Category Archives: Music

‘It was John who wanted a divorce’: McCartney sets the record straight on Beatles split

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Rock history has painted Paul McCartney as the man who broke up the band. Now he reveals that it was Lennon who was first to look for a way out

It remains the most analysed break-up in rock history: the one that set the template. When the Beatles split more than 50 years ago and Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr went their separate ways, it was McCartney who shouldered most of the blame.

But now McCartney is setting the record straight for good. “I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny,” he has insisted in a candid and detailed interview to be broadcast later this month.

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Tom Morello: ‘We came within a baby’s breath of a fascist coup in the US’

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Lockdown and ‘looking after the grandmas’ may have kept the Rage Against the Machine guitarist away from recent protests – but he refuses to be silenced

Tom Morello has made more than 20 albums, as a founding member of Rage Against the Machine – the political rap-rock band who have sold 16m records, and whose 1992 track Killing in the Name has become a perennial protest anthem – and of the bands Audioslave and Prophets of Rage. He also plays solo under the name the Nightwatchman, and has toured with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. His unique approach to the guitar, which he has self-deprecatingly described as “making R2-D2 noises”, has led to him regularly being voted as one of the greatest guitar players of all time. His latest album, The Atlas Underground Fire (released on 15 October), features a series of collaborations recorded in lockdown – with Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Damian Marley and Bring Me the Horizon, among others. He is a celebrated “nonsectarian socialist” political activist, famed for performing at demonstrations – he played at Occupy events across the US and Europe – and a co-founder of the nonprofit “social justice” organisation Axis of Justice.

You recorded your new album in lockdown. Did the pandemic also mean you missed out on the ongoing protests in the US?
Not only was there a global plague to contend with, there was the US political situation and the white supremacy comeuppance, all happening at a time when I was locked down with my 97-year-old mom, my 90-year-old mother-in-law, and two kids going crazy trying to learn remotely. I was unable to be on the literal frontlines for the first time in my adult life, because I’m trying to keep the grandmas alive, you know. So in the middle of the George Floyd protests I recorded a song called Stand Up, with Imagine Dragons, the great trans soul singer Shea Diamond and Bloody Beetroots as well. I was trying, from the bunker, to contribute in any way I could. But you’re absolutely right: that’s my bread and butter. I’m at the front of that march for 30 years, and now, you know, there’s a plumbing problem, or one of my kids broke a window with a basketball, so that’s my day

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Roger Taylor: ‘My most treasured possession? A massive statue of Freddie’

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The Queen drummer and singer-songwriter on former girlfriends, forgetting lyrics and liking red wine

Born in Norfolk, Roger Taylor, 72, is an original member of the band Queen, which formed in 1970. Their hits include Bohemian Rhapsody, We Will Rock You and Radio Ga Ga. Taylor’s new solo album is Outsider, and he is currently on tour in the UK. The Queen + Adam Lambert’s Rhapsody European tour takes place next year. Taylor is married, has five children and lives in Surrey and Cornwall.

When were you happiest?
When I first heard one of our records on the radio.

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Candi Staton: ‘When the promoters tried not to pay I had to get my gun out’

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Between the ‘chitlin’ circuit’ and her new rave tunes, the soul diva even picked up praise from Elvis. In our new series where you ask the questions, this storied musician reveals a few untold yarns

Why do you think that your early 70s classic albums (I’m Just a Prisoner, Stand By Your Man, Candi Staton etc) are less canonised than other ‘classic’ albums of that period by the Stones, the Beatles etc? mesm

Back then I didn’t get on the same chart as those guys because Black artists on smaller labels were put in the R&B charts, not the pop charts. It was musical segregation. To cross over you needed a big label and money behind you. There was a lot of politics. In the UK there was one chart, which is how it should be.

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The message: why should hip-hop have to teach us anything?

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Almost since it first emerged on the streets of the Bronx, audiences have expected hip-hop to express a revolutionary purpose. But perhaps this music shouldn’t have to take a political stand

Halfway through side one of A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the 1991 debut album by the hip-hop duo Black Sheep, some protesters interrupt the music. “Yo, man,” one guy says. “Why don’t you be kicking some records about, y’know, the upliftment of the Blacks?” Another asks why Black Sheep is silent about “the eating of the dolphins”. Someone else mentions “the hole in the ho zone”, turning environmental degradation into a dirty joke – perhaps unwittingly.

