fri 31/03/2023

New Music Books

Album: Dolly Parton - Run Rose Run

Tim Cumming

I tried, I really did. Took a shot at my best, and fell short, Yup, I couldn’t get beyond the opening chapters of Dolly Parton’s first novel, written with that veteran of popular page-turnin’, James Patterson. The best bit for me was on the first page, and it was pure Dolly, but in 22 little words, not 80,000. “Is it easy? No it ain’t.

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Music books to end lockdown: Sam Lee, Hawkwind, Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Electric Muses

Tim Cumming

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us.

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CD - The Lost Words: Spell Songs

Tim Cumming

Earlier this year, eight musicians – Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux – set about working with the ‘spell songs’ of nature writer Robert Macfarlane and the images from nature of artist Jackie...

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Peggy Seeger: First Time Ever - A Memoir, review - a remarkable life

Liz Thomson

Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music, a catch-all term about which Peggy Seeger and her creative and life partner Ewan MacColl (they didn’t actually marry until a decade before his death) had strong feelings.

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latest in today

Album: boygenius - The Record

Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two...

Theodora, Arcangelo, Cohen, Barbican review - gloriously dar...

Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4...

Riotsville USA review - a training scheme with a tragic lega...

Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its...

Album: The Zombies - Different Game

There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly...

Tom Dale Company, The Place review - immersive and genre-bus...

With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to...

Mansfield Park, RNCM, Manchester review - bringing out the b...

Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that...

Album: A Certain Ratio - 1982

1982 is only A Certain Ratio’s third album this century but it’s one that’s brimming with funky vibes that are more than enough to get...

Succession, Season Four, Sky Atlantic review - powerful begi...

How much more is there left to be said about the excellence of Succession? It’s back for a final season, and devotees will pore over...

Inspiral Carpets, Concorde 2, Brighton review - a raucous ca...

As Inspiral Carpets play “She Comes in the Fall”, a great song and one of their signature tunes, its martial drumming drags me into my own past....

Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us

“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking,...