New music
Thomas H. Green
This month we have some unjustly hyped rubbish electro-pop, some unjustly ignored brilliant eletcro-pop, some postmodern retro-disco, some dubstep, some grime, some sampledelic New York punk, and, at the top of the pile, one of Britain's brightest young actors proves he's equally adept on the microphone. Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs plough loudly through the lot with glee and the odd barbed word.Riz MC All in the Ghetto (Confirm/Ignore)
So actors shouldn't try to become hip-hop MCs, right? Remember Warren Beatty in Bulworth? Riz Ahmed, however, was an MC long before he made his name with a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Club music has always been hard to keep track of, and never more so than in the current climate of constant genre meltdown and cross-fertilisation. Which is why the DJ's art is more important than ever, particularly in the case of scene figureheads like the indefatigable Gilles Peterson – known for over 20 years as a patron of all things jazzy, but lately proving brilliantly adept at reaching all corners of what he refers to as “left-field dance music”. Shows like his are ideal – necessary, even – for nurturing, contextualising and showcasing new generation genre-agnostic talents like 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 ...
Kieron Tyler
Luke Haines holds a small cassette player to the microphone, switches it on and the sounds of birds are heard. It’s “Me and the Birds”, one of his new Outsider Music songs. His old Britpop-era band The Auteurs were guitar pop. His next outfit, Baader Meinhof, were edgier, noisier. After that, Black Box Recorder were artier. But this is beyond any of that. He sings of drinking cocktails in the lounge of a Travelodge with the birds he’s heard outside his window. The Suede reunion wasn’t like this.Although The Auteurs cropped up just before Britpop, Haines was more arch than the aiming-high Blur Read more ...
David Nice
Now I know why the BBC Symphony Orchestra slunk so easily into Piazzolla tango mode last Friday: they'd danced it under Latin American instruction four years ago. It's all part of their education department's annual Diverse Orchestras week, where performers from another culture come to open the players' fantasy and the onlookers get to learn something into the bargain. And learning has never been more fun than it was last night in the Tabernacle, Notting Hill's vibrant arts centre, where the Fez Andalusian Orchestra under one of the world's great string players, Mohamed Briouel, set a zinging Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Don Kirshner on 17 January at age 76 is a reminder that although the age of the New York-based song factory seems to be long gone, pop is still about the backroom. Where would Lady Gaga be without a producer/songwriter like Red One? What Kirshner established with his music publishing company Aldon went way beyond getting songs to the performers. He set a template that still resonates through pop.Music publishers don’t have pop-star glamour or rock-star chic. Headline-grabbing bad behaviour is often confined to contractual wrangling. Back in the Fifties and Sixties – before The Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s a testament to the authenticity of the Scottish folk ethos that this band even exists. A bunch of mid-career songwriters going on a musicians' retreat, getting caught in the vibe, and deciding to form a band. It sounds like something from the Sixties. So sometimes do they, at least when Karine Polwart goes all Sandy Denny. And they half look it too, with eight of them on stage swapping vocal duties as a musical collective. And then there’s the hippy names like King Creosote and MC Soom T, which sound more jazz than folk. But despite being both experimental and folkie in their approach, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Mahler, Mahler and anyone who even remotely knew Mahler. There is, of course, more to the South Bank's 2011 season listings than this but the great symphonic agoniser (and his many chums) forms the bedrock of the classical programming as we all go wild for the centenary of his death this year. In contemporary music big names such as Rumer, Elaine Paige and Brian Wilson will pack them in, while newcomers like Josh T Pearson and Melissa Laveaux have first Southbank exposure. The London International Mime Festival in January leads off dance and performance, which has a child-friendly look this 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 ...
howard.male
Question: which American star had their third wedding in the Griffith Stadium, Washington in front of more than 25,000 paying fans and recorded the whole thing for release as an album? If you’re wondering how you could have missed hearing about such a quintessential 21st-century publicity stunt it might be because, firstly, this extraordinary event occurred in 1951, and secondly, because the guitar-strumming bisexual bride (who hadn’t even found a groom when the event was arranged) has almost disappeared from the history books.Today, Sister Rosetta Tharpe is mainly only known to blues and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I'm absolutely horrified to hear of the death this morning from pneumonia, following a swine-flu infection, of Trish Keenan of the band Broadcast. I had only ever spoken to her on the telephone, but many friends knew her well and she was one of those rare people in music who was universally liked and admired by all who met her. Far more than just a singer and frontwoman, Keenan, 42, was a visionary artist: from their beginnings in the Birmingham alternative scene, she and her partner James Cargill, who always formed the core of the band, always blended art and life, and created a beautiful Read more ...