Singer announces she is rescheduling Weekends with Adele show as half her crew infected with Covid
Adele has been forced to delay her three-month Las Vegas residency after Covid hit the production.
“I’m so sorry, but my show ain’t ready,” the singer announced in an Instagram post. “We’ve been absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and Covid. Half my crew … are down with Covid – they still are – and it’s been impossible to finish the show.”
Continue reading...It’s 550 years since the islands became part of Scotland, and the archipelago is still not for the faint-hearted. But it has inspired its own diverse music, where fiddles and accordions meet the sub-bass of the sea
Five hundred and fifty years ago next month, the king of Norway lost a deposit he had put down to settle a debt: more than a hundred wild, treeless islands in the sub-arctic North Sea. The Scottish king, James III, had wanted Rhenish florins, but he had to settle for Shetland instead.
The archipelago eventually became part of the UK and has since developed a diverse, distinctive musical culture. This weekend, at the annual Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, the Shetland 550 concerts will celebrate it, bringing together experimental composers, jazz performers, poets and players of traditional tunes. The series is co-curated by the award-winning fiddler Chris Stout, who was born in the three-mile-long Fair Isle (population: 68) before moving to the Mainland at eight (population: 18,765). “Although, even there, you’re still only ever three miles from the sea,” he says.
Continue reading...Singer’s lawyer demands sister Jamie Lynn stop ‘referencing Britney derogatorily’ during promotion of memoir, and files allegations of misconduct against father
A lawyer acting for Britney Spears has threatened legal action against her sister Jamie Lynn, and accused their father of financial misconduct, including the hiring of a private security firm to keep Britney and people close to her under surveillance.
A letter written by Britney’s lawyer Mathew Rosengart instructs Jamie Lynn to “cease and desist from referencing Britney derogatorily during your promotional campaign” for her new memoir. “If you fail to do so or defame her, Britney will be forced to consider and take all appropriate legal action.”
Continue reading...With references ranging from drug users to the Japanese avant garde, Tom Heyes has transcended a dull life in the north-west through explosive choreography and streams of consciousness
First emerging as a surrealist reaction to the horrors of the second world war, the Japanese art of butoh incorporates violence, sacrifice and bodily mutilation: a captivatingly intense form of performance described by its founder Tatsumi Hijikata as the “dance of utter darkness”.
For a teenage Tom Heyes, growing up in dreary, small-town Lancashire, it was an escape from the abject mundanity of his life. “When I was first starting out I didn’t really view it as performance art. It was just me being fucked up in my bedroom,” he says, reflecting on his early interpretation of the craft which drew as much from donk (the north-west’s spin on hardcore dance) as it did the Japanese avant garde. Often he would be left bruised and bloodied from these punishing dance routines, “but those ones back then were the most raw shit ever”, he insists.
Continue reading...Did the iconic three-note sequence come from Stravinsky, the Muppets or somewhere else? Our writer set out to – dun, dun duuuun! – reveal the mystery
There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognisable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognisable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun!
On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.
Continue reading...As the €866m Elbphilharmonie celebrates its fifth anniversary, what could have been a costly mistake has become a symbol of the German city. London, take note
Five years ago the world felt a very different place. Pandemics belonged to disaster movies; the UK was reeling from the divisive Brexit vote but, with Theresa May newly installed as prime minister, the hope was that she might succeed in a soft Brexit and, in London; Simon Rattle’s imminent arrival as the London Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor was eagerly anticipated and along with it the city’s transformative new Centre for Music.
Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie opened in January 2017 with a glittering gala attended by celebrities and dignitaries. The spectacular concert hall was praised for its bold design, its superb acoustics and its “exceptionally exceptional exceptionalness”. But in London the hope – back then – was that the city’s own new concert hall would one day also be a world-leading arts venue to compete with Hamburg’s.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter is back with a new album after a decade spent nurturing her award-winning musical. She reflects on white privilege, finding a musical community – and moving back to rural Vermont
“Anything that you love can become a trap,” says the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. She’s talking about the career-defining stage musical Hadestown, an energetic Depression-era retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice which dominated her life for more than a decade.
Mitchell first toured it as a lo-fi theatre production in 2006, travelling through Vermont in a converted school bus, turned it into a concept album in 2010, and then spent several years reworking it for the stage with director Rachel Chavkin. Since opening on Broadway in 2019, Hadestown’s timelessly American tapestry of folk, blues, jazz, gospel and cabaret has won her a Tony award (and collected eight in total), a Grammy and a place on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2020. But it left her facing the question: what now? Her new book of exhaustively annotated Hadestown lyrics, Working on a Song, feels like a final clearing of the decks prior to the release of her self-titled seventh album, her first collection of original songs since 2012 and her “escape pod” from the musical.
