Music

SOPHIA DEBOICK on how Sarajevo’s musical heritage helped the city through its darkest hour. To the outside world, 1,425 days eclipsed half a millennium of history. The sheer horror of the 1992-1996 siege of Sarajevo and the inter-ethnic violence of the Bosnian War obscured its past as an urban powerhouse and centre of learning under […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on Cardiff’s considerable musical credentials. “Singing is in my people as sight is in the eye,” says the protagonist of How Green Was My Valley (1941), John Ford’s sentimental cinematic portrait of life in a 19th century Welsh village. The South Wales valleys have indeed rung with “the sound of many voices”, as […]

For both Brahms and the Beatles, Hamburg provided a hothouse to develop their talent and character, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. “I cling to my native city as to a mother” wrote Johannes Brahms in 1862. The devastating emotion of his German Requiem, inspired by his mother’s death three years later, proved this comparison was no small statement. […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the Minnesotan city and its most famous musical son. Minneapolis has always taken its own path. When Bob Dylan arrived in the city in 1959 from Duluth, 150 miles further north, he discovered that Minneapolis – the ‘City of Lakes’ – and its twin city Saint Paul were “rock and roll towns” […]

Globalisation might now be a dirty word for many, while U2 sometimes seem as disliked by an equal number. But, says IAN WALKER, at their finest the band capture a sense of optimism about the connected world. Commercially, U2 are as successful as any band could be. Over the last decade, they made more money […]

The brilliant neurologist-cum-writer Oliver Sacks wrote a book called Musicophilia in which he explored his own great passion for music through the lens of scientific detachment. The work is full of delights – not least Sacks’s unpicking of the troubling phenomenon of the ‘earworm’, or tune we cannot purge from our brains. The explanation? Invariably […]

Sophia Deboick on a modern music phenomenon and his creative hometown. Maastricht is a name that looms large in the history of the European Union. As the place of the EU’s birth with the 1992 Treaty it is forever associated with grey diplomacy and has been a four-letter word in the mouths of Eurosceptics. But […]

Sophia Deboick on the fascinating story of the star’s often self-destructive obsession with the US, 50 years after the release of the foreboding album which marked its beginning. David Jones was hardly the only baby boomer to adore all things American. The schoolboy was one of millions who had come through austerity Britain to find rock ‘n’ […]

An archipelago of 10 islands 350 miles off the coast of Senegal, Cape Verde is a place that was made by slavery. Its islands of jungle, mountains and volcanic landscapes were uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived in 1462, but it then became a key staging post in the transatlantic slave trade, developing a population of […]

A new biography of singer-songwriter John Martyn perfectly captures his flair, as well as his flaws, says GARTH CARTWRIGHT. Newly settled in London in 1992, one evening I ventured from my Forest Gate base to the Half Moon in Putney – an epic east to west hike for a gig – to see John Martyn. […]

DAVID KATZ talks to Chronixx, a Jamaican artist who has attracted comparisons with Bob Marley… and Frank Sinatra The problematic concept of the ‘next Bob Marley’ has surfaced at odd intervals ever since the reggae icon’s untimely death in 1981, with artists such as Ini Kamoze, Luciano and Buju Banton being saddled with it before […]

SOPHIE DEBOICK on a city where the extreme landscape has inspired its music. And which produced perhaps the most unlucky Eurovision contestant ever. Coming from a city on the edge of a continent 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle makes you tough. It also makes you think differently. The largest Arctic city outside of Russia, […]

Melburnians have a long history of outspokenness. The 1854 Eureka Rebellion of miners which led to an expansion of the electorate, the 1856 stonemasons’ march on parliament which resulted in the eight-hour day, and even the last stand of Ned Kelly, symbolic of defiance of the colonial authorities, are foundational events of the city’s history. […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a sometimes maligned city, and the intense star who still casts his huge shadow over it Viewed from the other side of the North Sea, Belgium is neither one thing nor the other. Both French and Dutch, it’s sometimes seen as no man’s land between France and the Netherlands and accused of lacking […]

Music photographer KEVIN CUMMINS took many of Britpop’s era-defining images and knew all its key players. So, as his new book about the period is published, why does he feel conflicted about the musical movement that sparked Blur v Oasis and Cool Britannia? In the mid-1990s anything and everything British was cool. Celebrity mockney chefs: […]

