tue 11/02/2025

guitar

theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Seasick Steve

Seasick Steve Wold (b 1941) has achieved widespread popularity over the last five years with his raw, rootsy, blues-flavoured sounds. He's also renowned for his customised guitars, such as one featured on his new album, You Can't Teach an Old...

Read more...

Wolfmother, Forum

Wolfmother: Riffery, proggery and big hair

Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century...

Read more...

Fleet Foxes, Hammersmith Apollo

Music folklore has it that this band from Seattle changed their name from Pineapple back in the hazy days before their debut album went platinum because frontman Robin Pecknold thought Fleet Foxes sounded like a weird, outmoded English sport - a bit...

Read more...

Disappears, The Borderline

Disappears: White-light intensity from Chicago

Sometimes you stare at live bands and question why they bother. It’s a pact - the band plays, the audience looks on and claps. Last night’s debut British show by Chicago's Disappears raised that question. The night before, they’d played Amsterdam’s...

Read more...

Seasick Steve, Electric Ballroom

Seasick Steve: The fewer the strings, the better

A guitar with one string? There is indeed such a thing. It’s played by Seasick Steve, and it consists of a stubby plank of wood, a pick-up and a couple of nails. And a string. The man born 70 years ago as Steven Wold plays it with a slide, and it...

Read more...

Rush, O2 Arena

Explosions, 40ft flames, light shows and back projections. It may have been at the Dome but at times it felt more like being in a music video. A mini-film opened the concert. Rush circa 1973 were boys called Rash, and they’d play only when professor...

Read more...

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Leeds Town Hall

They pluck, pick, slap, whistle, shout, hum and harmonise, effortlessly - they're not leaning on lamp posts: The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

The trick is to transform something relatively easy into something dazzling and bewilderingly complex. Seeing the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain is like watching eight masters of close-up magic. You’re not quite sure where to look, unable to...

Read more...

CD: Emmylou Harris - Hard Bargain

Forty years into her career, Emmylou Harris keeps on growing

Always renowned as an interpreter of other artists' material, Emmylou Harris has been a late developer as a songwriter. On 2008's All I Intended to Be, she successfully balanced cover versions with her own songs, but this time she has written...

Read more...

Miloš Karadaglić, LPO Foyle Future Firsts, 100 Club

Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s...

Read more...

CD: Moddi - Floriography

Pål Moddi Knutsen is from Senja, an island off north Norway’s west coast. Inside the Arctic Circle, it’s so far north as to be all but adjacent to the borders with Sweden and Finland. Due east, Murmansk is less than half the distance of Oslo. It’s...

Read more...

Jet Harris, the original Shadow RIP

Jet Harris was one of the architects of British rock'n'roll. His death rams home just how distant that era now seems. A former skiffler, he joined The Shadows after a spell backing Terry Dene, British rock's first bad boy. In time, Harris became a...

Read more...

CD: Josh Bray - Whisky & Wool

Josh Bray's songs are mellow on the surface, but there's turmoil churning underneath

This impressive debut from the Devon-born Bray teems with allusions to a raft of classic British songwriters, not least Nick Drake and John Martyn, though Bray also claims to have had his synapses jangled by everyone from Led Zeppelin and Nirvana...

Read more...
Subscribe to guitar