music industry
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Wyndham's Theatre review – searing stuffWednesday, 28 June 2017Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy – "performance" seems too mundane a word – of the... Read more... |
Whitney: Can I Be Me review - tragic account of superstar who fell to earthWednesday, 14 June 2017The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the... Read more... |
Lost in FranceWednesday, 22 February 2017Pulling together a music documentary strikes me as a simple enough concept. Gather your talking heads in front of a nice enough backdrop, splice with archive footage in some semblance of a narrative order and there you go. There’s no need to, say,... Read more... |
On the road with Bob Dylan: the mother of all rockumentariesWednesday, 12 October 2016Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to.When director DA Pennebaker went on the road with Bob Dylan as he played a number of English gigs... Read more... |
Vinyl, Sky AtlanticTuesday, 16 February 2016You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had... Read more... |
The Easybeats to AC/DC: The Sound of Aussie Rock, BBC FourSaturday, 13 February 2016Australia has long been a country shaped by its arrivals and, as this BBC4 documentary set out to show, so it was with rock music. Using the twin journeys of the Albert family from Switzerland and the Youngs from Scotland, it went on to map out the... Read more... |
Rock History Revisited in HBO's VinylWednesday, 10 February 2016It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Groningen: Uniting Europe with MusicSunday, 24 January 2016The nature of Europe, its administration, institutions and its porousness are hot topics. Sectors of Britain’s media and political class hyperventilate over trumped-up concerns while real issues which are just about impossible to address remain... Read more... |
Opinion: The new London hall - 10 Questions we need to askWednesday, 06 January 2016So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening... Read more... |
DVD: Lambert and StampSaturday, 02 January 2016Few rock managers deserve a full-length documentary as much as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who breathed life and inspiration into a lively young Mod group the High Numbers, and transformed them into The Who.They were an unlikely duo – a partnership... Read more... |
We Made It: The Electric Recording CompanySunday, 20 December 2015Always desperately seeking the next profit-boosting lifeline, the record industry is getting all worked up about the "vinyl revival". While sales of CDs and downloads have been falling, those shiny black circles, once believed defunct, have been... Read more... |
DVD: Love & MercyTuesday, 01 December 2015Most three-act movies include a scene in which the protagonist and his or her intimates are at their happiest – a state of affairs that can’t last. Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner, the writers of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, lit upon... Read more... |