Music

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 […]

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 […]