Two London clubs currently appear to be under threat. The Ministry of Sound, one of the most successful brands in club music's history, is kicking up a fuss because new housing block planned opposite it may make it vulnerable to noise complaints. Meanwhile, rumours have flown around over the last 48 hours that police are lobbying Hackney Council against Plastic People in Shoreditch whose licence is currently under review for reasons of “prevention of crime and disorder and public nuisance basis”.It's funny that these two have become news at the same time, as you could not find two more Read more ...

A new report from Freemuse, the organisation which campaigns against music censorship, describes the oppression of heavy metal musicians in numerous countries. From the underground to the mainstream, heavy metal is a global phenomenon attracting millions of fans – but along the way it has gained many enemies too. “Long-haired music”, as it has been described in Malaysia and China, has been banned by both governments.In several Middle Eastern countries, both musicians and fans have been arrested and accused of devil worship. Heavy metal continues to be banned from radio and television in China Read more ...

Latin Music USA is a long-overdue exploration of the Latino influence on American popular music. The four-part BBC Four Friday-night series zooms in on the bicultural American populations rooted in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico, but living in their original entry points, Miami, New York, LA and the Tex-Mex border. The series examines the lifestyles and politics behind the music and their impact in the US beyond Spanish-speaking neighbourhoods. “Each programme looks and feels different, matching the cultures,” explains the London director, Jeremy Marre. In the early days, the Cubans and Puerto Read more ...

Here’s a deceptively simple question. What is African music? Does a band make African music simply by dint of the fact they come from Africa? One of last night’s three African Soul Rebels acts was South Africa’s Kalahari Surfers. Ensconced behind a table’s worth of laptops and other gismos, they made subtly menacing, dubby rock with an early '80s slant. And in fact they did it rather well, conjuring memories of Gang of Four and their ilk.Warrick Sony, the band’s vocalist looked and sounded a little like Billy Bragg, and his fractured, edgy guitar work was involving. There was even one moment Read more ...

This week’s birthday videos include guitarists Andrés Segovia playing a fandango, Japanese heavy metal hero Akira Takasaki and George Harrison. Then there’s Johnny Cash and murdered Afghan singer Nusrat Parsa. It's also the birthday of the mighty Handel. Videos below. 21 February 1893: Andrés Segovia plays Frederico Moreno Torroba’s Suite Castellana Fandango. 22 February 1961: Akira Takasaki is the metal guitarist’s guru as a member of the top Japanese band Loudness. Here he shows his impressive axe credentials. 26 February 1932: The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, sings “Ring of Fire” from a Read more ...

There is something eternally refreshing about catching a band on the first show of their first tour after the release of their first album. Banter remains untarnished by overuse; smiles appear spontaneous and gratitude genuine; mistakes are swatted away with a giggle and a sly curse. Hope – that most intoxicating of emotions – fills the air like the scent of fresh cut grass. When the group march off stage at the end of the set and plonk themselves behind the merchandising table, it almost seems churlish not to hand over your cash, if only to buy into the dream that, right now, everything Read more ...

And so to the windswept hangar of Earls Court, and the 30th Anniversary Brit Awards. Except it wasn’t, because as any pedant knows the very first Brits (then mystifyingly entitled the British Record Industry Britannia Centenary Awards) occurred in 1977. No matter. Lady Gaga cleaned up with her outlandish couture-pop, the increasingly annoying Lily Allen turned up in her underwear to win the Best British Female Solo Artist award and daringly told host Peter Kay to **** off, and Liam Gallagher oafishly threw the microphone into the audience after picking up the Brits Album of the Last 30 Years Read more ...

The death at the weekend of Doug Fieger, the co-founder of The Knack, meant that melodic US pop had lost a fine exponent. But more than 30 years on from the eternal über-hit "My Sharona" the appeal of infectious hook-lined music lives on in the work of preppy foursome Vampire Weekend, who have made their name by mixing new wave revivalism with African beats, dubbing their style “Upper West Side Soweto”.Contra, the quartet's January follow-up to their 2008 eponymous debut, received mixed reviews. theartsdesk came down particularly hard on the band's derivative style, which frequently owed a Read more ...

Oumou Sangare, Malian diva and one of the world’s great singers, is not, as I eventually found out myself, a woman to be trifled with. When she bought some land outside Bamako, the capital of Mali, a local official by accident or oversight also sold the land to someone else who planted the fields. Sangare turned up with a bulldozer and destroyed the man’s crops. She also had a quiet word with the President of Mali and got the offending official sacked. I could easily imagine Sangare in her preferred garb of traditional colourful African robes and Parisian stilettos in the driving seat of a Read more ...

The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians. Crucially, though, that ideology comes through at least as strongly in the saxophonist’s music, the mix of jazz and Middle Eastern folk music pursued by his now decade- Read more ...

Along with the compact disc and record company profits, the Guitar Hero has become virtually extinct in the modern era. Thus, finding two gilt-edged specimens of this increasingly scarce breed sharing a stage is gold dust indeed. Both of them have been drenched in accolades, Jeff Beck having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice and Eric Clapton three times.Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds in 1965 after "God" decided that the group were becoming too commercial and un-bluesy, but while Clapton has remained stubbornly true to his blues calling over the decades, Beck has Read more ...

“The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself” says Kevin Warwick, one of the boffins interviewed on screen in Three Tales, the “video opera” from composer Steve Reich and his partner - they live as well as work together- video artist Beryl Korot, their “meditation on 20th Century technology.” When I met them the morning after the launch party in Amsterdam I could have done with an upgrade myself.Three Tales will be reprised next week at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge for four late night performances from the 17th – the first time the piece will have been reprised  Read more ...