pop music
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Small Faces: Here Comes the Nice - The Immediate YearsWhen theartsdesk last covered Small Faces’ reissues in May 2012, the review concluded “the Deluxe Editions are probably (who knows what might lurk in obscure archives?) the last word on these albums.” As anticipated and as revealed by this box set, more did indeed lurk in obscure archives. Moreover, the appearance of Here Comes the Nice calls into question just what half of those Deluxe Editions of the band’s four albums used as their sonic source materials. This new release boasts that it is “all sourced and remastered from recently Read more ...
Josiah Howard
Cher was the multi-platform performer of her day, a singer, TV personality, cabaret artist, and Oscar-winning actress. She came up as the initially teenage half of pop duo Sonny & Cher (pictured below left) in the mid-Sixties with her partner (and later husband) Sonny Bono, hitting the charts with megahit "I Got You, Babe". The pair went on to helm a successful TV show in the early Seventies but when they split up Cher was given her own self-titled variety show in 1975. New York journalist and writer Josiah Howard has focused on this in his new book Cher: Strong Enough. Below Howard tells Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If you’re a channel trying to prove that there is life in a tired old format, it’s hard to think of a more effective way than signing up Kylie Minogue. It’s tough for a telly talent show to make an impact in those early weeks, before the audience has warmed enough to the contestants to begin rooting for them or otherwise, but the prospect of will.i.am serenading the diminutive diva during the judges’ opening medley of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “I Predict a Riot” was reason enough to tune in to the third series of The Voice.The contestants were almost exclusively pale, skinny Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In her role as host of this 20th-anniversary celebration, Dannii Minogue was not afraid to ask the tough questions that fans of Ireland’s greatest - or possibly other greatest - boy band wanted to know. “It’s the elephant in the room,” admitted Keith Duffy (the handsome one, not that you would have been caught dead admitting it in the Nineties, who later went on to appear in Coronation Street) with a nervous laugh.You’d be forgiven for wondering which elephant Duffy was alluding to: could it be the inter-band tension that led to Ronan Keating announcing the band’s dissolution to a shocked Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
This year, even legendary punk rockers Bad Religion released a Christmas-themed album - as if to underline that, for just about any recording artist, it’s not a matter of "if" but of "when". Christmas Songs only shares one track with Kelly Clarkson’s Wrapped in Red - two if you’re counting the bonus tracks - but I can imagine them nestled comfortably together in some completist’s iTunes folder, alongside every other version of “White Christmas” committed to tape.With a Greatest Hits collection now under her belt, it’s probably as good a time as any for the American Idol-winning Texan to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dev Hynes's path of artistic development is one of the most pleasing in 21st century music. The flamboyant black indie-kid risking life and limb to ride the local buses growing up in Hackney, who channeled his frustration at the lack of a place for him in the world through the awkward, aggro, occasionally inspiring but awfully named early 2000s electro-punk trio Test Icicles, has since then through sheer force of will carved out a space within the music world where he can be himself.Hynes clearly adores the whole aestheticHis sophisticated indie singer-songwriter guise Lightspeed Champion had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've known rock photographer Tom Sheehan since we worked together at the Melody Maker in the 1980s, but even I didn't know that his stellar career stretches back "almost 40 years", or so it says in the programme notes for his new exhibition, Analogue, at the Lomography Gallery Store East in Spitalfields. Anyway, anyone who's ever been anyone in the great pop and rock malarky has been memorably photographed by Sheehan (or "painted with light," as he might facetiously put it). His work has appeared in Melody Maker, Mojo, Q, Uncut, The Times and Sunday Times, Time Out and many other places Read more ...
mark.kidel
Making a film about an artist with the phenomenal range and creative effervescence of someone like Elvis Costello was never going to be easy. There have been over 30 albums since he started out in 1977, hundreds of songs, many of which are as brilliant as anything written in the last 50 years, and a series of collaborations with artists including Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell, Chet Baker, the Brodsky Quartet, Emmylou Harris, T-Bone Burnett and many others.Portraits of great artists and musicians inevitably throw up a similar creative conundrum: I encountered it with Ravi Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
William Onyeabor: World Psychedelic Classics 5 – Who is William Onyeabor?A primitive drum machine rattles out a Latin rhythm. Keyboards begin. The gaps between the repetitive spirals of notes are plugged by blobs of fat synth. A disembodied yet warm voice sings “Good name is better than silver and gold. And no money, no money, no money, no money can buy good name.” The melody nods towards Kraftwerk’s “Computer World”. The music is as intense as early Marshall Jefferson and the whole suggests Tom Tom Club.William Onyeabor's “Good Name” is compelling and electrifying: minimal and Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s taken Avril Lavigne more than a decade to release a self-titled album, but in some ways it’s appropriate: after all, the Canadian singer’s best music still sounds exactly like what she was releasing as a teenager. The difference is that when she first burst onto the scene, all sweatbands and heavy eyeliner, Lavigne was a breath of fresh air - but now, on her new album, she seems to be taking her cues from the women she blazed the trail for.What she ends up with is the fun pop hits Katy Perry didn’t have room for in her spiritual new direction (“Sippin’ on Sunshine”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll”); Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway is currently attracting an uncommon degree of attention due to the absurd “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” by Ylvis, the comedy duo Bård and Vegard Ylvisåker. The country’s mainstream music hasn’t been this newsworthy since a-ha conquered the world in 1985. After 150 million YouTube hits for “The Fox”, the figure is still rising.The Ylvisåker brothers host the television chat show I kveld med Ylvis and the catchy musical novelty was meant for a sketch in the programme. It was intended to be the worst song ever. Ylvis had, though, roped in Stargate, the New York-based Norwegian Read more ...