The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival sponsored events defensively; “ It’s business as usual here at the Vortex”. The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues, that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose in Finsbury park, but…
The Tom Waits of 2008 has ventured far from the conventional balladry his career began with in the early Seventies, and deep into the forest of weird, faux-experimental fairground music. Tonight he appears as a dishevelled hobo, complete with Tourettes spasms and ticks, standing in a circus ring. Birds have eaten his breadcrumb trail. There’s…
Promoting the uncharacteristically accessible Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! album, Nick Cave’s back with The Bad Seeds. The elegantly dishevelled interncontinental post-punk supergroup assembled a quarter century ago after the collapse of Cave’s breakthrough Melbourne group, The Birthday Party. Tonight the septet’s fifty year old front man valiantly defeats the onset of middle-age by adopting a look…
On the basis of their album launch show at The Royal Albert Hall, it would be hard to explain to a teenager why R.E.M. were once so important. But today, everything from Emo to Alternative Country sounds as it does because of the Athens, Georgia band’s 80’s records, and when Radiohead and Coldplay graduated from…
This week, the 1980’s comedian Ben Elton told the Christian magazine Third Way that the BBC is too scared to make jokes about Islam. Apparently, Ben Elton himself even had a line about taking the mountain to Mohammed disallowed by the BBC on religious grounds. Comedy fans may find it ironic that this line vanished…
Emerging alone beneath the vast dome of the Roundhouse in jeans and a plain green shirt, Steve Earle looks like someone who has arrived to fix a washing machine, rather than the man who reclaimed roots rock in the ‘80s and cleared the path for the Alternative Country generation. Earle’s angry 2004 album The Revolution…