In response to all these demands for instruction, the guys from Black Sheep can only chuckle. Something about hip-hop makes listeners greedy for more words, better words. But Black Sheep made a brilliant album. What more could anyone want?

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From hardcore to bardcore: Kedr Livanskiy, the Russian producer inspired by Tolkienists

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Livanskiy’s operatic vocals and hazy beats put her at the forefront of Moscow’s underground club scene. Now she’s retreated from the city to the forest to nurture her imagination

Yana Kedrina’s earliest exposure to music came in a wooden dacha in a pine-forested village 2,000 miles from Moscow. Kedrina’s grandmother, who built the summer cottage with her husband, would invite Kedrina and her seven sisters over to sing Russian folk songs and drink cherry leaf tea. The rustic surroundings and feelings of kinship nurtured in Kedrina an infatuation with her culture’s folklore and a devotion to community.

“A large family, gathering to connect to its ancestral heritage, was an experience unique to a time that predated this individualism we live in now,” Kedrina says, speaking in Russian. Her grandmother never lived to see her blossom into an internationally recognised musician under the name Kedr Livanskiy (Russian for the Lebanese cedar tree). But Kedrina, 31, takes solace in the fact that her career has spiritually fulfilled her grandmother’s dream of travelling beyond her village in Russia’s Tomsk region.

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‘I saw something in Bruce Springsteen that nobody else saw’: the world according to Stevie Van Zandt

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The Boss’s trusty sideman has many plans – from saving central America to TV Hogmanay at the Playboy Mansion – and he’s more than happy to share his rock wisdom

It is the middle of the 1980s, and Stevie Van Zandt, having departed the E Street Band and left Bruce Springsteen’s side, is pursuing a solo career. He has also parlayed decades of experience playing in bar bands into a new and unusual role: international activist and campaigner against injustice. And so he finds himself, in company with Jackson Browne, in Nicaragua, against which the US is waging a proxy war.

He arranges a meeting with Rosario Murillo, the wife of Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, as he notes in his memoir, Unrequited Infatuations. “After a few drinks, I moved off the small talk and suddenly asked her if she loved her husband. She was taken a bit aback but said, Yes, señor, very much. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should spend as much time with him as possible, because he’s a dead man walking. It’s just a matter of time and time is running out’ … She was a very smart woman married to a revolutionary. But she was expecting a pleasant conversation about the arts, and the reality of what I was saying hit her hard.”

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‘We wanted to make history’: Michael Jackson’s bizarre year in Bahrain

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In 2005, a Bahraini prince welcomed the deposed king of pop and wrote a Hurricane Katrina charity single with him. But Jackson’s erratic behaviour sent plans off course

Omar Shaheen remembers the moment well. In early 2005, the young Bahraini was driving when he received a surreal job offer: the chance to work with Michael Jackson. “It was totally out of left field,” he recalls. “It is a pinch-yourself kind of moment when you get a call to say you’re going to be working with someone who you idolise and is the biggest superstar of all time.”

The request came from Sheikh Abdulla bin Hamad al-Khalifa, the second son of the king of Bahrain, who asked Shaheen to set up a state-of-the art recording studio on his grounds in anticipation of the star’s arrival. “There are so many adjectives to use,” Shaheen says of what was to unfold. “It was bizarre. It was crazy.”

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On my radar: Sam Fender’s cultural highlights

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The Tyneside rocker on his favourite bath time podcast, a second world war memoir and where to get the best breakfast kippers

Sam Fender was born in 1994 and raised in North Shields. He began writing songs aged 14, building on an affinity with Bruce Springsteen, and started acting a few years later, appearing in the ITV series Vera. After releasing his first single, Play God, independently in 2017, Fender featured in the BBC’s Sound of 2018 poll. He won the critics’ choice award at the 2019 Brits and his debut album, Hypersonic Missiles, entered the UK charts at No 1. His second album, Seventeen Going Under, is out this week on Polydor.

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‘Another miracle’: boy’s escape from Auschwitz train is made into opera

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Push will be performed in Boortmeerbeek, where Simon Gronowski fled to safety, nine days before his 90th birthday

The 90th birthday of Simon Gronowski, who at the age of 11 escaped a train destined for Auschwitz thanks to three Belgian resistance fighters, is being honoured with the staging of an opera inspired by his story near the rail tracks where he fled the Nazis eight decades ago.

