There is a story hidden inside my trumpet.
Not the kind of story people usually associate with innovation today. No laboratory. No startup. No investors. No software. No algorithm.
Just a poor Lebanese peasant’s son, born in 1941 in the mountains above Beirut, listening to village brass bands trying – and failing – to play Arabic music.
The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music has been peerless over the years in presenting world/global music acts in one magical place. Only WOMAD is a serious rival as a long-established global music fest.
“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened.
Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.
Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.
I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020.
I watched a video online recently of a three-year-old girl being quizzed with questions about her mom (adorable). It was a Mother’s Day video set up by her father who was speaking just out of frame. Some of the questions were answered with precision. "What's your mom's name?" was met with her mother's actual name. When the stakes rose and it came time for her middle and last name, the answers provided were "mommy" and "mom", respectively.
To celebrate Miles Davis’s 100th anniversary this week, Fontana have released a “ Deluxe Re-issue” of one of the jazz giant’s best-known recordings, the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s first film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) 1958. This ranks as some of the most emblematic specially recorded film music: a classic that in its own way characterises Miles’s unique capacity for constant re-invention throughout a long and adventurous career.
I’ve never thought of myself as a political artist. I write about love. The tender bits, the messy bits, the heartbreak that rearranges a life. That’s where songwriting usually finds me. “TIEF”, from my forthcoming album Sunshine Music, arrived differently. It’s built around an interpolation of “Slave” by the legendary calypsonian singer Mighty Sparrow. Calypso, a music that has lived in my bones for as long as I can remember. “Slave” proposed a question I sought to answer.
I was born Tamara Lee Neilson. I had an Uncle Kenny and an Aunt Dolly (who played guitar and banjo, respectively). I mean, did I really have a choice to become anything but a Country singer?
Michael Gira (born 19/2/54) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, author and artist. He founded Swans, a band in which he sings and plays guitar, in New York during the late 1970s. Since that time, Gira and Swans have been a major influence in the experimental rock scene and in the 1980s were lorded as the “loudest band on the planet”. Not ones to sit still, however, they evolved continuously, taking on new sounds and influences until grinding to a halt in the late 1990s.