folk music
Tim Cumming
Sunday evening was the last of a week of Kew the Music concerts – from Blondie to Paul Weller via Jools Holland and Leona Lewis – six nights, 8,000 people per night. The gate money is going towards the £400m facelift of the Temperate House, where the stage was set for the closing Sunday night of English and Scottish folk songs from Karine Polwart, Billy Bragg and Bellowhead.Polwart, with her brother Steven on guitar, and Fair Isle multi-instrumentalist Inge Thompson, delivered an early evening set of songs from her acclaimed recent album, Traces – "King of Birds", "Cover Your Eyes", "Tears Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Somewhere round about 10 years ago the concept of “folktronica” settled down to become a relatively stable area of music. Fringe its appeal may have generally been, but it incubated some major talents who are still making great music, and for better or worse primed general music fans' ears for the sounds of folk and thus arguably laid the ground for the monstrous success of Mumford & Sons.This year has seen a subtle resurgence in the sound, with artists affiliated to the first wave of folktronica like Tunng, The Memory Band, Colleen and CocoRosie all making extremely fine albums. But Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When Tunng started out in 2005, they were a peculiar proposition. Treading a fine line between Heath Robinson ramshackle and meticulous high-tech, ancient and hyper-modern, bone percussion and glitchy electronic sparkles, they certainly deserved the then-popular term “folktronica”. Though their melodies were unerringly catchy, their lyrics were so out-there, their lineup so unorthodox and their sound so psychedelic it was never likely they'd be more than a cult act.So why, last night, did they bring nothing to mind so much as Fleetwood Mac or Paul McCartney's Wings? Their new, fifth, album Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s just before midnight on Friday. A few hundred couples circle the floor of a school gym. On stage, violinists play a rhythmic music which cycles repetitively. Coloured with sad, minor notes, it sounds like a stately ancestor to bluegrass. Hands joined, the couples raise their arms above their heads. The woman spins. Breaking the link, the man suddenly bobs downwards, hops up and spreads his arms apart in a come-hither gesture. His partner’s raised hands say no. Linking arms at the waist, they resume the circuit.But he doesn't give up. He’ll try again and again to entice her. This is the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Lucinda Williams’s current tour might be billed as “intimate”, but anyone who has seen her perform before will know that intimacy tends to come with the ticket. It is true, however, that this pared-down format, in which she performs drummerless and accompanied – splendidly – by Doug Pettibone and David Sutton on guitars, pedal steel, bass and harmonies, brings the audience even closer to her extraordinary voice and unflinching words. In Edinburgh last night, the effect wasn’t “intimate” so much as visceral: at times it felt like placing a microscope over an open wound.Two of the first three Read more ...
peter.quinn
While the melodic and rhythmic subtleties of traditional Irish music are best experienced through listening to the solo performer, it's very much through groups that the music has reached a global audience. While some so-called "supergroups" have promised much and delivered very little – being nothing more than a session on stage with no thought for arrangements, pacing or mood – in this much anticipated UK premiere The Gloaming spectacularly fulfilled, and surpassed, all expectations.This surely has something to do with the fact that four-fifths of the group - fiddler Martin Hayes, guitarist Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been memorable nights at the Foundling Museum recently, with Alasdair Roberts delivering a superb solo show in April, while on Friday the Nest Collective hosted a double bill of Zimbabwean-born singer Eska and Bristol’s masters of English folk minimalism, Spiro.I’d seen Eska at Essaouira’s Gnawa Festival last year, performing with Soweto Kinch and Hamid El Kasri – she was so good they invited her back with her own band this year – and on the strength of her opening set in the Picture Gallery, the folks in Essaouira have chosen well. She has a powerful, emotive, and mellifluous Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Frank Turner has been setting his life to music ever since he re-emerged as a heart-on-the-sleeve singer-songwriter type some time in 2005, and so it’s hard to avoid the temptation to play therapist when considering his most personal collection of songs to date. Tape Deck Heart, his fifth album since then, is more love and loss than love and ire.It’s been billed as a breakup album so it’s not surprising that loss of the romantic kind features right from the opening track. On first listen, “Recovery” comes across as upbeat indie-rock-by-numbers but its jaunty chorus and effervescent wordplay Read more ...
bruce.dessau
If you want a jolting snapshot of how British pop culture has changed in the last three decades, take a look at the clip below of Billy Bragg singing "Between The Wars" on Top of the Pops in 1985. Even if the old Savile-anchored singles showcase was still around, can one imagine a contemporary singer having a mainstream hit with such a political song today? It makes you want to despair.Billy Bragg's 13th studio album, Tooth & Nail, seems to suggest that he is similarly troubled by the modern world. Despite their constant threat of nuclear annihilation, somehow the mid-Eighties suddenly Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Fairport Convention bassist and longest-serving member Dave Pegg is a genial raconteur. He is relating how he presented the band with the song “The Eynsham Poacher”, pretending it was his when really he had purloined it by taping it off someone, thus cheating them “out of £13.50 in royalties”. A light ripple of laughter rolls across this early 19th century church deep in Brighton’s Kemp Town district.There are a good few hundred people here, including many distributed around the church’s wooden gallery. The atmosphere is seriously partisan. Fairport’s fans are clannish. There’s even a jokey, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Richard Thompson has been stretching boundaries and defying expectations for almost half a century. An unassuming 63-year-old with a neat beard whose sole concession to showbiz is his jaunty black beret, though nominally a folk artist Thompson remains doggedly unaffiliated to any scene, trend or ethos.While still a teenager, with Fairport Convention Thompson was instrumental in concocting an organic blend of folk and rock. With his first wife, Linda, he plumbed the emotional depths of confessional singer-songwriting while also writing rude songs about licking lollipops. He has since scored Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hawkwind: Space RitualAlthough it was released 40 years ago, Space Ritual sounds contemporary. Hawkwind’s repetition, simplicity and single-minded focus effectively created trance-inducing mantras. Now, they cast a shadow over Six Organs of Admittance, Om and other voyagers into inner space. Space Ritual was a statement of intent and there’s no excuse not to get this reissue should your life lack one of British art-rock’s supreme achievements.In its original form, Space Ritual was a double album with a spectacular fold-out sleeve designed by the late Barney Bubbles. It was recorded live – it Read more ...