Tag Archive | rock music
Steve Earle: redemption songs
At Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall last week, Steve Earle opened with the Woody Guthrie-styled title song from his excellent new album The Low Highway. Later in the concert, Steve talked about the song’s genesis: travelling across his country and seeing everywhere the signs of economic failure, just as Woody did in the Great Depression: ‘I’m writing […]
Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan
I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan. It’s like Rimbaud said, ‘I is another’. – Bob Dylan, 1985 A million books have crawled over the minutiae of Bob Dylan’s life, his words, live performances and recordings, and I have read a fair few of them. But I do believe that Ian Bell’s Once Upon […]
Reading Mr. Springsteen
For Christmas my daughter bought me a copy of Bruce by Peter Ames Carlin, the first biography of Bruce Springsteen in 25 years to have been written with the co-operation of the singer. Books of this genre tend towards the adulation of the dedicated fan, notably, in Springsteen’s case, Dave Marsh’s Born to Run: The […]
Elbow live in Liverpool: Everyone’s here
To someone who grew up when the hit parade and radio playlists were experienced in common by everyone, the fragmentation of the music scene in recent decades can seem depressing. Music is no longer something enjoyed in common: instead, jostled next to each other on bus or tube but sealed inside our headphones we listen […]
Thea Gilmore: on tour in New Brighton
In the Blue Room of New Brighton’s Floral Pavilion Thea Gilmore was explaining how she and partner Nigel Stonier had, for the last five years, organised a literature and music festival in their home town of Nantwich in Cheshire. ‘Anyone know the material for a fifth anniversary?’ she asked. One guy suggested bacon. ‘Er, no…but […]
The Stones’ Crossfire Hurricane: It’s a Gas! Gas! Gas!
Last night I attended the red-carpet premiere of the new Rolling Stones documentary Crossfire Hurricane, at the Odeon Leicester Square. Well, no: I was there in spirit only, actually attending one of these increasingly common events where we sit in a cinema in our home town and experience a live event going on somewhere else. […]
Patti Smith in Manchester: spirit in the night
The rock’n’roll spirit soared and raged last Friday night in Manchester, as if thirty years had not passed and reduced the flame to a flickering ember. The reason? One of the few artists left with any credibility from the time when rock and poetry fused was in town, a battered survivor still raising a […]
The Beatles make history in Port Sunlight
A Historic Date In Music: August 18, 1962, Hulme Hall, Port Sunlight, Merseyside Re-posted from sixstr stories, an excellent blog that records important dates in musical history. This one was especially significant for a whole generation, now old and losing their hair, and unable to believe that it really was 50 years ago that the […]
Jerry Garcia: no simple highway
See here how everything Lead up to this day And it’s just like any other day That’s ever been Sun going up and then The sun going down Shine through my window And my friends they come around… Had he lived, Jerry Garcia would have turned 70 today. Born on 1 August 1942, Garcia was […]
Patti Smith’s Banga: new lands to be explored
Reviewing Patti Smith’s new album, Banga, for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zoladz writes: Remember those words that shot out of her lips like hot lightning on her brilliant 1978 record Easter: “I don’t fuck much with the past, but I fuck plenty with the future.” Well, more than three decades later, Banga is the work of someone interested in fucking […]
