Category Archives: Music

‘It feels good’: Kashmir folk singer’s rise from dusty street to music star

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Noor Mohammad Shah has given traditional Sufi music a new lease of life after a chance encounter

Noor Mohammad Shah had always happily lived a life of obscurity. Born in a small village in the conflict-ridden state of Kashmir in India, Shah had been introduced to the mystical world of Sufi music as a child and for decades since had made a meagre but fulfilling living singing traditional songs and performing on his rabab, a lute-like music instrument, at weddings and village festivals.

Yet it was a chance encounter between Shah and a group of young men, who happened to pass by as the god-fearing musician was playing his instrument on a dusty street corner, that would propel him into becoming one of Kashmir’s most famous modern rabab musicians.

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Britney Spears’s father asks court to investigate forced labor and treatment allegations

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Jamie Spears said he’s had no power over his daughter’s affairs for nearly two years after pop star called court arrangement ‘abusive’

Britney Spears’s father has asked the court overseeing his daughter’s conservatorship to investigate her statements to a judge last week on the court’s control of her medical treatment and personal life, which she called overly restrictive and abusive.

James Spears, who goes by Jamie, said in a pair of documents filed late on Tuesday night that he has had no power over his daughter’s personal affairs for nearly two years.

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Last Man Standing review – Biggie and Tupac murder case reinvestigated

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Nick Broomfield returns to the deaths of the two titans of 90s gangsta rap, and the disturbing influence of record label boss Suge Knight

Nearly 20 years ago, Nick Broomfield released his sensational documentary Biggie and Tupac, in which he uncovered hidden facts about the violent deaths of US rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, and found that intimate witnesses to this murderous bicoastal feud were willing to open up to a diffident, soft-spoken Englishman in ways they never would to an American interviewer. Since then, there have been two very unedifying movies about Tupac: the sugary docu-hagiography Tupac: Resurrection (2003), produced by the late rapper’s mother, and the similarly reverential drama All Eyez on Me (2017).

Now Broomfield returns to the same subject, updating his bleak picture of the 90s rap scene, a world in which energy, creativity and radical anger were swamped with macho misogyny, drug-fuelled gangbanger paranoia and a poisonous obsession with respect. Marion “Suge” Knight, head of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, cultivated a violent gang-cult image by associating with the Bloods, and encouraged his acts and proteges to do the same, including Tupac – and Biggie’s perceived oppositional identity condemned him. But even more disturbingly, the LAPD allowed its officers to moonlight at Knight’s firm as “security” (a term that euphemistically covers all manner of paramilitary violence and intimidation).

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Sex-positive pop star Shygirl: ‘I want to affect your equilibrium’

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After feeling sexualised even before her teens, the south London rapper wrested back her power. She explains how her disruptive club music creates a space where anything can happen

Shygirl’s tracks are, for want of a better word, filthy. The 28-year-old musician’s lyrics detail sexual exploits and disposable partners. “I like to glide, figure skate,” is not about ice dancing. This week she releases BDE, a collaboration with Northampton rapper Slowthai, and it’s less rapping on her part, more an intoxicating mix of cooed and snarled commands over ominous production. This is sex as chaotic workout, and if it ends up jarring the listener, the artist has achieved her goal. “I love it when art makes me uncomfortable, because I have to question where that’s from,” she says. “How can something affect my equilibrium like that? I want to affect other people’s equilibrium.”

Her domineering musical persona is worlds away from the chatty, pleasant woman I meet in a bar outside Cambridge University’s Union, where she has just given a talk about her artistry and the accessibility of the creative industries. About a quarter of our time is spent laughing; sharp introspections on owning one’s narrative as a public figure come as easily as self-deprecating tales of recording angry voice notes about previous partners. And it’s easy to see why she’s increasingly considered a fashion force: following a recent Burberry campaign and soundtracking runways for Thierry Mugler, she stands out majestically via orange hair, wholesome babydoll dress and eye-catching Telfar Clemens boots, noticed by wide-eyed students in our vicinity.

