Star Wars actor will lead Otis & Zelma, which will celebrate the ‘eternal love story’ between the singer and his wife
John Boyega is set to play Otis Redding in a new film telling the story of the soul singer’s decade-long relationship.
Otis & Zelma will see the Star Wars and Attack the Block actor play the tragic star with the Till breakout Danielle Deadwyler playing his wife, Zelma.
Continue reading...Family call for $3m in licensing fees stemming from Trump’s frequent use of the Hayes-penned Sam & Dave track Hold On, I’m Comin’
The family of late soul and funk singer Isaac Hayes has ordered Donald Trump to stop using the Hayes-penned song Hold On, I’m Comin’ at campaign rallies.
A letter sent to Trump and his campaign team, shared by Hayes’s son Isaac Hayes III, threatens Trump with legal action if he continues to use the 1966 Sam & Dave song, written by Hayes and David Porter. It alleges copyright infringement, and also demands $3m in licensing fees incurred from the use of the song between 2022 and 2024.
Continue reading...Cher finally recognised 60 years after her first recordings, while Mary J Blige, Peter Frampton and Dave Matthews Band are among the other inductees
Cher, Ozzy Osbourne, Mary J Blige and A Tribe Called Quest are among the stars to be added to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year – many of them rather overdue.
Artists can be added to the US institution 25 years after their first recording, but Cher – who once described her snub by the Hall as “kind of rude” – has had to wait until 60 years after her first releases with Sonny & Cher to be included.
Continue reading...London MC wins best male and song of the year, while Potter Payper beats stiff competition to win album of the year
Central Cee has topped the winners at the 2024 Mobo awards, winning best male for the second year in a row, and best song for Sprinter, his collaborative track with Dave, that dominated the summer months with a 10-week run at No 1.
Elsewhere the awards, which celebrate black musical artistry in the UK and globally, spread the garlands across a diverse range of music, with no one artist dominating.
Continue reading...Singer’s anti-war song reached US Top 3 in 1973 before being widely covered and sampled by artists including Drake
Timmy Thomas, whose spellbinding anti-war song Why Can’t We Live Together was a global hit in 1973, has died aged 77.
No cause of death has been given. His family wrote on his Facebook page: “With appreciation and gratitude, the family extends a thank you for the prayers, support, precious words and other expressions of love and kindness during this time.”
Continue reading...Singer’s upbeat and socially conscious songwriting appears on tracks by Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy and Kanye West
Syl Johnson, the blues, funk and soul singer whose work was much sampled in US hip-hop, has died aged 85.
No cause of death was announced by his family, who said of Johnson: “He lived his life as a singer, musician and entrepreneur who loved black music … A fiery, fierce, fighter, always standing for the pursuit of justice as it related to his music and sound, he will truly be missed by all who crossed his path.”
Continue reading...The man behind Something Inside So Strong and It Must Be Love talks about his half-century in music, coming out in the 70s – and his menage a trois on a Welsh mountain
Before meeting Labi Siffre, I am intrigued by the varied reactions I get when mentioning his name. Many people I speak to have never heard of him. Some remember his 80s anthem Something Inside So Strong. Others are dimly aware of a solo career before that.
And then there are those whose eyes light up – those who, like me, regard him as one of the key figures in British pop history, and wonder why he’s not celebrated as such. “Labi Siffre’s fingerprints have been on popular music for many decades now,” wrote the electronic musician Matthew Herbert in 2012. “But his actual voice is rarely heard.”
Continue reading...With Last Christmas sailing up the singles charts again, now’s the time to reappraise Michael’s best tracks, from sublime pop to haunting elegies
Tucked away on the B-side of The Edge of Heaven, Battlestations is a fascinating anomaly in the Wham! catalogue. Raw, minimal, and influenced by contemporary dancefloor trends – but still very much a pop song – it gives a glimpse of what might have happened had the duo stayed together and taken a hipper, more experimental direction.
Continue reading...Drawn from the Jam, the Style Council and his solo work, all of it powered by romance, storytelling and political vim, here is the best of a British songwriter unbounded by genre
On the B-side of A Solid Bond in Your Heart lurks Weller’s mea culpa take on the sudden demise of the Jam, the arrogance of youth and the perils of becoming the Voice of a Generation. “I was a shit-stained statue / Schoolchildren would stand in awe … I thought I was lord of this crappy jungle.”
Continue reading...Answering Guardian readers’ questions, the singer discusses his epic railway modelling, his admiration of the Sex Pistols and the secrets of his hair regime
Did you have any heroes in the beginning of your career that you wanted to move or look like? JoeHill
I didn’t look at singers and think: “That’s how I want to move,” but I sorta wanted to sound like ’em. I started off with Eddie Cochran – that rough-edged voice – and moved on to Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack and David Ruffin. I went from being a beatnik to a mod with long hair.
Continue reading...(Columbia)
While the topic of her divorce is all-consuming, the singer seems to be pushing gently at the boundaries of what people expect of her
There is a sense in which 2021’s biggest single – 84.9m streams in a week on one platform alone; straight to No 1 in 25 countries; a song that received more first-week plays on US radio than any other song ever – wasn’t so much a comeback as an act of global reassurance. The world may recently have lurched from one unimaginable crisis to another, but Adele’s Easy on Me brought with it the message that at least one thing hasn’t changed: Adele Adkins is still heartbroken and belting it out over a gentle piano and tasteful orchestration.
