punk
Thomas H. Green
The idea of "selling out" has clung to popular music, and indeed most art forms, for a long, long time. In our postmodern techno-consumerist society it's an increasingly outdated and irrelevant concept. The book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor shrewdly takes the whole notion of selling out to pieces, from the blues of the early 20th century to Moby's deconstruction of those blues decades later. Or rather, it simply points out there was never such a thing as a core purity from which anyone could sell out in the first place. Really, Barker Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The annals of rock’n’roll are littered with complacency, fading stars, and acts who’ve had it and then lost it, forever. So, after 20 years, what makes the Manics different? How come they’re still turning out hit albums? Possibly it’s their hand-on-heart, Welsh-valley principles. Maybe it’s the way they find libraries as interesting a subject as love. Or perhaps it’s the way that they keep recovering from the brink of near self-destruction. Listening to them last night, though, something else became clear.In their souls they still appear to be 19. It showed in their choice of first song, “ Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you’ve never heard a Gang of Four track, you probably still know their music. Their influence is all over the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, and R.E.M to name but a few of their fans. And that's just the musical legacy. Because Gang of Four, primarily active from 1978 to 1983, if they changed anything, changed the way bands considered the role of rock music. Paul McCartney may have wanted to fill the world with silly love songs, but Andy Gill and Jon King wanted to jam the airwaves with social injustice, war and disconnected lives.On the phone from his home studio in Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A freezing winter of discontent, a Labour party hell-bent on making itself unelectable, controversial warmongering and record levels of inequality. It may sound like yesterday’s papers but these themes were also addressed by iconoclastic post-punk artrockers Gang of Four in the late Seventies and early Eighties, more than 10 years before the Manics brought agit rock to the masses. Next Monday Gang of Four release Content, their first original album in 16 years.With their dance-friendly bass mated to Wilko Johnson-style guitar, Gang of Four were famously an influence on acts ranging from Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Over the last 25 years I've done a lot of DJing, or at least playing records in public that, occasionally, people have been refreshed enough to dance to. I've done sets in all manner of scenarios, from nightclubs to house parties, to gallery events, to a Finnish festival in front of thousands, to a Balham comedy club. The last used to pay me £300 a night to play the same cheese and predictability week after week, but one evening when I put on "Fools Gold" by The Stone Roses and my heart sank with boredom, I knew it was time to get out, £300 or no £300.So what is an "unexpected party Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It's been a while since the pop/punk and post/pre-Richey comparisons have been made. Ironic considering how seemlessly the Manics slip between modes these days. Today theartsdesk brings you an exclusive preview of the live, power-popping video of "Hazleton Avenue", due for release next Monday to coincide with their live digital EP, Some Kind of Nothingness (available on iTunes).Having had to postpone the Birmingham and London gigs in October due to James's laryngitis, tracks have been taken from elsewhere during the band's hugely successful tour, which recently took in Australia and the Far Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As New York gypsy punk live sensation Gogol Bordello tear into another Balkan rebel hoedown in front of a capacity Brighton crowd I'm reminded of an old Stones lyric, Jagger and Richards's 1971 classic "Dead Flowers": "When you're sitting there in your silk upholstered chair/ Talking to some rich folks that you know/ Well, I hope you won't see me in my ragged company/ You know I could never be alone". Gogol Bordello epitomise the rock'n'roll "ragged company", the scruffy outsiders.They revel in it. Extravagantly moustachioed frontman Eugene Hutz arrives on stage in a Homburg hat and shirt but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Musical luminaries including Mick Jagger, Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Liam Gallagher are lending their support to a campaign to save The 100 Club, the historic music venue in London’s Oxford Street. Soaring business rates of £4000 a month and an annual rental bill of £166,000 have driven the club to the brink of bankruptcy, and unless the savethe100club campaign proves successful, it faces closure by Christmas.Club owner Jeff Horton says: “The Government, Westminster council and even some of the commercial landlords say they want to help small businesses, they say they want to preserve Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.British folk has two distinct but interconnected strands, reflecting perhaps the (oft-forgotten) fact that we are an island people: a rootsy and sometimes purist obsession with homegrown tunes Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Unlikely cool. It’s what unites LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip. They’re the geeks and outsiders who made it to being hip on the dancefloor. These improbable, subversive electro-pop heroes have united this autumn for what for fans has been a dream double-headline tour. Both bands have had albums out this year and both albums have been well received. But for James Murphy the rumours are that this may be the last tour he does as LCD Soundsystem. And last night he sure was playing as if saying a long goodbye to the ones he’d loved.A joy of both bands is that although they essentially work out of an Read more ...
howard.male
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an amphetamine-fuelled chicken on rollers? No, it’s the one-time guitarist for Dr Feelgood (during the only period that matters) still doing the moves that made him the main reason to see the band in the mid-1970s. Now bald-headed and bushy-browed but still delivering those electrically charged stares (which he learnt to do during a brief stint as a schoolteacher), he had the air of a benevolent dictator last night as he surveyed the Academy’s crowd for would-be assassins to mock-machine-gun with his trusty Stratocaster.To an audience made up of Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is not easy to kickstart a fresh musical career after you've been in a painfully fashionable – and intermittently brilliant – band. It is even harder when this is your second bash at starting out again. And harder still when a couple of months ago you trousered enough money to keep you in leather jackets for a lifetime by briefly reforming that original band for a pair of festival cameos. Yet last night erstwhile Libertine and ex-Dirty Pretty Thing Carl Barât did enough to suggest that, if he digs his heels in, his personal rock drama might have a memorable third act yet.Barât's recent Read more ...