pop music
Britain's Most Dangerous Songs: Listen to the Banned, BBC FourSaturday, 12 July 2014
The most notorious case of the BBC banning a pop record was the episode of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" in 1977, which was of course the year of Her Maj's Silver Jubilee. "That was genuinely dangerous," Paul Morley intoned gravely (the... Read more... |
CD: Anushka - Broken CircuitTuesday, 08 July 2014
As dance music once more sweeps the mainstream, we're returned to the situation of the 1990s where singer and song can seem to become a little detached. Parades of “featured vocalists” deliver refrains for the producer teams who are queueing up to... Read more... |
Begin AgainMonday, 07 July 2014
Movies about the music industry often end up being bombastic or twee or merely idiotic. This one, written and directed by John Carney (who made 2006's not entirely dissimilar Once), picks its way carefully around the pitfalls to tell a story of love... Read more... |
The Lance Armstrong Story - Stop at Nothing, BBC Four / The Nation's Favourite Motown Song, ITVMonday, 07 July 2014
The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Glastonbury Festival 2014Thursday, 03 July 2014
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday... Read more... |
CD: How To Dress Well - 'What Is This Heart?'Sunday, 22 June 2014
It seems a little ambitious to be thinking of those omnipresent end-of-year album best-of lists when it is barely summer, but there’s something about How To Dress Well’s “What Is This Heart?” that puts me in that frame of mind. Not because I can see... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Chris & CoseySaturday, 21 June 2014
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are a living lesson in the rejuvenating power of remaining experimental in art. Their music holds its own alongside the young guns of electronica, who indeed frequently idolise them, and in person they frequently... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Too Slow to DiscoSunday, 08 June 2014
Various Artists: Too Slow to DiscoToo Slow to Disco is about the five years from 1975 onwards when men and woman alike sported billowing white shirts, had wind-swept, pouffed-up hair and sang frozen-nosed, freeze-dried songs in sensitive... Read more... |
Arcade Fire, Earls CourtSaturday, 07 June 2014
When you have quite as much going on as 10-piece (in their current form) experimentalist Canadian indie band Arcade Fire do, it’s hard to know where to look. It’s a fact they’re aware of, and it seems like they even riff on it quite heavily with the... Read more... |
John Ogdon: Living with Genius / You've Got a Friend: The Carole King Story, BBC FourSaturday, 07 June 2014
It's something of a cliche to regard concert pianists as mad geniuses or nutty professors, and John Ogdon fitted the formula only too well. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he displayed absurdly precocious musical brilliance as a child, and in due... Read more... |
One Direction, Murrayfield Stadium, EdinburghWednesday, 04 June 2014
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Aarhus: SPOT Festival 2014Sunday, 11 May 2014
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster... Read more... |