Romantic despair became her global brand from the moment she stopped the show at the 2011 Brit awards with her tearful performance of Someone Like You. It catapulted her from the massed ranks of soul-influenced singers filling a gap created by Amy Winehouse’s inability to follow up Back to Black, to mind-boggling levels of success. There’s always the chance that millions of people might flock to an upbeat Adele album that depicts her full of the joys of spring, but clearly she wasn’t taking any chances last time around: for want of new unhappiness, 2015’s 25 returned to the same failed relationships that inspired its record-breaking predecessor 21. No matter – it sold 22m copies.
Continue reading...As Cop26 opens in Glasgow, we provide the soundtrack, ranging from Gojira’s metal fury to gorgeous environmental paeans by Childish Gambino, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell
From its cover shot of a submerged bedroom down, 2019’s Titanic Rising feels like an album informed by the climate crisis, but the lyrics seldom address it explicitly. Something to Believe is the perfect example: a plea not to feel overwhelmed by or nihilistic about the challenges faced, beautifully steeped in the lush sound of early 70s Los Angeles.
Continue reading...The ‘godfather of rap’ is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this week alongside Jay Z and LL Cool J, and remains an inspiration for how he lifted up the downtrodden
In 1986, as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was being inaugurated in Cleveland, Ohio, I was touring Europe with the artist, poet, author and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron. At that time, you wouldn’t have readily associated someone like Gil with the term rock’n’roll. In fact, people were struggling to find any genre name that could encapsulate this urban griot’s unique and diverse repertoire. Gil would often joke that if you wanted to find his music in the record store, “look for a category that says miscellaneous”; true innovators don’t fit into established genres but create them.
Nevertheless, Gil is being inducted this year, a mark of how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has diversified and incorporated other musical forms, including hip-hop. Public Enemy were inducted in 2013 and this year Jay-Z and LL Cool J will join the ranks along with Gil.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...‘Dee Tee’ played alto sax, flute and percussion and was stylist for celebrated soul-funk band
Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, a founding member of the long-running soul-funk band Kool & the Gang, known for such hits as Celebration and Get Down On It, has died.
He was 70 years old.
Continue reading...With the 10th anniversary of her death this week, rediscover the best of Winehouse’s discography, where heartbreak and anger are mixed up with wit and joy
After all its emotional strife, the Back to Black album concludes with a jokey paean to weed. You could construct an argument that Addicted is Winehouse once more tapping into a venerable jazz tradition – it’s easy to imagine Fats Waller singing about someone snaffling his stash in the 30s – but perhaps it’s better to just enjoy its mordant wit.
Continue reading...As the US boiled with violence, 1969’s Harlem cultural festival nourished spirits with soul, jazz and gospel. Now, Questlove has turned lost footage of it into a brilliant, pertinent documentary
It’s 29 June 1969, and at Harlem’s Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park), the 5th Dimension are about to take the stage. The Los Angeles group are already stars, thanks to hits including Up, Up and Away and Aquarius, from the musical Hair, which topped the Billboard charts that spring. But their pop-oriented repertoire, often penned by white songwriters, has kept them off the US’s R&B radio stations and thus from Black audiences. “We’d tried to separate ourselves from the segregation in our society, but we still got caught up in all that,” remembers the group’s founding singer, Billy Davis Jr, today. “And the average Black family didn’t earn enough to come see us at the nightclubs we were playing. They’d seen us on TV, but they’d never seen us live.”
That was about to change with their headline performance on the opening day of the Harlem cultural festival. A series of six Sunday concerts that summer, the festival showcased the cream of the era’s soul, gospel, blues and jazz artists before an audience of 300,000, many from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “I looked out and saw a sea of faces, and their response was so loving, so welcoming and exciting,” says Davis Jr’s wife and bandmate, Marilyn McCoo, for whom the festival remains a treasured memory. She’s not alone. Harlemite Musa Jackson, then just a five-year-old, still remembers how the 5th Dimension’s orange costumes, gleaming in the sun, made them look “like Creamsicles”.
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...2020’s heavily male ceremony reversed with wins for Arlo Parks, Haim and Billie Eilish, as Little Mix become first all-woman winner of British group
Dua Lipa has topped the winners at the 2021 Brit awards, calling for Boris Johnson to approve “a fair pay rise” for frontline NHS staff as she picked up gongs including the top prize of British album for her chart-dominating disco spectacular Future Nostalgia.
She also won female solo artist, bringing her total Brit award tally to five and cementing her position as one of the UK’s most successful and critically acclaimed pop stars.
Continue reading...(Exile/BMG)
The veteran bluesman loudly wakes up the sheeple with this boring and paranoid double album, reminiscent of a dinner party with a bitter divorcee
Even a man as implacably opposed to lockdown as Van Morrison – who spent 2020 releasing songs rubbishing science as “crooked facts”, mocking people for wearing masks and describing the government as “fascist bullies” while also invoking the Berlin Wall – might be forced to concede it had its advantages. After all, it gave him the time to write the material for Latest Record Project Volume 1, a 28-song, two-hour-plus opus that allows him to set out his latterday worldview more fully than any previous work.
Continue reading...