tue 26/08/2025

New Music Reviews

Kano, Concorde 2, Brighton

Thomas H Green

Grime is having an ongoing moment. The current profiles of Skepta, Wretch 32, Stormzy, Novelist and others make this very clear. There at the beginning, along with Wiley and Dizzee Rascal, was Kano, as his new album Made in the Manor reminds us, harking back with bittersweet nostalgia to the scene’s earliest days as if they were decades ago.

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Adele, 02

Katie Colombus

Adele is resting her eyelids as the audience spills in, packing the 02, a huge video projection showing off those luscious eyelashes and dark eyeliner that have become synonymous with Adele style. Her eyes open as we hear the echoes of "Hello" before she appears on a small square stage in the middle of the auditorium, resplendent in a long, black, glittery gown. It's a spine-tingling, faultless rendition of the first hit from her most recent album.

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Little Mix, Brighton Centre

Thomas H Green

It says a lot that by the time Little Mix reach the final song of their encore, the recent mega-hit “Black Magic”, clad in silver sci-fi space bikinis and Barbarella-esque space-boots, it’s almost anti-climactic.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Pure Hell, Rexy

Kieron Tyler

The variables which help records attain cult status are usually permutations of obscurity, patronage, rarity and perceived or received notions of greatness. This fluid formula can make an album the acme of grooviness, even if barely anyone cared or had even heard of it when it was originally issued. Witness the Lewis album, L’Amour.

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George Martin (1926-2016), record producer and 'fifth Beatle'

james Woodall

For many pop-pickers, the presiding image of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee will be Brian May (he – yes, of course – of Queen) grinding out the national anthem on the roof of Buckingham Palace. For me, there was a much more meaningful moment later the same evening when Paul McCartney, Her Majesty and a tall grey-haired man gathered on the party stage, rubbing shoulders and so magically recreating a little trope of our recent cultural history.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Charlatans

Kieron Tyler

Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands.

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Barry Adamson, Komedia, Brighton

Thomas H Green

Barry Adamson has recently moved to Brighton and is clearly delighted with his new home town, which he refers to, shortly after starting his set, as a “dressing-up box by the sea”. Later in the evening he introduces the Hammond organ-laden “The Sun and the Sea” by telling his audience it was written about Brighton a few years ago, before he moved there, dryly informing us that he couldn’t fail to be drawn to somewhere that has “hail in the springtime and pebbles on its nudist beach”.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Prisoners

Kieron Tyler

When the Sixties-inspired The Prisoners released their second album Thewisermiserdemelza in 1983, the decade they looked to for their musical and sartorial style was closer to the album itself than it is to today. Now, the half-century remove from what the Medway band drew from then ought to be as distant as, say, the minutiae of 1916 are from those of 1966. Yet this is not the case.

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The Gloaming, Union Chapel

Tim Cumming

The Gloaming’s return to the Union Chapel in north London is a packed-out affair – and with good reason. Their British debut here, before the first album was released back in 2013, was a revelation. Few knew what to expect as Clare fiddler Martin Hayes, New York pianist Thomas Bartlett, Dublin-born viola and hardanger fiddle player Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, Sean Nos singer Iarla O Lionaird and Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill launched into the epic "Opening Set" from that debut album.

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Empirical’s Pop-Up Jazz Lounge, Old Street Underground

Thomas Rees

“I can’t believe it. Free jazz in Old Street tube, how cool is that?” It’s a relief to hear this kind of thing from passersby, because Empirical’s attempt to bring jazz to the people, to reach new audiences and develop their music through an experimental, week-long residency in a London tube station, could so easily have gone wrong.

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