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Jazz-funk guru John Carroll Kirby: ‘When musicians are uncomfortable, it can be interesting’

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He’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Harry Styles and more – and his own music is wondrously fun and spiritual. The LA artist explains why it sounds like butterflies and mountain lions

Amid the swirling sounds and scenes intersected by Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, John Carroll Kirby is somewhere at the centre of it all, shirt open, hair slicked back. He circles the city’s buzzing jazz movement with his soul-dappled instrumentals and is a keysman, composer and producer who’s been enlisted by some of the most exciting names in contemporary pop: Frank Ocean, Mark Ronson, Harry Styles, Blood Orange, and Solange Knowles, whose incendiary past two albums, A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home, were shaped in part by Kirby.

He laughs as he describes his own work as “French cat burglar music”: it blends jazz with new age, funk and exotica, flutes often taking centre stage. Tracks are inspired by paintings of ayahuasca visions or stories about dolphins that turn into lost boys. Kirby is of a spiritual persuasion, but he has a sense of humour about it, too.

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Belinda Carlisle on punk, cocaine, body image and Buddhism: ‘I was born a little bit of a rebel’

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As the singer for pioneering all-female band the Go-Go’s, Carlisle took on a sexist music industry – at a cost. She talks about overcoming addiction, the media’s obsession with her weight and finding happiness in her 60s

It hardly matters – who really cares about these things? – and yet it does. This year the Go-Go’s will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and earning a place at the museum in Cleveland, Ohio, for all its naffness, is still a mark of influence and recognition. “I always said: ‘Fuck them, I don’t care,’” says Belinda Carlisle, the band’s lead singer. “But when it actually happens, it’s: ‘Oh, this is not so bad.’”

The Go-Go’s have had a reappraisal in the past year, thanks mainly to a documentary by the film-maker Alison Ellwood. It tells the story of how these scrappy young LA punks put together a band (the lineup shifted until arriving at the current five members) and made history – incredibly, they are still the only female band who write their own music and play their own instruments to have reached the top of the US album charts. That was in 1982. As with many female artists, belittled for years by the male-dominated music industry and press, the recognition feels long overdue.

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Elton John and John Grant: ‘We help each other. We are both complicated people’

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The pop legend and the US indie star have long been friends and fans of each other’s music. With Grant staying chez Elton and about to release a new album, the pair sat down to discuss politics, homophobia – and why Elton should never write lyrics

It’s a boiling hot day in rural Berkshire, and a man in navy satin Gucci shorts has just walked into his library. It’s all ornate chairs, wooden globes and Buddhist statues, its oiled shelves lined with books about history, the arts – and tons about music. The scene is one of airy tranquillity, the perfect place for two culture-loving good friends to hole up for a chat.

One of them isn’t here yet – he’s popped to the bathroom after having his photo taken – but Elton John can’t stop raving about John Grant. “We have so many things in common – photography, art, music – it’s as if we’ve known each other for ever. And he’s fun!” Grant wanders in shyly in a pink baseball cap, weathered Talk Talk T-shirt, and glossy white DMs. “Much more fun than his records are anyway, haha.”

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Raves from the grave: lost 90s subculture is back in the spotlight

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Driven by a ‘groundswell’ of young devotees and fortysomething nostalgia, a series of events is celebrating the youth movement

It is perhaps one of the most ignored subcultures in modern British history, but rave music and the free party movement of the early 90s is coming back into focus.

Over the next few months, a series of films, exhibitions, memoirs and podcasts will reappraise free parties and the crackdown on them by John Major’s government, as well as their modern echoes.

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Ed Sheeran: Bad Habits review – a certain smash that’s ready for the Weeknd

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The UK’s biggest pop star returns, singing of compulsive hedonism over 80s dance-pop – remind you of anyone?

Spotify has chosen to promote Ed Sheeran’s new single by sitting it at the head of a playlist of his previous hits. The “plays” column of the latter makes for mind-boggling reading: the figures look less like streaming statistics and more like long-distance phone numbers. Every track is immediately recognisable – you could have spent your every waking hour engaged in a dogged attempt to avoid the music of Ed Sheeran and you’d still know exactly what they were and who they were by within seconds of them starting. He’s spent the last decade enjoying the kind of success that, in one sense at least, brooks no argument: even his loudest detractor couldn’t argue against his ability to write one song after another that attains a weird kind of omnipresence, hits that evolve into inescapable facts of daily life.

