pop music
The Lance Armstrong Story - Stop at Nothing, BBC Four / The Nation's Favourite Motown Song, ITVMonday, 07 July 2014
The fall of super-cyclist Lance Armstrong is a subject fit for Euripides or Shakespeare. It has also worked pretty well for director Alex Holmes, who managed to round up virtually all the key players caught in Armstrong's vortex of deceit for this... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Glastonbury Festival 2014Thursday, 03 July 2014
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday... Read more... |
CD: How To Dress Well - 'What Is This Heart?'Sunday, 22 June 2014
It seems a little ambitious to be thinking of those omnipresent end-of-year album best-of lists when it is barely summer, but there’s something about How To Dress Well’s “What Is This Heart?” that puts me in that frame of mind. Not because I can see... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Chris & CoseySaturday, 21 June 2014
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are a living lesson in the rejuvenating power of remaining experimental in art. Their music holds its own alongside the young guns of electronica, who indeed frequently idolise them, and in person they frequently... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Too Slow to DiscoSunday, 08 June 2014
Various Artists: Too Slow to DiscoToo Slow to Disco is about the five years from 1975 onwards when men and woman alike sported billowing white shirts, had wind-swept, pouffed-up hair and sang frozen-nosed, freeze-dried songs in sensitive... Read more... |
Arcade Fire, Earls CourtSaturday, 07 June 2014
When you have quite as much going on as 10-piece (in their current form) experimentalist Canadian indie band Arcade Fire do, it’s hard to know where to look. It’s a fact they’re aware of, and it seems like they even riff on it quite heavily with the... Read more... |
John Ogdon: Living with Genius / You've Got a Friend: The Carole King Story, BBC FourSaturday, 07 June 2014
It's something of a cliche to regard concert pianists as mad geniuses or nutty professors, and John Ogdon fitted the formula only too well. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he displayed absurdly precocious musical brilliance as a child, and in due... Read more... |
One Direction, Murrayfield Stadium, EdinburghWednesday, 04 June 2014
The sheer scale of One Direction’s global victory march is something to behold. Last night’s stopover on their Where We Are tour was the biggest concert ever staged by one band on Scottish soil, with 64,000 fans pouring into the national rugby... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Aarhus: SPOT Festival 2014Sunday, 11 May 2014
At last night’s Eurovision Song Contest, host country Denmark submitted “Cliché Love Song”, a weedy Bruno Mars-a-like designed to ensure they did not win for a second year running. It came ninth. While understandable that Danish national broadcaster... Read more... |
CD: Little Dragon - Nabuma RubberbandSaturday, 10 May 2014
Little Dragon are all about the slow burn. The Swedish band had been going for 10 years before they released their first single in 2006, and in the time since then they've built their profile steadily through hard gigging and interesting... Read more... |
Lykke Li, Village UndergroundFriday, 09 May 2014
A mournful voice sings “even though it hurts, even though it scars, love me when it storms, love me when I fall” over a strummed acoustic guitar which shares the lyrics dolefulness. As the centrepiece of her set last night, Lykke Li’s delivery of... Read more... |
When Corden Met Barlow, BBC OneTuesday, 06 May 2014
This had all the makings of a celebrity backslapathon of nauseous proportions, but it turned out to be a painfully touching exploration of the fragility of fame. Not that this means we have to feel sorry for filthy-rich pop stars and happy-chappy... Read more... |
