New music
joe.muggs
It's only after hanging up the Skype connection to Richie Hawtin that I realise how effective a branding exercise he has made the interview. In conversation the English-born, Canadian-raised Berlin resident is charming and smart, but listening back I realise that he has subtly repeated the names of his projects and products over and over, with the slickness of a high-flying salesman. But then you don't sustain a 20-year career making relentlessly odd music - yet still be regularly ranked in the very top flight of global club DJs alongside perma-tanned monstrosities more likely to Read more ...
bruce.dessau
If you stick the phrase "Britpop Revival" into Google, the first page of results suggests that there has been one in 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005 and even 1998, barely a handful of months after Britpop was the epitome of Cool Britannia. It looks as if there will also be one in 2011, with Pulp primed to play again, Damon Albarn talking about releasing a new Blur single in January and, judging by Suede's storming reunion last night, more from Brett Anderson's gang, who, in theartsdesk's humble opinion, never got the full credit they deserved during the heady Blur vs Oasis years.Lead singer Anderson Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s often assumed that people who write about music just sit around listening to achingly hip bands and rare grooves. Not true. You’ll often catch me listening to such Jeremy Clarkson-endorsed combos as Genesis or ZZ Top. Meat Loaf? Certainly. Guilty pleasure? As charged. Phil Spector may have had his pocket symphonies for the kids, but Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman gave them six-minute operas. To my mind there hasn’t been a song written that conjures up the glorious tragedy of being 16 quite like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”. The thing is though, the Loaf, he ain’t 16 anymore.He’s in his Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Anyone who has ever spent even a little time in a recording studio will be aware that the process of making an album lies somewhere between “watching paint dry” and “ripping out your own toenails” on the scale of interesting and enjoyable activities. It rarely makes for great television. The first image we saw in last night’s Imagine was of a youthful Bruce Springsteen holed up in New York’s Record Plant studio in 1977. He yawned; then he yawned again. Here we go, I thought.What elevated the film to more than just muso musing about “sound pictures”, “dead rooms” and “snare sounds”, all Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Of the runners and riders for an alternative Christmas hit, Captain SKA's jolly tune with samples of Osborne, Cameron, Thatcher and Clegg is the latest one to be gathering momentum. The other campaign, already rolling on nicely and more likely to succeed, is the one to get Cage's silent "4'33" to Number One for Christmas - a rather brilliant protest and a perfect present for the conceptualists and anti-consumerists in your life.Stars like Pete Doherty and Imogen Heap and an orchestra got together to not record that one yesterday with the Facebook page Cage Against the Read more ...
james.woodall
December 1980 "Our life is so precious together/ We have grown - we have grown/ Although our love is still special/Let’s take a chance and fly away somewhere alone".The first words of "(Just Like) Starting Over" weren't bad but they weren't that good either; a bit mawkish, a bit sentimental, but plain, honest, unambiguous. They were a very long way from Lennon's anguished recollection, in an interview shortly before 8 December 1980, of how things had been when he and Yoko had first got together:"I couldn’t understand why people wanted to throw rocks at her or punish me for being in love Read more ...
joe.muggs
Another week, another “fix” in the glorious cavalcade of manipulation, ill-feeling, class hatred, allegations of racism and – oh yes – singing that is The X Factor. This week it was another shift in the rules, seemingly in order to allow the judges to vote off 50-year-old Irish till operator and Shirley Bassey soundalike Mary Byrne and keep in a quantifiably worse singer, the steely-eyed and prematurely wizened teenager from Malvern, Cher Lloyd.It's the second seeming stitch-up in two weeks: last time around we witnessed the goalposts once again picked up and moved in order to get rid of 54- Read more ...
james.woodall
The couples profiled in the series included the likes of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Monroe and Miller, and remoter figures from the German 19th century. Pop hadn’t made it onto the list, though I learnt, once embarked on the commission, that Lennon-Ono had been considered but no author found. In 1996, I happened to be in the right place (Berlin) at the right time.John Lennon und Yoko Ono - zwei Rebellen, eine Poplegende (the last four words mean “two rebels, one pop legend”: the publisher's, not my, subtitle) went on to be one of the series’ bestselling books. My Read more ...
joe.muggs
Next time BBC2 want to do one of those periodic “what happened to the white working class” documentaries, they could do worse than come to a Pendulum gig. The crowd at Wembley Arena last night were defiantly not “studenty” as many for post-rave music acts can be, and neither were they multicultural; in fact, switch the haircuts and outfits around and you could pretty much transplant the same set of people back 30-odd years to an early Iron Maiden show. This was a 21st century heavy metal crowd through-and-through – not fashionable, not refined, but ready to get involved to the maximum extent Read more ...
david.cheal
One of the great pleasures of watching live music lies in witnessing the joy that people get from making it; to experience a great live band in their prime, to see them interacting with each other, feeding off each other, pushing each other on, is a marvellous thing. Arcade Fire are like that: this show, the second of two nights in London from the Montreal band, was an infectious outpouring of feverish emotion and raw energy. I really don’t think any of them are virtuoso musicians, but there was a cohesiveness, a sense of collective endeavour from the eight-strong ensemble, that made them Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It's been a while since the pop/punk and post/pre-Richey comparisons have been made. Ironic considering how seemlessly the Manics slip between modes these days. Today theartsdesk brings you an exclusive preview of the live, power-popping video of "Hazleton Avenue", due for release next Monday to coincide with their live digital EP, Some Kind of Nothingness (available on iTunes).Having had to postpone the Birmingham and London gigs in October due to James's laryngitis, tracks have been taken from elsewhere during the band's hugely successful tour, which recently took in Australia and the Far Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s something going on in the North. Iceland’s Hjaltalín incorporate a disco sensibility and Sweden’s Concretes draw from the same well on their new album WYWH. Although this is probably not the future direction of Nordic music, it’s now an important part of it, showcases a reinvented Concretes and, judging by last night’s show, they might as well be a new band. Although still glacial – you could never imagine them breaking a sweat on stage – this show drew a curtain on their past.There’s something going on in the North. Iceland’s Hjaltalín incorporate a disco sensibility and Sweden’s Read more ...