclaiming the rock festival from bovine crowds and sensory overload, the Green Man also provided a nexus for a rising scene of hirsute youngsters intent on mining musical source material outside the standard canons of rock and club Read more ...
david.cheal
The Academy was heaving, the floor was so sticky with beer that lifting one’s feet was an effort, and the crowd were beginning to lose patience. Frederick “Toots” Hibbert and the Maytals were late; a 9pm start for this London show was scheduled, but the appointed hour had come and gone, the minutes were ticking by, and the DJ’s efforts to keep us entertained with a string of ska and reggae classics were beginning to fall on stony ground. There was even some booing. Had it not been for the blast of cold air from the super-efficient air conditioning system that kept things chilled, tempers Read more ...
joe.muggs
One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.Listen to "Oscillations" and "Seagreen Serenades" by Silver Apples ( Read more ...
howard.male
Back in June of this year, the international successful Malian blues band gave what felt at the time like a curiously muted performance at the World Cup Kick-off Celebration Concert in Johannesburg. But perhaps it was the effect of having their laidback hypnotic grooves juxtaposed to the in-your-face emoting and hip-gyrating of the likes of Shakira and Alicia Keys that seemed to somewhat mystify the stadium audience. Because this is a band that seem to have little interest in doing any more than just playing their music, and humbly hoping that people will climb aboard without them having to Read more ...
howard.male
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! But this visual and musical treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient collective of musicians who, rather Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“This song is for my kids – and all their Mommas.” Even at 74, Kris Kristofferson exudes the quietly satisfied air of experience of a man who has spent at least half his life drinking, shagging, smoking and strumming to his heart’s content, and now has a whole lot of good times (and plenty of bad) to draw from at will.A former military man, sports champion and Rhodes scholar, his talent for raising hell was always balanced by his more literate side, and the musician who provided the obvious visual inspiration for the recent Jeff Bridges vehicle Crazy Heart long ago eased into elder statesman Read more ...
paul.mcgee
During the 1980s, a major artistic response to the Conservative government came in the form of a sustained surge in music that was, on some level at least, politically engaged. Not necessarily in the classic agitprop manner either. For every band of Red Wedge-compliant rabblerousers, there'd be another act insisting that "the personal is political", as they made domestic power struggles or everyday banalities their preferred songwriting topic. With a Tory government once more, pursuing an aggressive programme that possesses uncomfortable echoes of the Thatcher era, emerging Liverpool Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psycho-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s little-known Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI yesterday, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Tony da Gatorra.Da Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...