|  |  |  | | | | | Music news, reviews, comment and features | guardian.co.uk | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Seven days with the musician
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Texan festival is known for making or breaking acts A roster of new acts hoping to export their British brand of music to big-spending audiences across the Atlantic are heading to the Texas city of Austin this week to play their hearts out in bar-room gigs that could help them make it big in America. The South by Southwest festival, acknowledged as the biggest international melting pot for new ideas in technology, film and music, is seen as a rite of passage for bands trying to crack the lucrative American market, luring dozens of emerging acts, many on the brink of emerging as household names at home. Among those packing their six-strings and swagger will be the Vaccines, a four-man troupe of indie rockers from London; Chapel Club, a downbeat rock band touted by the NME; and Leeds alt-rockers Dinosaur Pile-Up, who have already notched up success touring with the Pixies. While some of SXSW's tiny venues would make Britain's pub stages look cavernous, those making the trip will be following in the footsteps of acts such as Muse, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand, who all enjoyed wider success after Austin. And while names such as Pulled Apart by Horses and Lower than Atlantis might be alien to mainstream audiences here, their British origins should lend them exotic kudos in Texas, while also offering them the possibility to schmooze with rock royalty such as Queens of the Stone Age and the Strokes. To further help their cause, music industry promoters will generate a buzz around the 40-odd acts heading to Austin with a "British Music Embassy" stage, although they have been robbed of their prize act due to injury. Anna Calvi, hotly tipped for future success after her self-titled debut album scored five-star reviews, has pulled out after hurting her wrist and hand. "Perhaps that's for the best," the Los Angeles Times's music blog said in weary acknowledgement of the blind adulation that often greets British acts. "The rock crit press was ready to name her the breakout artist of 2011 without even seeing her perform." During daylight hours, SXSW might not seem an obvious destination for those seeking the rock'n'roll big time. The event appears to proceed much like any large convention with thousands of delegates meeting in the Austin Convention Centre to visit the Exhibition for Creative Industries or joining panel discussions. At night, however, SXSW transforms into a hub for hundreds of international musical acts appearing on more than 80 stages across the city. It also hosts a film festival with a programme that showcases the latest and boldest documentaries and features. Friday night saw the premiere of David Calek's controversial documentary Heaven Hell, a defence of sexual bondage. More conventional entertainment was available at the Paramount Theatre for the festival debut of British director Duncan Jones's surreal new thriller Source Code, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays an air force captain who finds himself inside the body of another man. Other performers and musicians will be converging on Austin on Monday. Appearing this week are the Black Lips, the "flower punks" from Atlanta, Georgia, known for their boisterous live performances. DJ Diplo will also be appearing, as will Midlake, who are backing John Grant, the musician whose last album, Queen of Denmark, was rated as one of the best of 2010. This weekend, stars invited to the technology festival to debate the dawn of the next age range from the creators of the world's most successful computer games and social networks to Craig Venter, the man who mapped the human genome code. • If you want to follow the bands on the bill at SXSW online, the Observer and the Guardian have joined up with Google, Last.fm, Soundcloud, Amazon, MusicBrainz and YouTube to create an index of every band playing. Go to www.guardian.co.uk/culture/sxsw
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Troxy, London Expectations surrounding the arrival of Beady Eye were low in one respect but mega in two others: forget their record, because any incarnation of latter-day Oasis minus their chief songwriter was scarcely likely to ring the sonic changes; rather, first, what about the interviews? Noel Gallagher was the sharper wit, but there was always something irresistible about his younger brother's outbursts: by turns caustic and surreal, Liam succeeded in emulating his idol John Lennon when it came to giving journalists memorable quotes just as much as in any other respect. So given the opportunity to set up the release of his new band's record in the wake of Oasis's ugly split in August 2009, Liam, you felt, would come out of his corner snarling. Instead, he's sounded just a bit defensive, and while scarcely conciliatory towards "our kid", neither has the Pretty Green fashionista minted anything quite so damning as his famous description of Noel's "old man vibe... big woolly jumpers and cardigans... Terry Wogan, Val Doonican shit". Nor has he been mouthing off about contemporary bands who might be seen as real rivals to Beady Eye, whereas Oasis could dish it out without recourse – even if few could resist the pop he did have recently at Radiohead: "Them writing a song about a fucking tree? Give me a fucking break! A thousand-year-old tree? Go fuck yourself!" None the less, any concerns that the fight has gone out of Liam are quickly assuaged when you see Beady Eye live, the second treat that the idea of the band promised – partly because any audience chanting Liam's name was always going to be prone to feistiness itself. So it proves at the Troxy in east London on the last night of the group's first short UK tour, with the lads rucking down the front and, up on the balcony, blood spurting from someone's lip one minute, before he puts his arm round the mate who's punched him the next. The appeal of Oasis from the off was in no little part located in the licence they gave a generation to, well, rock'n'roll, following the indie wallflower years, and it wasn't pretty, it wasn't clever, but since they've been gone, no one – not Kasabian, not the Enemy, certainly not yet the Vaccines – has filled their boots. So why not Beady Eye, who, if you squint, look oh-so-very-much like Oasis? One answer might be that the generation weaned on "Supersonic" and "Some Might Say" should surely have grown up by now, and mellowed. On "Lippy Kids" on Elbow's new album, Guy Garvey sings of the charms of reckless youth; it's a gentle, wistful song, in which he notes that he, for one, "never perfected the simian stroll". But Liam is actually a year older at 38 than Guy, and he still walks that walk, exuding menace, leaning up and into his mic like he might butt it. Nothing's changed, except, and it's in no way a reliable memory, when Oasis played Knebworth in 1996 and Liam wore a ridiculous chunky jumper very much in the style of T Wogan, I don't remember seeing him from half a mile back sweat any then; too cool. But tonight, he refuses to take off his macintosh even as damp patches begin to spread across it. But that's less a sign of his ageing than an indication that, once again, he really means it, maaan. The wall of noise that the band produces is similarly both fierce and deeply comforting, constructed using some classic templates. Last year's first single "Bring the Light" actually sounds quite novel, because it mines the barrelhouse boogie of Little Richard, rather than the fab sounds of the 1960s; they come, too, inevitably, and "The Roller" could scarcely be more Lennonesque, although they do a clever thing on "Beatles and Stones" – "I just want to rock'n'roll/I'm going to stand the test of time/Like Beatles and Stones" – because that one actually sounds just like the Who. Subjected to this noise, faced with Liam as a frontman, that part of the brain that tells you that this is desperate stuff, devoid of originality (and just look at how the rest of the band are dressed, like they're auditioning for a film of the Britpop years, a pastiche of a pastiche), shuts down, and "The Beat Goes On" actually does sound like the big Zippo lighter moment it so plainly wants to be. "Someday all the world will sing my song," Liam sings, and heard live, it doesn't sound a wholly absurd suggestion. It's not "Champagne Supernova", never mind "Let It Be"; but there's also the rather touching – from Liam! – acknowledgment that "I'm the last of a dying breed." But then, back out on the streets afterwards, it turns out that it is still 2011 after all.