As the country marks a decade since independence, musicians talk of the songs and rhythms that help create a shared culture and community for people displaced by civil war
“What comes first is a culture and then a nation,” says David Otim, a musician from Bahr el Ghazal, who performs and teaches South Sudanese songs. “Our [civil] war, which was caused by a foreigner, led us to not understand ourselves, made us go and destroy our culture out there [in refugee camps].”
Continue reading...Do you know your Ant from your Dec and your Three Lions from your Atomic Kitten? Find out with our tricky and slightly silly quiz
They are the soundtrack to our summers of joy and despair. The songs that accompany the moments when our hearts soar as goals go in, and break as crucial penalties are missed. But how much do you know about the football tournament anthems that fans sing with such glee? Find out with our football anthems quiz – getting full marks is going to be harder than getting a ticket for Wembley on Sunday. But remember, it is just for fun, and unlike the forthcoming Italy v England Euro 2020 final, there are no prizes.
The Guardian Euro 2020 football anthems quiz
Continue reading...The duo started their debut album 36 years ago, but work for Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and others got in the way. Now it’s finally complete, R&B’s great studio psychologists look back at an unmatched career
Some albums take a long time to make, but few have had the gestation period of Jam & Lewis: Volume One. The production duo started work on their debut artist album 36 years ago, just as their career was taking off on the back of the SOS Band’s hit single Just Be Good to Me, but they were thrown off-course working for a minor figure with a couple of flop albums to her name: Janet Jackson.
Together they started shaping what would become her 10m-selling 1986 breakthrough Control, which understandably “kind of stopped the progress on our own album”, as Jimmy “Jam” Harris, 62, puts it today, when he and his partner, Terry Lewis, 64, appear on a video call from their homes in Los Angeles. With Control ready to be delivered, they wrote a song for themselves that sounded the perfect calling-card for a Jam & Lewis album. “We thought we were done with Control, then Janet’s manager came to hear the album,” says Harris. “We played him Nasty, When I Think Of You, The Pleasure Principle … And he says: ‘I just need one more song, for Janet.’ I’m going: ‘No, man, no.’ We get in the car to go to a restaurant, Terry puts a cassette in, and about the third song in, Janet’s manager says: ‘That’s the song I need.’”
Continue reading...As Todd Haynes unveils his documentary about them, we rate the best work of a band who overturned and reinvented rock’n’roll
The Velvets recorded two versions of Ride Into the Sun: a fabulous 1969 instrumental laden with fuzz guitar and a hushed 1970 vocal take backed by organ. Somewhere between the two lies one of their great lost songs; Lou Reed’s disappointingly flat 1972 solo version doesn’t do it justice at all.
Continue reading...Black artists pioneered dance music, but the scene remains white-dominated. UK rising star Sherelle is dodging the trolls and trying to make change with her platform Beautiful
Wearing a fleece jacket covered in black and white acid smilies, Sherelle is a walking embodiment of dance music when I meet her. The 27-year-old north Londoner and self-professed “bocat” – a Jamaican slang term used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who enjoys giving cunnilingus, now proudly reappropriated by her on her T-shirts – is one of the UK’s most purely enjoyable new DJs. By blending various global forms of dance music, she is a catalyst for unrestrained raving who has stormed her way into the limelight at 160 beats per minute.
She grew up on dancehall booming out of her mum’s hi-fi system, and hip-hop and R&B music videos on cable TV. “In my house we had cable illegally, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it,” says Sherelle, whose younger self would cringe at her mother and older sister. “Whatever they were watching, they would dance to. I have a graphic image of Beenie Man’s Who Am I, around the time the tune came out, and my mum and sister having the greatest time. I was mortified.”
Continue reading...Samuel Ingham has faced intense scrutiny for his representation of Spears, who has said she’s been unable to choose her own lawyer
Britney Spears’s court-appointed lawyer has asked to resign from the conservatorship that has controlled her life for 13 years.
The news of lawyer Samuel D Ingham’s decision to step down comes after the singer’s emotional courtroom testimony prompted the resignation of her manager and the withdrawal of a wealth management firm involved in her conservatorship. The legal arrangement, which has been in place since 2008, has given Spears’s father and other parties intense authority over her career, finances, personal life and medical care.
Continue reading...First released in 1981, it is at the top of the iTunes chart this week, alongside many other very old albums and artists. Will our nostalgia loop ever end?
Name: Queen’s Greatest Hits.
Age: 40.
Continue reading...He was able to exist so easily in my world that it helped me feel happier there too
In the summer of 2015, I attended UK Black Pride (an annual event celebrating African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Caribbean-heritage LGBTQI+ people). It is one of the few places where I feel truly among family. My difference as a queer person of colour disappears in the sea of black and brown faces dancing in the sunshine – jumping around to the likes of Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack and Jazzy Jeff’s Summertime; songs that also bring back memories of London in the 90s, the London of my teens.
I come from a working-class, multicultural, east London community, but, after graduating from university, I also graduated to the middle classes. At UK Black Pride, I was reminded how far away I now felt from that world and, in that instant, recognised why love seemed to elude me. I dated men from my “circle”: men I’d met working as a lawyer or through university friends. Men who were middle class. Men who were often (but not always) white.
