Music

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of Johannesburg and its undisputed queen, Mama Africa Johannesburg was a city built on gold, springing up rapidly after precious metals were discovered there in the 1880s, but it became a byword for impoverishment. Soweto in particular, originally a mine workers’ encampment and later one of the places black Jo’burgians from […]

Thirty years after his death, a new biography of Steve Marriott, of the Small Faces, paints a bleak picture of rock excess. The 30th anniversary of Steve Marriott’s death at the age of 44 – he died in a house fire on April 21 1991 caused by his falling asleep with a lit cigarette – finds the […]

From beach bums to hippies, hair metal rockers to gangster rappers, LA’s musical story has more twists than most. LA is a city of extremes. It’s a place where you either make it big or hit rock bottom, with a huge gulf between the mansions of Bel Air and the tents and shacks of Skid Row, […]

The Seychelles are a place where musical cultures from every part of the world – African, Indian, Polynesian, Arabic, Far Eastern and European – truly harmonise “The real richness of these islands is our cultural heritage,” Seychellois musical legend Patrick Victor has said. That is a cultural heritage that ranges far beyond the island of Mahé, smaller […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of the Mexico capital. Some places are so alive with their own internal mythology that their music speaks of little else. Chilangos, the contested term for the denizens of Mexico City, have played out a love affair with their city in popular song over the last half century, but music […]

Sunderland’s indomitable party spirit is to be found in its exuberant 1990s girl band, and its very own drug-addled rave subculture. The atmosphere at the Blue Monkey club was almost physically tangible. The dancefloor filled with drug-fuelled revellers, lights and lasers roiling while ultra-high energy hardcore pumped out of the speakers, this old bingo hall on Sunderland’s […]

The new film The United States vs Billie Holiday is part of a canonisation the singer would have disliked, says BONNIE GREER.

SOPHIA DEBOICK on a place where music has articulated the angst of a colonised community, as well as addressed its more modern taboos. Greenland is a place where colonial history is lived every day. The world’s largest island, lying mostly within the Arctic Circle, it was settled by Norsemen as early as the year 1,000 […]

SOPHIA DEBOICK on the music of the Scottish city. A white teenager with a voice like a world-weary soul singer twice her age could only be a product of Glasgow. Lulu grew up in the city’s Dennistoun district amid poverty and violence, but she put Glasgow’s mark on the charts as the British pop era […]

Your weekly check on how Project Fear is becoming Project Reality, selected by Steve Anglesey.  It has been a gloomy week on the sunlit uplands of sovereign Britain as Michael Gove’s war on experts appeared to have been extended to exports. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in charge of ensuring smooth trade after […]

Elton John has called on the government to renegotiate a better settlement for musicians after they were largely ignored during Brexit negotiations. The British pop icon accused Boris Johnson of having “screwed up” by failing to reach an agreement with the EU for visa-free tours by British musicians. John said Britain’s Brexit negotiators either “didn’t care about […]

Manchester’s musical conveyer belt has been responsible for some outstanding acts over the years. SOPHIA DEBOICK tries to join the dots between them. “My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets.” So Morrissey – once the master of ironic kitchen sink portraits of Mancunian life – opened his memoirs, evoking the endless terraces […]

A Tory minister has admitted the UK rejected a proposal by the EU to extend the music visa scheme in favour of more stringent border policies. Culture minister Caroline Dinenage said No 10 declined the offer because it would have meant allowing “visa-free short-stays for all EU citizens”. Speaking in the House of Commons, Dinenage […]

Matt Withers talks to the Poet Laureate of Brexit Britain about Europe, lockdown and cultural appropriation in music This time last year Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods, the Poet Laureate of Brexit Britain, was writing the first songs for the band’s sixth studio album. The themes would have been familiar for those who know the […]

A petition launched by touring musicians has amassed almost 230,000 signatures as they attempt to secure a free “cultural work permit” that would allow them free travel through the 27 member states to perform. The group of musicians and tour crew who have mostly been left unable to work due to the coronavirus pandemic say they […]

Emma Luck on the singer who shook up Italy. When the long-awaited call came for a meeting with Elvis’ manager Colonel Parker and the King himself in Memphis, Little Tony leapt at the chance. Known as ‘the Italian Elvis’, the performer had always acknowledged the influence of his American hero. It was not hard to […]

There is more to Bethelem than just carols, as SOPHIA DEBOICK explains. “For 2,000 years people have sung songs for my hometown,” says Leila Sansour in a trailer for her film Open Bethlehem (2014), a personal odyssey through Bethlehem’s past, present and future. Indeed, no other place has been a byword, so frequently invoked in […]

Remembering Conny Plank, the music producer who helped define an essentially European sound. There are music producers who become famous in their own right. Joe Meek, Rick Rubin, Jerry Wexler, Stephen Street, Quincy Jones: most of us could probably reel off a list of mixing desk maestros who have helped change or define the sound […]

Shane MacGowan is a challenging subject for a new documentary film. JASON SOLOMONS talks to its director about a hard to love character and staying the right side of romanticism With his rotten-looking mouth, pallid grey skin and slurred speech, Shane MacGowan is the alternative face of Christmas. The Pogues singer and drunken Anglo-Irish poet […]

The Ethiopian capital has always been an ebullient, ambitious, swinging city – apart from a brief interlude of civil war and despotism. SOPHIA DEBOICK reports “If you’re here it means that things are better than where you come from.” This is how Francis Falceto, the Frenchman behind the Ethiopiques series of reissues from the golden age of […]

Dub London: Bassline of a City – celebrates the best of dub music. Wondering what ‘dub’ is? Essentially, it’s a remix of a song with the vocals (and much instrumentation) stripped away while the rhythm is boosted with added reverb and sound effects. In doing so new soundscapes are created. Dub was first developed in […]

MITCH BENN on the annual controversy over Fairytale of New York. One of my favourite things about the Christmas season is the way that new Yuletide traditions are always evolving and emerging to take their place alongside the more ‘time-honoured’ ones. A recent addition to the canon of Christmas customs is the online game Whamageddon; as […]

Overshadowed by her music, modelling and private life, Richard Luck says Jane Birkin’s career in film deserves a reappraisal – even if not all of her movies themselves do. She has many stories to tell, Jane Birkin. Little wonder her recent book – Munkey Diaries, published for the first time in English this summer – concentrates […]

TIM WALKER looks at the life of Sir Cliff Richard… One of the frustrations of being Sir Cliff Richard is that newspapers only normally dispatch showbusiness journalists to talk to him. That’s limiting for him, and limiting, too, for the public in terms of their understanding of him. So it delighted the veteran entertainer when, […]

Patrick Sawer on a new book which underlines the extraordinary closeness that The Clash used to enjoy with their fans. In his eulogy to the exuberant heyday of music papers, the Ulster singer and critic Gavin Martin tells his audience, no doubt digitally-native youngsters enthralled by tales of the golden age of rock, that he […]

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 […]