New music
Tim Cumming
A great wall of noise greets the audience as it settles in to the Royal Festival Hall - the sound of some heavy outer planet’s radio frequency, a subtly oscillating drone that recalls NASA’s recordings of radio emissions from Saturn made by the Cassini spacecraft. Lou Reed’s work station for the night is set centre-stage, behind a rack of electronic machinery, a row of guitars awaiting their signal stacked behind him, but for 20 minutes or so there’s just that continuum of noise – in fact the sound of three guitars leant up against a stack of live amps. Is this to soften up the audience’s Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Sometimes the back story doesn’t lead you to where you expect it might. Sometimes that turns out to be a good thing. Dan Arborise was born in Borneo to Polish parents, which opens up all sorts of musical possibilities, most of them probably far less exciting than they sound, but in reality his music is as English as sweet summer rain.I missed his first album, Around in Circles, released in 2006, but last year’s follow-up Of Tide and Trail made me sit up and take notice. This was woozy, trippy folk with a dash of west-country weirdness, a tinge of the acid-fried out-there-ness of Ozric Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To call Laura Marling folk rock’s Sylvia Plath for the Pete Doherty generation probably sounds like faint praise. But ever since I heard her described thus I haven’t been able to lose the Plath comparison. Fragile, sensitive, effortlessly talented; Marling’s all these things. But more, she’s a poet of feeling too much and caring too deeply, able to perfectly crystallise such emotions because she always seems to be living them. Capable of finding wonder in a wet weekend, or tragedy in a sunny afternoon because she never quite belongs. With the new album I Speak Because I Can, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite his "interesting" haircut and fondness for the undeleted expletive, violinist Nigel Kennedy is a man of exceptional taste and discernment. While recording his new jazz album Shhh! at Rockfield studios, he took time out to hail theartsdesk and greet the 'desk's Adam Sweeting.This is a hectic year for Kennedy. He's currently playing a programme of J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington on a German tour with his newly-formed Orchestra of Life, comprising young musicians from Kennedy's adoptive home, Poland, and at the end of May he hosts a weekend of Polish music (and other activities) on London's Read more ...
howard.male
With Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio landing on these shores this weekend, I found myself remembering one of the most memorable listening experiences of my life; the first time I heard Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music. How do you get your bearings in music that comes at you like amplified tinnitus, neither anchored by rhythm nor pulled into focus by vocals? Metal Machine Music is the authority that you must either surrender to, or flee the room from. Back in the Eighties, a friend of mine would listen to it almost ritualistically, so I felt obliged to approach it with similar reverence. Read more ...
howard.male
“I can’t fucking hear yer!” are not the welcoming words one expects to hear from a world music favourite, it has to be said. But the audience at Dingwalls don’t look like the usual world music crowd either. This Brooklyn trio have clearly crossed over into the more lucrative club global category, and their hyperactive light show is further evidence of this. But good luck to them, because they are certainly the best of the bunch at doing this whole funky, jazzy, ragga, reggae thing, as well as being far more interesting than the more pantomime-like Gogol Bordello (of which Tamir Muskat used to Read more ...
david.cheal
“I want to tell you a story. About a story.” Thus spake Laurie Anderson at the beginning of her new show, Delusion, which is running for four nights as part of the Barbican’s Bite season. It was a typically cryptic, teasing prologue from a woman who, for more than 30 years, has created her own unique brand of performance art from a combination of music, poetry, stories, visual effects and electronic sounds.Here she was accompanied by two musicians, on sax and violin, who spent most of the evening silhouetted behind two screens; by her own electric violin; by pre-recorded and sampled sounds; Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ben Drew, who records as Plan B, is busy on the promotional rounds. He has spent the day at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios being interviewed by Fearne Cotton and others for TV and radio, and performed his new single "She Said" as well as an ebullient cover of Charles & Eddie's "Would I Lie to You?" He's accompanied by a nine-piece band, including three gospel backing singers, and is as sharp-suited as the promo photos you see here.Drew, 26, grew up in Forest Gate, East London, one of two children in a single-parent family. He never fitted in at school, was often in trouble and was expelled Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week's birthday musicians include Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man”, Joel Grey advocating polygamy, Mikhail Pletnev playing Rachmaninov, early hip hop from Herbie Hancock and Afrika Bambaataa, Henry Mancini and Bessie Smith. Videos below. 16 April 1939: Dusty Springfield in her Southern soul phase singing “Son of a Preacher Man”. {youtube}dp4339EbVn8 {/youtube} 11 April 1932: Joel Grey has two ladies in arguably the best song from the film Cabaret. {youtube}oPOiaAU_vJg {/youtube} 12 April 1940: Herbie Hancock had one of the earliest hip-hop-influenced hits “ Read more ...
david.cheal
Earlier this week, when the line-up for Richard Thompson’s Meltdown festival was announced, one name in particular will surely have raised a few eyebrows: Paolo Nutini. Among the appearances by serious old folkies and earnest young Wainwrights and an “evening of political song” that Thompson has planned for his stint as curator of the annual festival on London’s Southbank, a show from this young Scottish singer and songwriter seemed a bit of a lightweight choice; perhaps even a controversial one.With two hit albums to his name and a fascinating back-story – he was spotted when he made an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Laurie Anderson's new show Delusion opens at the Barbican in London next week. Since the late 1960s she has been at the forefront of artistic innovation. From early pieces where she appeared in art galleries (wearing ice-skates in a block of ice that slowly melted), to her epic opera United States I-IV, she has carved out a niche as something between a poet, artist, technician, humourist, pop star and magician. We chatted over a coffee for breakfast in Paris last week, after I had seen Delusion the previous night.Anderson's last show, Homeland, was partly a response to the fact Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We have lost one of the great cultural catalysts of our time, a brilliant provocateur, a different kind of artist. Malcolm McLaren was a dear friend, who will be painfully missed – we spent, for example, Millennium Eve together with a few friends in France. When Malcolm hit on the “serious joke” of running for Mayor of London in 2000, he roped me into being his agent. It was a lost cause, of course, but at times it was a surreal and often comic adventure. But then one of his favourite sayings was “Any fool can be a benign success, it takes real courage to be a failure”.He was 64 when he died Read more ...