In an unusual year that’s kept us most of us away from live music venues, Guardian writers pick the songs that deserve to have made more impact
Continue reading...Category Archives: Music
Listen up: making music from the northern lights
A biologist and composer have turned the aurora borealis into sound to create a magic melding of art and nature
There’s a hypnotic crackle before a whoosh of sound flies from ear to ear. It’s followed by a heavenly chorus that might be whales whistling, frogs calling or the chirping of an alien bird. It sounds celestial because that’s what it is. The noise is the aurora borealis: the northern lights.
The vivid green lights that trace across the Arctic sky emit electromagnetic waves when the solar shower meets the Earth’s magnetic field, and these can be translated into sounds that are made audible to human ears by a small machine.
Continue reading...‘It speaks to an ancient history’: why South Africa has the world’s most exciting dance music
Styles like afrohouse, gqom and amapiano are thriving – but with ‘half-baked white kids getting a lot more airplay’, South Africa’s inequalities still hold the dance scene back
Many people got their first taste of South African dance music this year via six Angolans dancing in their backyard, dinner plates in hand. Their viral video, with casual but masterful moves set to Jerusalema by South African producer Master KG, created a global dance craze; the track ended up all over Radio 1 this autumn and topped streaming charts across Europe.
Jerusalema is just one track amid what has now become arguably the most vibrant and innovative dance music culture on the planet. In South Africa, dance music is pop music, from townships like Soweto and KwaDabeka to cities like Durban and Cape Town. The country has 11 official languages, each with their own cultural practices, and even the national anthem of the so-called Rainbow Nation is comprised of the country’s five most commonly spoken: Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. Out of this rich cultural heritage, and in a country that has long had distinct dance styles like jaiva, marabi, kwela and mbaqanga, has come wave after wave of astonishing work.
Continue reading...Good Riddance 2020: the ultimate New Year’s Eve songs, as voted by you
We asked you to help us create an epic end of year playlist to see out the bin fire that has been 2020. After nearly 10,000 votes, here it is
We asked you, Guardian readers, to nominate the song you’d want on the ultimate New Year’s Eve playlist: one that represents the year we’ve had, the year we’re hoping for, or just the way we’ll feel (and the words we’ll be screaming) at midnight. Then, 9,534 of you voted on them.
It was all over, though, once the Mountain Goats got involved. Their popular 2011 track This Year was sitting at No 3 until the band discovered it and tweeted about this fact with a shameless plea for votes.
Continue reading...My perfect Christmas playlist, by Michael Kiwanuka, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Tim Burgess
Pop stars who lit up 2020 talk about their Christmas routines and share the tracks they turn to on the big day – scroll down to hear their choices
2020 Mercury prize winner and associate of mysterious band of the year Sault
Continue reading...Jamie Cullum: ‘I channel a lot of emotional intensity into my music’
The musician, 41, on what he owes Michael Parkinson, the joys of cultural freedom and why he’ll feel nervous when he’s finally able to perform again
Growing up in a very provincial village near Swindon, in Wiltshire, I struggled to articulate why my family was different. My parents were immigrants. They had it drilled into them to be as British as possible, live a very British life, observe the Britishness of their existence. I think they were culturally cauterised. A mixture of people came in and out of my household from my father’s Prussian Jewish contingent, who for a large part of their UK life were often too frightened to have a German accent or observe their Jewish faith, and my mother’s Indian Burmese contingent, where everyone had darker skin and ate different foods.
I didn’t feel that different. I just thought I had a bit of a tan, and that everyone’s aunties brought them lime pickle for Christmas. My parents were dealing with being first-generation immigrants in this country. I had way more cultural freedom than them, but felt less able to acknowledge my heritage when I was younger.
Continue reading...Silent night: ‘In our family carols are a ritual celebration – this year the music stopped’
For Sian Prior, 2020 feels like the year the carols nearly died. But perhaps there are new ways to keep the song alive
The purists would say I shouldn’t sing Christmas carols. Heathens have no right to be warbling about mangers, angels and holy nights. Strictly speaking, those tunes belong to the faithful, not to atheists like me. But on Christmas Day you will usually find me hovering beside the piano, waiting impatiently for the carolling to begin.
My mother will play the accompaniment, my sister will sing the melody, I’ll find a harmony and my brother will take the bassline. We four non-believers will regale the rest of the family with We Three Kings and none of us will care what the purists think.
Continue reading...Pop in 2020: an escape into disco, folklore and nostalgia
Amid the chaos of the pandemic and with the future so uncertain, the pop music that resonated was glittery, danceable and comfortingly familiar
Pop music has the ability to be more reactive to current events than ever. Advances in technology mean that the famously swift musical responses of rock’s past – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio, in the US Top 20 within weeks of the Kent State massacre that inspired it; the hastily cobbled-together tributes to Elvis Presley and John Lennon that appeared in the charts in the wake of their deaths – should theoretically look tardy. If an artist is so minded and inspired, they could write, record and release a song that reacts to current events overnight.