Continue reading...The bassist and saxophonist recreate an old photo and look back at a mortifying incident in a German sauna
Pioneers of the New Romantic movement, Spandau Ballet’s career launched in the late 70s within the walls of Blitz, an enigmatic club in Covent Garden known for influencing the sound and style of 80s pop. Formed by London school friends Gary Kemp, Tony Hadley, Steve Norman and John Keeble – and later Gary’s brother and former roadie Martin – Spandau Ballet went on to soundtrack the bombast and excess of the decade, selling 25m albums globally. Known for their bitter breakup – Tony, Steve and John launched an unsuccessful case against Gary for a share of the band’s songwriting royalties – they’ve since reformed but are now on hiatus. Martin has gone on to have a successful television career, while saxophonist Steve and his band, the Sleevz, celebrate the 40th anniversary of Spandau’s debut album with a UK tour later this year.
Continue reading...After breakups, breakdowns, stalkers and worse, Chan Marshall has rewritten her bleakest lyrics and recorded an album of highly personal covers. ‘We all need sweetness,’ she says
Chan Marshall is sitting cross-legged on a bed, crying. It’s a sniffly, unselfconscious kind of crying, tears smudging sooty eyeshadow. Thirty years into her often wayward career as the US singer-songwriter Cat Power, she is crying because in a few weeks’ time she is 50 and she can’t believe she made it, that life turned out OK, that she’s happy. At least, happier than she was when she turned 30, the day her then boyfriend “stood me up”. Or her 40th, when she felt controlled in the relationship she was in.
“He was involved with this church,” she explains. “I wasn’t allowed to have friends. Or a party. So … hmm. I’m so sorry.” She shakes her head, reaches across the bed and clutches my hand. “It’s heavy, dude.” She takes a bolstering tug on a cigarette. “The 20s were so fucking difficult, like: ‘Oh, now I gotta do this some more?’” she carries on. “Turning 40 was: ‘Uuuurgh, well I made it this far, but it’s got to get better.’”
Continue reading...As her breakthrough album Born to Die turns 10, we pick the best of an artist whose beautiful, damned aesthetic changed the course of pop
Apparently inspired by the suicide of a friend and remixed by Cedric Gervais into that rarest of things – a party-starting Lana Del Rey banger – Summertime Sadness was a hook-laden highlight of her second album Born to Die, later becoming a key text in the #prettywhenyoucry “sad girl” aesthetic Del Rey inadvertently spawned.
Continue reading...The folk-rockers have weathered divorce and trauma to become one of the US’s best bands. Loved up with one another on tour, they explain their need for imperfection – and why recording is like sex
It is early afternoon in downtown Nashville, and the party is already going strong. Bachelorettes in pink cowboy hats are flowing, mask-free, in and out of the honky-tonks. The members of Big Thief, though – Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik and James Krivchenia – are sitting outside the Ryman Auditorium like dots of oil floating atop the water. No one seems to notice that one of the US’s best bands is scattered around a patio table a few hours before their show tonight, just yards above the 24/7 bacchanal.
“There’s a pigeon-keeper up there,” says the band’s frontperson Lenker, leaning forward in her chair in a horse-print shirt, jeans and a bandanna, her gaze fixed on a small skyscraper. She points, and the rest of the band follows her finger to a group of birds on top of a building, furiously in motion. “They’re flying in circles, so there has to be a cage up there. They only do that when there is someone conducting them.”
Continue reading...A centuries-old outdoor folklore ceremony featuring singing, dancing, costumes and crop-blessings, the wassail is having a pandemic-era revival – with witchy reinventions
On a January night in the tiny Herefordshire village of Eardisland, a crowd of hundreds is being led to an orchard down a muddy country lane. Their leaders wear tall hats, garlanded with fruit, feathers and flowers; their faces are a damp, mossy, green; their ankles jingle with bells. It is very dark: the only light comes from a crisp, crescent moon and the flaming torches that men, women and children hold in their hands.
The scene may sound sinister, but there is joy in the air at this crop-blessing wassail, a midwinter folklore ceremony, usually in apple-producing counties, involving singing, dancing and other folk customs. At Eardisland, the Leominster morris – they in the extravagant hats, plus flowery jackets made from old bedsheets and curtains – pour cider made from last year’s apples on to tree roots, hang toasted bread on tree branches to tempt the spirits, and light fires to represent renewal and the coming spring sun. The mood is jolly. “I’ll hopefully not set my leg on fire,” says the announcer, Josh Johnson, to laughter, before stamping flames out.
Continue reading...Postwar Japan embraced the music of its former enemy – and, powered by anti-establishment feeling, remade it. As they find a new global audience, the country’s jazz innovators explain what drove them
The story of Japanese jazz is about music and a movement, but also a nation’s state of mind – a daring vision of a better future after the second world war, sounded out on piano, drums and brass. Jazz is a distinctly American art form – the US’s greatest cultural achievement, in fact, along with hip-hop – and a healthy scene had formed in the 1920s and 30s as American players toured the clubs of Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka. But Japan had historically been an insular nation – its policy of sakoku, which for more than two centuries severely limited contact with the outside world, had only ended in the 1850s – and an increasingly nationalist government, feeling jazz diluted Japanese culture, began to crack down. By the second world war, “the music of the enemy” was outlawed.