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Deutsche Grammophon) Does the world need another set of Brandenburgs? Yes, when they are as freshly minted and as adventurously sonorous as this marvellous set from Abbado's young period-style Orchestra Mozart. Nicely described not as conductor but as "concertatore", Abbado leads supple, imaginative readings; a great deal of the strong character is provided by his leader, violinist Giuliano Carmignola, and there is a brilliant harpsichord solo from Ottavio Dantone in the fifth concerto. Only the fourth is rather deliberate and rhythmically stolid; the second with its glorious high trumpet provides a great finale: these are peerless highlights of baroque music.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (EMI) Neil Tennant called his band's late-80s spell of commercial infallibility their "imperial phase". But with a score that often sounds as though John Williams's Stormtroopers are about to march into view, those words seem apt here. The ballet that Tennant and Chris Lowe have scored (a forthcoming Sadler's Wells production) is based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen rather than George Lucas, but ominous melodrama prevails nonetheless, even when it comes via disco rather than dense orchestration. It's hard not to wonder what the dancers might be doing to all this and, as with Tennant's voice (which makes only a brief appearance), their absence is frustrating.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Newly engaged pop iconoclast Patrick Wolf tells Elizabeth Day how falling in love at first sight inspired his joyous new album Patrick Wolf is sitting in a London private members' club, sipping genteelly on a Bloody Mary that is the same colour as his flamboyantly dyed auburn hair. Dressed entirely in shades of navy, Wolf has an elegant manner, and folds his angular 6ft 4in frame neatly into a velveteen-upholstered armchair like a long-legged flamingo. "The thing is," he says, eyes blinking as though startled by the sound of his own voice, "I really don't feel I belong in pop music." And yet Wolf is set to make quite an impact on the genre. At the age of 27, he is about to release his fifth album, Lupercalia, a work packed full of sweeping orchestration, surges of positive sentiment and oodles of commercial potential. Critics have described it as "immaculate" and "a triumph of romanticism", which isn't bad for an album that features ukulele and has such an unapologetically erudite name (for those of you without a Classics degree, Lupercalia was the forerunner to Valentine's Day: an ancient pastoral festival intended to avert evil spirits and release fertility). Admittedly, it's not the kind of thing you generally associate with the Pussycat Dolls. Lupercalia is, says Wolf, "hugely confessional" and documents his experience of falling deeply in love with the man he is about to marry. "It was a long process," he says. "Not just the first week or the first year of love, but it's quite a few years before that… feeling the absence of love and then its discovery." Three years ago, after relationships with both men and women, he met William Charles Pollock, who works at BBC 6 Music, by chance, at a Christmas party. It was "love at first sight". Wolf was at a low ebb, after touring relentlessly and experiencing bouts of depression that led him to contemplate quitting the music industry altogether. His songs at the time reflected his state of mind – melancholic and aggressive, with tortured, complex lyrics – and his performance persona became increasingly outrageous as he took to the stage dripping in feathers and spray-painted silver. But now that Wolf is engaged to be married, he seems to have rediscovered a sense of simple optimism. His next single, "The City", has already been hailed by the website Digital Spy as "four of the most joyous minutes you'll have this year with your clothes on". The accompanying video features a group of shiny, happy people paddling in the surf in Santa Monica. "I wanted nothing to feel artificial on this album at all," says Wolf. "I wanted to document my joy as naturally as possible… It was time to grow up and change." Later he adds, almost as an afterthought: "I can't lie about things. I find it very hard." And it is true that Wolf seems to embody an unfettered innocence. He is at pains to express himself clearly in answer to questions, taking time to ensure that he has got his point across as honestly as possible and admitting: "I'd rather be embarrassingly open than embarrassingly guarded." Both his openness and his creativity stem from a "wonderful childhood", raised by an artist mother and a musician father in Clapham, south London, with regular holidays to visit his maternal grandparents in County Cork, who introduced him to WB Yeats and the Irish fiddle. "My childhood was full of fantasy," says Wolf, stirring his Bloody Mary with its celery stick. "Dad would only talk in fables or metaphor. It would be: 'Let's go find a pot of gold when there's a rainbow', not: 'Let's go kick a football.' It's in my blood to tell stories." When he was sent to a private, all-boys' secondary school in Wimbledon, he found it difficult to settle in and was badly bullied. "I was suddenly in a male, academic environment, in a place that preached competitiveness through sport and army training, and I was painting my toenails so that when I turned up, they'd send me home… I just wanted to be alone with my four-track. Solitude is one of my favourite things." Wolf spent his spare time making music and editing his fanzine. When, aged 14, he interviewed Minty, Leigh Bowery's art-rock group, he managed to persuade them to allow him to start playing the theremin on stage as part of the band. Wolf promptly dropped his real surname – Apps – in favour of something altogether more fabulous ("I wanted it to sound courageous," he explains) and was soon reinventing himself as a performer. When he was 15, Wolf's parents transferred him to Bedales, the progressive boarding school, and the bullying stopped; but he admits it has taken him several years, and psychotherapy, to deal with its impact. Negative criticism, he says, has lost its power to wound – "I'm not comfortable with it but I'm numbed to it" – and now he is keen to move on. "I find it quite strange thinking about myself as a teenager," he says. "It feels like a world away." Given all that Wolf has packed into the intervening years, that is not surprising. After leaving school, he busked and studied composition for 12 months at Trinity College of Music, before releasing his first album, Lycanthropy, to critical success at the age of 20, citing influences as diverse as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hector Berlioz and Chet Baker. Two more albums followed, featuring collaborations with, among others, Marianne Faithfull and Tilda Swinton. In between recording albums, he modelled for Burberry and attended Elton John's White Tie and Tiara ball. Then, after being dropped by his record label, Wolf funded his fourth album, The Bachelor, by selling shares to his fans through the Bandstock website, generating £100,000 and making it into the top 50. Such fan loyalty is all the more impressive given that Wolf is an artist who defies easy categorisation, both in his music (which splices folk, classical and electro-pop) and in his transgressive attitude to socially prescribed gender roles. "I really believe that love and respect in any relationship can exist outside the terms 'gay', 'straight' or 'bisexual'," he explains. "There's a kind of reverse sexism these days, where the biggest male pop stars are very booted-and-suited blokes. A man has to be seen as being in control, paying for everything: it's aspirational to have a lot of money and get all the girls." In a world of pre-fabricated popstrels and identikit boy bands, Wolf is a much-needed iconoclast. "That's something I'm really proud of," he says. "I've never made anything that fits easily into one stream or another." And for that, perhaps, we should all be grateful. Lupercalia is out 30 May on Hideout
