Reviewing The Clash’s 27 October 1976 appearance at Birmingham’s Barbarella’s, UK music weekly Sounds detected a particular, unique, characteristic of the band. Jonh (sic) Ingham identified “a Clash trick of everything dropping out except for Mick Jones' guitar, dropping back in two bars later behind a thundering crack from Terry Chimes' baseball bat sized drumsticks.”The drop-out was a feature of dub, the form of studio-created reggae which emerged in the early Seventies. Music historian David Katz has pointed to “Ivan Itler the Conqueror,” a 1970 single side credited to Bunny Lee Allstars, Read more ...

“Rimbaud, I guess. W.C. Fields. The family, you know, the trapeze family in the circus. Smokey Robinson. Allen Ginsberg. Charlie Rich, he's a good poet.”It’s 3 December 1965. Bob Dylan is in San Francisco to play the city’s Masonic Auditorium before setting off on other dates around California. He’s sitting down in front of journalists and TV cameras for a press conference. The response above was prompted by being asked “What poets do you dig?” Image What he’s just said is not followed up. Instead, the next question is about the nature of Read more ...

Confessions II arrives amid a welter of promotional spectacle and global corporate partnerships. At heart, though, it’s Madonna retreating from projects stuck in development hell, and working through bereavement, via the salve of making music in a low-key London situation with Stuart Price. He produced 2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, to which this is a sequel. The preceding singles did not bode well but Confessions II contains surprises and shows a superstar holding her own.Returning to the arena of clubland bangers, and presented as a continuous mix, it’s hampered by the fact that house Read more ...

The parade of stage musicals borne from films continues with Pride, which takes the open-hearted, small-scale 2014 movie of the same name and brings it to the stage with many of the film's creatives (director Matthew Warchus and writer Stephen Beresford) along for the ride. The unbridled appeal to the emotions will be familiar to those who know Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, two other musicals sourced in sweet indie English films that acquired a full-throttle theatrical life of their own. (Like Billy Elliot, this show, too, reserves musical pride of place for a song devoted to solidarity, Read more ...

I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020. During that time of plague and alienation, I time-travelled back to the era I had pinpointed as the beginning of this suitably dark and prophetic musical subculture: the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent. I planned to chart the course of Goth's rise from the ashes of punk and the economic crisis that paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government to take power on 4 May 1979. Then follow its course through the coming decade of Cold War, Miners' Strike, Read more ...

For many years Paul Weller had a conflicted relationship with the oldest parts of his back catalogue. It was rare to hear more than one of his pre-1990 songs in concert. Then he started slipping them in, but only a couple. Tonight, he’s clearly at peace with the whole of his long and varied career, playing seven songs by The Jam and four by the Style Council in a set well over two hours long. It’s a joy to hear these gems scattered with vital precision among the eclectic smorgasbord of what came after.Weller has always been a lean, urgent presence and he remains so. Chewing gum, iron-grey of Read more ...

“Enola Gay” is perfect pop, the ultimate party-uplift banger. It’s that rare song which only seems to grow better as the years, then decades pass. This is tricky to reconcile with the fact it’s about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (albeit opaquely). But, when Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark play it as the last song before their encore, the subject matter fragments amid its subversively joyous synth riff, as has been the case ever since it was a Top 10 hit, back in 1980. It’s greeted ecstatically, like the old friend it is. Image OMD’s set Read more ...

“Promise me delight” is a tantalising entreaty. One which – in its particular way – this captivating 17-track compliation delivers on. Promise Me Delight - Italo Disco and European Pop from the Golden Age digs into what its title articulates, with the golden age in question spanning 1982 to 1988, with an emphasis on 1983 to 1986.A specific form of Continental European pop is celebrated. One which was dancefloor oriented, with electropop leanings and an emphasis on tunes as much as on atmosphere and rhythms designed to move body and feet. Not much of this pulse-quickening, often-fervid, almost Read more ...

Will viewers tire of Rivals before It runs out of Rutshire Chronicles to adapt? Not if these screen versions of Jilly Cooper’s novels about toffs and hot totty in the Cotswolds are executed with the brio of the first two series.Like The White Lotus, Rivals has already set out its stall as a brand. It luxuriates in its idyllic location, all imposing sandstone piles and legions of big dogs and polo ponies, and has recruited the cream of the acting profession to inhabit it. The dialogue is smart, the tone exceptionally cheeky. Like the US show, it has a distinctive musical landscape – here, a Read more ...

Mille Petrozza was born in 1967 to a Calabrian father, and a mother who was a refugee from Communist East Germany. He grew up in the Altenessen district of Essen, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, where his father worked in the coal mines. As a young teenager, inspired by a KISS concert, he and school friends Jürgen "Ventor" Reil (drums) and Rob Fioretti (bass) started a band.By 1984, after going by various names, the band was called Kreator, with Petrozza the frontman and rhythm guitarist. Their raw 1985 debut album Endless Pain was followed by 1986’s seismic Pleasure to Kill. The latter Read more ...

The opening track is Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina.” After first appearing on the 1976 album Fearless it was re-recorded and issued as a flop UK single in July 1980. The new version had also been an OK-selling US single in 1980. The reason this deeply atmospheric, velvety, yearning country marvel had UK sales potential after it came out on minor-league British imprint Young Blood was due to radio play: radio play on the BBC’s Radio 2.“Evangelina” illustrates exactly what Wednesday Morning 6AM - Radio Hits From The Small Hours 1970-1983 is about: the musical continuum defined by a maverick aspect Read more ...

Stagefront are two silhouetted figures, heads at a strange angle. Like hanged men. Beside each is a robed demon sentinel with a burning torch. Overseeing all is a gigantic, trompe l’oeil devil, gnarly-fanged, eyes a glazed pink blaze. The demons touch their torches to the doomed mannikins who go up in flames. Kreator, amid the enkindled carnage, plough into the utter pummelling of “Endless Pain”, the title track of their 1985 debut album. The moshpit explodes again.The German thrash perennials, over 40 years into their career, are bigger than you might think. They’re filling 3000- Read more ...