rock
Adam Sweeting
Back in Britain for the first time in 13 years, Tom Petty and his indestructible crew seemed delighted to be playing at the Albert Hall, and taken aback by the frenzied reception from the audience. They have a soft spot for Blighty, since this was where their debut album first started making waves in 1977 after being initially ignored in the States, but their long absence seemed to have had the effect of turning them into long-lost legends. Peter Bogdanovich's epic documentary about the band, Runnin' Down a Dream, has probably played its part too.Petty himself, now bearded and almost Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Sex Pistols played their final live show on 14 January 1978 in San Francisco. According to the third and final programme in the Punk Britannia series, “for many, it would be the end of punk”. It certainly was for ex-Pistol John Lydon, who'd form Public Image Ltd. Taking on the task of tracing what happened next was a challenge. Nothing was neat. Loose ends, new strands and evolution of the existing meant it couldn’t be. If this programme succeeded, it was in portraying the turmoil that came in punk’s wake.Bringing order where there is chaos is always difficult. As an overview of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ever since their original collaboration on 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have made music that sounded as old as the hills. Primitive and funky, they reduce rock to its raw materials, without flash or frills or any chords more complicated than a G7. For this new project (their first together since Greendale in 2003), Young has assembled a batch of elderly folk songs and traditional ballads and processed their simple chord structures through the Crazy Horse blender.Folk music connoisseurs will recognise several of these, even if Young has given himself Read more ...
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The end had long been nigh for The Cult, when it first came in 1995. It wasn’t just the booze and the arrival of grunge. It was as much that smart-arse Brit Pop was never going to have much truck with a man who called himself Wolf Child and wrote lyrics like, “Cool operator with a rattlesnake kiss”. More fool them. But yet, for all the brilliance of Love, Electric and Sonic Temple there was no denying things went seriously downhill after the fourth album. Still, fans have long believed in one last Memphis hip shake from the old peace dogs. And finally, on their second comeback, we now have Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As a teenager in the 1990s, there were two female-fronted bands that occupied my heart and my attention. Although I’d never have called Garbage my favourites, thanks to flame-haired Scottish frontwoman Shirley Manson it was fair to say that I felt more of a kinship towards them than many of their grungy contemporaries, so now Courtney Love’s blasphemous resurrection of the Hole name for Nobody’s Daughter in 2010 is a distant memory I’ll confess to having approached Not Your Kind Of People with far more enthusiasm than cynicism.“Blood For Poppies”, the first song to emerge from what amounts to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George Osborne dreams of. This culminated in the Night Train EP which not only contained guitars but managed the improbable feat of mixing in rap in a non-embarrassing way. Artistically, things were looking good. And when they announced with this year's follow up, the consensus was that their main problem would simply be the lingering issue of brand image.But 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 ...
Russ Coffey
This may be the Thick as a Brick 2 tour, but it’s also the 44th year of Ian Anderson’s performing career, mainly as Jethro Tull's front man. In that role he's variously been a bluesman, a rocker and a folkie.1972's Thick as a Brick was dubbed a "progressive rock satire". Tongue-in-cheek as it might have been, it was also 100 percent prog. Yet, like much of Tull’s back catalogue, it continues to influence a new generation. The question the crowd at Hammersmith were asking last night was this: at 64, could Anderson still pull it off?The answer in part is given by the new album. Here Anderson Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Some say that since Gomez beat Pulp to win 1998’s Mercury award, their progress has been a little disappointing. After two or three albums their infectious frazzled blues became replaced by anodyne AOR, until eventually all their wild innocence had gone. Maybe it was too much too early, or maybe because half of them migrated to the States. Either way, their last two offerings have felt like they're simply pandering to safe suburban tastes. Last night’s concert, however, was less about last year’s Whatever’s on Your Mind than the band's 15th anniversary. And, if Gomez have become increasingly Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Sometimes I feel I’m the only one who finds Jack White’s music overrated. Although he's undeniably a prodigious axe man, I've never found his trademark raw, “underproduced” sound as convincing. That, however, was The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. Now White’s made an album just under his own name. And that begs the question of whether he has come up with a new musical manifesto. And, if so, is it any good?Anyone hoping for a substantial creative left-turn will be disappointed. Blunderbuss still pounds the stripped-down blues rock trail. It's true there are more diversions along the way, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Suddenly, all America wants to be a redneck”. That might be slightly overstating the impact of southern rock on American culture. Californian ex-actor Ronald Reagan becoming president in the footsteps of Georgia’s Jimmy Carter suggests it’s an unsound declaration, despite the prime-time scheduling of The Dukes of Hazzard during Carter’s tenure. Sweet Home Alabama made the case for the rock music of the south, but failed to convince that it inspired a cultural shift.Instead, this was essentially the story of two bands: The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The path traced began with Read more ...