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Choir of St John's College, Cambridge, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts / Nethsingha (Chaconne) Lassus (c 1530-94) was a celebrity musician in his day, moving between his native Low Countries to Rome and Munich. At least 2,000 of his masses, canticles, motets and hymns have survived. He was also bipolar, then called "melancholia hypochondriaca". This may or may not explain the harmonic adventure which leaps out of his prodigiously inventive compositions, from the exotic sensuality of Veni in horum meum to the spiky moral indignation of Quid gloriaris in malitia. With lively support from His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge takes full advantage of this treasury of vocal colour with exuberant, full-toned precision and impressive musicality.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | An alternative history of pop would need to embrace Marsha Hunt, the Au Pairs and Zakk Wylde. Oh, and Westlife I once wrote an article in response to a single released on 17 September 2001 that ended up being so long it became a book. I had been asked for 600 words about this single. I ended up writing about 170,000. The book proposed that all music would eventually break free of the planet and various earthly limitations to do with humans and technology and become a sort of collective consciousness that would drift through space and time forever, giving anyone or thing who came across it an astounding sense of what we were thinking during our brief moment in the sun. It wasn't exactly Nick Hornby, but Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye gave it a great review, and Johnny Marr has just emailed me to say he's reading it again, so it struck some kind of chord, even if not one that you'd find in Nick Hornby's favourite music. The song that became a book, Words and Music, was "Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Kylie Minogue, and I turned the lonely drive she made in the song's video towards a city that seemed designed by JG Ballard, Kraftwerk, John Foxx and Le Corbusier into a fictional history of music. I thought there might be a sequel to this book with the new Lexus commercial, which features Kylie driving, but this advert seems designed not by robots and philosophers but by stylists and copywriters, and any article I might write about this ad, the new world social drumming, the pointed interior silence and a very polite and unKraftwerky, quite Kate Middleton-y Kylie, would run out at about this point. Working out what to play when I deputise for Jarvis Cocker – busy with Pulp work – on his 6 Music Sunday Service show on 20 March could turn into a sequel to Words and Music. Right now, marvellous Marsha Hunt is my lead character. A chapter that takes us from Marsha Hunt's super-snazzy "(Oh No! Not) The Beast Day!" via Talking Heads and the Bush Tetras to Gorillaz leading to a chapter about musical openings that could belong on any album from the past 45 years. A chapter that goes from post-Cream solo Jack Bruce via Birmingham post-punks Au Pairs to post-classical Ben Frost and post-torch Julianna Barwick while compiling a soundtrack to the nude Patrick Lichfield photograph of Marsha starring in Hair that, and here's another chapter, perversely explains the erotic fascination I had as a teenager with one of her boyfriends, Marc Bolan. A chapter that works out music you'd wish Lady Gaga sounded like, as opposed to a hybrid of Boney M, Sam Fox and Hot Gossip, so that she was as fascinating as she thinks she is: Lali Puna, Ladytron, Skull Defekts, Kreidler, Nite Jewel, Africa Hitech, a combination of Nico's Chelsea Girl, the Bee Gees' loopily lovely post-Zombies/Hollies debut, the post-heady 1969 Jimmy Webb-produced Thelma Houston album Sunshower, Marsha's 1977 German disco album and Autechre's Incunabula. I could write a short book, nicely structured for the hooked ebook reader, about the two new tracks from Actress, of last year's alluring post-concrete album Splazsh, to be played between Herbie Hancock's Sextant and Venetian Snares' Cavalcade of Glee and Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms. Harrier ATTK/Gershwin on Nonplus Records will inevitably be put in the grime/dubstep/funky category, and my short book, entitled If It Can Be Done Why Do It, would explain why this genre should in fact be called the hidden soul of things, or logjam, or trauma and those responsible for this music not called groups, or DJs, or producers, or projects, or chameleons, but pasters. Marsha Hunt, actress, among many other things, could be on the cover. No book, just a short paragraph – this could be it – about Westlife, made from wood and deference, miming their new single on This Morning, and how their combination of short jackets, shaved necks, weeping strings and manly maudlin is the very opposite of magic. A chapter about how I made my mind up about who to vote for in the Metal As F*ck category in the ninth annual Metal Hammer Golden Gods awards : Slayer, Slipknot, Zakk Wylde or the Deftones. A final chapter about alternative pop universes and how different the world would be if we remembered, even revered, Chubby Checker not for "The Twist" but for his finely dishevelled recorded-in-Holland post-Hendrix psychedelic 1971 album. The book concludes that, in fact, the world would be more or less the same, except that the current Lexus TV commercial would feature Kylie driving the Residents wearing 1968 Marsha Hunt afros and performing their version of James Brown's "It's A Man's Man's Man's World". And Beady Eye would not exist at all, not even to the extent of being a glint in Liam Gallagher's shaky, staid retro-mind.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Fiction) This New Zealand band are named after some words in a Tricky song that, they've said, sum up "everything that's brilliant and stupid about music culture". Something which, as an enthusiastically hyped band who tick every modish box going, they should be well attuned to. There are boy-girl vocals, there are euphoric, ravey synths offset by stormy Nine Inch Nails guitars, and there are huge, festival-friendly choruses that will outdo MGMT's most persistent summer anthems. In other words, there is an awful lot going on and the result is both a bit brilliant and a bit stupid.