This is not a state of affairs that Bad Habits looks likely to change. That Sheeran has trailed it as a “surprise” and “mad” tells you more about his innate populism than the song itself: it’s a well-written, extremely commercial pop song, cowritten by regular collaborators Fred Gibson and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid, the latter of whom also had a hand in earlier Sheeran hits Shape of You, Photograph and Bloodstream.

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Lorde: ‘I’m not a climate activist. I’m a pop star’

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She quit social media, embraced the feral and grieved for her beloved dog. Now rejuvenated, Lorde is back with a nature-inspired new album – though she tells our writer there’s a sinister side to its sunniness


Lorde, in case it wasn’t obvious, has made her name on glorification. Ella Yelich-O’Connor was an aristocracy-obsessed 16-year-old when her imperiously cool debut album, 2013’s Pure Heroine, elevated suburban New Zealand adolescence to pop echelons in which those kids had never previously seen themselves. In 2017, Melodrama cast post-breakup hedonism in glittering synths, dramatising one fabulous night on the cusp of adulthood as if it were Greek tragedy.

Her forthcoming third album, Solar Power, has humbler origins, especially for a songwriter who likes describing inspiration as “divine”. The loose, sunny instrumentation – inspired as much by Crosby, Stills & Nash as Nelly Furtado – mirrors a shift within the 24-year-old. “When I got my dog, all of a sudden you’re literally picking up shit, cleaning up vomit and not caring,” she says cheerfully, video-calling from the start of a jet-lag-addled workday in Los Angeles.

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Stars and fans rally behind Britney Spears after shocking claims

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Justin Timberlake and Rose McGowan among those calling for end to singer’s conservatorship

There was tentative anticipation surrounding Britney Spears’ address to an LA court during a hearing on Wednesday on the future of the conservatorship that has governed her life for 13 years.

Would she affirm the theories of the #FreeBritney movement, which alleges she is being held against her will? Or would it be a disappointing procedural affair of little substance?

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‘They thought we were terrorists’: meet Joe Rush, the master of mutoid art and king of Glastonbury

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The punky master of outsider art was once a pariah, thrown out of Britain for his anarchist ways. Now, he’s a national treasure. Joe Rush relives 40 years of sticking it to the ‘straight world’

“They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.

“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”

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‘Something had gone horribly wrong’: me, Mick Jagger and the lost autobiography

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Ghostwriter Barry Coleman says he was given two ‘awful’ weeks to finish an entire book with the Rolling Stone – then the singer pulled the plug in case it was too dull

Barry Coleman still remembers the day in 1983 when he was called by his editor at the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson and told: “We’ve got a problem. Can you come in … tomorrow?”

“The urgency was a bit disorienting,” he recalls. “Something had clearly gone horribly wrong.”

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The Doors’ greatest songs – ranked!

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Ahead of the 50th anniversary of singer Jim Morrison’s death, we rank the LA band’s best tracks, from the summer of love anthem Light My Fire to the apocalyptic The End

Jim Morrison frequently drew on his romantic dalliances for lyrical inspiration. Take Morrison Hotel’s raucous rocker Queen of the Highway, a song about his soon-to-be-wife, Pamela Courson, that frames their relationship as loving, if somewhat ill-fated: “He was a monster / Black dressed in leather / She was a princess / Queen of the Highway.”

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Britney Spears speaks at last: will her day in court upend all we thought we knew?

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The singer will today make a bid to take back control of her life. After a glut of speculative documentaries and conspiracy theories, her own voice can finally be heard

Britney Spears never used to be an enigma. In the early years of her career, she did interviews for print, TV and radio. She held press conferences and endured day-long junkets. She shot behind the scenes videos, documentaries, TV specials. Britney was candid and trusting. “I’m from the south,” she told the Observer in 2001, “so I’m a very open person and I’ve had to teach myself not to open up to too many people.”

