New music
Peter Culshaw
"There have been some legendary rock'n'roll train rides over the years", as music journalist Nigel Williamson put it, "but there has surely never been a train ride like the one Manu Chao took across Colombia in 1993." The travellers included Manu's band Manu Negra (a hugely successful band throughout Europe and Latin America at the time) and assorted other musicians, clowns, circus artists and tattooists, not to mention ice-sculptures and, a fire-breathing dragon called Roberto.The train toured, without security, from Santa Marta on the coast to Bogotá, one of the most dangerous areas in the Read more ...
robert.sandall
Speech Debelle – and she for one is not surprised. In a feisty speech accepting her nomination for the £20,000 prize, given annually to the best British album of the year, the 25-year-old rapper from South London warned the other 11 acts on the shortlist ahead of last night’s judgment that she planned “to take this one home”. By 10.20 last night the panel of judges agreed that she should, making Debelle the third female solo artist to win the Mercury in this century, following PJ Harvey in 2001 and Ms Dynamite in 2002, for her debut album Speech Therapy.Jubilant in victory, Debelle singled Read more ...
joe.muggs
Artists who are naturally awkward in their own skin can go in a number of directions. Many, including a good number of The Pastels' 1980s “C86” indie contemporaries, are content to simply be musically awkward, shambolic and ultimately rather pathetic and self-defeating. Others like, say, Talking Heads' David Byrne, charged with hyperactivity, take their awkwardness to the Nth degree and used it as a drive towards diverse creative explorations.Then there are those like The Pastels themselves – led by Stephen McRobbie, a man so uncomfortable-looking on stage he gives the impression that even Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What exactly is the point of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies? I don't ask this with any malice or hostility, just in a tone of inquiry. It is a question that I think his new Violin Concerto, Fiddler on the Shore, raises. That is, is Davies still here to shock and annoy, or to assuage? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Davies's baton presented the British premiere of the work last night, with Daniel Hope as the soloist, in the first of two proms that celebrated the composer's 75th birthday. Within its single-movement span were representations from the two opposing camps of Davies's life and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dot Allison was one of the true idols of my late teens. As the singer for Glaswegian E-comedown country-dub balladeers One Dove, her platinum bob and ruby lips, and ability to play otherworldly waif and sussed raver at the same time, made her seem impossibly glamorous – and even more importantly, the breathy purity of her voice as she sang “and where it is dark, there are ghosts / that give me hope” (in "White Love" – perhaps the greatest lost pop song of the 1990s) soothed me through endless adolescent traumas.One Dove managed just a single, glorious album in Morning Dove White, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Oasis have split up, but The Beatles keep getting bigger. This week, in a synchronised splurge of Beatle product of almost D-Day like proportions, their complete remastered albums are being reissued, the group appear in virtual form in the computer game The Beatles: Rock Band, and the BBC continues the Beatles Week which kicked off in a blaze of Kleenex-moistening nostalgia on Saturday. The Sunday Times even managed to exhume an unpublished interview with John Lennon, in which he sabotaged the myth of the great Lennon-McCartney feud by confessing that he thought Paul McCartney was jolly good Read more ...
howard.male
Why do Fol Chen make me feel so happy? To begin with it was just a smile that crept across my face when I stumbled across their barmy animated video for "No Wedding Cake". This mini-epic features a lip-synching fish, some lion-headed dancing girls, and an owl that ends up stealing the bleeding heart of a goat-horned man. Another promo, for the sprightly "Cable TV", has five mini-skirted girls going through the girl-group motions. But, needless to say, Fol Chen are not a girl group, so that made me smile some more.But charming and intriguing as their videos are, it’s the music that matters of Read more ...
robert.sandall
At first sight, it seems extraordinary that there has never been a serious biography dedicated to the Supremes before now. They achieved more than enough to deserve a shelf-ful. In their heyday from 1964 to 1969 America loved them to distraction: only Elvis and the Beatles bettered the 12 number ones the Supremes racked up on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Their popularity with white audiences who had been raised on the Elvis principle – that it was OK for pop to sound black as long as the singers weren’t - rocked the mainstream on its axis.Black acts from the Four Tops to the Jackson 5 Read more ...