Brand-free, eschewing sponsorship, and letting kids in for free, the Hop Farm Festival in Paddock Wood, Kent, has risen steadily in stature to become one of the major fixtures on the UK festival circuit. If the festival is young, most of its audience and stars are of a certain age. Last year saw Morrisey, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and Manu Chao headline, while Prince played his only UK show there.This year the emphasis was on great English eccentrics like Ray Davies, Suede, the Psychedelic Furs and, enjoying his newly hip status, Gary Numan, while the likes of White Denim, Race Horses, The Read more ...

Over recent years a number of musicians and bands have immersed themselves in the exotic funky sound of 1960s/70s Ethiopian jazz (brought to our attention by the Éthiopiques CD series) to produce excellent new music. The best of these acts include The Heliocentrics (with guest Éthiopiques star Mulatu Astatke), The Imperial Tiger Orchestra, Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex (Mekuria being another of the style’s original exponents) and Dub Colossus. The latter provided a useful launchpad for this supremely gifted and versatile young pianist.But this solo album is by no means just a showcase for Read more ...

Regina’s Spektor’s kooky New York piano gal shtick sure divides audiences. For every person who finds her a perfect antidote (I refuse to say adorkable) to all that’s mainstream and soulless, there is someone else who wants to punch her on the nose for singing “on the Braa-dio-uh-oh” instead of “on the radio.”Mind you, it’s not all icing sugar. She might have started her career sounding like an ad man's idea of a pixie dream girl, but time has proved she really means it. Still, it can get a bit syrupy, no? Well, last night it didn’t. Thumping out power chords and belting out slogans like “ Read more ...

Bob Dylan once described himself as ''just a song and dance man''. If the phrase was intended to debunk our veneration of him as the voice of a generation and to imply that he's just an old-fashioned entertainer in the great showbiz tradition, devotees have never believed him and have carried on seeking clues to the meaning of life in his work, campaigning for him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and generally treating his every utterance as if he's the Oracle.Yet at the Hop Farm deep in rural Kent on a cool, moonlit Saturday night, the serious artist was finally transformed into song Read more ...

It seems almost a lifetime since Tom Jones was a man in very tight clothes who did well in the clubs of Las Vegas. After the fallow years, his 1988 cover of Prince’s “Kiss” kick-started a tongue-in-cheek rehabilitation period that lasted a decade, right up to the unforgettable “whoowauh!” of “Sex Bomb”. But what happened next surprised everyone. Jones started to relearn his craft. And now, after the last two decidedly post-ironic albums, the question remains, has “Jones the Voice” really become a genuinely credible artist?The organisers of the 2012 Blues Fest series certainly felt so. And Read more ...

It seems disingenuous to refer to Milk Maid as a band: among the few facts you're likely to glean about this project is that lynchpin Martin Cohen has, through no fault of his own, gone through 11 different bandmates in the last two years. Fans of last year's debut need not despair though - the work of the former Nine Black Alps bassist has never exactly suffered from pursuing a lo-fi, intimate approach.There's a certain element of wilful stubbornness in the determination to eschew the likes of Pro-Tools in favour of a 16-track tape machine, but the dark lyrical themes and surprisingly poppy Read more ...

Wandering through the winding alleyways of the Medina, there was Bjork dressed in a dazzling blue dress and hat and listening to a Gnawa group with its dull, thudding bass and metal castanets. She was here to perform at the Fes Festival of Sacred Music, although the presence of Bjork suggests at times the notion of sacred may be a bit blurred. She has anyway said that her favourite singer is the wonderful Sufi singer Abida Parveen, and spent several days exploring the city.Fes is one of the holiest cities in Islam. With a university that predates Oxford and Cambridge by three Read more ...

The Searchers: Hearts in Their EyesKieron TylerAlthough second to The Beatles as Liverpool’s most consistent Sixties chart presence, The Searchers have never previously been given the box set treatment. Like the Fabs, they were innovative and influential. They presaged folk rock, and without them there would have been no Byrds and maybe even no Tom Petty. The subtitle, celebrating 50 years of harmony & jangle, says it well. The four CDS and 121 tracks take the story from 1963, before they signed with Pye Records, to the present day via their Seventies new wave-inclined recordings for Sire Read more ...

This is presumably called "Doing a Damon" in the music business these days – when an acclaimed songwriter steps out of their comfort zone to try their hand at something more ambitious. Last year Paul Heaton presented his extended composition The 8th, exploring the Seven Deadly Sins, at the Manchester International Festival in a theatrical setting and the performance is replicated here.This is no Dr Dee-style opera though, more a case of Heaton finding guest vocalists to slot into his well-established sweet-sour compositional style. Cameos include Mercury nominee King Creosote, old  Read more ...