Americana
Liz Thomson
From Muswell Hillbilly to Beverly Hillbilly, Ray Davies – Sir Ray – has long been infatuated with America and it must have been a great disappointment when the Kinks were banned from touring there in the mid-1960s. Then in the 1970s and Eighties they were reborn as a stadium rock band, criss-crossing the States and losing their audience back home.These days, Davies is a much-loved figure, drawing crowds at venues large and small, the power chords of those Sixties anthems recognisable to all and his quiet observational songs cheered to the echo. The centrality of the Kinks to popular music Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s a while since John Mayall last played Ronnie Scott’s, and the six shows this week didn’t begin to accommodate his many fans. The line to get in on Tuesday started a long while before show-time, and those who turned up hoping for returns will be pleased to know the British blues legend will be heading back to Britain in the autumn. Those lucky enough to possess tickets were treated to an excellent opening show, much of it drawn from his recent album Talk About That.Just as he did when Mayall celebrated his eightieth birthday at Ronnie’s, Nigel Price opened the proceedings with a great Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los Angeles, where it was recorded over seven days, with guest appearances from guitarist Jeff Beck and pianist and band leader Jools Holland, on whose TV shows May has guested several times.Life. Love. Flesh. Blood is the fifth studio outing for the girl from Dublin’s Liberties, and it's full of emotion, polished and stylised. May has performed with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of dystopian short stories about contemporary America (the wonderful Tenth of December is the most recent), it’s unlike any other. This is a tale told by ghosts, three in particular, who inhabit the graveyard in Georgetown where Willie, Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, dead from typhoid, lies interred.The urbane voices of hans vollman, roger bevins iii and the reverend everly thomas (their names are lower-case throughout, perhaps because they are shadows of their former selves) recount the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
An album to please old fans and make new ones, Windy City is a peach – even at first playing it feels like slipping in to a worn-in pair of jeans or boots, a comfy ol’ fit. And that’s because the songs are country classics and in our musical DNA.Alison Krauss might have grown up in Decatur, Illinois but she surely has Tennessee blood in her veins. Windy City finds her paired up with Buddy Cannon, a state native who’s produced albums by the likes of Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Billy Ray Cyrus. Her debut for Capitol, it’s her first solo outing in almost 18 years and she’s backed by some of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“I’m not necessarily the ‘I’ in my songs” declared Tom Waits in James Maycock's documentary, its title a tipping of the proverbial hat to another artist who, in his 69 years on earth, inhabited many roles.Tom Waits has mostly kept journalists at arm’s length and he’s never been one to talk about his private life, so producer/director Maycock (whose subjects have included Yehudi Menuhin and Yoko Ono) relied on archives for this rewarding 60-minute film. But he found plenty of other figures prepared to speak intelligently about his work, and in some cases about the man.Role-playing is a way of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.But there Ritter stood, pulpit to his right, flying-eagle lectern (the symbol of St John the Evangelist) to his left. The numbers of last Sunday’s hymns were still on display. Leonard Cohen liked to mix sex Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Ryan Adams’s 16th solo album since he debuted in 2000 with Heartbreaker reveals many influences, including AC/DC and the Electric Light Orchestra - notably on the opening track and single, “Do You Still Love Me”, where keyboards are to the fore. But mostly Adams is channelling The Boss.Bruce Springsteen seems everywhere evident – the vocal style, the keening harmonica breaks, the big echo and much besides: "Haunted House", with its pounding drum, acoustic guitar and a vocal line that coils around just a few notes; "Shiver and Shake", its vocal almost spoken over two or three gently Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The unsinkable Dolly Parton turned 70 in 2016 and the new year marks the 50th anniversary of her debut album, Hello, I’m Dolly. Pure & Simple is her 43rd studio album, its genesis a brace of stripped-down concerts given at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium which were reprised at Dollywood. Such a back-to-basics approach is much favoured by country musicians – Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Loretta Lynn have trodden a similar path. Everything is relative, however: the backing quartet multiplied in the studio yet still Dolly describes it as “almost like a garage band”.As ever, Parton’s Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind of people we’re learning to call the disenfranchised have been Shepard’s focus for the last 40 years, and now they’re global news. In Fool for Love (which there’s still time to catch at the pop-up venue Found III) he exposed the grubby truth behind the working-class alpha-male ideal. In Buried Child (which won a Pulitzer on its first outing in 1978) he turned his X-ray gaze on the traditional American family.The USP of this revival is its casting, with Ed Harris, Hollywood Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The 37th studio album from the man dubbed “the godfather of grunge” is raw, down and dirty-sounding – like many of the problems Neil Young grapples with. Recorded over four days at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-la Studios in Malibu with Jim Keltner on drums and Paul Bushnell on bass, this is Young in full-on angry activist mode, “fighting for clean water” and “standing against the evil way”.The Dakota Pipeline battle – “raging on sacred land” all year – against the construction of an oil pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux territory at Cannonball, is Young’s preoccupation on Peace Trail, though Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a collection of essays which chronicle and celebrate a decade when hope abounded, when it seemed (despite manifold horrors) there was still all to play for.That’s not to say it was all peace and love. Far from it. At home, Americans fought a bloody battle for the most basic civil rights and abroad a costly and futile war in Vietnam. Khrushchev decided to park nuclear missiles on Cuba and for 13 days the Read more ...