music industry
Owen Richards
The most famous face in musical history, and perhaps the instigator of modern culture as we know it; he truly was the King. But for a documentary focused on such an icon, The King touches very little on Elvis Presley the man. This is not another biography on America’s first son, but a study on the persona, the myth and the brand that was created around him.Everyone has their own idea of who he was: the hip-swivelling rebel, the military hero, the irresistible leading man, the grotesque Vegas attraction. He was, in every complex and contradictory way, the living embodiment of the United States Read more ...
Jo Southerd
Gota Fría, or “cold drop”, is a Spanish weather phenomenon associated with violent rainstorms, when high pressure has caused a pocket of cold air to dissociate itself from the warmer clouds. Meteorologists, please excuse my basic and probably erroneous interpretation; the point here is that any person who’s experienced mental ill-health will likely relate to the idea of a sudden dip in temperature, a torrential downpour, and the accompanying isolation. On Gota Fría, the Peru-born, Bristol-based singer-songwriter Beth Rowley explores darkness and light via classic songwriting, delivered Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“There’s a rhythm in the air around Memphis, there always has been,” Carl Perkins once said. "I don't know what it is, but it's magic." The city on the Mississippi lives up to its musical heritage with performance venues aplenty, and a host of museums dealing with its illustrious musical past: there's Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion with all its garish gold lamé costumes, cars and even private jets; Sun Studios is now a museum; and there is a Stax Museum, a Blues Museum and the much-praised Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum.Memphis-born music journalist, filmmaker and author Robert Gordon has Read more ...
Owen Richards
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts. Created with genuine passion, authenticity, and a dream list of guests, this documentary series proves to be essential viewing.Shad, an established rapper in his own right, became obsessed with hip hop in the 90s, but wants to go back to where it all began: the Bronx, hip hop ground Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Joe Penhall and the music biz? Well, they have history. When he was writing the book for Sunny Afternoon, his 2014 hit musical about the Kinks, he had a few run-ins with Ray Davies, the band’s lead singer. A couple of years ago The Stage newspaper quoted Penhall as saying that his initial “bromance” with Davies had “rotted into a cancerous feud”, and that the singer had wanted a writing credit for Penhall’s work. The pair have since patched up their differences, but the emotional fuel of this conflict powers Penhall’s latest play, whose production at the Old Vic gets a shot in the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Maen, a member of the rap collective Sa’aleek, was working one night in their small makeshift studio in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah. He dozed off, only to find the studio door had been concreted over and he was trapped. It took fellow band members 36 hours to dig him out, but Maen didn't seem that worse for wear. As studio disaster anecdotes go, that takes some beating... Palestinian musicians tell you of many difficulties, not just anarchic building in the camps, notably that there are at least eight different travel documents, allowing different rights of movement. One Read more ...
David Kettle
The crucial yet almost indefinable role of music in film – it’s a subject ripe for exploration and celebration, from the musicological technicalities of leitmotifs and ostinatos, through to the colourful characters working to bring directors’ sometimes vague musical notions to sonic reality. All of which gets raced through in this jam-packed documentary by first-time director Matt Schrader, a somewhat frenetic, 93-minute dash through the subject.Schrader has clearly put in a massive amount of work, and Score is very much a labour of love. He’s amassed dozens of interviews, with remarkable Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If the Small Faces weren’t quite The Beatles or the Stones, they were one of the classic British bands of their era, and their recordings are treasured by ancient Mods, Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher and even discerning representatives of today’s youth. Carol Harrison’s stage musical, evidently a labour of love by a devoted fan who knew singer Steve Marriott back in the day, successfully evokes the thrills and chaos of the mid-Sixties music business, and (better still) features an onstage band which manages to do the music justice.The quartet’s career only lasted from 1965 to 1969, which means Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The second decade of the 21st century will undoubtedly be remembered for huge innovations in accessing music, just as much as for the music itself. As well as acknowledging upfront talent, then, the Hospital Club’s h.Club 100 Music shortlist for 2017 makes it clear what’s going on behind the scenes is currently as important as what’s out front. It’s an era of fast and vast change in the music industry, and, over the last year, a select few have stood out at the forefront, demonstrating shrewd, even visionary awareness of where things are headed.Richard Davies, for instance, and his ticket Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway 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 wrecked glory that was Billie Holiday toward the last months of her life in the Lanie Robertson musical play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. A monologue fleshed out with three (excellent) musicians, one of whom doubles as a sounding board of sorts, Lady Day was originally intended to run in London this time last year when pregnancy unexpectedly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 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 soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...