Sitting alongside Gronowski during Sunday’s performance in Boortmeerbeek, a village north-east of Brussels, will be the sculptor Koenraad Tinel, whose elder brother was the Flemish SS guard who ordered him and his mother, Chana, on to the train on 19 April 1943. Chana did not escape from the transport and was killed in the gas chambers on arrival at the death camp.

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The raging return of Idles: ‘We’ve always used violence as part of our vocabulary’

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After scoring a No 1 in lockdown, the post-punk band’s singer Joe Talbot reflects on writing about car crashes, substance abuse and Rishi Sunak on their new album

Towards the end of Idles’ upcoming fourth album, Crawler, lead singer Joe Talbot comes to a euphoric realisation. “In spite of it all,” the 37-year-old howls, “life is beautiful.”

It’s an apt conclusion for a band who have endured personal tragedy and childhood trauma, and in just four years cemented their status as the face of British post-punk. Their debut album, Brutalism, burst forth with Talbot raging about rape culture (“Sexual violence doesn’t start and end with rape / It starts in our books and behind our school gates,” he shouts on fan favourite Mother), NHS funding and white privilege. Its follow-up Joy As an Act of Resistance swiped at toxic masculinity via similarly seething anthems and catapulted its creators to No 5 in the UK album chart. Last year’s Ultra Mono, a more diversified flurry of synths, pianos and hummed vocals, did even better, finding its way to No 1.

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Shakira says two wild boars attacked her in Barcelona park

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Singer held up her dirty and torn bag as evidence on Instagram: ‘They’ve destroyed everything’

Shakira said two wild boars attacked her in a Barcelona park and destroyed her bag.

In an Instagram story post, the singer held up her dirty and torn bag as evidence, which she said boars tried to carry off into the woods.

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‘Roar, roar, roar!’ Japan rolls out rock music against bear attacks

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Authorities hope rock’n’roll song will help people of Iwate prefecture stay safe as number of bear sightings rises

Can rock’n’roll keep people safe from bear attacks? One Japanese region is hoping so, and has commissioned a cautionary anthem warning residents about the threat of its ursine inhabitants.

Bears are common across Japan and regularly spark frantic hunts when they venture into towns, where they have attacked and even killed residents.

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‘I’ve been dead so many times’: the life and times of New Orleans’s blues king

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Little Freddie King has survived three shootings, stabbings, a near fatal bike accident, a stomach ulcer, an accidental electrocution, Hurricane Katrina, and now a pandemic

In a dark, wood-panelled room, thick with humidity and reeking of smoke, the bluesman sits on a battered red couch that droops in the middle. He takes a moment to reflect before walking to the stage. He’s dressed in a pair of shades, a straw fedora, and a technicolor suit jacket splashed with turquoise, pink and peach. His flamboyance is an instant contrast with the dingy surroundings. He takes a final drag of a cigarette, down to the butt, before adjusting his tie.

Little Freddie King has played this venue – BJ’s Lounge, a ramshackle bar in the Bywater neighbourhood of New Orleans – for the past 27 years. But tonight is special. Tonight is his 81st birthday.

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Britney Spears’ father suspended from conservatorship in victory for singer

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Star has sought liberation from Jamie Spears’ control of her finances and personal life for years

A Los Angeles judge has suspended Britney Spears’ father from the conservatorship that has controlled her life for 13 years, marking a major victory for the singer, who has long objected to the arrangement that has stripped her of independence.

At a court hearing on Wednesday, Judge Brenda Penny ordered Jamie Spears suspended as conservator effective immediately.

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Leonard Cohen goes to the doctor: Ian Cook’s best photograph

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‘He said he had to see a throat specialist then added: “Do you want to come along?” Later, we drove to a party with me sitting on his lap in a limo’

In 1979 Leonard Cohen was in London for a few days on a European tour and I had been assigned to photograph him by the US magazine People. I arrived at the Dorchester Hotel and was shown up to his room. He announced that he had picked up some sort of larynx infection on the plane and that he might not be able to perform. He said that he had an imminent appointment with a Harley Street specialist. My heart sank and I thought: “There goes the assignment.” Then he said brightly, “Do you want to come along with me?”

