singer-songwriters
Thomas H. Green
Bobby Gillespie (b 1962) is best known as the lead singer and driving force of rock band Primal Scream. He was born and raised in Glasgow and met future Creation Records boss Alan McGee at school. The pair would later move to London and, after a brief period drumming for The Jesus & Mary Chain (he played on their influential Psychocandy album), Gillespie signed Primal Scream to the nascent Creation in 1985. After various different stylistic incarnations, Primal Scream captured the zeitgeist and hit gold in 1991 with their MDMA-electronic-dance opus Screamadelica.Primal Scream have Read more ...
peter.quinn
Album number three from Ivor Novello-winning singer-songwriter Laura Mvula sees her paying singularly personal homage to the music of the 1980s. Change, Chic, Michael Jackson and more are all called to mind at various points, with “Church Girl” seemingly nodding to the US songwriting and production team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with its textural palate of drum machine (a Roland TR-808, perhaps?), hand claps and shiny synths, plus a final fade to the unadorned beauty of the human voice, a stylistic trait which Mvula uses to exquisite effect here and elsewhere on the album.Whether it’s the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in dark days of the first lockdown when she was birthing her new album, Joan Armatrading was the subject of a TV documentary called, not surprisingly, Me, Myself, I, a fascinating look at a career now almost 50 years old. It was a powerful story of a woman who has always known her own mind, musically and otherwise, and who has always engaged with the media on her own terms and who has never ceded control of her music or her career to others. “I think it’s possible to be yourself and get on in pop music”, she has said. So she has proved.Kate Bush was probably the most original of the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Pop music, like Hollywood, is a dream factory: a place where you can be anything you like, as long as that’s not a middle-aged woman. I’ll hit the last year of my 30s next week, with the number one spot in the country held by a woman who has her driving licence but isn’t old enough to drink. Cannot relate. In either respect. Thank god, then, for the return of Liz Phair.Coming more than a decade since her last album, Soberish is a record with plenty to say. The woman who wrote “Divorce Song” when she was 23 has, in her 50s, written what may be the greatest ever song about divorce: “Spanish Read more ...
caspar.gomez
INTERLUDE 1: INVALID CODE-AGEDDON6.45 PM on Saturday 22nd May and all is well. Like tens of thousands of others across the UK (or maybe even more?) my wall flatscreen is tuned to Glastonbury’s livestream. Prior to the event itself promos for Water Aid and the like roll by, the kind usually on the huge screens beside the Pyramid Stage at the festival.One of my usual Glastonbury compadres, Finetime, is round, the fridge is loaded with beers, posh bottles of Bordeaux breathe by the radiator. Finetime has made his patent fiery quesadillas, timed for the 7.00 PM start. We’re going to make a right Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Well this is rather groovy! National treasure and the man with that voice, Matt Berry has been locked away in his lair, channelling the early seventies and twiddling with lots of knobs. Save for the drums, he plays every instrument (all 19 of them) on this magical mystery tour de force – that includes piano, Wurlitzer, Mellotron, Moog, Hammond, Vox and Farfisa organs. There’s no getting away from it, this man is ridiculously talented. But there’s also no getting away from the fact that you’re half expecting a joke at any moment. That’ll teach him to be so intrinsically funny.Be that as it may Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With over eight million copies sold in its 50-year lifespan, Déjà Vu was, as Cameron Crowe writes in the booklet accompanying this compendious four-CD edition, “one of the most famous second albums in rock history”. It was originally released in March 1970, only some nine months after Crosby, Stills and Nash’s influential debut album, yet in the space between the two, the tectonic plates had somehow shifted.CS&N had now gained their Y in the brooding form of Neil Young, and the indivisible tightness of the original trio – so exactly mirrored in their radiant harmony singing – now had to Read more ...
John Bungey
If you want to understand the psychic harm that prolonged lockdown can do to a man, then take a listen to Van Morrison's new 28-song set. Actually, you don't need to listen, the song titles say enough: “Where Have All the Rebels Gone?”; “Stop Bitching, Do Something”; “Deadbeat Saturday Night”; “They Own the Media”; “Why Are You on Facebook?”While Sir Van's vast catalogue is revered for transcendent love songs and joyous R&B, it also includes a sub-genre of complaint songs (“They Sold Me Out” on Magic Time or “School of Hard Knocks” on Keep it Simple, for example). With the singer stuck at Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never be my masters again,” the artist, real name Tyler Dozier, sings as the strings swell, in a voice like the wilderness. “Men will never be my owners again.”The distinctive minor-key arpeggiated riff that punctuates the track was, says Dozier, “originally supposed to be a worship song”. Dozier grew up up in Dothan, Alabama – a city named for the biblical location where Joseph’s brothers threw him into a well before selling him into slavery – in a strict Read more ...
Liz Thomson
At 85, Peggy Seeger has lived in Britain for most of her life, arriving in 1956 as a Radcliffe dropout at the invitation of folklorist Alan Lomax, who had plans for a British equivalent of the Weavers. That didn’t work out, but the visit brought her together with Ewan MacColl, folk singer, song collector, actor and left-wing firebrand. They wouldn’t marry for years, but they were soon singing together and living together, criss-crossing the country, kids in tow, playing clubs, collecting songs from communities of fishermen, miners, navvies and gypsies, and preserving a history that would soon Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn’t spent more time alone with their thoughts than they otherwise would have liked over the past 12 months. Manchester musician Caoilfhionn Rose has been confined a little longer: forced to take a year off from music after she became ill on tour in Denmark, her second album documents a physical, emotional and spiritual healing. A sonic and lyrical tapestry that is part inward-looking, part looking to the natural world for comfort, Truly offers a musical balm to a world getting ready to step outside again.The root of that universality is Rose’s Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ted Barnes is an outsider by design. Not in the sense of being wilfully awkward or outré – the music on his first solo album in almost 13 years years is gentle, harmonically rich, extremely accessible – but in that he has sidestepped standard career paths, and seems to be all the better for it. As guitarist for Beth Orton for a decade and member of the band Clayhill, he certainly had more than a glimpse of what music industry life entailed, hard touring included, but he chose to get off the treadmill and focus on composing for films, music libraries and acrobatics shows. And his music is Read more ...