Willis penned hits for Earth, Wind & Fire, and wrote score for musical The Color Purple
Allee Willis, the US songwriter behind the Friends theme tune as well as hits such as September by Earth, Wind & Fire, has died aged 72.
She had suffered a sudden heart attack and Willis’s partner, Prudence Fenton was described as being “in total shock” over the news.
Continue reading...From uptempo romance to feelgood dance, politically spicy rap and crowdpleasing pop, the biggest tracks across Africa last year went big on cross-continental appeal
Continue reading...Her debut album confirmed her as the most exciting pop artist of her age. In the week she turns 18, Eilish talks about fame, fandom and her fears of adulthood
Billie Eilish was a star long before 2019. For a lot of 13- and 14-year-olds she was a game-changer the moment her song Ocean Eyes appeared on Soundcloud in 2015: an artist who spoke directly to her audience because she was her audience, a teenage girl who had co-written the song as a piece of homework and uploaded it for her teacher to access. But 2019 was the year that Eilish’s impact on pop became unavoidable: a show-stealing performance at Coachella; the youngest person to be nominated for all four biggest Grammy categories; the loud praise of fellow musicians from Tyler, the Creator to Thom Yorke; and a raft of younger artists operating under her influence.
Most importantly, the release of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, confirmed her as the most exciting pop artist of her age: a dark, adventurous, eclectic set of songs, that appeared blithely unconcerned with chasing trends. Recorded at home by Eilish and her elder brother Finneas, without co-writers or big-name producers, it showed that, in a world of pop stars desperate to be seen as auteurs, Eilish genuinely is one – a fact underlined by her directing the impressively disturbing video for single Xanny. She turned 18 yesterday.
Continue reading...‘We did it,’ Carey says, after streaming services finally help seasonal hit to top spot
It is perhaps the most cherished, euphoric and vocally impressive Christmas song of all time, but Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You had never reached the US No 1 spot – until now.
When it was released as part of an EP in 1994, US chart rules meant it couldn’t compete with singles. Later reclassified as a standalone song in 2000, it has been a seasonal fixture in the charts ever since – and after 25 years has finally reached No 1.
Continue reading...The voice behind It Must Have Been Love had suffered from health problems after undergoing radiation treatment for a brain tumour
Marie Fredriksson, who as the singer of Roxette was one of the most recognisable voices in 1980s and 90s pop, has died aged 61 following a long illness.
Her family said in a statement to Expressen, a newspaper in her native Sweden: “It is with great sadness that we have to announce that one of our biggest and most beloved artists is gone.”
Continue reading...Twenty-five years after her death – and with a Netflix series on the way – Selena’s approach to straddling Mexican and American identities is proving invaluable in the age of Trump
On a sticky Sunday in August, more than 5,000 people are standing through sporadic torrents of rain to attend a free outdoor concert in New York’s Central Park. The event, Selena for Sanctuary, has been organised in response to the Trump administration’s severe policies on undocumented individuals, and the crowd has gathered to support immigrant-rights organisations such as Make the Road New York – all in the name of the pop star Selena Quintanilla.
Selena has been dead for nearly 25 years. The superstar was shot and killed in 1995, at the age of 23, by her fanclub manager, Yolanda Saldívar. Yet at the concert, she seems more present than ever: fans wear T-shirts emblazoned with her wide, red-lipped smile. Others wear one-piece jumpsuits and jackets with gleaming rhinestones, nods to the sparkling stage outfits Selena would often make herself. From the stage, a parade of up-and-coming bilingual artists belts out covers of her classic cumbia hits: Mexican-American indie star Cuco offers his take on Bidi Bidi Bom Bom, dream-pop newcomer Ambar Lucid sings Techno Cumbia, and Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis performs Como la Flor. Their songs are a celebration during a turbulent time, reflecting how Selena still serves as a symbol of hope in the fight for immigrants’ rights.
Continue reading...It’s 20 years since Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm went solo, but, she says, it has taken until 2019 – ironically, the year of the band’s reunion tour – for her to really find herself
It’s often said that meeting a Spice Girl feels a lot like encountering a cartoon character. You can see it with unfiltered Mel B, poised Victoria and Emma, still resolutely family-friendly at 43. Geri’s modern lady-of-the-manor act is the antithesis of her old outrageousness, yet she is still swimming in camp. But with Mel C – or Melanie C as she styles herself these days – that’s not the case.
