New music
Peter Culshaw
Welcome to the latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s occasional radio show, which normally has a global music focus. This week’s guest for the entire two hours is the musical cult hero and all-round good bloke Lu Edmonds.Lu has an unusual background, being brought up in Moscow and Caracas, and speaks Spanish and Russian. If you want someone with a widescreen take on pop and punk and post-punk music in the last 40 plus years, Lu is uniquely placed. He joined punk pioneers The Damned for the their second album. He’s currently a vocalist, saz and cümbüş player in the Mekons Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Even those with the most tangential connection to pop music will be aware that K-Pop is all conquering, and the likes of BTS and BlackPink are on some metrics the most successful of recent acts anywhere. But at the same time, there is also a growing awareness that there is a burgeoning Korean indie and art music scene, the flames of which have been fanned by what has become one of London’s most interesting and enterprising annual festivals, K-Music.This year's K-Music had another bumper crop of talent, the most intriguing being Park Jiha, a Korean multi-instrumentalist who creates immensely Read more ...
mark.hudson
Looking back on the most exciting, atmospheric and musically challenging gigs I’ve seen to date, there are several contenders in each category. But for the distinction of THE MOST DISTURBING GIG I’VE EVER BEEN TO there is only one possible option: the night in autumn 1973 when I saw a band called Dr Feelgood supporting Ducks Deluxe, a bluesy soully pub rock band in – of all places – Surbiton Assembly Rooms.The NME, then the Bible of pop, were talking up Pub Rock, a back-to-basics, real music in small venues movement, as the thing of the moment, and a bunch of us from school, maybe six, went Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“All of this music, it’s nothing to do with the listener,” Stormzy announced to Louis Theroux in a recent TV interview. “All I can do is feel what I feel and document that, and whatever that is, that’s what it’s going to be.”The 29-year-old rapper singer and songwriter, also known as Michael Omari, was talking about This Is What I Mean, his third album and, by some distance, the biggest departure, both musically and lyrically, since his incredible rise from the UK’s underground grime scene to stadium-filling stardom.The conversation comes after listening to a, then unfinished, version of “ Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Mary Gauthier’s first tour in more than three years landed at London’s Union Chapel on Saturday, concluding with another sold-out gig. The venue is perfect for unplugged acts – intimate, architecturally pleasing and acoustically spot on. But cold, on this windswept November night.The vibe, however, was warm and cosy. Jaimee Harris – Gauthier’s partner in life and music – opened with a half-hour set that set the tone for the evening. Relaxed, chatty – a living room concert in all but location – Harris was joined on fiddle by Michele Gazich (pictured below, far left), whose work with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Any reminder of the greatness of Love is welcome, and Expressions Tell Everything does this in fine style. A box set, it contains eight picture-sleeve seven-inch singles, a book and a couple of postcards. It’s very stylish.The period dwelt on is 1966 to 1969, over which the original band changed line-ups, fell apart and was then resurrected with new players behind main-man Arthur Lee for the Four Sail album. On record, Love began in 1966 as a hybrid of folk-rock and The Rolling Stones, and went on to incorporate Bossa Nova and jazz for the late-1966 second album Da Capo. The magnificent Read more ...
India Lewis
Arriving to the second night of two shows in the same venue, you would expect it to be a little quieter. But Wet Leg’s second outing at the O2 in Kentish Town was anything but – their burgeoning reputation (they are supporting Harry Styles next year) ensuring an excellent and enthusiastic turnout. The crowd was mixed, but with more than a smattering of the bald(ing) 6 Music dads that are now standard fare for any emergent alternative pop acts. There were two warm-up bands, described by one of the two frontwomen of Wet Leg with glee as the chance to organise their own mini festival Read more ...
Liz Thomson
On a dreary evening in our dark winter of discontent, a couple of hours spent in the company of The Manhattan Transfer was a joyous uplift. The sell-out audience at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall clearly agreed, happily engaging in a sort-of call-and-response on the first encore of “Tequila” and cheering them to the echo as they took what may be their final bow in this country as a quartet… but let’s hope not. For while this 50th anniversary tour may be their last, the evident joy these musicians take from singing together surely suggests they are unlikely to resist at least a few concerts Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Choosing packs a punch – the effect of which lingers. What’s captured by these 11 songs comes across as unfiltered, disconcertingly direct. And what it is that’s captured appears to be an account of someone getting to grips with how their lifestyle has had negative impacts.Much of the London-based singer-songwriter Sophie Jamieson’s debut album is – openly – about how alcohol was a friend which became an enemy. Jamieson has said the choice had to be made between whether to abandon it or surrender herself to its spell. Choosing’s opening track “Addition” is an account of a drunken night. “Long Read more ...
Robert Beale
If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.Schuldt has a very clear beat and makes his gestures economically, but every one of them works, and he gets precise and telling results. He’s appeared in this hall before, with the BBC Philharmonic in 2018, and with the same Strauss work, Tod und Verklärung, and we realised then that his command of an orchestra in a complicated score and the richness Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Wilko Johnson, who has died aged 75, enjoyed an astonishing afterlife while he was still alive. After Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood film Oil City Confidential (2009) restored his crucial former band's profile, a terminal cancer diagnosis in 2013 perversely flooded Wilko with the wonder of life, leaving this melancholy soul content for perhaps the first time.Renewed, surreal popularity climaxed when Wilko played Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny” for surely the last, tear-soaked time at Camden Koko that March. And yet, a doctor's suspicion of his continued vitality revealed a less Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...