New Music Features
The Arts Desk Radio Show 3Tuesday, 29 May 2012
After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Russell WatsonMonday, 21 May 2012
A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma". Read more... |
George Harrison: Something in the VaultsMonday, 14 May 2012
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. Read more... |
Levon Helm: 1940-2012Friday, 20 April 2012
Levon Helm, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 71, was not only the drummer in The Band, one of the load-bearing beams of American roots rock. He was also an astonishingly soulful singer, whether as lead or harmony, with a voice that seemed to imbue everything he sang with an unfussy yet absolute truth, as inescapable and essential as the earth. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Laugharne WeekendWednesday, 18 April 2012
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Busara Festival: Africa's long song of defianceSaturday, 14 April 2012
The 18th-century Omani fort in Zanzibar is silhouetted against a clear African night. Nneka, a bird-like Nigerian female artist in shabby leggings, is hammering out “Vagabonds in Power” on an open-air stage inside the fort, just metres from a sea of entranced faces. The song is a poke at Africa’s leaders, specifically their part in the Niger Delta mismanagement and related death and corruption scandals. Read more... |
Gavin Bryars on The Sinking of the TitanicWednesday, 11 April 2012
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Estonia: Tallinn Music WeekThursday, 05 April 2012
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across. Read more... |
Popcorn and Polymorphia: Jonny Greenwood meets PendereckiThursday, 22 March 2012
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects. Read more... |
theASHtray: Homeland, Kings of Leon, and we need to talk about AïdaSaturday, 25 February 2012
So Homeland is here, and mid-ranking-CIA-operative Claire Danes is chasing Marine-Sergeant-and-possible-al-Qaeda-double-agent Damian Lewis all over the shop (but really only in their heads, so far), and neither of them is getting anywhere fast, so Claire goes home for a kip and sticks on some relaxing music, and would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it? – another bloody jazz nerd! Read more... |
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