So, Birdsong is over, and for all the arts-crit ink spilled upon it I am still none the wiser vis-à-vis my three main points of concern. First: it is a truth universally acknowledged (I asked around) that the most memorable episode in the Faulks novel was the one about the blowjob. This scene was not so much absent from the TV version as, er... cunningly re-gendered. Why?! Second: there was, in the first few minutes of the "drama", a superfluous and sarky line (by a Frenchman, obviously) about modernist composers who can only work around four notes. Which was not Read more ...

Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of  “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits. Bible-black and whisky-soaked this is the work of a man who was born to be living through a depression. And still, there’s a lightness of Read more ...

The Roundhouse is a melee of moneyed cosmopolitan twentysomething trendies. The beautiful people are out in force. My God, there are some delicious women and men here, expensively dressed, uptown couture to the hilt, a hefty smattering of languages from around the globe. Unexpectedly, for me at least, 22-year-old Chilean-American electronica prodigy Nicolas Jaar has the most chi-chi gig in London tonight. This is not a plus – the queues at the bar are half-an-hour long, dilettante party people buying rounds of exotic shots and bottles of bubbly, waving wodges of tenners about. And while Jaar’ Read more ...

I don't know if Mark Ronson was too busy or too expensive to produce Maverick Sabre's debut album, but although his name does not feature in the credits the spirit of the mixmeister behind Back to Black looms large here. Which is both a plus and a minus. If you loved the immaculate retro-soul of Amy Winehouse – and Plan B's soulman rebirth – you will love 21-year-old Michael Stafford's impressive stab at the same sub-genre. If you don't? Poor you. I'm sure there is someone from The X Factor to meet your musical needs.Lonely are the Brave has much going for it. For starters, Stafford has a Read more ...

The Chemical Brothers have long had one of the most vital shows around. It’s a visual spectacular that can only be likened to peak-time Pink Floyd or Jean-Michel Jarre, yet precision-tooled, without the bombast of those acts. Their long-term visual designer, Adam Smith, is mostly responsible and now he’s shot a concert film of the electronic duo’s appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan last year. Smith has directed a few bits and bobs before, notably the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit, and he’s the perfect choice to take the Chemical Brothers experience into the cinema.He doesn’t, Read more ...

The dust will eventually settle around the flapdoodle about withdrawn albums, whether Lana Del Rey is authentic, a fabulist construct or rubbish live. And when it does, this, the debut album, will be left. There’s no doubt that “Video Games” and its follow-up “Born to Die” were terrific singles, sieving the existential drift of Julee Cruise and Chris Isaak through a hip-hop sensibility. The package was completed by the irresistible Del Rey voice, a downer-dosed Stevie Nicks.Whatever the carping, the former Elisabeth Grant’s name is all over Born to Die. She – as Lana Del Rey – has written Read more ...

Laura Veirs may be increasingly seen by some as an “undiscovered gem”, but to others she still comes over a bit too corn-fed to warm to. Of course, the much applauded Year of Meteors and July Flame contain some mighty pretty moments, but there’s also a sense that they belong to a slightly smug American West-Coast eco-culture. But now, recent mother Veirs has released an album of “children’s folk songs,” gaining rave reviews. Would last night's show find her fuzzy and huggable, intimate, or just a little too worthy?When Veirs walked on stage in a “vegan chic” vintage pea-green dress and horn- Read more ...

Last night was one of those occasions when I found myself looking forward to seeing the support band more than the main act. This wasn’t because Senegal’s sublime Orchestra Baobab haven't delivered a transportive heart-warming set of Cuban and soukous grooves every time I’ve seen them live. It was simply because Belgium-based Congolese rapper Baloji made Kinshasa Succusale - one of my favourite albums of last year.This extremely diverse collection of tunes relies heavily on a talented array of guest musicians (Amp Fiddler, Konono No1, Royce Mbumba and La Chorale de la Grace, to name but Read more ...

A semantic side effect of my longish involvement in music culture has been hearing certain phrases pass from fringe slang obscurity to mainstream acceptance. Among these is the term “chill out”, purloined by ravers from the hippies to describe post-club Ecstasy comedown music, especially after the KLF used it. By the early 2000s, however, “chill out” was tired and ubiquitous, conjuring images of candlelit Primrose Hill dinner parties where Zero 7 played predictably, coolly in the background.If there was a tipping point in this process it was Air’s extremely successful 1998 debut album Moon Read more ...

Exactly three years ago, late in the morning of 29 January, 2009, the news began to circulate that John Martyn had died at the age of 60. I spent the following 24 hours or so talking to many of his cronies to help assemble a tribute feature for a music magazine. Chris Blackwell, the man who had signed him to Island in 1967, had just stepped off a plane in Jamaica. He sounded fuzzy and uncertain. He knew Martyn was dead but needed details. “What happened, I haven’t heard?” he asked. Pneumonia, I told him. “Ah, God, that’ll do you in.”Bert Jansch sounded even more doleful and lugubrious than Read more ...

If The Wombles had made this it would likely raise a smile despite its lame, lazy nostalgic guitar pop. It even goes as far as to include a feeble version of seminal skiffle song "Rock Island Line". The harsh words it deserves, however, are tempered with pathos, for Ringo 2012 only garners limelight because its creator was drummer for the biggest band of all time. Despite the constant Beatles hagiography of the frotting heritage rock press, these days no one under 50 has personal recall of their epic impact (the rest of us watch BBC Four documentaries and sigh). The Beatles led Western pop Read more ...