New music
theartsdesk
As we all have only one shopping day left, theartsdesk hopes to make Christmas Eve a little easier by offering a few enlightened recommendations. From our writers on new and classical music, opera and ballet, film and comedy, here is a list of CDs and DVDs that we hope will enhance your 11th-hour shopping experience. Happy Christmas from all at theartsdesk. DVDsIn the Loop, dir. Armando Iannucci (Optimum)by Jasper ReesThe cinematic spin-off of The Thick of It seems destined to take its place as an enduring moreish classic alongside This Is Spinal Tap. It’s as if the film knows it itself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been a very good year for Beatlemania, with all the albums re-repackaged and the group going virtual in Rock Band. The BBC lobbed in their own Beatles season-ette, and one of the more striking images from their riot of documentary footage was of John Lennon escorting his Aunt Mimi up the steps onto the plane taking them to America, with her handbag and Sunday-best hat.That surely settles any debate about his real feelings for Mimi. She is depicted in Sam Taylor-Wood's absorbing film about Lennon’s teenage years as a stern exemplar of moral discipline, but driven by honourable motives and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tonight, 23 December, is a significant night for culture in Oaxaca, Mexico – it’s the Noche de Rabanos. The Night of the Radishes. Thousands of people descend into the zocalo to witness sculptures carved from extremely large radishes, especially grown for the occasion. It was certainly one of the most memorable Christmas exhibitions I’ve seen.Competition is fierce for the first prize and the spread in the morning paper. The prize was 13,000 pesos or about 700 pounds. Typical scenes sculpted are of the Nativity and other religious themes, but there are others depicting political or Read more ...
paul.bradshaw
As we gathered in St John’s Church in Waterloo last Thursday to hear The London Lucumi Choir perform, on the same day people in their thousands were making the pilgrimage to the Church of San Lazaro in Cuba. In that church, just outside Havana, pilgrims walk or sometime crawl the few miles to the Church, often bearing gifts of rum and cigars as penitence. It is a sign of the times that songs to the orishas – the deities that populate the Yoruba religious pantheon, who all have their own distinctive, trance-inducing rhythms – can also be heard in a Christian church in London. Our Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was a month before Christmas and I was watching venerable folkies the Battlefield Band at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Halfway through their set they played “Robber Barons”, a new song about the nefarious medieval practice of German feudal lords charging exorbitant tolls on traffic travelling on the Rhine; as the verses mounted, it moved – seamlessly, like all good folk songs – to expose the habits of the unscrupulous bankers of the early 21st century.The message was clear: times may change, but we are still at the mercy of a different kind of robber baron, lining his own castle with silver Read more ...
glyn.brown
Ray Davies, that old curmudgeon, has said he’s not keen on touring alone since the demise of The Kinks. But he’s sorted that out for the moment by choosing to play alongside 45 new people – the members of the Crouch End Festival Chorus, with whom Davies has decided to reinterpret his hits. You’d think this could be undiluted lift-music hell: the Mike Sammes Singers trample everything you love. But though the album, named The Kinks Choral Collection as if the rest of the band are on it, is occasionally silly, the live result was wildly uplifting.The Chorus didn’t actually appear until the set’ Read more ...
graeme.thomson
From the moment the roadies began assembling Dave Grohl’s drum-kit in a manner that resembled the construction of the Queen Mary on Clydeside, it was clear that power was going to be the watchword of last night’s Edinburgh appearance by Them Crooked Vultures, the supergroup that’s threatening to give the term a good name.Foo Fighter Grohl, former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Queens of the Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme have just released a surprisingly decent debut album, but at times they sound constrained on record. Rooted in lengthy jams that unleash great spiralling Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
16 December 1899: Noel Coward, sharing a birthday with Beethoven, an early English rapper of the silk polka dot dressing gown and cigarette holder school.
{youtube width="400" height="300"}vdEnxNog56E{/youtube}16 December 1770: Not sure whether to admit this, but I can't have been the sole Sex Pistols fan who only became enamoured of the second movement of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a teenager after watching Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, with Alex and fellow droogs discussing the magnificence Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tim Lawrence is an author and academic, whose musical studies have led him from the dance scene of the 1990s to researching New York's disco scene – his Love Saves the Day was the first and remains the definitive history of the music, history and politics of disco – and then to the singular figure of Arthur Russell. A cellist, singer, songwriter, producer, composer and electronic artist, Russell existed both within and without disco and many other scenes in a period of cultural ferment in New York when many of the sounds that form the fabric of popular culture were being first created.Russell Read more ...
joe.muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...
rose.dennen
J Mascis can almost only sound like J Mascis. Comparing the original material of J Mascis and the Fog and the Dinosaur Jr songs he played last night at the Garage in Islington, there's not a huge amount of difference between the bands. His laid-back, almost comatose delivery and very particular song structures stamp his personality onto every song. Which isn't really a surprise - he's toured with various line-ups over the last 10 years in this band, including Mike Watt of the Minutemen and Ron Asherton of the Stooges but the writing has been very much a Mascis mission.The only thing that does Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A self-styled “string quartet comprising a guitar, fiddle, mandolin and accordion” - welcome to the topsy–turvy world of Spiro. A world where nothing is quite what it seems. A world where up is down, black is white, and folk is, well, kind of avant-garde.The four-piece band started off in Bristol in the early '90s as “The Famous Five”. Two of them were classically trained and the other two were raised in the hard-knock world of punk. So they decided to form a folk band. Except they wouldn’t play folk It was to be more folk mixed with classical, warapped in a contemporary coat. If Steve Reich Read more ...