After the country’s surrender, occupying forces oversaw sweeping reforms. American troops brought jazz records with them; Japanese musicians picked up work entertaining the troops. There was a proliferation of jazz kissa (cafes), a distinctly Japanese phenomenon where locals could sit and listen to records for as long as they wanted. For some, jazz was the sound of modernity.
Continue reading...He has found critical and commercial success, while behind the scenes the frontman has battled with his self-confidence and severe stage fright. He explains why he still loves being in the band
Dan Smith doesn’t know how to switch off. In the decade or so that he has been the creative heart, and frontman, of the band Bastille, he has thought about music constantly. There was a two-week period over Christmas and new year where he thought he had managed not to. Then he went to a double bill at the cinema.
“I got the whole way through the first film and three-quarters of the way through the second film before I had to leave, sing into my phone in the corridor awkwardly, and then come back in,” he says. “If I have a song idea that pops into my head, I have to get it down. It will eat away at me if I forget it, or it’s just on loop in my head.”
Continue reading...‘The idea of wearing checked shirts came from Bruce Springsteen – plus you could buy them cheap at Millets!’
I knew [singer/guitarist] Stuart Adamson when he was in Skids and I was in the Delinquents and all the bands in Dunfermline used to rehearse in stables next to each other. When Skids were doing their third album he said to me: “Wouldn’t it be great to do a twin guitar thing?” I thought he was just being nice. Then after Skids split he knocked on my door and said: “Remember that conversation? Do you still want to do it?”
Continue reading...Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young also appear in 26 minutes of home video at event that marked end of hippy dream
Twenty-six minutes of unseen footage of the vast and notoriously violent Altamont music festival held in northern California in 1969 have been unexpectedly uncovered.
The home-movie footage – which is vividly shot on 8mm film, but frustratingly silent – has been published by the Library of Congress on its website.
Continue reading...Artist, poet and singer, Dieynaba Sidibé, AKA Zeinixx, has made her way to the top of the country’s male-dominated hip-hop scene and wants her messages of hope to inspire young women
When Dieynaba Sidibé discovered graffiti, it was love at first sight. She was 17 and had already begun experimenting with painting and drawing.
“It was on TV. I was sitting in my living room and I saw people doing big walls and I thought, ‘This is what I need’,” the Senegalese artist says, one hoop earring shaking as she laughs. “I don’t like small things. I was doing big canvases, and I said to myself: ‘A wall is a bigger surface for expression’.”
Continue reading...The brothers recreate a family photo and talk about how they came back from a huge fallout – and a best man’s speech starring a puppet testicle
Justin and Dan Hawkins are the Lowestoft brothers behind rock band the Darkness. Puncturing the genteel Dido and Keane-era mainstream of the early noughties with their stadium rock and low-cut catsuits, their music had a short-lived period of ridicule before their debut album Permission to Land went on to sell 3.5m copies. At the peak of their commercial powers they won three Brit awards, an Ivor Novello, and penned the modern Christmas classic, 2003’s Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End). The band split in 2006 after the release of their second album, but they’ve since reformed and released five more records. They are currently on tour.
Continue reading...Irish musician says Shane O’Connor, last seen on Friday morning, ‘was the very light of my life’
Sinéad O’Connor’s 17-year-old son has died, two days after he was reported missing.
The musician shared the news on social media, writing that he “decided to end his earthly struggle” and asked that “no one follows his example”.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
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The trio repurpose their sound from post-punk to pop-facing with a polished and snappy fifth album
Scroll down the Wombats’ Spotify page and you come to the section headed “Fans also like”. It features a selection of their mid-00s contemporaries, fellow strivers in the league of what was cruelly dubbed “landfill indie”: the Pigeon Detectives, the Kooks, the Enemy, Scouting for Girls. As everyone knows, fashion is cyclical and this stuff currently lurks at the foot of fortune’s wheel: old enough to seem like yesterday’s news, not old enough to seem appealingly retro. Give it 10 years and they’ll be packing them in at 00s revival festivals, as their Britpop forebears are today, but for now, it’s strictly self-released albums and tours of venues euphemistically described as “intimate”.
By rights, the Wombats should be in the same boat as those bands, more anonymous than their peers (close your eyes and try to visualise frontman Matthew “Murph” Murphy, let alone drummer Dan Haggis), they were dumped by their major label in the same year the NME became a free sheet in the face of slumping sales. But the Wombats’ recent interviews come peppered with unexpected phrases: “their studio in LA”, “forthcoming gig at the O2 Arena” and “produced by Jacknife Lee”, the latter fresh from working with U2. It’s not just that they now play far bigger venues than 15 years ago, it’s that the venues come packed – as every reviewer notes in astonishment – with kids too young to remember the Wombats’ first flush of fame. Last year, their 2015 single Greek Tragedy belatedly went gold in the US: between the original and a subsequent remix by Swedish producer Oliver Nelson in 2020, it’s racked up nearly 175m streams on Spotify.
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