rock
Peter Culshaw
I meet Corinne Bailey Rae upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho – she wanders into the room and a couple of record company types intercept her. I hear phrases like “consumer segmentation”, “demographics”, “functionality of streaming” floating across the room – it sounds like someone has a new type of iPhone app they want her to sign up to. She looks polite, if a bit bemused. But in a depressed record business, Corinne Bailey Rae is a really big deal.Her self-titled 2006 debut album sold nearly four million copies, went straight in to the top of the British pop charts, spent 71 weeks in the Read more ...
howard.male
Dr. Feelgood was the first band I ever saw live, and I can still remember that frisson of expectation queuing up outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1975. I didn’t even know who they were or what they sounded like, I simply had some pals who were soon-to-be-punks who’d got wind of the fact that these Canvey Island ne’er-do-wells were the harbingers of something new, something borrowed, and something blue. But the blues were only the starting point for "Feelgood" as we, necessarily, truncated their name.By the summer of 1976, Feelgood had become the best live band in the land. But by the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The prefix “Christian” can invite mockery. The suffix “rock” usually makes it worse. And a Christian Rock band celebrating 25 years in yellow and black Spandex? Surely that has to be a spoof. But I have news for you: Eighties Californian glam metal band Stryper are real, back, and tonight they rocked.Stryper were formed in a world where the more macho a band the more they wore make-up, and where the intricacy of the guitar work was in direct proportion to the volume of hairspray. Stryper made no concessions to such conventions. Nor would they make any concessions to their religious beliefs. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A series celebrating musicians' birthdays. 30 December 1910: Enough of all the seasonal jollity. With any luck, yours was more real than forced. The other side of New Years is, for many of us, a certain existential panic. What happened to the last year? How did we do? How the hell did it go so fast? And, more scarily, though hopefully invigoratingly, how many more do we have left? Paul Bowles, best known as author of The Sheltering Sky, wasn’t a musician exactly, but was a musicologist (the peerless collections of the Moroccan music he recorded are in the Smithsonian). In 45 seconds, he 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 ...
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 ...
theartsdesk
This round-up of the freshest new music and most well-ripened classics we could find in November features everything from Miles Davis to Kraftwerk, Norah Jones to the actual Pope, via Toms Petty and Waits, Dubstep and related bass-driven electronica from Portugal, Angola, Denmark and Tanzania, and the soundtrack to Life On Earth. Our reviewers this month are Robert Sandall, Peter Culshaw, Adam Sweeting, Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, Howard Male and Marcus O'Dair.
CD of the Month
Tom Waits, Glitter and Doom Live (Anti)
by Robert Sandall
When I saw Tom Waits at the Hammersmith Odeon (now the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In Garrow's Law: Tales from the Old Bailey, writer Tony Marchant has turned to the real-life archives of the Old Bailey to find cases to illustrate the pioneering legal work of William Garrow. In the late 18th century, courtroom trials bore more resemblance to bear-baiting or witch-finding than to anything connected with justice or due process. Defendants couldn't speak in their own defence, and the notion of having counsel who could demolish dodgy witnesses or interrupt the prosecution's outrageous slanders hadn't yet caught on.Thus the stage was set for the redoubtable Garrow, who was so Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The first signs were good. I've been to a lot of shows by “heritage bands” in my time, but I don't think I've ever seen a crowd for a band of Fleetwood Mac's vintage that had such a relatively even age distribution. Sure, it was weighted towards the greying end of the scale, but every age group down to teens – including teens there in groups under their own steam, not just with parents – was well represented, right across class boundaries too.But then Fleetwood Mac have always been a lot of things to a lot of people. From the bluesy sixties underground Peter Green era, through the spectacular Read more ...
robert.sandall
Performing your classic album as a full concert item has become a significant part of rock’s heritage culture in recent years, and the tide of potential classics is rising all the time. Last night, it was the turn of Spiritualized to re-visit their 1997 opus, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.One of the most critically feted releases of the Britpop era - the NME voted it Album of the Year in 1997 ahead of two competing blockbusters, OK Computer by Radiohead and The Verve’s Urban Hymns – this ambitiously styled record always carried the aura of an event, and 12 years later its Read more ...
howard.male
If Bowie, Bolan, and Roxy Music were the shimmering glam triumvirate of early 1970s British pop, then what were Mott the Hoople? Surely they don’t belong with the likes of the Sweet, Suzi Quatro and… er… Gary Glitter. In fact with their R&B and rock 'n' roll roots they’ve more in common with some of the decade’s more credible rockers such as the Faces or even the New York Dolls. It was in their ragged swagger and the stylised arrogance that vocalist Ian Hunter projected while implicitly inviting every teenager in the land to join his gang rather than that bacofoil-clad impostor’s gang.But Read more ...
robert.sandall
Reputations, it seems, can grow in ways that elude even their owners. When the original five members of Mott The Hoople finally decided to re-form, 35 years after they drifted apart, they booked two shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in October and crossed their fingers. According to their 70-year-old vocalist Ian Hunter, “we realised if we were ever going to do it, it was now or never, but we still thought we’d be lucky to fill the second night.”The response astonished them – and me. Two sold-out nights at the Apollo rapidly turned into five, with talk of an American tour to follow. A list of Read more ...