In 2020, there was a torrent of reactive tracks released in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests: YG’s FTP, Lil’ Baby’s The Bigger Picture, Stevie Wonder’s Can’t Put It in the Hands of Fate, HER’s I Can’t Breathe, the two acclaimed double albums released by the mysterious British collective Sault. Even the Killers reworked their 2019 anti-Trump track Land of the Free to reference Floyd’s death. But if anyone was expecting something similar to happen as a result of Covid-19 – a rash of unexpected new releases ruminating on the strangeness and anxieties of life in a pandemic or sternly admonishing politicians for their mishandling of the crisis – 2020 will have proved a crashing disappointment. They didn’t happen in any quantity, unless you count the well-intentioned but musically ghastly burst of charity singles that proliferated during the spring lockdown, or the equally abysmal anti-lockdown tracks released by Van Morrison and Ian Brown, rock’s own tinfoil-hatted Laurel and Hardy. The music that did appear unexpectedly, from artists keen to put the time on their hands to creative use, largely avoided the subject of the pandemic entirely: Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore, Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now, Paul McCartney’s McCartney III.
Continue reading...Match made in heaven? Why Taylor Swift is a Brazilian football team’s unofficial mascot
Starting with the singer’s 2006 debut, Corinthians have not lost a match either side of the release of any of her albums
Name: The Taylor Swift Rule.
Age: 14.
Continue reading...Cher at 74: ‘There are 20-year-old girls who can’t do what I do’
Her $60m annual Las Vegas residency was off the cards this year, but the singer still has lots to say about animal rights, Trump’s ‘toxic’ politics, cosmetic surgery and the men in her life
The Goddess of Pop is in town. And what an entrance she makes. Two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster. She looks the ultimate in revolutionary chic – Cher Guevara. She is not in London to promote a record (100m sold and counting) or a film (she won the best actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck); she is here to talk about rescuing the world’s loneliest elephant from a zoo in Pakistan and flying him to a sanctuary in Cambodia. Cherilyn Sarkisian, aged 74, has never been predictable.
We meet in a London hotel, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where she has been eulogising elephants. She is masked, I am masked, and we sit at opposite ends of the room. It’s such a strange world we’re living in, I say – how are you coping? And she is straight off into a turbo-charged rant. “How am I taking it? There are no words that describe it. And in my country the president doesn’t believe it has anything to do with him. He doesn’t think he has any responsibility to help us.”
Continue reading...Good riddance 2020: vote now for the ultimate New Year’s Eve songs to end a very bad year
The year that lasted centuries is finally coming to a close – and we need some music to bid good riddance to the horrors of 2020.
Last week Guardian Australia asked our readers what song they’d add to the ultimate New Year’s Eve playlist: one that represents the year we’ve had, the year we’re hoping for, or just the way we’ll feel (and the words we’ll be screaming) at midnight.
Below are all the songs that were nominated, and now we need you to vote so we can build the perfect soundtrack for your night. Voting closes on Wednesday 16 December – and we’ll launch the playlist of the top 20 songs on Friday
Continue reading...David Byrne: ‘Spike Lee and I have a lot in common’
The former Talking Heads frontman on the importance of performance, covering Janelle Monáe, and his hope for the American experiment
David Byrne is one of popular culture’s great polymaths: a musician, producer, artist, actor, author, record label owner and film-maker. He was a founding member and lead singer of the influential post-punk group Talking Heads and has had a long and varied solo career that has included collaborations with Brian Eno and St Vincent. The film of Byrne’s acclaimed 2019 Broadway stage production of the album American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, is available on digital download from tomorrow and DVD on 11 January.
How has the lockdown been for you?
When it was warmer, I could go for bike rides around [New York] with friends and band members, so we could at least see each other and explore parts of the city we didn’t know. I still do that occasionally but it’s a little bit harder now it’s getting colder.
Country superstar Charley Pride dies aged 86
Pride, the first black inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, died from complications related to coronavirus
The singer Charley Pride, the first black superstar of country music, died on Saturday at the age of 86.
His publicist confirmed that Pride died on 12 December in Dallas, Texas from complications related to coronavirus.
Continue reading...Songs for Europe: what music did Bowie and Iggy listen to in 1970s Berlin?
A new compilation, named after one of Bowie’s local haunts Cafe Exil, offers a speculative guide to the pair’s soundtrack favourites
David Bowie once described his 1970s Berlin trilogy – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – as containing “a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass”. It’s that same dislocating retro-futurist vibe that Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley was looking for when he created his latest compilation, Cafe Exil: New Adventures in European Music 1972-1980.
Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips
Continue reading...Shawn Mendes: ‘The fear strangled me. I really fell down’
As a teen he wanted to be the biggest pop star in the world, but global fame came with crippling anxiety that left him unable to sing. So, ‘three therapists and 55 self-help books’ later, has he overcome his addiction to success?