Continue reading...Star of music, TV and film who had UK Top 10 hit in 1978 with Do It, Do It Again had been suffering an undisclosed illness
Raffaella Carrà, the pop singer and actor who was an entertainment icon in her native Italy, has died aged 78.
Her long-term partner, Sergio Iapino, announced her death, saying: “Raffaella has left us. She has gone to a better world, where her humanity, her unmistakable laugh and her extraordinary talent will shine forever.” He said she had been battling an unnamed illness for some time.
Continue reading...A legal arrangement set up in the wake of a mental health crisis has left the singer with little control of her personal or professional affairs. Laura Snapes and Sam Levin describe how she’s challenging the situation in court
This episode first aired on our global news podcast Today in Focus.
Britney Spears shot to global fame in 1998 with her hit single Baby One More Time, released when she was 17. It was the first of a string of hits that made her a millionaire many times over. But the rapid rise came not without cost for her personal life. A mental health crisis led to a very public breakdown, and in 2008 she was placed under a a conservatorship which, overseen by her father, took control of her finances and many of her personal affairs.
Continue reading...In 2016, when Alicia Keys released her sixth studio album, Here, she celebrated the launch with a gig in New York’s Times Square. An article written in the Guardian by a journalist who was on the promotional junket described the machinery of her management system at the time, as functioning “like an onion”. A formidable, multi-layer of managers, confidants, coaches, assistants, a personal film crew and various people with ambiguous job functions formed around Keys, like a “shock absorber”. Fast forward to 2021. I am waiting to interview Keys via Zoom on the day she launches a special edition of Songs in A Minor, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking award-winning debut album that started it all. When she appears on screen there is no “onion”, no entourage, no shock absorber. Just her. She is sitting on a light-coloured sofa in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of immaculately lined-up books. And she is trying to pull a jumper on. Her voice – smooth, deep and slightly gravelly – calls out, “Good morning!” and as she inches in to take her position close to the screen, she smiles so fully that every crevice of her face lights up.
Looking at a barefaced Alicia Keys, hair pulled back into a bun, one can’t help marvel at how much she still resembles the 20-year-old who made her 2001 TV debut singing Falling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. (Winfrey, who calls herself Alicia’s “mother-sister-friend” has since said, “Even before she belted out the first soulful notes of the lyrics that made her famous, I could feel the power of her presence.”) Following the God-like endorsement of the influential Winfrey (and the backing of Clive Davis, the legendary music producer who gave Keys her big break), the song topped the charts. The album sold millions (10.5m physical sales and 645.8m streams to date) and Keys was nominated in six Grammy award categories. She won five of them and has since gone on to win 10 more. Keys is still awestruck that she, and the album that brought her global fame, still have a presence today.
Continue reading...Early bird or lie-in? I’ve been an early riser for years. One Sunday, very soon, I’m going to set my alarm for 4am, go and sit in my local wood and, if I don’t get arrested, listen to the dawn chorus.
Sunday brekkie? We’ve got a 9-, 12- and a 16-year-old. Our house is like a restaurant with all the different eggs, avocados and pancakes. The battle is getting them off their screens to gather around the table.
Continue reading...Bessemer Trust, approved last year to be added as co-conservator, wants out after singer’s testimony that she opposed arrangement
A wealth management firm that had been tapped as co-conservator of singer Britney Spears’ estate, has asked a Los Angeles court to withdraw from the case after the pop superstar’s testimony that she opposed the arrangement.
Related: Trump legal troubles escalate after company charged with tax crimes – live
Continue reading...He played through extreme drug-taking on Bowie’s Station to Station, and with Yoko Ono weeks after Lennon’s death. The guitarist explains why he’s great at backing legends – and terrible at selling timeshares
It’s not surprising that Earl Slick was in the middle of a tour when the first Covid lockdown began. The guitarist is, by his own account, “the biggest roadhog on the planet”, one of rock’s most celebrated sidemen: his association with David Bowie stretched over five decades; he has played with everyone from John Lennon to the Cure to Carl Perkins. This time, he was playing in the UK with his friend Glen Matlock, which meant he spent the first six months of lockdown living not at home in New York but in the former Sex Pistol’s spare room in London, an experience he winningly likens to the 1968 comedy The Odd Couple. Apparently, Matlock was the neat-freak Jack Lemmon character and Slick the more laissez-faire Walter Matthau figure. They put on shambolic Facebook live performances, which, Slick notes, “probably had more comedic than musical value”. Between songs, there was certainly a lot of peering at the camera and discussing whether or not it was switched on.
Video-calling from his home in New York, he says he “lost a lot of gigs and a lot of dough” as a result of the pandemic, but at least he had time to put the finishing touches to a solo album, Fistful of Devils, his first in 18 years. It’s instrumental – a stark contrast to 2003’s Zig Zag, which featured Bowie, Robert Smith and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott among its supporting cast. “But when I go out live,” he notes, “I always go out with a singer. When I’m on stage with a singer, all my sideman tools get pulled out the box. Even if my name’s on the marquee, the main focus should be on the vocalist.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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).
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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