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Two Bowie biographies shed new light on the career of pop's greatest chameleon, but the man himself remains elusive In 1971, David Bowie's bullish new manager, Tony Defries, walked into the office of RCA in New York for a meeting with the heads of a record label whose biggest star was Elvis Presley. "You've had nothing since the 1950s," Defries informed them, employing a confrontational stance that may well have been borrowed from one of his role models, Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, "but you can own the 1970s, because David Bowie is going to remake the decade, just like the Beatles did in the 1960s." Defries, for all his bluster, was right. David Bowie's golden years lasted from November 1970, when he released his first cohesive album, The Man Who Sold the World, until September 1980, when he released Scary Monsters...and Super Creeps, which is generally regarded as the last great album by an artist who, despite the relentless attention-seeking of Lady Gaga, remains the greatest shape-shifter in pop music. In between came a run of albums that saw Bowie adopt and, just as quickly, cast off a range of personas that kept both fans and critics guessing about the nature of his identity, his sexuality, and his complex relationship with pop stardom. Bowie's breakthrough album, the glam sci-fi fantasy that was The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), precipitated a wave of fan hysteria that, indeed, harked back to Beatlemania, but also signalled the darker, often sexually ambivalent, energies of the punk-rock revolution of the late 1970s. By then, Bowie had explored the contradictions of celebrity (Aladdin Sane, 1973), made a dystopian concept album based on George Orwell's 1984 (Diamond Dogs, 1974), reinvented himself as a blue-eyed soul singer (Young Americans, 1975), tentatively embraced electronic experimentation on Station to Station (1976) and emerged, on Low and Heroes, both released in 1977 as punk challenged rock's old guard, as an experimental art-rocker without peer. Nothing that Bowie has done since has come close to equalling the artistic momentum and relentless reinvention he achieved during that decade, but he remains one of the key, and defining, figures in pop, and one whose influence can be detected in most of the groundbreaking music that has been made since, from the U2 of Achtung Baby and Zooropa to Arcade Fire on their most recent album, The Suburbs, from Joy Division to Lady Gaga in all her guises. Yet, David Bowie, the great chameleon of pop, as both these books attest, remains somehow unknowable. Paul Trynka has done a stalwart job of tracing Bowie's many musical shifts and performing personas, but the man himself remains alarmingly elusive, just as he did in the last major biography, Marc Spitz's David Bowie: A Biography, published in Britain last year. Like Spitz, Trynka did not have direct access to his subject, nor to some important Bowie friends-come-collaborators such as Brian Eno, who helped shape Bowie's vision on Low and Heroes. For Starman, the press release asserts, Trykna interviewed "over 200 friends, ex-lovers and fellow musicians". As befits an erstwhile editor of Mojo, a magazine that tends to approach rock music as first and foremost a heritage industry, he is good on the musical development of a pop star whose early albums, David Bowie (1967) and Space Oddity (1969), were both little more than confused collections of ill-matched songs, and showed little hint of the confidence and brilliance that was to follow. Beginning with Bowie's childhood as plain David Jones in post-war Brixton, Trynka tells a tale that has perhaps been told too often to surprise anymore, but that nevertheless intrigues in its mixture of ruthlessness, shifting loyalties, monumental drug taking, decadent behaviour and, for a while, undiminished musical invention. The cast of characters is colourful-going-on-exotic, and includes Lindsay Kemp, the mime artist whose hold on Bowie was such that he almost forsook pop music for interpretative dance; Iggy Pop, Bowie's long-time friend, rival and a performer whose unlikely artistic resurrection in the late-70s was orchestrated by Bowie as well as Angie Bowie, nee Barnett, his first wife, would-be manager and fellow sexual adventurer. There are also several less well known but no less intriguing walk-on characters such as Daniella Parmar, an androgynous beauty whose cropped and dyed hairstyle seems to have been the template for Ziggy Stardust's barnet, and Vince Taylor, the 50s rocker whose fall from grace underpinned the album's overall concept. Trynka also delves deeply and illuminatingly into Bowie's prolonged cocaine addiction, which, at its height, shocked even Iggy, whose own appetite for destruction was legendary. You can catch a glimpse of Bowie at his most strung-out in Alan Yentob's film Cracked Actor, first shown on the BBC in 1974 and now available via YouTube. Trynka trails an unravelling Bowie though his cocaine-fuelled obsession with the occult and his cocaine-addled outburst of megalomania during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1976, in which he name-checked Hitler and said, "I'd adore to be prime minister. And, I believe very strongly in fascism... I dream of buying companies and TV stations, owning and controlling them." (That same year, Bowie was captured on camera giving what looked like a Nazi salute, but which was more likely an innocent wave, to a crowd of fans at Victoria station. The photograph, alongside Eric Clapton's drunken onstage eulogy to Enoch Powell, precipitated the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement that same year.) One of the inbuilt problems with any David Bowie biography is how to broach the long decline that began with the mediocre Let's Dance album in 1983 and continues to this day. Trynka fares no better than Spitz in his attempts to make sense of what is, after all, the natural order of things in pop apart from a few exceptions such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Bowie's last notable appearance was a walk-on part in an episode of Ricky Gervais's comedy-of-cruelty sitcom, Extras, in which he played a heartless manipulator unaware of his own monumentally self-centred personality. As Trynka acidly notes, "'The Little Fat Man (With the Pug-Nosed Face)' would be the most significant new Bowie song of an entire half-decade". Perhaps, though, David Bowie, now 64, is simply ageing gracefully, having successfully reinvented himself, after his marriage to erstwhile supermodel Iman, as a family man. Conversely, Any Day Now by Kevin Cann casts an obsessive eye over Bowie's early years and, thus, is very much a Bowie fan's dream book. Ranging from the year of his birth, 1947, until the release of Diamond Dogs in 1974, it is a diary-come-scrapbook of information and trivia. The photographs alone are extraordinary, a pictorial history of the young David Jones's dalliances with Mod subculture and hippiedom, and the renamed David Bowie's embrace of glam, gender-bending and sci-fi fantasy. Tour posters, ticket stubs, magazine covers and myriad snapshots of the fledgling star add to the general sense that this is a book for Bowie obsessives made by a Bowie obsessive. Entertaining, then, and oddly illuminating in its own completist way. A book for anoraks – if your anorak was geometric, glitter-encrusted and sequin-studded.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Mute) Texan Josh T Pearson, once of apocalyptic trio Lift to Experience, has more recently played ghost at the feast at niche altrock festivals, terrifying indie kids with sets of brooding country-noir. If anything, this terrific solo debut – recorded over two nights – ramps up the intensity; Pearson's anguished croon and acoustic go largely unadorned as he picks over relationships in their death throes. Easy listening it certainly isn't – "Woman When I've Raised Hell" captures the self-justifying snarl of an aggressive, delusional drunk – but Pearson stares out the abyss with a remarkably clear eye, and the overall effect is more of catharsis than desolation.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (33 Jazz) Among his many strong points, Tim Richards has the power to make quite well used jazz numbers sound fresh and unhackneyed. Half of these 12 pieces are standards of one kind or another, but even Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss" (dating from 1938) comes across with the bloom of youth. His own compositions, notably the title track, are satisfyingly rich harmonically, while swinging like the proverbial clappers, and the piano sings under his touch. Dominic Howles's purposeful bass lines and Jeff Lardner's alert drumming make this a proper jazz trio, too, not just piano plus support.