rock
igor.toronyilalic
Glaswegian James Dillon (b 1950) is one Britain's most critically acclaimed living composers. Early detours as a drunken and drug-taking wastrel gave way to what he calls "musical terrorism". By which he means his blistering career as one of the most intoxicating and uncompromising of the New Complexity school of composers. His music has won awards (an unprecedented three from the Royal Philharmonic Society) but few British establishment friends or commissions, which has forced him into almost permanent exile. Now, for his 60th birthday, he makes a rare return to Glasgow for one of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's epic collection has a somewhat retro feel, with CDs by Ray Davies, Neil Young, Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan. The CD of the Month is all-conquering Tennessee rock band Kings of Leon. The Box Set of the Month comes from the vaults of Apple records and there's an amazing compilation of music from Angola in the 1970s. The rest of the selection is bang up to the minute, with the latest electronica, jazz, grime and alt-country dissected by theartsdesk's team of critics, Adam Sweeting, Howard Male, Russ Coffey, Joe Muggs, David Cheal, Peter Quinn, Thomas H Green, Bruce Dessau, Kieron Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The lens loved Mick. Those child-bearing lips, to use Joan Rivers’s ripe phrase, always came up a treat in photographs. Did it ever love Keith quite so much? Ever since he started creosoting himself in eyeliner and crumbling like an oxidising mummy before our very eyes, he has been the incarnation of the photogenic rock wreck. Once upon a time, though, when The Rolling Stones were at their creative zenith, the Human Riff presented a young and even ingenuous mug to the camera. A new exhibition of portraits, to coincide with the publication of his autobiography Life, shows Richards before Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Naturally his company brought it like a memorial on their farewell world tour before the troupe closes down, but last night’s UK premiere of it at the Barbican felt both sketchy and cumbersome, overburdened with fussy set and effects, and underburdened with the usual vigour and unearthly certainty of his dance. I’m happy to find that MCDC will make London one more pass next autumn Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“It’s not often you get a global superstar down at the Elephant and Castle,” marvelled a local who spent the evening dancing like a dervish to the infectious music of Manu Chao, who had breezed into London for a rare show last night off the back of a short tour of Japan and the West Coast of America. The first person I saw as an usher was Colombian philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera whose book What if Latin America Ruled the World? suggests - among many other things - that the US is becoming the next Latin American country. Like the others he was wearing a Colombiage T-shirt - the Read more ...
james.woodall
Since December 2007, the question has been: will they or won’t they? For Led Zeppelin fans everywhere, the one-off “reunion” concert at London’s O2 arena has stoked one rocketing demand: that the three survivors, guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones, joined by the son of their dead drummer John Bonham, Jason, not only reunite but record again and tour the planet, and perhaps resurrect some of the magic intensity that made Zeppelin by a very long way the most successful rock act of the 1970s and, some might claim, of all time.The band’s founder, Page, has, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"The Legend of Axl Rose" sounds like the title for a long and fanciful western movie, about a bandit who defies the law and even time itself. In person, wayward vocalist Rose does indeed resemble some kind of picaresque outlaw who rules his own eccentric kingdom, and he lent much-needed gaiety to this sprawling performance by constantly ringing the changes on a huge wardrobe of hats, jackets and multi-coloured T-shirts.He's doing his best to defy time too, quite successfully in the case of 2008's Chinese Democracy album, which took 17 years to reach fruition. But lax time-keeping has been Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the antidote to Martin Scorsese’s 2008 documentary Shine a Light, which, for all its technical excellence, depicted the increasingly senior rock band sounding pretty crap. Ladies & Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones was shot at four concerts in Texas on the Stones’s 1972 American tour, hot on the heels of the release of Exile on Main Street. While its pre-digital quality and all-round primitiveness is a little bit startling, that’s all part of the way that it transports us back to a time when rock’n’roll was still barely housetrained and vaguely lawless. It didn’t exist just to provide Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a Memphis musician and occasional Rolling Stones sidesman (he played piano on "Wild Horses"). Tosches wrote that Dickinson's 1972 album Dixie Fried was "a dark gale-force reworking of old Southern music, a baptism of loud and dangerous rhythms, that stands as one of the great testaments not only of rock'n'roll but also of its ancient unfathomable Read more ...
bruce.dessau
A few years ago a friend told me that Brighton resident Nick Cave had been spotted singing "The Wheels on the Bus" at a local nursery. This might have been an apocryphal incident, but it still highlights a predicament of the older rock star. How do you deal with life's quotidian issues – the daily grind – while still rocking out? Cave’s fiendishly simple solution? Ignore the problem and do both, combining school runs by day with explosive gigs like this one last night.Grinderman might feel like a perverse back-to-basics outlet for the UK-based Australian, but, two albums of literate, swampy, Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's extraordinary, rich and strange releases are led by Ninja Tune's 20th-anniversary album of new tunes and remixes ("hard to know when to stop throwing the compliments"), Robert Plant's new band ("puts most vintage rockers to shame") and the new one from fellow veteran and "louche Lothario" Bryan Ferry. There's electronica from Magnetic Man and theartsdesk writer Joe Muggs's new Dubstep Compilation, cyber-pop from Tinie Tempah and a terrific new project featuring musicians from Eritrea. Stinker of the Month is the Motown covers record from Phil Collins. Reviewers this month are Joe Read more ...
Russ Coffey
I Am Kloot are a band it’s hard not to like in an almost personal way. The Manchester-based trio exude warmth, northern charm and a sense of self-contentment, seemingly impervious to the fact that they still haven’t made it as big as everyone thinks they should. Maybe that’s unsurprising. With the band’s leader in his forties, maybe it would be odder if they weren’t making music for reasons other than pampering egos. And it shows.Sky at Night, their fifth and latest album, is as honest as it is gently and disturbingly beautiful. It's arguably also as much the product of producers Guy Garvey Read more ...