From the Mayor of London’s office come dubious missives promising a halt to the capital’s cultural drain, but that the office continues to oversee the closure of live venues across central London means that all musicians – and that means…
If music hadn’t found him and permitted him self-expression, Pat Dam Smyth would have excelled as a performance poet, the curious fervency of his voice long nourished by the proselytising city in which he made his musical bones. The Northern…
If Vincent Price had dropped out, tuned in, bought a drum kit and then eschewed a barber, he might, just might, have turned into Bobby Gillespie, the Glaswegian’s lugubrious, feline face looking at and through the lens of every camera…
“People ask me, how the hell did you wangle a week in Abbey Road?” says Chris Sheehan over a coffee in the ‘canteen’ down the corridor from Studio 2. We’ve just witnessed Pat Dam Smyth put the finishing touches to…
With a wealth of music made and stacked high behind him, upon which he can hang the sign ‘Legacy’, Mike Scott has returned with a record made accessible for anyone not familiar with his previous work. With an ever revolving…
The official video for ‘You And I’ begins and ends with pyjamas. They fill the screen. The promo, shot and cut with the elan of the young Scorsese/Schoonmaker partnership, arrests the eye. The rooms through which she walks are beautifully…
Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad decade. We were all very positive about life back then, positive about the state of things, like the nation and how we fitted into it, and how, with a modicum of elbow grease…
Making a comeback is a tricky thing to pull off. Things have changed since you’ve been away. The industry has for one thing, your face and voice for another. Then there are your energy levels. Your memory is also affected….
‘If you have to kick against the pricks, must you mention them by name?’ asked John Osborne once upon a time. The answer, in this case, is No. There is not enough time to kick out against a confederacy of…
If we’re to accept that we live in transitional times and that political shifts have, for a long while, starved the arts of much-needed funding, then this eponymously-named debut musical statement from Cellar Doors arrives just in time. Having performed…