Black Country Rock

At best, I’ve got an ambivalent attitude to tribute bands. I have to admit that is has evolved over the years. For me to buy into them, they need to fulfill a few criteria. The original music needs to mean something to me beyond being presented with a facsimile. I’m not looking for pale imitations. The original music needs to be honoured, not in a verbatim note for note methodology but more in…

After an eight year wait, there's a new album by the Everlasting Yeah, ex of That Petrol Emotion. It's well worth a listen.

Where were we? It’s May 2016. Covid 19 sounds like the name of an Aphex Twin track, Brexit could be Autechre’s new album and you’d expect to hear Article 50 playing from a converted double-decker bus in a field in Somerset at 2am. As Gladys Knight and the Wu-Tang Clan said – how could it be so simple then? It’s been over eight years since we’ve heard collectively from the Everlasting Yeah. The…

It’s possible that there is not a band that is more Café Oto than the Necks. The Australian three piece have been around since 1987, initially happily improvising together in Sydney. Keyboard player Chris Abrahams and bassist Lloyd Swanton still live within 100km of their original base but drummer Tony Buck has lived in Berlin for over 20 years. Pre-pandemic, they’d get together in Australia to…

The Smile have been getting people exercised, more so than one would expect. There’s the usual crew who don’t get Radiohead. I can understand that – the band’s music can be obtuse and challenging, Thom Yorke’s vocals have their idiosyncrasies. As one of my friends might say – it’s not for everyone. Then there’s the Radiohead fans who seem to worry about how the Smile should be approached and…

A wonderful of evening of jazz at Cafe Oto with Mongolian singer Enji - yes, really...

Living in London, you’re often reminded just how many people from unexpected places around the world live in the city. Cafe Oto is a magnet for these sorts of diasporas, offering a night out for the geographically displaced. Last year I enjoyed Malian band L’Etran De L’Air, a fantastic night of African guitar pop. This time round, it is the turn of Enji, a jazz singer from Mongolia, now based in…

It's the final weekend of Ryuichi Sakamoto's Kagami at the Roundhouse in London. Try and make it if you can.

I think I’ve probably spent more time reading Miki Berenyi’s book than I have listening to her music. It demonstrates the power of the critics and word of mouth, a recurrent theme in this account of her life and her time in Lush. The band’s relative prime was in the early nineties. They were signed to 4AD, home to the Cocteau Twins, Pixies and Throwing Muses. I’d probably heard a couple of…

In the time-honoured fashion of better late than never, here’s my top ten gigs of 2023. A spoiler alert – Cafe Oto could feature quite significantly. I make no apologies for this. It is driven by a few factors. Firstly, economics – the cost of greed/living crisis combined with putting my daughter through university means that I’ve got less disposable income to hand. Secondly – we didn’t get…

I thought I had missed the chance to see Lucrecia Dalt tour the !Ay! album. She played Kings Place in swanky redeveloped King Cross earlier in the year. And yet here I am at a canal-side warehouse in Hackney on a chilly November evening for some Columbian electronic bolero music. !Ay! was one of the most acclaimed non-mainstream albums of last year. It won best album in the Wire Magazine and yet…

This was alchemy. How do you create a stomping joyous rhythmic explosion out of the old rock’n’roll ingredients? Two guitars, a bass and drums. Etran De L’Air got here in the nick of time. Their flight was delayed. We got constant updates (“They’re at King’s Cross!” “Hurray”). They piled out of their van, tuned up and were up and running ten minutes later. No Lana Del Ray timekeeping histrionics…

It’s been a couple of weeks since I saw Alva Noto reproduce his Xerrox works with the small classical ensemble s t a r g a z e. The idea for the four volumes of the Xerrox series came initially to Noto in Japan. Some recordings that he’d made became electronically corrupted and rather than hit “delete”, he decided to embrace the glitches. He copied the files over and over, hence the portmanteau…

The phrase Imperial Phase gets kicked around. That's where Big Thief are at. Read about a brave and confident first night at the Hammersmith Apollo here...

What do I love about Big Thief? I’ve been thinking about this in the days that have passed since the first of two shows at the London Apollo.  I think it’s their confidence and bravery. I get a kick out of seeing bands who are taking risks, changing things on the hoof. This manifests itself in a number of ways. They start with an unreleased low key soulful number called Ruined, It’s quietly…

Defiance. Lucinda Williams is not slowing down despite her recovery from a recent stroke. Great to see the band back together again.

Where were we with Lucinda Williams and the Barbican? We last saw her in 2019. She was railing against Trump. Now her ire is directed toward the US Supreme Court, in the wake of the reversal of Roe vs Wade. She’s released the slightly one dimensional Good Souls, Better Angels plus a series of jukebox cover albums, recorded during the course of the pandemic.  Lu front and centre And she’s had…

Another fantastic evening at @Cafeoto with @hawkinsmusic and Roberto Ottaviano. My birthday present membership is the gift that keeps giving. Read about the evening here:

The beauty of having been gifted a membership to Cafe Oto is that it reduces ticket prices to such a ridiculously cheap level that I am minded to take a chance on things I’m unfamiliar with.  It’s a chilly Friday night in the middle of January, and I’ve paid £8 to watch Alexander Hawkins and Roberto Ottaviano perform together. Roberto Ottoviano (left) and Alexander Hawkins (right) What piqued…

Graeme Thomson's brilliant book about Simple Minds, Themes For Great Cities. answers the questions us fans wanted to ask. Read about it here:

When I mentioned to a couple of muso-mates that I was reading Graeme Thomson’s superb biography of Simple Minds, their questions were pretty much identical – “I wonder if it will answer why they became so bad?” The moment that this perceived negative transition can be probably pinpointed in my mate’s eyes to a place and time – Wembley in November 1984 when they recorded Don’t You (Forget About…