punk
Peter Culshaw
“It’s not often you get a global superstar down at the Elephant and Castle,” marvelled a local who spent the evening dancing like a dervish to the infectious music of Manu Chao, who had breezed into London for a rare show last night off the back of a short tour of Japan and the West Coast of America. The first person I saw as an usher was Colombian philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera whose book What if Latin America Ruled the World? suggests - among many other things - that the US is becoming the next Latin American country. Like the others he was wearing a Colombiage T-shirt - the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ari Up, frontwoman of The Slits from the age of 14, died yesterday aged 48 after a long illness, it was announced by her stepfather, John Lydon of the Sex Pistols. The brilliant and confrontational female-fronted Slits were one of the finest examples of the punk era's DIY creativity, and also one of punk's most successful engagements with reggae. Ari Up never stopped being a fervent supporter of reggae culture in all its forms: after The Slits she formed New Age Steppers with legendary British producer Adrian Sherwood, and for many years she lived in Kingston, Jamaica where she was a keen Read more ...
bruce.dessau
In 1985 I travelled to Madrid to interview Jonathan Richman. Two questions into our perfectly amicable chat, proceedings assumed pear-shaped proportions. The eccentric musician behind the proto-punk hit "Roadrunner" announced that he did not want to speak any more so that he could preserve his voice for the gig that night. The rest of the interview was conducted by pen on a piece of scrap cardboard.Last night's show in a tiny bar in New Cross – part of a typically quirky mini-tour of intimate venues – briefly looked in danger of ending early too. Or not starting at all. Richman and drummer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a Memphis musician and occasional Rolling Stones sidesman (he played piano on "Wild Horses"). Tosches wrote that Dickinson's 1972 album Dixie Fried was "a dark gale-force reworking of old Southern music, a baptism of loud and dangerous rhythms, that stands as one of the great testaments not only of rock'n'roll but also of its ancient unfathomable Read more ...
bruce.dessau
A few years ago a friend told me that Brighton resident Nick Cave had been spotted singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at a local nursery. This might have been an apocryphal incident, but it still highlights a predicament of the older rock star. How do you deal with life's quotidian issues – the daily grind – while still rocking out? Cave’s fiendishly simple solution? Ignore the problem and do both, combining school runs by day with explosive gigs like this one last night.Grinderman might feel like a perverse back-to-basics outlet for the UK-based Australian, but, two albums of literate, swampy, Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Just before Edwyn Collins came on, the throbbing bassline of Chic's "Good Times" rumbled out across the packed South Bank auditorium. As a statement of intent it was pretty clear. Having suffered two debilitating brain haemorrhages followed by a bout of MRSA in 2005, Collins is understandably delighted to be gigging again. To paraphrase the old stand-up comedy opening salvo, he is probably delighted to be anywhere again. Some paralysis down his right side means he walks with a fetching silver-topped stick and does not play guitar onstage any more, but nothing held him back. His rapturously Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at the Bargehouse in the Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank for just three days ending on Sunday. It’s also a tribute to the genial genius behind the troupe, Pierre Bidon, who died earlier this year, at the age of 56.The exhibition features all sorts of memorabilia (and press cuts, including some by me from the not-very-lamented Blitz magazine - I went Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Get your tent and ice-box and plan your summer's entertainment with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from heavy rock by Scottish lochs to Morris-dancing in the south west, and taking on opera, classical and major international arts festivals for good measure. If you know of a festival we've missed, please email info@theartsdesk.com with brief details of venue, booked artists and the website and we'll put it in for the world to see. ScotlandRock Ness, 11-13 JuneDores, Inverness-shire, ScotlandFatboy Slim, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has been said that Dan Treacy (b. 1960) is the TV Personalities in the same way that Mark E Smith is The Fall. Certainly he has been the sole consistent member since they appeared in 1978 with the single "14th Floor" and subsequent cult hit "Part Time Punks". The early Eighties incarnation of the band, which included "Slaughter" Joe Foster and Ed Ball (later of The Times) has a claim to laying down the blueprint for British indie.Treacy's recurring themes of childhood, Sixties culture, and lo-fi, punky psychedelia became scene staples as Creation kingpin Alan McGee has acknowledged. The Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to believe that it’s 30 years since the release of The Clash's London Calling, an album that sounds as vital, immediate and relevant today as it did then. Yet there are probably people who remain more familiar with London Calling’s iconic cover than the music contained on the two discs of shiny black vinyl that came with it. Perhaps that’s one reason a new exhibition inspired by London Calling is about the cartoonist and illustrator Ray Lowry, rather than The Clash or the album itself. Lowry, who died in 2008, designed the sleeve, and the curators have come up with the excellent Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We have lost one of the great cultural catalysts of our time, a brilliant provocateur, a different kind of artist. Malcolm McLaren was a dear friend, who will be painfully missed – we spent, for example, Millennium Eve together with a few friends in France. When Malcolm hit on the “serious joke” of running for Mayor of London in 2000, he roped me into being his agent. It was a lost cause, of course, but at times it was a surreal and often comic adventure. But then one of his favourite sayings was “Any fool can be a benign success, it takes real courage to be a failure”.He was 64 when he died Read more ...
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.Alongside these many activities, Childish also co-founded the Stuckists, that rather silly anti-conceptual art Read more ...