fri 11/07/2025

1990s

CD: Hawkwind - Road to Utopia

Implausible times call for implausible music, and it doesn't come much more unlikely than this. Hawkwind, the die-hard troupers of gnarly cosmic squatter drug-rock, have re-recorded highlights from their catalogue, arranged and produced by Mike Batt...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Teenage Fanclub

The cover images of the four albums Teenage Fanclub issued on Creation Records suggest ambivalence. While Bandwagonesque’s title acknowledges the hopping onto trends endemic in pop, the graphic of a bag with a dollar sign recognises the related...

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 42: Flaming Lips, Blacklab, Juno Reactor, U2, Ross From Friends and more

Initially, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl began with the sentence after this one, but it's so dry readers might drowse off, so I started with this one instead and would advise moving through the next one, just picking up the gist quickly......

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Annie Ernaux: The Years, review - time’s flow

“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and...

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CD: All Saints - Testament

As far as All Saints aficionados will be concerned, 17 years after they originally split they’ve pulled the dream team back together. Not only is regular “fifth member”, producer/songwriter K-Gee Gordon on board, but for two songs so is producer...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Kamal Keila

Music from Sudan is overshadowed by the country’s recent history. At the end of June 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir assumed control and it became a one-party state. Shariah law was introduced. Osama Bin Laden was resident in capital city Khartoum from...

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Summer 1993 review - the tenderest fabric of childhood

Carla Simón’s debut feature Summer 1993 is a gem of a film by any standards, but when you learn that its story is based closely on the thirtysomething Catalan director’s own early life, its intimacy becomes almost overwhelming. It has at its heart a...

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The Cure, RFH review - sterling close-up show from alt-pop stalwarts

The Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival in London came to a close on Sunday night with a spectacular, concept-driven headline set by The Cure, or CUREATION 25, as the band was actually billed, presumably because of a previously contracted show at...

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Ryuichi Sakamoto: 'Ideally I'm recording all the time, 24 hours a day' - interview

Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer...

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CD: Morcheeba - Blaze Away

Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and...

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LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - incandescent swansongs by Mahler and Tippett

Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the...

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10 Questions for Musician Jeremy Cunningham of The Levellers

Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The...

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