country
Adam Sweeting
We're packed into the basement of Madrid's Costello Nite Club, a kind of narrow brick-lined tunnel off the Calle Gran Via. It's the kind of place where you could imagine finding groups of earnest jazzniks nodding along to atonal pandemonium in 11/7 time.Not tonight though. Onstage, we find a stocky, bearded gentleman in a burgundy-coloured jacket and fedora hat. He's leading his all-American band through a selection of country-rock, bluegrass, hoedowns and swamp blues, played with a downhome country twang and a topping of scorching country fiddle by Erin Slaver. From the look of him, you Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The story of Orion, aka Jimmy Ellis, really was a case of truth being weirder than fiction. “He couldn’t have failed, if Elvis had never lived,” we heard from Shelby Singleton, boss of Nashville’s Sun Records, which launched his career – meaning that Ellis was born with a voice so close to the King’s that he couldn’t escape becoming something of a stand-in. There was no other direction for his talent, despite efforts to clear matters up by recording a song, “I’m Not Trying To Be Like Elvis”.The mask he donned over his eyes to give an extra element of mystery was a stipulation in his contract Read more ...
Marianka Swain
If the thought of three hours of DH Lawrence fills you with dread, fear not. Ben Powers’ inspired melding of Lawrence’s trio of mining plays births a spellbindingly intimate epic with atmosphere thick as the coal dust engulfing this cloistered 1911 East Midlands village. The community is powered and oppressed by the industrial machine swallowing up the menfolk, but our focus is on the women’s claustrophobic domestic sphere. In Bunny Christie’s effective design, houses are both contained spaces and bleeding into one another, with no walls but rooms marked out: somewhere between Our Town Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Back in the early 2000s, it was rumoured that Ryan Adams had covered Is This It by The Strokes in its entirety. According to my extensive cataloguing of the career of Americana’s enfant terrible, only “Last Nite” ever surfaced (I have a live version, which opens with a couple of versions of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), but the point is that Ryan Adams is no stranger to these sonic experiments. Which is why, as a huge fan of both artists I have found it both amusing and perplexing to watch the internet collectively lose its shit over Adams’ version of Taylor Swift’s 1989.The parallels between Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing will ever test the depth, breadth and sheer virtuosity of a large orchestra more than Mahler’s symphonies. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the two unsurpassable concert experiences, for me, have been Bernstein’s Mahler Five at the Proms and Abbado’s Lucerne Festival Ninth, or that the two London orchestras with the most consistently challenging conductors, the LPO under Vladimir Jurowski and the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Sakari Oramo, have chosen to open their new seasons with the two most experimental of the 10 symphonies on consecutive nights.And “night” is the key word for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title of Don Henley's fifth solo album refers to the rural area of East Texas where he grew up, listening to country music stations like Shreveport's fabled Louisiana Hayride and absorbing the building blocks of the country-rock sound he forged with the Eagles. The Eagles went through many changes, but country remains close to Henley's heart, and Cass County sounds like the country albums that used to come out of the old Nashville in the 1950s and Sixties. Try his version of the Louvin Brothers' 1955 hit "When I Stop Dreaming", remade here as a scintillating duet with Dolly Parton.Despite Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg specialises in claustrophobic, asphyxiating atmospheres, from his breakthrough family abuse tale Festen to the more recent study of small-town paranoia, The Hunt. Moving from domestic close-up to the Wessex wide shots and cosmic panoramas of Thomas Hardy, there’s a grinding of gears, and choosing Far From The Madding Crowd as his Hardy debut, when John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation is so revered, seems provocative.The Wessex countryside comes across as postcard-pretty rather than awesome and bleakVinterberg has cast well, and Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Read more ...
mark.kidel
Iris DeMent’s settings of poems by the great 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova are as original as they are courageous: it's so easy to fall short of the genius displayed by the Russian mistress of the lyric verse. This is a work of love and devotion – prompted in part by DeMent’s adoption, along with her partner the equally original and talented Greg Brown, of a girl from the former Soviet Union.There is a kinship between the singer from the American South , raised in the Pentecostal church, and the tortured soul of Akhmatova, who lived through Lenin and Stalin’s terror, refused to go into Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American SingerAlthough there are different American music charts, success in one category but not another is not a marginal accomplishment. A major star on the country chart can be as popular, heavy selling and as big a live draw as one on the mainstream chart – now known as The Hot 100. But crossing over is still the dream. Taylor Swift isn’t for the country charts alone. Back in the Nineties, nor was Alan Jackson. The daddy of them all though was Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991). In 1955, his single “Sixteen Tons” figured as strongly on the pop Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, as I am, there’s a game that you end up getting quite good at: one in which you have to separate the stories, about the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ workingman, from the multi-millionaire songwriter. Roots rocker Jason Isbell writes from a similar place as Springsteen – albeit on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line – but his work has never presented as much of a dichotomy. Sure, it’s not like he’s at Springsteen’s level of success, but with his understated, gravelly vocal delivery and gentler melodies, his portraits of Southern life are Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury is an odd time. For some it means carrying on carrying on, trying to wring the very last drops out of the weekend and putting off the inevitable, stomach-churning lurch that will signal a nosedive into a colossal comedown. For others, it’s simply a day to be a bit more sensible: after all there’s a long drive tomorrow… Whichever, there seems to be a clamour for the familiar, something to cling to while you take the edge off with more booze or think about A-road alternatives to avoid congestion. This is where the faded glory of the "once-greats" comes in: mid- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Merle and Willie – these kind of senior country summits can either be a bit of a coaster, all well and good underneath your tumbler of Bourbon, or actually something to write home about. Keep this one away from the liquor. It’s produced by Buddy Cannon, who's worked with Willie Nelson on five albums since 2008, including last year's excellent Band of Brothers, and is co-writer on four more late-period Willie Nelson tunes – small, well-turned gems that continue to make the world a better place by being here, and collaborated on by text messaging, according to an interview in The Tennessean. Read more ...