Even if she was your favourite Spice Girl, and you have never met one before, and she turns up to your interview in a closed Kings Cross bar wearing a hoodie and trackies – just as she would have done when Melanie Chisholm became Sporty Spice 25 years ago – it’s still only the little things that nod to the fact she was in one of the biggest girl groups of all time. She speaks quietly, often in an awed whisper, and is not beholden to the propaganda-like version of the Spice Girls’ story that some of her bandmates uphold.
Continue reading...Leonard Cohen’s final songs can now be heard on the album Thanks for the Dance. Here his son Adam talks about their emotionally complex relationship
“There are some songs I’m half way through that are not bad,” Leonard Cohen said in his final interview, published in the New Yorker on 17 October 2016. “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs.” Three weeks later, on 7 November, having released his 14th album, You Want It Darker, Cohen died in his sleep after a fall in his home in Los Angeles. The task of finishing those songs was passed, at Cohen’s request, to his son, Adam. The results can be heard on Thanks for the Dance, released last Friday.
“Essentially, I wanted to take the listener on an unconscious journey through the sonic signatures of my father’s career, without it sounding like a regurgitation,” says Adam Cohen, who, in his soft Canadian cadences and carefully constructed sentences, can sound uncannily like his father. “My dad always rejected invitations from producers like Rick Rubin and Don Was to make a retro record that sounded like his older stuff. He said he didn’t want to do the nostalgia act.”
Continue reading...Singer appeals to fans for help in escalation of feud with Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta
Taylor Swift’s performance at the American music awards is in doubt, as is the future of a new Netflix documentary about her, the singer has claimed, thanks to an ongoing feud with “tyrannical” music managers Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta.
Related: Taylor Swift returns to US court after appeal over copyright lawsuit
Continue reading...Traumatised by her legal struggles with producer Dr Luke, the once hedonistic pop star felt she didn’t deserve to be happy. But now she is back with a new album – and ready to party again
I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw Kesha. It was at T in the Park 2011, an otherwise unmemorable weekend festival in Scotland. During her main-stage performance, the woman then known as Ke$ha told the crowd that she had one pressing question. “Is there,” she said, prolonging the anticipation, “enough glitter on my titties?” The noisy consensus was no, there was not, so her accomplices doused her in a can of lager and an explosion of gold that left her looking like the daughter of C-3PO and Dolly Parton.
These gleeful exploits defined Kesha Rose Sebert as a pop star for a while. She followed her defiantly trashy 2010 debut, Animal, with the equally riotous Warrior in 2012, becoming a trailblazer for hedonistic pop. Then she disappeared. In 2016, a new image emerged: Kesha wearing a white suit, sobbing in court as she tried to escape her contract with the producer Dr Luke (AKA Lukasz Gottwald), whom she accused of sexual and emotional abuse including date rape and bullying that led to her developing an eating disorder. He denied the allegations. Her case was dismissed. While she could pick new collaborators, she still had to record for his label, an imprint of Sony, and he countersued for defamation.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter is releasing his sixth album in three years – his best since 1997. Would he like to expand on how he made it, or why he chose his collaborators? He would not
There is a song on Van Morrison’s 1991 album Hymns to the Silence called Why Must I Always Explain? in which the Northern Irish singer-songwriter appears to rail against the endlessly tiresome process of giving interviews. “And I never turned out to be the person that you wanted me to be,” he sings. “And I tell you who I am, time and time and time again / Tell me why must I always explain?”
The song is in my mind when I meet Morrison on a midweek morning in Cardiff. The singer sits by the window in a fourth-floor hotel room; a pale white knuckle of a man in a blue patterned shirt, his hair a sweep of bracken red. Beyond him, the view over the bay has been obscured by heavy autumn mist.
Continue reading...The songwriting storyteller recorded thousands of cassettes for visitors to Cahuita, his paradise town in Costa Rica. Now the race is on to rediscover them
‘Welcome to Cahuita town, welcome one and all,” Walter Ferguson sings on the song Cahuita Is a Beautiful Place, offering an invitation to drink some rum and listen to calypso in this corner of Limón, Costa Rica. Its charming lyrical bounce and layered guitar sounds like the work of more than one man, although it is his work alone – and a song that might never have been heard if not for a project aimed at locating the thousands of one-of-a-kind cassettes that Ferguson recorded at home for friends and visitors wanting to take home a piece of this “beautiful place”.