Shawn Mendes had a simple ambition. He wanted to be the biggest pop star in the world. At the age of 14, he taught himself guitar from YouTube videos. At 15, he was recording six-second covers of other people’s songs on the social media platform Vine. By the time Vine was discontinued three years later, he had clocked up more than half a billion views.
When he was 17, his debut album of self-penned songs (with help from seasoned professionals), Handwritten, went to No 1 in the US and his home country, Canada. So did its two successors. His first No 1 single, Stitches, has been viewed on YouTube well over 1bn times, as has Señorita, a duet with his girlfriend, Camila Cabello. His song Treat You Better is closing in on 2bn YouTube views. It really is an astonishing story.
Continue reading...US composer Harold Budd dies aged 84
Composer of calmly beautiful works who rejected the term ‘ambient’ collaborated with Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins and more
Harold Budd, the left-field American composer whose work straddled minimalism, jazz, dream-pop and more, has died aged 84. His death was confirmed by his close collaborator Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, who wrote on Facebook that he was “feeling empty, shattered lost and unprepared for this”.
Cocteau Twins wrote on Facebook: “It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Harold Budd. Rest in peace, poet of the piano.”
Continue reading...Tina Turner: ‘When I was in the zone, it was like I was flying’
She was a rock’n’roll powerhouse who electrified audiences worldwide. As Tina Turner releases a guide to happiness, she talks to playwright V (formerly Eve Ensler) about how she found the strength to overcome illness, abuse and tragedy
The first time I experienced Tina Turner in the flesh, I was a 16-year-old hippy chick doused in patchouli oil. I didn’t just see and hear Ms Turner sing Proud Mary at the Fillmore East in New York City – I felt her in every cell of my teenage body. I was transfixed by the ecstasy of her thunderous hips and legs, the vibrating canopy of her shaking fringe, the irrefutable bidding of her sultry, raw voice.
She was female sexuality fully embodied and unleashed. She catalysed the same in me and in multitudes across the planet, selling more than 200m records in her lifetime. The queen of rock’n’roll seemed as much shaman as singer. I knew instinctively that she had suffered abuse and pain. We survivors have a kind of radar.
Continue reading...After no club dancefloors for almost a year, last night was cathartic, joyous and sweaty | Ben Neutze
Sydney and Melbourne nightclubs are finally open (with a few Covidsafe caveats) – and for LGBTQI people, an essential space has returned
The perfect lockdown anthem came pretty early in 2020: Charli XCX’s frantic, party-thirsty Anthems, from her album released in mid-May. She starts by declaring “I’m so bored” before recounting days in lockdown and everything she desperately craves about partying: anthems, late nights, her friends, “the heat from all the bodies”. Charli also misses New York – although the city that never sleeps is still very deep in its Covid-induced nap.
It’s a different story in Australia where, after seven months, Sydney and Melbourne finally got the green light to return to nightclubs on Monday. There was one sticking point: no more than 50 people on the dancefloor at once, with enough space for one person per four square metres.
Continue reading...The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb: ‘There’s fame and there’s ultra-fame – it can destroy you’
The band’s last surviving member talks about falling out with his brothers before they died, how his wife saved him from drugs – and why he had to ask Michael Jackson to leave his house
From underneath a black Stetson hat, Barry Gibb stares out of my laptop screen. He is in Miami, where he has lived since 1974 when the Bee Gees’ career was in the doldrums and Eric Clapton suggested a change of scenery might do them good. They relocated en masse, moving into the house Clapton immortalised in the title of his album 461 Ocean Boulevard. Gibb never really left, although he still has a home in England. He liked Miami, he says, because it reminded him of Australia, where his parents emigrated when he was 11.
He lives in a waterfront mansion in an exclusive country club, which is clearly a long way from the penury the Gibb family experienced in Australia – of which more later – but that’s what comes of selling between 120m and 220m records, depending on whose estimate you believe. His late brother Robin used to own a house a couple of doors down – Tony Blair caused rather a fuss by holidaying there when he was prime minister – and, as he puts it, “multiple Gibbs” live nearby: five children, seven grandchildren. There are clearly worse places in the world to be holed up during a pandemic. “We’ve been trying to self-isolate and do everything we’re supposed to do,” he says. “As you’ve seen on the news, [coronavirus] is pretty rampant in Miami.”
Continue reading...Rita Ora apologises for second breach of Covid lockdown restrictions
Singer should have been self-isolating after trip to Egypt when she celebrated birthday at London venue
British singer Rita Ora has apologised after reports emerged that she should have been self-isolating when she celebrated her birthday at a London restaurant last month.
The 30-year-old flew to Egypt in a private jet on 21 November to perform at the five-star W Hotel in Cairo, an appearance for which she was paid a six-figure sum, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Continue reading...