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Pop stars singing catchy little ditties about date rape is nothing new, but it's high time we stopped humming along. Plus, the upside to celebrity bigotry In Britain's tabloids, there are spidergrams of awfulness that extend flickeringly from a central blonde. Turn, please, to Kerry Katona, the pop star who failed the psychological tests required to go on Celebrity Big Brother, and the central body of today's spider, and then to ex-husband Brian McFadden, one of its legs. McFadden, a pop star himself, is in the news this week after his new single "Just The Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar)", released by Universal Music, was roundly read as a catchy ode to date rape. "I like you just the way you are," he bleats in a song that's broken the Australian iTunes' Top 40, the artwork for which features McFadden posing as if for a mug shot. "Drunk as shit dancing at the bar, I can't wait to take you home so I can do some damage… I can't wait to take you home so I can take advantage". On Twitter McFadden defended himself: "Yes it is dumb lyrics and a dumb beat… That was the point!!!! When did I ever claim to be John Lennon?" Brian's, to be fair, is by no means the first paean to sexual assault – as well as the recent mixed-messageathon "Love The Way You Lie" by Rihanna and Eminem (Entertainment Weekly wrote that its video suggests "Domestic violence is AWESOME"), my favourite is Frank Loesser's duet "Baby It's Cold Outside", which was written in 1944, a time when the term "date rape" was 40 years off being invented. "I've got to go away," sings the woman, marked "mouse" on the original score. "Baby it's cold outside," replies the man, marked "wolf". "Say, what's in this drink?… Mind if I move a little closer?/At least I'm gonna say that I tried/What's the sense in hurting my pride?" Like a Diet Coke, the song fizzes sweetly as it erodes. Universal promises McFadden's song is "infectious" and will "rattle around in your head for hours", and there's the problem. As it wiggles through our brains leaving a slimy trail of legalities, the lyrics of a pop song with a "barn-dance flavour" only reinforce the sad confusion of the 48% of young British men who don't consider it rape if the woman they've had sex with was too drunk to know what was happening. Date rape is a problematic term in Britain, a place where dating implies some candle-lit romance, some level of "maybe" – perhaps that's one of the things disorienting this 48%, so driven in their lust they find romance on a sofa puddled with WKD-coloured vomit. Perhaps another is pop's forever-long obsession with watching women, as if they're ants on a hot patio and you're the boy with the magnifying glass. It's not that McFadden's fun little anti-consent song should be banned, or even that he should necessarily be expected to apologise, more that listeners should be encouraged to listen past the persistent beats that make up our background hums, and instead of singing along under our breath, simply open our mouths and shout. THE BIGOTRY BONUS
Galliano, like Mel Gibson before him, is said to be entering rehab after his antisemitic rant was made public, its mobile-phone format now familiar as a grainy frame for unmasking baddies. Is there really a rehab for antisemitism? Chicken soup on a drip, someone's mum wiping your mouth with a licked lilac hankie, weekly sessions explaining why Jews don't camp? Or is this, like so many rehab trips before, simply the knee-jerk PR response to a career-damaging outburst? I welcome these big reveals of celebrity bigotry – it allows me to trim the fat from my list of to do's. Now not only need I never buy a pair of Dior sunglasses, I don't have to watch Charlie Sheen's "get-your-son-out-of-the-house-so-I-can-have-sex-with-someone-nearer-his-age-than-mine" sitcom Two and a Half Men or Gibson's "aliens-want-to-harvest-humans-but-oops-can't-deal-with-water-didn't-quite-think-this-through" film Signs. With my Sky+ box heaving with unwatched series links, now I just need the stars of Boardwalk Empire and True Blood to punch some puppies and my evenings will be clear. Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/evawiseman for all her articles in one place
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Ample Play) "Brimful of Asha" might have been the worst thing to happen to Cornershop, the 1997 hit unfairly pegging them as an Anglo-Asian novelty rather than one of Britain's most charmingly idiosyncratic bands. In recent years this has meant low-key gems such as 2009's Judy Sucks a Lemon have been overlooked, and the same fate may meet this, their equally fine sixth album, fronted by singer Bubbley Kaur, a newcomer whom band leader Tjinder Singh discovered working in a Preston launderette. She first appeared on one-off 2004 single "Topknot", and its sound – Punjabi folk meets ramshackle funk – provides the excellent template for proceedings here.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Columbia Records Every so often, a new act rises to prominence at incomprehensible speed. Thanks to some favourable alignment of the stars and the time-shrinking effect of the internet, they magnetise hype and A&R interest before even playing a gig, or recording a demo, or figuring out how their instruments work. To be fair, the Vaccines did get a single out before Columbia Records signed them at the end of 2010, and they can play just fine, but their journey from zeroes to heroes dominating the year's hotlists in January, taking third place in the BBC's Sound of 2011 poll, was abrupt indeed. They got together only last June. Now, still months away from their first birthday, the London retro-rockers have whipped up a debut album, and as the title suggests, they have mixed feelings about the anticipation weighing on their shoulders. As much as it defensively pre-empts anticlimax, What Did You Expect From the Vaccines? also shrugs off criticism with brattish insouciance: What do we care what you think? This attitude is loud and clear on "Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra)", the exuberant opener, which sounds very much like a Ramones track, only shorter. It crams power chords, mention of F Scott Fitzgerald and what might be the world's briefest guitar solo into a svelte 84 seconds. The other tracks feel epic by comparison but rarely stray above the three-minute mark. Immediacy, it turns out, is the Vaccines' bread and butter. The uncharitable thing to say about the album is that it sounds like it was written in a tremendous hurry. The arrangements are pretty tight but not exactly complicated, and the lyrics don't pause to worry about how much sense they're making. "Break me on the 37th hour/ Tout me, doubt me, show me all of your power/ I will watch you rise on my back from the ground", frontman Justin Young sings with an air of great solemnity at the start of "All In White", before going on to blather about hearing double and fabricating salvation. To criticise this fast and loose approach is to somewhat miss the point, though. More than one song is preoccupied with warding off the years and having breezy, inconsequential fun, and the music largely fulfils that brief. The reverb-heavy guitars and driving bass lines recall the Jesus and Mary Chain, and more recently the Killers, but the sunny celebration of adolescence is straight out of 60s pop. Young has a knack for making thrown-together lyrics sound urgent, and before long, stadium-sized crowds will surely be waving their lighters to his appeal, in the chorus of "Wetsuit": "Put a wetsuit on/ Come on, come on/ Grow your hair out long... Do me wrong, do me wrong, do me wrong". It's interesting that Young's previous incarnation was Jay Jay Pistolet, a folky singer-songwriter who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn. Something of that past life comes through in the hidden bonus track at the end of the album, where a slow, dreamy piano plays and Young sings much more coherently about a father-son disconnect and feeling like somebody else's child. The most affecting moment on here, it suggests that the direction taken on the rest of the album was just one of several explored by the band last summer. It may not have been the best direction to take, but it looks like it will continue paying dividends.