rock
joe.muggs
Welcome to the grown-up rock mothership. I've seen bands play in TV studios plenty of times over the years, but walking into the Later... With Jools Holland recording at BBC Television Centre for the first time, as I did last night, is something else. Studios generally have a disappointing feeling of smallness, or of looking behind the curtain to reveal artifice, but this genuinely was like stepping into the TV screen: the circle of bands and punters exactly as you see it when the camera spins around in the show's intro.For full disclosure, I should say here that I have never been a fan of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The protests around the Iranian presidential elections of 2009 brought home to many in the West not only how dominated by youth the pro-democracy movement in Iran is, but also how westernised the youth of that country are. Symbolised by Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death at the hands of security forces was caught on camera and beamed around the world, this was an Iran a world away from the glowering Ayatollahs and pepperpot women in black chadors we tended to see on news reports.No One Knows About Persian Cats is a timely reminder of the existence of this young, modern Iran Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In life Tom McRae is a cockeyed optimist. When his label, V2, dumped him, his response was to start up his own recording studio and to enthusiastically play every honky-tonk between LA and New York. It was the fans that kept McRae positive. An almost fanatically loyal crowd, they stuck with him through thick and thin and asked for little. Their demand was singular and a little perverse. All they wanted was to leave each concert feeling a little bit more depressed than when they went in.For, in music, McRae is a miserablist, out and proud. The Sixties had Leonard Cohen. The Eighties had the Read more ...
howard.male
What do you imagine a Swiss Cajun/Zydeco trio would sound like? It’s not a question that’s easy to navigate without slipping into the politically incorrect quicksand of racial or cultural stereotyping. So it gives me great pleasure to report that any narrow-minded assumptions I may have had in that department were instantly confounded by the reality of the life-affirming racket made by these three young men from Geneva as they rocked the basement bar of the St Moritz Club in Wardour Street.The first clue that this was my kind of band was the cover of their second and most recent album, Brule Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
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 ...
joe.muggs
The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I meet Corinne Bailey Rae upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho – she wanders into the room and a couple of record company types intercept her. I hear phrases like “consumer segmentation”, “demographics”, “functionality of streaming” floating across the room – it sounds like someone has a new type of iPhone app they want her to sign up to. She looks polite, if a bit bemused. But in a depressed record business, Corinne Bailey Rae is a really big deal.Her self-titled 2006 debut album sold nearly four million copies, went straight in to the top of the British pop charts, spent 71 weeks in the Read more ...
howard.male
Dr. Feelgood was the first band I ever saw live, and I can still remember that frisson of expectation queuing up outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1975. I didn’t even know who they were or what they sounded like, I simply had some pals who were soon-to-be-punks who’d got wind of the fact that these Canvey Island ne’er-do-wells were the harbingers of something new, something borrowed, and something blue. But the blues were only the starting point for "Feelgood" as we, necessarily, truncated their name.By the summer of 1976, Feelgood had become the best live band in the land. But by the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The prefix “Christian” can invite mockery. The suffix “rock” usually makes it worse. And a Christian Rock band celebrating 25 years in yellow and black Spandex? Surely that has to be a spoof. But I have news for you: Eighties Californian glam metal band Stryper are real, back, and tonight they rocked.Stryper were formed in a world where the more macho a band the more they wore make-up, and where the intricacy of the guitar work was in direct proportion to the volume of hairspray. Stryper made no concessions to such conventions. Nor would they make any concessions to their religious beliefs. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A series celebrating musicians' birthdays. 30 December 1910: Enough of all the seasonal jollity. With any luck, yours was more real than forced. The other side of New Years is, for many of us, a certain existential panic. What happened to the last year? How did we do? How the hell did it go so fast? And, more scarily, though hopefully invigoratingly, how many more do we have left? Paul Bowles, best known as author of The Sheltering Sky, wasn’t a musician exactly, but was a musicologist (the peerless collections of the Moroccan music he recorded are in the Smithsonian). In 45 seconds, he Read more ...
graeme.thomson
From the moment the roadies began assembling Dave Grohl’s drum-kit in a manner that resembled the construction of the Queen Mary on Clydeside, it was clear that power was going to be the watchword of last night’s Edinburgh appearance by Them Crooked Vultures, the supergroup that’s threatening to give the term a good name.Foo Fighter Grohl, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme have just released a surprisingly decent debut album, but at times they sound constrained on record. Rooted in lengthy jams that unleash great spiralling Read more ...
joe.muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...