In the run up to Ferguson’s 100th birthday in May, his son Peck (the 10th of Ferguson’s 11 children) and Swiss calypso fan Niels Werdenberg have spent two years on a labour of love: the Walter Gavitt Ferguson Tape Hunt. Their goal is to track down these lost gems, digitising songs that, in 2018, the Costa Rican government designated part of the country’s cultural heritage.
Continue reading...Ahead of her ambitious Cornucopia tour reaching the UK in November, we select the greatest work by the Icelandic pop-polymath
An overlooked gem, tacked on to the end of her fan-selected Greatest Hits collection, It’s in Our Hands is a sublime slice of future R&B conjured up in collaboration with the avant-techno duo Matmos. There is a particularly spicy and formidable version included on the Vespertine Live album.
Continue reading...Anger grows at culture of exploitation and failure of agencies to protect performers
The death this week of the South Korean singer and actor Sulli has turned the spotlight on the darkest corners of the highly pressurised K-pop industry and sparked anger over the failure of management agencies to protect their stars from the menace of “toxic fandom”.
Sulli, a former member of the group f(x), had spoken publicly about her mental health problems and shock at her death has led to calls for greater support for performers. Authorities said she was suffering from severe depression and are investigating suicide as a possible cause of death.
Continue reading...The singer and former f(x) member, who was the victim of online bullying, had severe depression, according to police
The K-pop star and actor Sulli has been found dead at the age of 25. Police said that the celebrity, born Choi Jin-ri, was discovered unconscious at her Seongnam residence on 14 October.
“Her manager visited her home after failing to reach her since their last call the night before,” Seongnam police said, adding that Sulli had been experiencing severe depression. “It seems that she took her own life but we are also looking into other possibilities.”
Continue reading...Guitarist Robbie Robertson helped to change music history with Bob Dylan’s backing group the Band. He remembers how the ‘brotherhood’ ended in heroin addiction and self-destruction
In 1965 Robbie Robertson was living in the room next to Bob Dylan’s at New York’s Chelsea hotel. This was when Dylan was writing Blonde on Blonde. “The television was on. There was music playing. The phone was ringing. There were people coming and going – and he was writing away on his typewriter. I thought, ‘I don’t even understand how somebody can close off the outside world like that and concentrate. This guy is from another planet,’” Robertson says. But for a while he shared that planet, or came as close to sharing it as any musician did at the time.
Robertson was the lead guitarist of the Band (then known as The Hawks), the five-piece group that backed Dylan when he first went electric: essentially, they supplied the noise that the acoustic-loving crowds booed on tour. But while the collaboration changed the course of music history, it had another, quieter and more personal effect on the Band, shifting the dynamics of what Robertson calls their “brotherhood”, the way the five of them related.
Continue reading...Drummer who straddled jazz, blues and rock ‘passed away peacefully’
Ginger Baker, one of the most brilliant, versatile and turbulent drummers in the history of British music, has died aged 80.
His family had previously made it public that he was critically ill and asked fans to “please keep him in your prayers”. His Facebook page said he “passed away peacefully” on Sunday morning.
Continue reading...The protester held two signs, one condemning anti-Islam party For Britain, and another that said ‘Bigmouth indeed’
Morrissey has ejected an anti-far-right protester from a show in Portland. During his performance at the city’s Moda Center on Monday night (30 September), a woman held up two signs. One depicted the logo of the anti-Islam party For Britain struck through by a red line. The other read: “Bigmouth indeed.”
In fan footage from the concert, Morrissey can be seen addressing the woman after the second song of the night. “Let’s be quite frank,” he says. “When you with the sign are removed, I will continue.” His fans then join in as he repeatedly shouts “go”, “we don’t need you” and “goodbye”, calling upon his lighting technician to bring up the house lights.
Continue reading...Family of Baker, who has also performed with Fela Kuti and Public Image Ltd, ask fans to ‘keep him in your prayers’
Ginger Baker, the jazz and blues drummer who co-founded the rock band Cream, has been reported critically ill.
A tweet posted from his official account reads: “The Baker family are sad to announce that Ginger is critically ill in hospital. Please keep him in your prayers tonight.”
Continue reading...Sisters Jessica and Lisa Origliasso say reporting of incident ‘in conflict with video’ evidence, and they will take legal action over ‘intimidating and confusing’ removal from flight
Pop duo the Veronicas have disputed the account of their removal from a Sydney plane over an “incredibly intimidating and confusing” cabin baggage dispute, and are taking legal action.
Sisters Jessica and Lisa Origliasso were asked to leave Qantas QF516, which was bound for Brisbane on Sunday morning, amid an argument with cabin crew.
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