New Music Features
First Person: rising folk star Amelia Coburn on her French inspirationThursday, 01 May 2025
“Sandra” is one of my favourite tracks from my album Between The Moon and the Milkman which was released last year. While living in Paris a few years ago I shared a flat with an older French lady. We loved to chat every night when I came home from work, but one time she told me a story that stayed with me about her late husband, who was an abusive alcoholic. Read more... |
First Person: singer-songwriter David Gray on how the songs on his new album came to himThursday, 13 March 2025
Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. Read more... |
10 Questions for Black String’s Youn Jeong HeoThursday, 03 October 2024
The first K-Music festival landed in London for than a decade ago, and has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the stages of the capital, whether that’s the sorrowful storytelling tradition of Pansori, the sonic attack of bands like Jambinai or Black String, who return this year to King’s Place on 30 October, with the extraordinary sound of the gayageum – part harp, part oud, part theramin – under the hands of band leader Youn Jeong Heo. Read more... |
Here comes the flood: Bob Dylan's 1974 Live RecordingsWednesday, 18 September 2024
Lighters at the ready, because here comes the flood. Drawn from 16-track tape, 1/4in reels and lo-fi sound board cassettes that are now a half century old, the 27 CDs of 431 performances, 417 of them previously unreleased, of Dylan and The Band’s 1974 arena tour of the US, is a set that challenges the listeners’ staying power perhaps more than it celebrates an epochal tour. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Jaminaround 2024 - preview of the unique Dorset venue's second editionFriday, 16 August 2024
We’re in deepest Dorset, on the edge of the village of Cranborne. The sun has just set. A cluster of thatched rooves, ancient looking barns and outhouses. Read more... |
10 Questions for folk singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney - 'deeply personal songs that open out to the universal'Monday, 25 March 2024
The British folk artist and singer songwriter Olivia Chaney released her third solo album this week, as we break out into springtime, and she’ll be touring sporadically around the UK over the next few months, with a showcase at London’s Union Chapel in June. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Salzburg Jazz & the City Festival - perfection in free venuesTuesday, 24 October 2023
As a cultural destination, Salzburg really is hard to beat. Each year, a million and a half tourists descend on this compact city with its baroque architectural delights, and a population of just 150,000. The city of Mozart and of the Salzburger Festspiele was also once home to Paracelsus, Heinrich Biber, Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, and more recently – of course – The Sound of Music and Red Bull. Read more... |
'The music business was created for people like me who are not criminal enough to go to jail, and not mad enough to go to the nuthouse'. Sinéad O'Connor, 1966-2023Friday, 28 July 2023
Sinead O’Connor, who has died aged 56, was, the world agrees, a brilliant, unstable, unique talent, a provocateur with an angelic voice. The Mirror’s front page yesterday was a moody black and white picture with the headline “Nothing Compares…”. Read more... |
Appraising Billie Holiday's 'Fine and Mellow' - anatomy of a jazz masterpieceTuesday, 11 July 2023
On December 8th 1957 there was a heavy snowstorm in New York. Ten elderly jazz musicians struggled to make their way through the drifts to a television studio on 10th Avenue. One of them – the bass player – collapsed in the street, and died in hospital three weeks later. But the others got through because they needed to be there, they wanted to be there to support Billie Holiday, who’d been their close friend and inspiration for more than 30 years. Read more... |
'Time Out of Mind' Revisited - a deep focus take on classic DylanTuesday, 24 January 2023
The 1997 release of Time Out of Mind was the resurrection of an artist who appeared to have wandered off the reservation some years before, lost in transit on his Never Ending Tour, trailed by an army of "Bobcats" who followed him for show after grinding show. “How can you stand it?” he once asked of a woman who told him she’d seen dozens of NET gigs. Read more... |
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