thu 20/03/2025

New Music Reviews

When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors

Adam Sweeting

It was the Danny Sugerman-Jerry Hopkins biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, that kicked off the Doors death cult 30 years ago, at a point where the band's reputation was wallowing low in the water. Previously it had been quite acceptable to regard much of their work as cheesy pseudo-jazz with stupid lyrics, and their posturing vocalist Jim Morrison as a tedious drunk with a Narcissus complex.

Read more...

Lennon Naked, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

Films about rock stars usually fail, because it's impossible to recreate whatever larger-than-life qualities made them unique and famous in the first place. You frequently end up with a slightly embarrassing party-piece impersonation that captures some of the mannerisms but misses the essence of the character.

Read more...

Being N-Dubz, Channel 4

joe Muggs Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer: oddly charming

Tulisa, Dappy and Fazer of North London pop phenomenon N-Dubz – or, if you prefer, Tula Constavlos, her cousin Dino Constavlos and their schoolfriend Richard Rawson – are easy to mock, and Channel 4 know it. The first episode of this showbiz slice-of-life documentary about the ebullient trio is so slathered with the kind of hideously knowing upper-middle-class arched-eybrow voiceover that characterises the whole of the channel's T4 youth programming strand that you have to wonder if they...

Read more...

Singles & Downloads 6

Thomas H Green Wiley, master of both grime and pop

Wiley, Electric Boogaloo (Back Yard)

Erratic and spiky where his old mucker Dizzee Rascal has been slick and unerring in his rise to the top, East Londoner Richard "Wiley" Cowie has managed several massive pop-dance hits while remaining thoroughly entangled in the edgier, more aggro grime music scene which he helped to invent. This is very much on the pop-dance side of his output, with every mid-1990s club-energising trick in the book thrown into the...

Read more...

theartsdesk at Sónar festival, Barcelona

joe Muggs Local Catalan band Bradien hold their own among the international avant garde

In retrospect, deciding on a quick in-and-out trip to the Sónar festival was a slightly silly idea. Not because there was any problem with the event, or with getting there, or because I had any difficulty chucking an all-nighter then making it to my plane at 11am, though. Quite the opposite: it was a silly idea because a small taster of one of the best-organised music festivals I have ever been to could only make me deeply hacked off that I wasn't going to be there for the whole thing.

Read more...

Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright III, Royal Festival Hall

David Cheal

It takes quite something to be able to hold the attention of a packed Royal Festival Hall with nothing but an acoustic guitar, a piano, and a bunch of songs.

Read more...

Richard Thompson, One Thousand Years, Royal Festival Hall

Russ Coffey

Richard Thompson’s appointment as curator of Meltdown 2010 split opinion at theartsdesk. I was one of those who hoped the hoary old maverick would exhilarate with daring new acts. Others feared it would just be a folk-in. In the end the program contained Iranian punk, some folk and a whole lot of Thompson himself. He's offered film scores, a new show, and a collaboration.

Read more...

Ed Harcourt, Wilton's Music Hall

Adam Sweeting Multi-layered songwriter Ed Harcourt gives it some Heathcliff

If the audience at Wilton's charmingly archaic music hall were feeling depressed by the bleak comedy of the England "performance" against Algeria, a whirl around the musical block in the company of Ed Harcourt was the perfect antidote. Critics feel compelled to categorise everything, and Harcourt has been compared to all and sundry, from Brian Wilson to Harry Nilsson to Tom Waits. But...

Read more...

Steve Winwood: English Soul, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

Almost like an inverted echo of Stevie Wonder over in Detroit, Little Stevie Winwood was a Brummie teen prodigy who scored an early dose of stardom with the Spencer Davis Group at age 15. Raved over for his amazing soulful vocals and effortless instrumental skills, he went on to form Traffic before joining “supergroup” Blind Faith with Eric Clapton.

Read more...

The Duckworth Lewis Method, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Bruce Dessau

There cannot be many famous rock songs that mention cricket. Roy Harper's poetic "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" springs immediately to mind. And 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday". And then the trail goes fairly cold. Until 2009, when The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Tommy Walsh of Pugwash collaborated on their inspired Duckworth Lewis Method concept album.

Read more...

Pages

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Santosh review - powerful study of prejudice and police corr...

Held up by the censors in India though screened at Cannes and nominated for an International Oscar, Sandhya Suri’s 2024 film ...

Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet review - Shakespeare without...

1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the...

Lizz Wright, Barbican review - sweet inspiration

Lizz Wright’s exquisite singing breaks all boundaries between soul, gospel and jazz. In so doing she channels many interwoven strands of the...

Wardruna, Symphony Hall, Birmingham review - Einar Selvik...

Wardruna are something of a modern musical phenomenon. Part Scandinavian folk revival, part prog rock epic and part pagan ritual, their wide-...

Album: Billy Hart Quartet - Just

There was a telling remark in Wynton Marsalis’s recent interview with Katty Kay for the BBC show “Influential”. Talking about how jazz functions...

Flow review - come the apocalypse, cue the animals

I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had...

Album: Greentea Peng - Tell Dem It's Sunny

Going by the sounds of her new album, it wouldn’t unreasonable to assume that Greentea Peng enjoys sucking on a spliff every once in a while. ...

Adolescence, Netflix review - Stephen Graham battles the pha...

A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-...