punk
howard.male
“We didn’t have a real agenda. We just wanted to play some tunes and have a good time.” Thus spoke the immaculately suited but still mischievous-looking Mick Jones. And thank goodness he said it because, from the off - even before the off - I didn’t think anyone would. The interviewer (his ideological preconceptions crumbling) protested, so unfortunately Jones had to qualify his unguarded statement by saying he couldn’t of course speak for the other members of The Clash. But I wish he’d just left what he said as a big fat V-sign to all those set on creating a revisionist version of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Lydon is currently having a slight return. I caught PiL’s gig at Heaven a few weeks ago (featured as a bonus DVD disc on the deluxe edition of This Is PiL and reviewed elsewhere on theartsdesk). I wasn’t expecting much. Lydon, once the edgy heart of British punk, a mercurial, snidely uncomfortable presence, has graduated over the years into an eye-rolling pantomime dame and, of course, the butter ads and other misguided media forays forever tarnished his pithy societal spite. The concert, however, was visceral. PiL’s current incarnation are a musical force to be reckoned with and played for a Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to think of any other records as exuberantly hedonistic as the handful of singles this London band rattled off at the beginning of the 1980s. Yes, they were accompanied by the then necessary punk sneer which said, This is all strictly ironic. But the music couldn’t lie. The music really did want you to go wild in the country, even if naughty Annabella Lwin just wanted to sneak off for a fag. Or was naughty Annabella just an illusion too? The 40something Lwin who skipped and twirled onto the Islington Academy stage last night certainly had as much energy as the 14- to 18-year-old Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Funny how things turn out. As Damon Albarn has morphed from Blur’s Fred Perry-sporting jackanapes into the thinking man’s musical adventurer, flitting from opera to Malian music to cartoon conceptualist, Graham Coxon has opted to pursue the low key and lo-fi, seemingly happier hanging out on the margins than infiltrating the mainstream.Coxon is currently touring his eighth solo album, A+E. It isn‘t a bad place to start: A+E is a tremendous record, easily the best thing he has done as a solo artist and up there with his best work full stop. A harsh, furiously inventive collection of 10 noisy Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The Moscow girl punk band Pussy Riot say their impromptu performance inside Russia’s major cathedral of their song “Holy Shit” was a prayer. They were replying to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill who called it “blasphemy”.Speaking at a liturgy in Moscow’s Deposition of the Robe Cathedral, the Patriarch condemned Pussy Riot’s actions at Christ the Saviour Cathedral as “blasphemous” saying that “the Devil has laughed at all of us.”“We have no future if we allow mocking in front of great shrines, and if some see such mocking as some sort of valour, as an expression of political Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Manchester’s Buzzcocks were first to hit the seven-inch racks with their Spiral Scratch EP, but south London’s Outsiders were the first punk-era band to make a do-it-yourself album. The Wimbledon trio’s Calling on Youth, released in May 1977, was self financed, recorded at home and manufactured independently. Thirty-five years on, it’s reissued on CD for the first time today.The Outsiders weren’t by-numbers punks, even though they regularly played Covent Garden hot-spot The Roxy. Frontman Adrian Borland was influenced by America’s Doors and Stooges, whose Iggy Pop was so moved by one of their Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There are times when Paul Weller seems little more than a strutting anachronism, his gear-box jammed permanently in reverse. His appearance – a toasted walnut with a tinsel trim; or, if you prefer, Ian McLagan in aspic – is a pitch-perfect rendition of a clapped-out Seventies rock star. More than once in his long career his music has sounded similarly out-dated, all earnest huff'n'puff and stodgy “authenticity”. Sonik Kicks – thank heavens – is emphatically not one of those occasions. Instead it sparkles with psychedelic mischief and brims with youthful vigour. So much for appearances.The Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Well, better late than never. I wanted to see The Stranglers at The Roundhouse in April 1977, but a combination of homework, strict parents and being way too young meant that I had to make do with playing their debut album Rattus Norvegicus IV to death in my bedroom. Neatly 35 years later I finally made it and the band did their bit by performing more tracks from their early years than they did from their very well-received latest album, Giants.The quartet was in remarkably fine fettle. The part of Hugh Cornwell, who left in 1990, is currently played by genial Sunderland musician Baz Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This album caught me completely off guard. The Stranglers work of the late Seventies/early Eighties is classic post-punk pop but their critical and (slight) commercial comeback since 2004’s Norfolk Coast album has been less convincing. Giants, however, is a corker. The band’s oldest member, drummer Jet Black, may now be 73 – and is pictured on the CD wearing an oxygen mask – but this is the sound of a reinvigorated quartet utilising their last-gang-in-town status to create music that’s poignant, tuneful, and unafraid of adventure.Giants startles from the start, opening with instrumental “ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Hyper-energized and calculatedly ramshackle – thus echoing its subject matter – the documentary traces the emergence of the sync-sound super-8 filmmaking craze from the alternative art and music scene oriented around the CBGB rock club on the Bowery. Did you know that Jim Jarmusch was once in a band, the Del-Byzanteens, which supported Echo and the Bunnymen Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. Bible-black and whisky-soaked this is the work of a man who was born to be living through a depression. And still, there’s a lightness of Read more ...