New Music Features
Interview: Corinne Bailey RaeMonday, 08 February 2010
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.
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So farewell to the FoundryThursday, 04 February 2010
My abiding memory of The Foundry is being held aloft by my throat by the landlord, Falklands veteran and notorious band manager Alan "Gimpo" Goodrick, as he accused me of stealing a Shirley Bassey album. I had been DJing for a book reading by Mark "Zodiac Mindwarp" Manning, and there was a lot of absinthe being drunk thanks to some fellow from The Idler. I knew at that point I shouldn't have begun the evening by playing the line "there may be trouble ahead" from Bassey's version of "... Read more... |
Jackie Oates, BBC Radio 2 Folk AwardsTuesday, 02 February 2010
Since releasing her first solo album in 2006 while still a member of the acclaimed Northumbrian group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - who also garnered three Folk Award nominations for themselves this year – Oates has developed a unique repertoire of English balladry to which her clear, richly emotive voice is so suited. Read more... |
Q&A special: Rave for HaitiFriday, 22 January 2010
Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it.... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Nashville: Writing a Song With Guy ClarkSunday, 17 January 2010
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable... Read more... |
Interview: Andy Serkis on playing Ian DuryWednesday, 06 January 2010
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. Read more... |
Electronica 2000-9: Back to the Grass RootsSaturday, 02 January 2010
The received opinion is that the music of the 2000s has been characterised by fragmentation, discontinuity, faddishness and a lack of coherent identity. Read more... |
Music Business 2000-9: The Medium, the MessageSaturday, 02 January 2010
The point at which the, ah, Noughties revealed themselves to me as a decade in search of more than just a decent name arrived when Sky News' showbiz gofer phoned up to ask me to come on and blah about this exciting new band that everybody was talking about, Arctic Monkeys. Read more... |
Pop Music 2000-9: The Triumph of the Noughty GirlsSaturday, 02 January 2010
The girls have produced the best pop of the Noughties: Kylie’s “Can’t get you out of my Head”, Missy Elliot's “Get Ur Freak On”, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”, Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”, Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue” and Lady Gaga's "PokerFace" were just way better and more innovative pop music than that produced by the legion of blokey indie types (with a few honourable exceptions, like the Arctic... Read more... |
Don't Mention the RBS in EdinburghTuesday, 22 December 2009
It was a month before Christmas and I was watching venerable folkies the Battlefield Band at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Halfway through their set they played “Robber Barons”, a new song about the nefarious medieval practice of German feudal lords charging exorbitant tolls on traffic travelling on the Rhine; as the verses mounted, it moved – seamlessly, like all good folk songs – to expose the habits of the unscrupulous bankers of the early 21st century. Read more... |
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