soul music
Adam Sweeting
Back in the days before you could bash together an album on a phone, recording used to involve a group of musicians playing together in the same room. Finding the perfect studio ambience and acoustic was 90 per cent of the battle, and many a veteran musician will tell you that the studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama were the greatest of them all.Many of these old troupers had been rounded up by film-maker Greg Camalier for this fine and evocative documentary, which avoided the Brian Pern-style cliches of the bog standard rock-doc by being packed with great stories, brilliant music and loads of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
For better or worse, it’s not enough these days to be a perfectly serviceable pop singer. With Saturday night TV shows churning them out by the dozen, you need more than an attractive face and an ability to hit the right notes to stand out. With her brassy voice and purposefully idiosyncratic looks Paloma Faith, who herself will shortly be mentoring a musician as part of yet another nationwide talent search, always seemed like somebody doing her own thing - it’s just a shame that doesn’t come across on her third album, A Perfect Contradiction.While this may be to do with the lengthy cast of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Trip-hop is much maligned as a genre, and understandably so. One of the worst names for a style this side of “folktronica”, it rapidly came to mean anything downtempo that wasn't a standard indie rock format – including plenty of the blandest music ever made. As the late Nineties drew on, it and other experimental electronica faded together into the even vaguer audio Prozac of the “chillout” section, all holiday show sound-beds and CDs on supermarket checkout displays for stressed shoppers to impulse-buy as their children pestered them for sweets.Think back, though, to the glories of Massive Read more ...
joe.muggs
For those of a certain vintage, Lisa Stansfield's voice is woven into the fabric of memory. Of course there was her 1989 monster single “All Around the World” (“and ay-ay-ay-ay can't find my baby”) – but just as importantly, we first heard her earlier that year on Coldcut's monumental bit of starry-eyed acid house utopianism “People Hold On”, which has been sampled, bootlegged and repurposed so many times that the tiniest inflexions of her “give a little life, give a little love” refrain are as familiar as our own faces.Of course, she was a middle-of-the-road soul singer before that, and Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you're looking for good vibes, you could do worse than watch people who've queued up for a surprise show by a megastar finally getting through the doors, having paid only a tenner. The buzz on the way into the Shepherds Bush Empire last night, in fact, was a real tonic – people whooping, spontaneously singing, grinning inanely. A quite peculiar mix of celebrities – Nick Grimshaw, Cara Delevingne, Alan Yentob and George Clinton – all took to their seats looking as excited as the 3,000-odd standard punters. This was what fandom should be about, and it couldn't have started off the evening Read more ...
joe.muggs
In a world where everyone is expected to be a “brand”, Gilles Peterson sets some very interesting precedents. Probably best known as a radio DJ – currently on BBC 6 Music, plus his globally syndicated Worldwide show – he also remains as in demand to play in clubs as at any time in his 25-year career, he runs the Brownswood label, and has his own Worldwide Festival, currently with winter and summer editions in different locations in France plus four years running in Singapore and one in Shanghai. And somehow his individual personality remains at the heart of all of this.His annual award show Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Neil Young: Live at the Cellar DoorCrosby, Stills, Nash & Young had fallen apart in summer 1970 and Neil Young was left to promote After the Gold Rush, his third solo album from August that year. He hit the road on his own after "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" had nudged the singles’s chart. As 1971 unfolded, the tour would be billed Journey Through the Past – he was playing recent songs alongside material from his earlier albums, including those made with The Buffalo Springfield.Live at the Cellar Door catches Young in Washington D.C during a series of dates over 30 November to 2 Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dev Hynes's path of artistic development is one of the most pleasing in 21st century music. The flamboyant black indie-kid risking life and limb to ride the local buses growing up in Hackney, who channeled his frustration at the lack of a place for him in the world through the awkward, aggro, occasionally inspiring but awfully named early 2000s electro-punk trio Test Icicles, has since then through sheer force of will carved out a space within the music world where he can be himself.Hynes clearly adores the whole aestheticHis sophisticated indie singer-songwriter guise Lightspeed Champion had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Brenda Holloway: The Artistry of Brenda Holloway / Various Artists: ERA Records Northern SoulAs the home of the Motown empire, Detroit dominated American soul music in the Sixties. Yet the label’s boss Berry Gordy bowed to the inevitable and opened a Los Angeles office in November 1963. The West Coast’s home of film was taking over as America’s music business hub. Brenda Holloway was among Motown’s first California signings and spent her time with the label shuttling between LA and Detroit, recording in both cities. ERA Records was Los Angeles born, and competed with Motown on its new turf. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“We grew up like animals,” says FAME Studios’ founder Rick Hall of his upbringing. “That made me better… I wanted to be somebody.” He did become somebody, and in the process put Alabama’s Muscle Shoals on the map. This film tells the story of how a small city birthed some of the greatest American music of the 20th century, and of the ripples which subsequently spread. The Rolling Stones recorded there in 1969. Five years earlier they had released their version of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On”. Hall was behind the original, his first production.Tucked just inside the north-west Read more ...
James Williams
"We got 42 years of music to lay on you" is an audacious opening statement for any live band, but when the speaker is Phillip Bailey, lead singer in the current reincarnation of the legendary Earth, Wind & Fire, it is a statement of intent. Playing at the palatial Albert Hall in support of their new album Now, Then & Forever, the current line-up of young session players, complementing the core trio of Bailey, bassist Verdine White and drummer Ralph Johnson, proved without a shadow of a doubt that they still have the energy and skill to hold a crowd enraptured.This is one of the first Read more ...
kate.bassett
The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, four-storey housing block hulking upstage. The adaptation is by Roddy Doyle himself, based on his 1987 comic novel.As many will also remember from the 1991 big-screen version of The Commitments, Doyle’s young protagonists are scraping by in Ireland, with no scintillating job prospects. But then they get together, form a band, work hard at it and wow a guy who has a recording studio. Though looking set to go Read more ...