disco
Kieron Tyler
With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There is a tradition in oral storytelling of individual embellishments and flourishes, of one tale taking many forms – the more it is told, the finer the detail. Characters are added and the narrative extended. In this way, stories stand up to near endless repetition for they always have something new to offer us, there is always something new to learn.Sadly, The Story of Funk: One Nation Under a Groove is not one of these stories. As soon as the titles had rolled, we were told, again, how James Brown invented the funk. We heard, for the umpteenth time, of Sly Stone’s daring pairing of funk Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The National Theatre's new Dorfman auditorium gets off to a kick-ass start with Here Lies Love, the Off Broadway musical transplant that does for the closing months of Nicholas Hytner's tenure as artistic director what Jerry Springer the Opera did for the early days of his regime a decade or more ago. An ongoing hit at New York's Public Theatre, David Byrne's maiden foray into the often-treacherous waters of musical theatre remains an experiential triumph, its undeniable kitsch factor wedded throughout to a witty, sometimes wounding trawl through the life and disco-intensive times of none Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's rare that you can trace a genre to one man. But house music is well documented: “house” originally simply meant the music played at the Warehouse club, by one Frankie Knuckles, who died yesterday in Chicago from diabetes-related complications. Knuckles was a disciple of New York disco, who'd served his DJ apprenticeship in the city's spectacularly decadent gay bathhouses in the mid-Seventies as an understudy of Larry Levan (who would set up the Paradise Garage, which itself gave its name to another genre – garage).Seeking a club where he could have complete creative freedom, he moved to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Kerri Chandler is quite simply one of the most revered figures in dance music, as much now as when he emerged from the New Jersey club scene onto the international stage nigh on a quarter of a century ago. True to the spirit of the disco, he has only ever released three albums in that time, but has made over 100 12” singles, and maybe twice that number of remixes of other people's work, as well as untold performances as one of the most consistently popular DJs in house music.His style is exceptionally musical, taking rich influences from soul and jazz and heavy on the use of “real” Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight. Subtitled “From the Gay Scene to the Mainstream”, it started loosely in the Sixties, then jumped back and forth across the Atlantic until the present day as the story demanded.It started from the premise that gay clubs were the places that played the best music, and that it was gay artists who were pushing the stylistic boundaries, which were then duly Read more ...
joe.muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Giorgio Moroder: Schlagermoroder Volume 1 1966-1975 / On the Groove Train Volume 1 1975-1993 / On the Groove Train Volume 2 1974-1985 / Son of my FatherSo far, this year has been good for Giorgio Moroder. He’s been integral to Daft Punk’s world-conquering Random Access Memories. “I Feel Love”, the timeless, pulsing synth-dance fantasia he fashioned for Donna Summer, opened the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. At once, he’s evocative of a particular era and his influence is shaping the contemporary. The voyage through these seven CDs (three doubles and a single) shows how hard he’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ian Dury: Lord Upminster / Ian Dury & the Music Students: 4,000 Weeks HolidayAs a single, "Spasticus Autisticus" was never going to be an easy sell. Ian Dury's reaction to the United Nation’s declaration of 1981 as the International Year of the Disabled was caustic and confrontational. Witty too. The BBC decided it was in poor taste and gave it no airplay. Yet it featured in the opening ceremony of last year’s Paralympic Games and the BBC broadcast it. Dury would have appreciated the irony."Spasticus Autisticus" was the first single released by Dury after he had left Stiff Records. Read more ...
joe.muggs
A wise man once said: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. It's a simple concept, but it seems so very hard to grasp, even – or especially – in a supposedly media-savvy world. The oddest thing of all is that it seems to be the people who consider themselves the most resistant to, or able to rise above, hype campaigns who have been caught up the most in the frenzy around this album.I have been consistently boggled and slightly saddened by the number of people who should know better that I have seen tripping over themselves to explain how “bland” or “disappointing” or “derivative” or “cynical” or "shallow" Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ke$ha’s presentation is very shrewd. When she first appeared a couple of years ago, she seemed to be trashy, binge-drinking progeny of the Lady Gaga phenomenon. As time passed, the 25-year-old Californian singer tempered this version of herself with a musical self-awareness contrary to tabloid reports of global boozing and bum-flashing. Notably, she worked with Wayne Coyne of space-pop alt-rockers The Flaming Lips, contributing a track to, and appearing on the cover of, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. More recently she’s been telling anyone who’d listen that her second album, Warrior Read more ...