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A week of events to celebrate International Women's Day only highlights the fact that classical music – and composing in particular – remains a curiously male preserve. But the exceptions are growing in number… Try this test. Write down all the women composers you know of. No, don't run away. Given the nature of this column, stick to contemporary classical. Too hard? OK, include anyone, past or present, who has written religious, symphonic, chamber, vocal, choral, operatic, electro-acoustic works. To make it simple, film and TV scores are allowed too. Still zero? You're in distinguished company. The Guardian's 100 Most Inspiring Women this week, marking the 100th International Women's Day, featured not one. In a confined space, however, the panel chose from an even tinier breed, naming a female conductor (Marin Alsop) as the classical exemplar. Before you start huffing, this is only marginally lower than the percentage the BBC Proms manages most years, ranging from one out of 43 conductors in 1989 to a miserable one out of 63 in 2010 (according to a report by Women in Music). Prejudice? Misogyny? Lack of habit or confidence or education? It's all these things; a different topic but not unrelated and impossible to ignore. Classical music, however much it has changed for the better, remains a predominantly male haven. This is a numerical truth, not the prelude to a rant. Yet it seems baffling, if not shocking, that even now we still use the two words – "woman" and "composer" together as a collective noun, whereas it has long been out of date to refer to Barbara Hepworth or Tracey Emin as "women artists". It's a century since Dame Ethel Smyth composed "The March of the Women" (1911), which she conducted through the bars of her cell in Holloway prison with a toothbrush. That remains the single most famous observation about a "lady composer". Merely mention Smyth's habit of dressing in tweeds, smoking cigars and falling in love with Virginia Woolf and you can see why she hasn't become a usable female-composer archetype. Many more know the tale of the toothbrush than have heard her music. Today you can rapidly correct that omission. Comedian-conductor Sue Perkins will direct an all-women's orchestra in Smyth's anthem as the culmination of this weekend's Women of the World (WOW) festival at the Southbank Centre. All week, indeed, women's music has been in the spotlight. Last Tuesday, the PRS for Music Foundation, which currently has a female membership of 14 %, launched Women Make Music, "a unique funding opportunity for women music creators", including jazz and rock, with assistance worth up to £5,000, to "raise awareness of the gender gap and encourage new collaborations". The aim, according to Sally Taylor, chair of PRS for Music, is to "encourage more women to come forward", and "to promote role models for the future". You may think this itself is a retrograde step. Let's go back to that test. Did you total the fingers of one hand? Not bad. With the BBC Proms a useful benchmark, you could qualify as a programme adviser. When the new season is announced next month the cry will go up, as it does each year as surely as the huntsman's tally-ho: "Where are the women composers?" And a spokesperson will rush in with some sticking-plaster statistic: one more than last season, two more than the year before. Better anyway than 2006: total nil. 2008 was a redemptive high, with six females out of 117 composers, or 5%. If individuals themselves feel variously angry or ambivalent at being given a helping hand – the same arguments are rehearsed each year for the Orange prize despite the healthy number of women writers – most understand the need for consciousness-raising action. "It's a delicate balance," agrees Janis Susskind, publishing director of Boosey & Hawkes. "None of the women composers I deal with like being singled out. It's more about vigilance, about noticing that there's no woman on a list. Why not? Are we satisfied? How could things be different?" We can guess the myriad reasons, domestic, financial, educational, for their absence in the past. Nuns wrote music for their own use, famously the 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen. Later, many high-born women who sang or played wrote their own music, especially songs. But with the idea of a profession being lowly, so their talent remained uncelebrated. Some hid behind pseudonyms, like the stylish "Mrs Philharmonica". Most were forgotten until the explosion of gender studies began to vitalise the forgotten history of women. Aaron Cohen's International Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1987) managed to gather 6,000 entries. Even having written a book on Hildegard, interviewed many modern pioneers from Elizabeth Maconchy to Minna Keal to Judith Weir and followed the subject fairly closely, I still only recognise about two dozen names. The idea that composition was a male preserve haunted even those who were demonstrably good at it, such as the formidably gifted Clara Schumann, who said it was not a job for women. She devoted herself to helping her composer husband. Today, at last, the landscape is changing. There's a groundswell of action: the Barbican's next Total Immersion (9 April) is devoted to Korea's Unsuk Chin, belatedly a big name. Women fill composition classes in conservatoires as never before. They are securing top composer-in-residence positions (see panel below), with a rash of talent, born in the 1980s, now finding voice. We don't always help ourselves, and I speak collectively. Men are supposedly keen on women but I couldn't find one to accompany me to an "all-women composers" concert on Tuesday, or a female friend, come to that (pancake duty, either cooking or eating, was partly to blame). Fortunately others filled the church of St Andrew Holborn for Beneath These Alien Stars, a concert for International Women's Day. The large, enthusiastic – mixed – London Oriana Choir chose from across the centuries to show the variety on offer, impressively mastering 17 works new to them, including a UK premiere, Talk Show by Elena Kats-Chernin (b 1957). She has achieved her own celebrity by writing the current Lloyds TSB music. The cruelly short-lived, blazingly talented Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) was faithfully represented in the lush, radiant "Hymne au Soleil". Sally Beamish's "God of the Moon" and works by Karin Rehnqvist and Cecilia McDowall, as well as Judith Weir (subject of a festival in Manchester last week) and Roxanna Panufnik (new associate composer with the London Mozart Players), stood out. This expressive choir, conducted by David Drummond, who devised the programme – yes, a man – gave Jocelyn Pook's "Mobile" as an encore. It wittily incorporates a "nana na na" representation of the Nokia theme as if to announce, whisper who dare, that women can be, in the best sense, musically sharp. So now that the alibis and inequalities have gone, all doors are open. Still we cannot escape the unanswered, unfashionable and, certainly, uncomfortable question: for all the many good, even excellent women composers, why has there not yet been a great one? Where is the possessed, wild-eyed, crackpot female answer to Beethoven, who battled on throught deafness, loneliness, financial worry and disease to create timeless masterpieces? The answer, and I run for cover even raising the matter, may lie in biology or even psychopathology. If one should arrive, what a cry of joy and relief will be heard. And in this brave new world, that toothbrush will grow into a lightweight, perfectly balanced baton and those prison bars will prove, after all, to have been the work of nurture not nature.