rock
Barney Harsent
The thing about having a very distinctive voice is that it gives the audience something to latch onto. That’s all well and good, but it can also mean people find it easier to hear without listening. As the familiar tones and comfortable cadences of King Biscuit Time and former Beta Band member Steve Mason drift in, it’s easy to see how people could simply think, “Ah, another Steve Mason album.” Which it is, to be fair – but it’s also the rather wonderful result of all his former experiments.From the Beta Band – the glorious, stumbling and staggering Beta Band, with their moments of ragged Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something. The Seventies – that was when music had real value, when you had an album and it was like a book – something to treasure...” I’m not sure whether it would have been Martin Scorsese or Mick Jagger who said it, but at some point during the supposed 20-year genesis of this New York-based music biz drama, one of them did. Definitely.Vinyl, however, as the show’s near two-hour pilot ably Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Australia has long been a country shaped by its arrivals and, as this BBC4 documentary set out to show, so it was with rock music. Using the twin journeys of the Albert family from Switzerland and the Youngs from Scotland, it went on to map out the particular path that would eventually lead AC/DC on to global domination. The Youngs, you see, included guitarists Angus, Malcolm and George.The pairing of these opposites – the refined Alberts from Switzerland, who set up a music company that had been established for more than a generation by the time rough and ready Youngs arrived from Glasgow – Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was 20 years ago that Mick Jagger suggested to Martin Scorsese that they should make a film "that spanned four decades of the world of music in New York City". The idea has finally come to fruition as Vinyl, HBO's new 10-part series that kicks off on Sky Atlantic on Monday 15 February.The two-hour pilot show is directed by Scorsese and co-written by Terence Winter, who has previously worked with the director on Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street. It's a riotous ride through 1973 New York, a city then awash in debt, crime and sleaze, but also a seething musical melting-pot of punk Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It would be easy to write off The Jezabels’ third album as style over substance. The gaudy, synth-heavy gloom-pop of Synthia seeks to catch you off guard with its sexualised sighs, sinewy rhythms and liquid melodies. It’s only on repeated listens that its wider themes emerge: gender roles and identity; desire and disgust and, in “Smile”, a devastating put-down of the everyday street-harasser.It begins with “Stand and Deliver” – an immersive, seven-and-a-half-minute synthesised dream sequence during which frontwoman Hayley Mary transforms from wide-eyed ingenue into high priestess of electro- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the latter half of the 1980s, Wendy James’s band Transvision Vamp created quite a stir. Their music, including a chart-topping second album, was fizzing, bright-coloured, punky power pop and James was a pouting, hissy-fit of a frontwoman, emanating urgent wannabe-famous sexuality. She disappeared from view in the Nineties, turning up again in the new millennium, first with a band, Racine, and then solo.The second and final Racine album and James’s 2010 solo effort, I Came Here to Blow Minds, boast an unexpectedly effective gnarled, druggy punk. These were followed by a 2012 double A-side Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The Cult, functionally Ian Astbury, Billy Duffy and whoever else is joining them at any given time, have, like a peculiarly showy chameleon, constantly changed their colours without ever blending in. From goth pirates banging out breakthrough, incense-smoked anthems, they've progresssed through hoary heroics of cock-rock cliché, to dark, occasionally industrial and deeply confessional folly.Refusing to rest on their extravagant laurels, The Cult have largely avoided the heritage shades of many of their peers. Yes, there were a couple of tours to celebrate the albums Love and Electric, but Read more ...
mark.kidel
Few rock managers deserve a full-length documentary as much as Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who breathed life and inspiration into a lively young Mod group the High Numbers, and transformed them into The Who.They were an unlikely duo – a partnership which reflected the class-busting mood of London in the 1960s. Lambert was brilliant, cosmopolitan and gay: he had been to public school and Oxford, and his father was the composer Constant Lambert. Stamp was the son of a Thames tugboat captain, a cockney chancer with a sharp intelligence and a great deal of ambition.In a fast-cut, restless Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The year has seen great albums from the fringes – in English folk, Leveret’s beautiful instrumental debut New Anything, or Stick in the Wheel’s visceral, political, London stew of an album, From Here, and Sam Lee’s assured, exploratory second album, Fade in Time. In Jazz, there was the likes of Partikel’s String Theory on Whirlwind Recordings, and in World music, Songhoy Blues’ debut. However, the frontrunners for this writer's favourites of the year were both rock icons of wildly different hue – Keith Richards’ Crosseyed Heart and The Fall’s Sublingual Tablet.It took a while to settle on Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There's a line of argument – and a fairly convincing one – that this is the decade that pop culture lost its imagination. Right now the cinemas are booked out with the latest sequel to a 38-year-old movie franchise, my Twitter feed is collectively losing its shit to a new Twin Peaks trailer and a Stone Roses reunion is headlining half of next year's festivals. We haven't even been bothered to come up with a name for this decade, although when our children's children run nostalgic compilation shows dedicated to the "twen-teens" I will happily take the credit.Against a backdrop of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is, depending on who you listen to, either a work of unparalleled theatrical daring and creative genius or an unlistenable descent into ludicrously self-indulgent toss. Of course, these are not necessarily contradictory positions... Me? Well, I’m revisiting Queen now that I have an eight-year-old fan living in my house, and it’s been quite the eye-opener, as was BBC Four’s documentary. Queen: From Rags to Rhapsody, along with Days of Our Lives and Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, completed a trilogy of documentaries. It used the band’s sonic triptych as a reframing Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 100 Club is dark. Really dark. People are shrouded in the ink-light. I think it’s to save their embarrassment as they order a drink and realise they’ll have to either apply for a loan or sell a child in order to get drunk. In any case, the indoor gloaming provides the perfect setting for the opening act of the evening, Demian Castellanos. The creative helm of psych-rock act The Oscillation, he's on his own tonight with a wordless solo set showcasing new material.Starting off with tones and drones, Castellanos doesn’t so much create a mood as conjure up musical weather. There’s a gadget Read more ...