singer-songwriters
Ismene Brown
To celebrate theartsdesk's second birthday on Friday, we held a panel discussion on The Art of Performance at Kings Place, London, in the Kings Place Festival. Actor Toby Jones, singer-songwriter Mara Carlyle, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and ballerina Bridgett Zehr discussed the challenge of turning work into performance and the moment of offering their artistry to the audience - their goals and inspirations, their best (and worst) performances, and their attitude to critics like us. We filmed the talk live, and below you can watch the event again as it happened, or you can read the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When I lived in Brighton in the mid-Nineties, a certain type was 10 a penny. Young, stoned, middle-class buskers, acoustic guitar strummers who were au fait with hip hop and able to improvise endless streams of witty wordplay and often to make human beatbox rhythms. They tended to have an innate sense that what they were doing was a novelty act, though, and as if embarrassed about adopting the tropes of rap for their whimsical amusements they rarely pursued it as more than a cabaret act – although you can hear echoes of what they did in certain bands of the time such as Gomez.Ed Sheeran is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
John Grant’s Queen of Denmark was released less than 18 months ago. Yet here it is, already being performed at one these "so-and-so plays such-and-such an album" shows. Does it merit this treatment? Based on last night, yes. This one-off reunion of Grant with his patrons, Texas’s Midlake, lit the Festival Hall with the beauty and literate miserabilism of his songs. In jeans, suit jacket and a T-shirt, Grant strolled on stage and the audience erupted in applause. He’s touched a chord.Although last night was billed as “performing the songs from Queen of Denmark” it was more than that. It Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On 9 September theartsdesk, Britain's first professional arts journalism site, will be two years old. To celebrate we’re holding a live debate with four leading performers during the Kings Place Festival. An actor, a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist will share their different experiences of performance. Join us, live or online, for a stellar event.Toby Jones actor | Mara Carlyle singer | Mahan Esfahani harpsichordistBridgett Zehr ballerinaLeading performers in different art forms join us for a live debate and lunchtime reception in the Kings Place Festival.Actor Toby Jones, acclaimed Read more ...
howard.male
While obviously not as seismic a Top of the Pops moment as Ziggy singing “Starman”, the almost contemporaneous appearance of the flat-capped Gilbert O’Sullivan hunched over his piano as if it were a dying coal fire certainly stuck in my memory as clearly as Bowie’s androgynous space-age carrot-top. Although the flat cap was quickly ditched in favour of casual knitwear and even a hairy chest phase (see pic below), today’s 64-year-old Mr O’Sullivan feels that his fate in the shape of his image was sealed all those decades ago, and he’s been fighting ever since to transcend it.Although a Read more ...
howard.male
I first heard Bahia-born Lucas Santtana on the best compilation of contemporary Brazilian music of the past couple of years, Oi! A nova musica Brasileira. His track “Hold Me In”, an acoustic slice of bossa nova, was a quiet interlude amonst all the dance, electronica and rock tracks. But it didn’t really give much indication of what an adventurous musical talent he might be.One curiously satisfying thing about this album is that one hardly notices which songs are sung in Portuguese and which in English (the divide is about 50/50), as focus is constantly being drawn to the sonically Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having arrived in the Golden State via Detroit and Amarillo, Texas, John David Souther became one of the architects of the Californian soft-rock sound. It didn't hurt that he shared an apartment with future Eagle Glenn Frey and lived upstairs from Jackson Browne. Souther never became a superstar in his own right, but thanks to his high-profile collaborations with assorted luminaries, his songwriting royalty cheques must have been artefacts of many-zeroed beauty.Natural History is a collection of songs from the Souther catalogue, tastefully recorded with a skilful chamber-rock ensemble using Read more ...
Paul McGee
By and large, Adele Adkins chooses to avoid the limelight, and therefore little is known of either her personal life or her indulgences, whatever they may be. The spectacular success of 21 suggests that her audience couldn't care less either way, which I think is quite telling. Compare and contrast, on the other hand, with the shambles formerly known as Amy Winehouse. When she emerged - or rather, came out swinging - in 2003, it was with some forthright opinions on her peers in her left hand and, for a 19-year-old, an arresting line in cynical, world-weary lyrics in her right ("Fuck Me Pumps Read more ...
howard.male
So how did you survive the 1980s? I don’t mean money-wise; I’m sure you had plenty of that. I mean musically and therefore spiritually. It was a diet of Thomas Mapfumo and old Nina Simone albums that got me through the first half, until the Red Cross parcel of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs arrived in 1985. Who knows how many times that treasured piece of vinyl got lowered onto my 30-quid hi-fi in my desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching thunder of Phil Collins’s drum kit and myriad other musical abominations of the period?Swordfishtrombones was the album that marked Tom Waits’s dramatic move Read more ...
david.cheal
Paul Simon is now nearly 70 years old and as he walked onto the Hammersmith Apollo stage last night it struck me that he is beginning to look like the little old man he will eventually become: still nimble, enviably trim, but nevertheless, he was noticeably older and more fragile-looking than when I last saw him five years ago. The second thing that struck me was a certain weariness in the opening songs - a mechanical quality to the playing, and a concomitantly flat atmosphere. The opening song, “Crazy Love Vol II”, was ploddy, while “Dazzling Blue”, from his new So Beautiful or So Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The prospect of seeing a band seemingly in thrall to peak-popularity Fleetwood Mac in a Shoreditch basement intrigued. Could San Francisco's Vetiver reproduce the glossy sheen of new album The Errant Charm live? The answer was no, and last night’s London show was all the better for that. As the guitars intertwined, the sonic swirl was more akin to a Seventies LA version of shoegazing than a recreation of the seductive West Coast sound.The time shift aspect of Vetiver is distracting in a live setting. It’s impossible to look at North Carolina transplant Andy Cabic and his band without being Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Mehdi Zannad isn’t a familiar name, but he’s issued a raft of albums as Fugu and has been championed by Stereolab. His profile in Japan is good, and he’s composed soundtracks in his native France. Fugue, the first album released under his own name, is co-produced by Tahiti 80’s Xavier Boyer. "Fugue" translates as "break away" – which he has from the Fugu guise. He’s also broken away from English. Fugue is Zannad's first French-language album. Language, though, is no barrier to basking in this summery pop.Zannad was inspired to sing in French after working on the film La France in 2007. Read more ...