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As he prepares to bring an Italian orchestra to England, Antonio Pappano talks about the musical soul of Italy – and why he no longer wishes he was called Tony Smith… I wonder whether Antonio Pappano would have succeeded as a conductor if, as he wished when he was a teenager, he'd been called Tony Smith? On the podium, Pappano – music director of the Royal Opera in London and of Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, whose orchestra he brings to Manchester, Birmingham and Basingstoke this month – embodies Italian gusto. Rehearsing, he is liable to ask for a crisper rhythm by saying the music should sound like spaghetti cooked "al dente", gritty not mushy; he likens the tone of his Santa Cecilia orchestra to the colour of Amarone wine, made in the Veneto with dried grapes. "Lots of sugar, a very high alcohol content," as he said, smacking his lips, when we talked in Rome last year. Pappano's slightly tubby physique ought to be an advertisement for these culinary pleasures, but he sweats off the calories in performance: conducting opera, he needs to replace his sticky, puddled shirts at the end of every act. He even chews while beating time – a ruminative tic, I suspect, not evidence that he's actually eating. Yet this man for whom music is an Italian meal happens to have been born in Epping in 1959. His father had migrated to London from the south of Italy and worked in restaurants while moonlighting as a vocal coach for singers. At school in Pimlico in those more monocultural days, Antonio was teased for possessing an exotic name with too many open vowels, which got mockingly garbled into Pappino or Pappone. Anxious to merge with the anonymous mob, he begged his parents to change their name to Smith. When he was 13, the Pappanos moved to America. Sent to a new school in Connecticut, Antonio was again a misfit: "It took my brother about two days to lose his English accent, but I never got rid of mine." He escaped the school bullies by growing up fast. By the time he was 16 he was already a working man, playing the piano for his father's students, at choir practice in local churches, and in a cocktail lounge. "I did the whole gamut of music," he told me, throwing his arms out wide to encompass all that tingling, twangling, resonant air. "I loved playing three-minute show tunes in the cocktail bar, though it hardly prepared me for the five-hour Wagner operas I conduct today!" In his 20s he moved back to Europe, and – now defining himself as "an Italo-American English boy" – served as Daniel Barenboim's assistant at Bayreuth. His conducting debut was in Oslo in 1987; five years later he became the music director of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where his colleagues frenchified his name by re-accenting it as Páppanó. After a decade he returned to London with his American wife, also a vocal coach, to take over from Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden; now, once again, he was Tony. Up to this point, Italy had played no part in Pappano's career and little enough in his life, though the country is stamped on his face. He may not be Roman but his nose is, while the dent on his forehead is a souvenir of a childhood holiday spent with his grandparents in the family's ancestral village in Campania. "I fell while I was playing, and hit my head on the pavement edge. The village had no doctor, so they carried me down the street to the barber, who closed the hole with sealing wax, not stitches! I'm a tribute to rustic medicine." Then in 2005 the Accademia – founded in 1585 by pope Sixtus V, who made the church composer Palestrina its first president – hired Pappano as the principal conductor of its orchestra, at the time in the doldrums. The appointment was his belated homecoming. "In middle age," he beamed, "I'm discovering my Italian roots. Until now I didn't really know what I was, though I found it easier to be Italian-American than Anglo-Italian. These days I feel I'm acquiring a real Italian identity, joking with the players in their language – though they're always correcting my errors, since I never learned Italian. At home with my family we spoke a patois, a language of our own that was the southern dialect of my parents with English words and American slang mixed in." Last year on BBC4 Pappano undertook an operatic tour of Italy, bobbing ebulliently on the Grand Canal and bawling a gondolier's serenade. In publicity photographs for his orchestra, he has been promoted to a Roman icon, posing – though in person he is affable and earthy, not at all imperious like many baton-wielders – next to a crumbling chunk of stone incised with the initials SPQR, standing for Senatus Populusque Romanus, signature of the ancient republic. But working in Rome has acquainted him with the more chaotic aspects of Italian life, nerve-wracking for someone used to the more disciplined habits of the north. "The guys in this orchestra need handling. I love their virtuosity and the theatrical spell they can weave when they're playing instrumental music. They have qualities you can't translate – panache, brio. But rehearsals can be temperamental. It doesn't come naturally to them to concentrate or to sustain a tone, and I tell them that it takes me four sessions to get results I'd achieve immediately with my orchestra at Covent Garden. It's not that they're less good, it's just the result of what I call their endless yap-yap-yap. So I'm trying to make them more German, without taking away their native swagger." When performing Respighi's symphonic poem Pines of Rome – included in the Manchester concert this week – Pappano also indulges the unlovable Italian hobby of shooting songbirds during the autumn, a small reminder that a Roman holiday once consisted of watching lions gore Christians at the Colosseum. During his residence in Italy, Wagner fumed about this cruel habit, and thought the silence in the countryside proved that music had fled to Germany. Italians may be lustily passionate, but they are not sentimental: anything that moves is fair game, especially if it is edible. In his musical description of the rustling nocturnal pines on the Janiculum Hill, Respighi included the song of a nightingale; convinced that orchestral players could never compete with the bird's lyrical rhapsody, he insisted that a recording of an actual nightingale should always be used. "Ah," said Pappano, "we don't do it that way! One of our technical guys is a hunter, and he has an elaborate collection of whistles, lures that trick birds out of hiding so they can be shot. He hides in amongst the orchestra, and he's our decoy nightingale." The Santa Cecilia's season opened with concert performances of Rossini's Guillaume Tell, an epic of Swiss nationhood composed in French for the Paris Opéra; on the poster, Pappano gamely impersonated the son of the archer William Tell, sceptically eyeing the apple pierced by an arrow that was propped on his head. "There's something about Rossini," he said after the final rehearsal, "that gives you a sense of the ideal Italian character type – his measured elegance, his modishess, his exhibitionism… though of course nowadays most of these qualities are on display in the work of clothes designers, not musicians! Yet at the time people called Rossini 'il Tedeschino', the little German, and thought he wasn't Italian enough, just as Puccini, who for us is so Italian, turned away from the native tradition and followed Wagner's example – all those dark-hued symphonic harmonies in his later operas. Verdi worried that the generation of composers that came after him would betray Italy. It's still a problem for musicians: with a symphony orchestra you inevitably think of doing Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler." With the Royal Opera, which his matey conviviality revitalised after the departure of his aloof, abstracted predecessor Bernard Haitink, he has performed an eclectic repertory that includes the recent, joyfully scandalous premiere of Mark-Antony Turnage's Anna Nicole. But he hinted, with a guilty twinge, that he may have neglected his own patrimony. "I've done productions of Wagner, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten and Birtwistle at Covent Garden, but maybe not as many of the Italian classics as they expected me to." He will make amends in future seasons, conducting Verdi's Otello and his French grand