We hopped in a taxi and I followed him into the surgery. The doctor examined him, sat him in a chair and gave him a nebuliser. With his dark glasses on, a scarf wrapped around his neck and a large silver-coloured mask covering his nose and mouth, he looked quite bizarre but it made an unusual photograph, not like any others I’d seen of him. Forty minutes later, much to his relief – and mine – he said he felt much better.

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Unreleased John Lennon recording sells for £43,000 in Denmark

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Song and interview were recorded by Danish schoolboys during Lennon and Yoko Ono’s stay in Thy in 1970


A cassette tape recording of an interview by Danish schoolboys with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the Beatles star sings a previously unreleased song has been sold at auction in Copenhagen for £43,000.

The 33-minute audio track was recorded by four teenagers as part of a report for their school magazine in January 1970, just months before the Beatles announced their breakup.

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‘For us, Black hair is Black history’: Rihanna’s fashion show sparks row for styling white models’ hair in braids

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The Savage X Fenty lingerie label has been accused of cultural appropriation over the hairstyles in its annual fashion show. But why is this still going on?

Singer Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty fashion line has stirred an online debate around cultural appropriation, after models wore what appeared to be braids during the label’s lingerie show. After the show was screened last Friday on Amazon Prime, viewers expressed concern on social media at seeing non-Black models, including Emily Ratajkowski, with braids.

“I wish I could write something as funny as putting all these white girls in braids for the Fenty show,” tweeted comedian and television writer Raina Morris. And Dylan Ali wrote: “I love the Fenty show but I think we need a trigger warning for seeing this many white women in braids.”

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Britney vs Spears review – Netflix doc is schlocky, trashy and deeply uncomfortable

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Certainly not in the pop star’s best interests, this disturbing film gives redemption stories to controversial figures from Britney’s past. Nothing about this feels right

What is in Britney Spears’ best interests? It’s a question that has been discussed and dissected by those around the pop star for 13 years, often abstractly, or with feigned concern, in the press or in court documents. It has been that way since she was placed in a controversial conservatorship, presided over by her father, Jamie, in 2008. It’s a question also posed by film-makers, whose narrative arcs often involve picking at the scabs before reaching for the plasters. In February, the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears recast her career through a post-#MeToo lens, via familiar shots of Spears shaving her head and distressing images from 2008 of her in the back of an ambulance prior to being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. A month after it aired, Spears said on Instagram that she was “embarrassed by the light they put me in” and that “she cried for two weeks”. In May, Spears called the BBC documentary The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship hypocritical. “I think the world is more interested in the negative !!!!” she said.

In this context, Netflix’s Britney vs Spears – directed and narrated by fan and film-maker Erin Lee Carr – feels uncomfortable. Conceived two and half years ago as an insight into “[Spears’] artistry and her media portrayal”, the film was hastily retooled after Framing Britney Spears and Spears’ explosive testimony at a conservatorship hearing in July. Oddly, the documentary chooses not to place Spears’ own words – a rarity for so long – at the start of the film. Rather it follows a standard chronological narrative, zipping through the successes of the early years before homing in on troubled times. It pores over Spears’ divorce from Kevin Federline in a way that feels tabloid-y, while dramatic instrumental music hums underneath. It often has the feel of a schlocky true crime documentary, with Carr and the journalist Jenny Eliscu shown riffling through papers, or sticking name tags on pictures showing the main protagonists. Anytime Jamie Spears is mentioned we get a slow zooming shot of his face.

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‘Racism is rampant’: Alien Weaponry, the metal band standing up for Māori culture

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The New Zealand trio have gone global thanks to their forthright Māori-language songs, which confront colonial history and ongoing inequality

New Zealand was a war zone in the mid-1800s. On one side were the British and the colonial government, craving a stranglehold on more of the country’s land. On the other were the indigenous Māori people, fighting to preserve tino rangatiratanga: their sovereignty and self-determination.

On 29 April 1864, the British invaded Pukehinahina, also known as Gate Pā. Despite being grossly outnumbered, the Māori fended off the attackers using concealed trenches and guerrilla tactics. It was a fleeting victory in a war that, ultimately, led to the confiscation of 3m acres of Māori land.

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