These days however, if Britney interviews are granted, they are conducted under such strict terms that few publications have bothered. Even the radio and TV appearances when she has a record to sell are strictly surface level. Her music gives few clues to her state of mind. Her last four albums offer up sexy party tunes that don’t reflect the artist’s lived reality: now 39, by her own account she doesn’t drink, keeps a small circle of friends, only went out clubbing twice in the four years she spent in residence in Las Vegas, and prior to meeting current boyfriend Sam Asghari in 2016, was “over” dating.

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Britney Spears will directly address Los Angeles court on conservatorship

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Singer will offer rare testimony on controversial arrangement that has given Spears’s father control over much of her life for 13 years

Britney Spears will directly address a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday, offering rare testimony in the case of the controversial conservatorship that has governed the pop star’s life for 13 years.

The hearing has drawn interest from fans across the globe, who have for years organized a campaign under the hashtag #FreeBritney to protest the unusual legal arrangement that has stripped the singer of her independence since 2008. The conservatorship has given her father, Jamie Spears, control over her estate, career and other aspects of her personal life.

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Unknown treasures: the forgotten women of Manchester’s Factory Records

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A new exhibition shines a light on the female creatives and managers who helped turn the home of Joy Division and New Order into a three decade-long powerhouse

From its figurehead Tony Wilson through to the male-dominated bands that found fame on the label, Factory Records is sometimes seen as the epitome of a muso lad fest. But a new exhibition at Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum is having a go at changing all that, casting welcome light on the women who were integral not only to Factory’s birth but its three decade-long survival.

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‘I’m working through 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’: readers’ WFH playlists

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Some of you went classic rock; others Iranian ambient. And yet others took on epic challenges that will take years to complete … here’s what you’ve been listening to while working under lockdown

If I need to concentrate on something really thorny, I go for Bach every time. It seems to allow my brain to work at a high level and I do almost all my best work to Bach. András Schiff or Angela Hewitt playing keyboard works, and Hilary Hahn on violin. Beethoven’s late quartets and Schubert lieder are good for deep thought. If I’m just doing low-level stuff, then Radio Paradise is my go-to – it’s a commercial-free internet station, which I like because it mixes a lot of stuff I know from my younger days with music that I’m less familiar with. Edward Collier, software developer, Cheltenham

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Mykki Blanco: ‘I’ve helped to push open some closed doors. It’s a cool feeling’

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The rapper has worked with Kanye and Madonna and blazed a trail for black queer pop. Their new mini album, they say, feels like the start of a new chapter…

Mykki Blanco has just moved to Hollywood, and five minutes into our conversation, the 35-year old rapper’s beloved mother calls. “She needs to chill out. Like, I don’t work?” laughs Blanco. “She’s helping me pick out furniture and she’s gone crazy about the whole thing.” There is something pure about one of hip-hop’s most experimental figures having their mother help them decorate. The non-binary musician (who uses the pronouns they/them) has been living outside the US for the past five years, residing mostly in Europe: London and Portugal’s countryside. They also lived in Paris during the city’s second lockdown in late 2020 – an experience Blanco describes as “emotionally distressing”. But now, back living near family and friends, Blanco’s spirits seem high. Their new mini album, Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep, an electric collection of love songs featuring Blood Orange and Jamila Woods, is a fresh beginning. For starters, it’s the first time they have had a record deal.

That may come as a surprise considering Blanco has not only worked with Kanye West, Charli XCX and Madonna, but was also a founding member of “queer rap”, a sub-genre of hip-hop that allowed LGBTQ+ people to express themselves freely. Tattooed and 6ft 2in tall, Blanco has long played with drag and gender presentation, whether donning waist-length braids and a pink corset or a shirt and a shaved head; rapping bluntly over trippy synths, their hyperactive lyrics address sexuality, partying and bravado from a queer perspective. In 2012 Elle magazine declared them “hip-hop’s new queen”, and in the New York Times Michael Schulman enthused about their “glamazon alter ego… a redoubtable presence on the New York downtown art and cabaret scene”. They self-released their 2016 debut album, Mykki, to critical acclaim: it was described by the Observer’s Kitty Empire as “one of the year’s most riveting musical self‑portraits”.

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