opera Les vêpres siciliennes along with Puccini's Trittico and Manon Lescaut. More works by Rossini – the feminist comedy L'Italiana in Algeri and the majestic Babylonian tragedy Semiramide, which for Pappano is Rossini's Aida – are on Pappano's wish list, and he thinks that Covent Garden should have a new production of those loud, lachrymose shockers, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. The Santa Cecilia is one of the few Italian orchestras not confined to an opera-house pit. It is a national treasure, but is there enough national music for it to play? "True, my first concert here had nothing Italian in it. But gradually we're restoring the repertory that's been neglected, and we're adding to it by commissioning a work from a contemporary composer every season." Pappano has returned to the baroque period in a new recording of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, out next week. It's a plangent, agonised performance, with Anna Netrebko and Marianna Pizzolato emoting at the foot of the Cross – a reminder, like Pappano's recent CD of Rossini's Stabat Mater, that in Italy religious faith is an operatic drama of despair and jubilant recovery. He has also not been snobbish about recognising the work of current composers best known for their film scores. Last Christmas he performed a cantata by Ennio Morricone, who wrote the violently metallic soundtracks for Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, and in February the orchestra played Nino Rota's dance suite from Visconti's The Leopard. "There's an enormous nostalgia in Italy for the 1940s and 50s," Pappano explained. "The films of de Sica or Fellini seem to come from simpler, happier times. Cinema Paradiso sums that up, and Morricone's music brings the lost paradise back." The Leopard caters to a deeper and perhaps more painful nostalgia: quotations from Verdi accompany the story of a Sicilian aristocrat who shrewdly compromises with an upstart democracy during the Risorgimento, the campaign to free Italy from foreign occupation. Although the Santa Cecilia tour commemorates the 150th anniversary of Italian unification in 1861, it's questionable how much there is to celebrate in the country's subsequent history. Was the Risorgimento really a resurgence? Liberators like Garibaldi and Cavour hardly expected the advent of Mussolini or of Berlusconi, the perma-tanned magnate with re-afforested hair who recruits babes for his "bunga bunga" parties from the inane game shows on his television network. "Well," said Pappano, "it was not so long ago that all these separate provinces gave up their autonomy, joined together, and started to speak more or less the same language. Rome may have been here for ever, but Italy is a very new idea. There's a lot of cynicism now, but Italians still have a kind of utopian hope, and it's rooted in music – for instance, in Verdi's patriotic choruses." The best loved of these is "Va, pensiero", the homesick lament of the slaves in Nabucco. It supposedly served as a political protest during the Risorgimento; it is now always encored in performances of the opera, and functions as Italy's unofficial national anthem. In his television series Pappano conducted it in the open air in Naples, with a chorus of hundreds and an audience of thousands, all of whom fervently sang along. Why, I asked, does this piece have such emotional appeal? "Italians don't have unity as one of their traits," Pappano replied, returning to his comment about the peninsula's makeshift unification. "They're individualists, like the players in my orchestra. 'Va, pensiero' grabs them because it offers a respite from that: for once they can do something together – and it's all written in the middle voice, so anyone can sing it!" Italy's political and cultural institutions are mostly in disarray, like Roman ruins with their feral cats. Despite that evidence of carefree civic irresponsibility, a chorus, like an orchestra, is a model of co-operation; perhaps music may yet be able to unify this melodious but unharmonious country.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (Rabble Rouser) The Tyneside family troupe have become flag-bearers for British folk not by chasing electric dreams but by blending their lowing sibling harmonies with neo-classical arrangements. They're on imperious form on this fourth album, mixing the customary antique Geordie ballads with songs by Tom Waits, King Crimson and Jon Redfern, whose "Give Away Your Heart" is a commentary on the Iraq war ("disappointment is everywhere" comes the refrain). The predominant mood is mournful but affecting: "Close the Coalhouse Door", for example, is a spectral farewell to the mining industry. There's a danger the self-confessed "miserable buggers" strike the same chords too often (that Hovis-ad trumpet!), but so far, so canny.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Deutsche Grammophon This tribute to a giant of the 19th-century violin is an engaging run around both Joachim the performer and Joachim the composer. Big-hearted Daniel Hope, backed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under Sakari Oramo, seems equally at home in the wide open spaces of Bruch's violin concerto (which the master totally revised and improved) or the warm intimacy of Joachim's own delightful Romanze for violin and piano. Hope maintains that the wonderfully lyrical Notturno Op 12 is the epitome of the term "romantic" – touching and inspiring rather than wild and passionate – and in his hands it's hard to disagree.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Marianne Faithfull on her formative food experiences My father worked for MI6 and my mother was a baroness. She was worn down by the privations of war and he looked well fed. But he was a frugal man and when I'd put mounds of butter on a piece of bread he'd say, "What on earth do you think you're doing?" Then mother would say, "She can have all the butter she wants!" I stopped boarding at convent school at 12 and would walk home each day, a latch-key kid, and prepare supper – very continental delicatessen food – for my working mother. She would write descriptive lists for me, of things like "4 Very Nice Apples", "4 Delicious Bananas" and "2 Really Good Lamb Chops". So I learned to examine food for goodness and freshness. My father belonged to a commune and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting. I love dinner parties – other peoples' anyway. I find cooking while talking very difficult. For a posh one I'll bring out the heirlooms from my mother's side – knives and forks with "SM" on them, for Sacher-Masoch or Sado-Masochism, you can take your pick. And I drink espressos from lovely turquoise and gold cups which survived two world wars. I was anorexic in the 60s and 70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now. When I was a street junkie I would just eat shredded wheat with milk and sugar. About every two weeks I'd take myself to San Lorenzo and have fish, mashed potato and spinach, which I'm sure is what kept me alive. I live in Paris and like going to hotels to eat. I love the Hotel Costes, although the Crillon is more grand. I occasionally go to the Caviar House & Prunier to have Caspian caviar in a baked potato. The food that's never let me down in life is porridge, especially with milk and maple syrup, which is delicious. Paris isn't a porridge place but I can buy it in London when I'm there and bring it back with me. I've hated being associated with that famous confection [Mars Bar]. I don't eat them and I never have, and what is said to have happened just never did. So I have no good feelings about it whatsoever. It's meant the loss of my feminine self. I serve black tea, which I call Froggy tea. And I have green teas and all sorts of nice teas. I'm serving tea all the time. Horses and High Heels is out now on Dramatico Records
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | This year's festival in Austin, Texas, kicked off with film screenings including Source Code
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