New Music Features
Listed: Linda Thompson's Top 10 Traditional SongsSunday, 20 October 2013
"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published today on theartsdesk. When she talked to me she also discussed her early adventures in traditional folk music. "I was already interested in folk singing in Glasgow," she said. "Great people like Archie Fisher. Read more...
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Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked DoorSaturday, 12 October 2013
Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country. Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album,... Read more... |
Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story, BBC FourThursday, 10 October 2013
Tubular Bells stands alone in the history of late 20th-century music: a rock album without vocals. But it turns out as well to have been a kind of one-hit wonder for multi-instrumentalist and composer Mike Oldfield. The piece apparently came out of the blue – at least that is how it felt in 1973, when Virgin Records adventurously made it their first-ever LP release. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Oslo: Pushing folk’s frontiersSunday, 06 October 2013
Four days in Norway’s capital attending Folkelarm, the festival of Nordic folk music, raises the perennial and always knotty question of how far music can move beyond the traditional yet still be labelled as folk? With the charming and reassuringly old-fashioned accordion- and string-driven dance band the P. A. Røstads Orkester there’s no such problem. Read more... |
Flatshare with Bowie: what happened nextSaturday, 28 September 2013
Forty four years ago David Bowie was living in the spare room of the suburban flat I shared with my two young children. He was broke and I was only occasionally employed – so we started a Sunday night folk club in the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street – for fun and so he could pay me some rent. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Russia: WOMAD PyatigorskWednesday, 25 September 2013
“Some say that I come from Russia / Some think that I come from Africa / But I'm so exotic, I'm so erotic / 'Cos I come from the Planet Paprika...” Read more... |
Darbar Festival: The ancient art of DhrupadFriday, 20 September 2013
This is a key weekend for lovers of Indian classical music or the merely sonically adventurous – the Darbar Festival in the Southbank has some of the most extraordinary practioners of the art from both the Carnatic (South Indian) and Hindustani (North Indian) traditions.The most fascinating aspect may be the presence of some really ancient styles notably Dhrupad. Read more... |
Listed: The 20 best movie songsSunday, 15 September 2013
Seeing and hearing A Field in England's Richard Glover sing "Baloo, My Boy" while in bedraggled character reminded me of the power often exerted by songs explicitly or implicitly germane to a movie's narrative. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Katowice: On tour at Tauron Nowa Muzyka FestivalWednesday, 11 September 2013
Day 1 Read more... |
Another Self Portrait: Bob's buffed up for Bootleg Series Volume 10Monday, 26 August 2013
No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official releases. While the latter are set in stone, the Bootleg Series is more like a basement excavation, digging into the softer darker clays of epochal concerts, wildly alternate versions, and almost willfully lost treasures. Read more... |
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