rock
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes TV doesn’t need to be “challenging” or “groundbreaking” to be thoroughly worthwhile. The first episode of Sky Arts' new “…talks music” series saw the familar format of a live, seated interview applied to one of pop music’s highest achievers: Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie led proceedings in an attractive theatre in front of an audience of students. Most memorable were some blistering live demonstrations of Buckingham’s craft.Gerrie’s interview style may have been a little more One Show than Parkinson but still he kept the singer/guitarist well at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is studio album number 10 for the seasoned Seattle-ites, and on a first listening you might feel inclined to flip it into the bin marked "solid but unexciting". Give it a bit of time to breathe though and it starts to reveal its strengths.Among these are the lead guitar playing of Mike McCready, something of an unsung hero in the annals of axemanship but a chap eminently capable of blowing the bloody doors off in a variety of styles. For instance in "Mind Your Manners", one of the disc's standouts, he unleashes a blistering riff-and-chord barrage in a bring-back-the-Dead-Kennedys style, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There has been conjecture that Motörhead’s latest album is titled in honour of frontman Lemmy Kilmister’s recent health problems, notably the insertion of an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator) in his chest after he suffered cardiac arrhythmia and other circulatory issues. However, one listen to Aftershock gives the finger to any notion that his band is slowing down. It may not be a match for 2010’s The World is Yours, a beast of an album whose fearless Götterdämmerung defiance was startling, but there’s enough solid Motörhead jolt to satisfy.Boasting the ramped-up amphetamine blues- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was much to be said for attending the third and final show of Crosby Stills & Nash's Albert Hall stint, because this was the night when they played their debut album in its entirety. Clearly much – almost everything, in fact – has changed since 1969, but though the musicians are four decades older, their original collective spirit survives remarkably intact.The addition of Neil Young turned CSN into a supergroup, but the original trio had a natural cohesiveness the four-piece version could never replicate, despite the fact that they were completely dissimilar characters with very Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This 3D film lets you see the whites of Metallica’s eyes. Filmed live last year, the band are already gurning and grinning sufficiently to project their exuberance at playing their songs of rage and pain to the biggest hall's back without video assistance (singer James Hetfield is pictured below). Nimrod Antal’s cameras anyway let you experience US metal’s biggest and most enduring band as if you’re on-stage with them. It functions like one of Elvis’s concert movies, letting Metallica get to you on-screen if you can’t get to them on tour. It also tacks on a post-apocalyptic tale outside the Read more ...
Serena Kutchinsky
We all know the backstory of the Mighty Mac, the breakups, the betrayals, the addictions and now, finally, the reunion. These days they're more like the Mellow Mac with the emotional hatchets buried, lingering hugs on stage, and tender tales of their time as struggling Seventies hippies. Few other bands, not even Abba, have mined their private lives for inspiration to the same extent. Unlike today's manufactured pop-ettes who invent relationship strife to grab column inches and make themselves more interesting (Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, I'm looking at you), heartache has always been at Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A fortnight after its release, fans now know the Manics’ latest album Rewind the Film to be a rich, contemplative affair. The musical dynamics are intimate and seemingly best suited to small venues, like the one that features in the video for the single “Show Me the Wonder”. As I made my way across London last night, I wondered if this new sound was why the band had chosen to downsize from last year's O2 to the cosy surroundings of Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Was this "last phase of the band's development" to be consciously close-up and personal?To an extent yes, though not straight away. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nirvana: In UteroNext April marks 20 years since Kurt Cobain took his own life. Paving the way for that tragic anniversary is a reissue of 1993’s In Utero, the album which unintentionally became the band’s musical epitaph. Their third, it was written and recorded after Nevermind (1991) had pushed Nirvana to world-wide success. The pressures surrounding the creation of In Utero must have been immense and are utterly unimaginable to anyone outside the band or not close to it.Yet In Utero was and is an incredible album: the full-bore affiliation of Cobain’s ear for a pop melody and his Read more ...
joe.muggs
I once got quite excited by Kings Of Leon. Way back in 2007 I saw them play at the Astoria, and witnessed a band who appeared to be ready to parlay indie credibility and southern-states rocker charm into a genuinely interesting kind of mainstream success. And the album that followed, Because of the Times, seemed to live up to that, full of widescreen Springsteenian ambition while retaining just enough of the Strokes/Pixies buzziness they started out with.Then in 2008 came “Sex is on Fire” and “Use Somebody” – two of the most annoying songs of all time, so perfectly designed for absolute Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The punchline about angry upstarts journeying to po-faced middle-aged is an easy enough one for a band to make, but over the past few years the Manic Street Preachers have managed something far harder: they’ve started to make good records again. Rewind the Film is apparently the more sedate of two planned albums and it’s no laughing matter - even if a song called “Anthem for a Lost Cause” is straight out of Manics 101.From its opening couplet (“I don’t want my children to grow up like me, it’s too soul-destroying, it’s a mocking disease”) to its sepia-tinted title track, Rewind the Film is an Read more ...