50 years ago, Black Sabbath released two albums that created a brand new sound. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. It was music with cinematic ambition. First torrential rain, then a tolling bell, thunder, and a dissonant, sinister guitar riff which would have been wholly appropriate as the announcement of the entrance of the devil himself.When Ozzy Osbourne intoned lugubriously “What […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a Colombian city characterised by great riches, then vast bloodshed, and a culture that has endured through both. Barranquilla was once a byword for success. From the 16th century, the Colombian city’s position at the mouth of the Magdalena River and by the Caribbean Sea made it a crucial trading post, connecting […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the Midlands city that helped launch the careers of many acts from elsewhere, as well as plenty of its own. English pop group Showaddywaddy with their cars outside Filbert Street stadium, home of Leicester City Football Club, Leicester, 11th March 1976. Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images – Credit: Getty Images Despite a […]

In recent years the city’s creativity has been stifled and its musical energies diverted into protest, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Hong Kong is an economic powerhouse, global port, and one of the most densely populated places in the world. Smaller than London, this special administrative region of China on a city scale is almost a country […]

Historical attempts to curb Romanian culture have only aided creativity, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. José Ferrer in crisis. Picture: Submitted – Credit: Archant For a short while, Romania looked like it might become a beacon of creative freedom in the communist east. When Ceausescu became general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965 he adopted […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on Lucky Dube, the South African reggae star who made his life a mission, until it was cut tragically short It was just one murder among thousands. The shooting of a 43-year-old man in a botched carjacking in a Johannesburg suburb in October 2007 was barely worthy of note given that 18,487 killings […]

The Siberian city might appear a musical backwater, but it doesn’t sound like one, says SOPHIA DEBOICK The winter temperature plummets to 20 below zero in Novosibirsk and as the capital of Siberia it is a place easily associated with the inhumanities of Tsarist-era penal colonies and the Soviet Gulag. In fact Novosibirsk – the […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the French resort that came to embody the very essence of glamour and hedonism. Juan-les-Pins had two golden eras, one in the carefree inter-war years and one in the 1960s, both decades of revolution in fashion, cinema and music and of beautiful people. Situated between Cannes and Nice, the Cap d’Antibes peninsula […]

The Floridian city has a prolific record of producing boisterous, exuberant music. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports. Miami is the party city without rival, and its music has rarely deviated from pure aural sunshine. But for all idyllic associations, its geographical location has meant it has faced directly into geo-political strife. In the 15 years after the […]

Once a stop-off on the hippy trail, the Nepalese capital has a distinct musical culture – complete with its own version of hip hop – which must carefully navigate the country’s sensitive politics. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports Kathmandu is the gateway to Everest and to dreams. Here, the final outpost of urbanity before the 13,000 feet […]

Many of its greatest musical talents may have left the city behind, but the success they enjoyed is built on their experiences there, says SOPHIA DEBOICK. Although it began at the periphery, as a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall in 122 AD, Newcastle spent many subsequent centuries at the centre of the world. It was […]

SOPHIE DEBOICK on how a city’s legacy of musical manufacturing and industry has been repurposed in the pop era A city of lakes and mountains at the foot of the Alps and 20 miles from the shores of Lake Garda, Brescia has an affinity with the finer things in life. The plains around the city […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a city where music has been shaped by a traumatic history, but often transcends it. Derry has been a byword for the Troubles, its disputed name a symbol of the divide between nationalists and unionists. After a history of sectarian tension dating back to the 17th century, the Troubles began in earnest […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on two cities divided by a river but united by style and sounds. Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a former Belgian colony – faces Brazzaville – capital of the much smaller, previously French-held, Republic of the Congo – just across the river for which both countries are named. […]

Elvis Presley did much to promote Hawaii’s musical culture, but its native sons have far more to offer themselves. SOPHIE DEBOICK reports. Honolulu is more than 2,000 miles from the West Coast of the US, but is a place deeply embedded in American mythology. As a tourist playground focussed on Waikiki – once the home […]

The Vengaboys are perhaps Rotterdam’s best known recent export, but the city also has its very own curious genre, SOPHIA DEBOICK reports Exterior view of the Rotterdam Ahoy, the official venue for the planned Eurovision Song Contest 2020 which has been cancelled due to coronavirus. (Photo by Robin Utrecht/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) – Credit: […]

The music of the Big Apple is every bit as brash, bold and brilliant as the city itself, says Sophia Deboick. The musical soul of New York is the musical soul of America. The vagaries of 20th century history have rarely dented the confident, even arrogant, spirit of the music from and about the city, […]