wed 10/09/2025

rock

Kings of Leon, Hyde Park

Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in...

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Jon Allen/ Josh Bray, Bush Hall

Jon Allen and his support Josh Bray are two sides of a coin. Of the two folk-rockers, the smoother, more polished Allen’s the heads. Bray is rougher, more unknown. But last night they both showed the depth of quality that exists in contemporary...

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CD: The Bookhouse Boys - Tales to be Told

London nine-piece hammer home a Gothic mariachi assault

It's fair to say that The Bookhouse Boys are not one of those bands who spotted a successful trend and thought, I know what, let's adapt our sound to that. The London nine-piece are often compared to Ennio Morricone but there are really only...

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Maverick Sabre, Jazz Café

Maverick Sabre: Reggae and soul from Stoke Newington via County Wexford

Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of Maverick Sabre. Then I saw his weird potato-face looks and heard his utterly distinctive voice on Later... With Jools Holland, and was intrigued; thus I found myself last night at the Jazz Café in a sold-out...

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tUnE-yArDs, Scala

Sometimes you hear something new and your perspective on music shifts seismically, making everything you were listening to previously sound safe and predictable by comparison. Inevitably, as one gets older and more musically knowledgeable, such...

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CD: JuJu - In Trance

JuJu: The new progressive rock? Only in the best possible way

Over the past five years, Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara have made two albums and an EP together, but it’s only now that they’ve got round to doing what most bands can’t wait to do, which is give themselves a groovy band name. Even though I’m a poo-...

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Wolfmother, Forum

Wolfmother: Riffery, proggery and big hair

Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century...

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Fleet Foxes, Hammersmith Apollo

Music folklore has it that this band from Seattle changed their name from Pineapple back in the hazy days before their debut album went platinum because frontman Robin Pecknold thought Fleet Foxes sounded like a weird, outmoded English sport - a bit...

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CD: Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See

"I poured my aching heart into a pop song/ I couldn't get the hang of poetry": a line from the title track of the Arctic Monkeys' fourth studio offering, Suck It and See, pretty much sums things up really. The new album is a poppy selection of...

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Singles & Downloads 13

Wiley's hectic schedule pauses briefly to drop a contagious pop nugget

At one level the day of the single is gone - the 7-inch, the CD, the physical format - and yet, at another it's more relevant than ever. Sure, any track can now be downloaded from an album and hit the charts but singles, downloads - chosen...

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Queen - Days of Our Lives, BBC Two

Despite selling 300 million albums, being memorialised in stage musicals and computer games and with a feature film about their early career in the works, Queen are still moaning about the press. It's a theme that simmered steadily through this two-...

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CD: Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs

The story goes that Eddie Vedder first picked up a ukulele in Hawaii in the mid-Nineties, since when the instrument has become his constant travelling companion and a handy songwriting tool. A whole album's worth of songs written on the funny little...

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