Bee Gees singer dies aged 62

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:26:00 GMT

Barry may have been the leader of the Bee Gees, but Robin was the eccentric, the grit in their oyster

His big brother Barry wrote the bigger hits, and his twin brother Maurice hung out with Ringo Starr and Oliver Reed, but Robin Gibb has always been my favourite Bee Gee. In their pre-disco days, Robin always had his hand cupped over his ear and, with his spaniel hair, cut a wan figure on stage. Barry could soften his voice, go gooey and breathy on a song like Words, but Robin's voice was loud, quavering and intense. It sounded unhappy; it sounded like no one else before or since.

I've always been drawn to pop's unlikely outsiders, ones who make a mark without resorting to any of the usual rock'n'roll behaviour, whether they be Del Shannon or Vic Godard or Adam Ant, and Robin Gibb fits the bill perfectly. There's the childhood story about him picking up the fire bug. Aged eight he became a part-time pyromaniac, and quickly progressed from bedclothes to advertising hoardings. One day a member of the Manchester constabulary came knocking and gently suggested the family should consider emigrating. Manchester's problem became Australia's, but Robin started to channel his pyro activities into vocal harmonies – with no New York subway stations available, the brothers practised their art in public conveniences.

While Barry Gibb was the pin-up, and the group's leonine leader, Robin struggled to assert himself, even though he was as prolific a writer as his big brother. The Bee Gees' manager Robert Stigwood, he felt, favoured his prettier older brother when it came to A-sides. He was also dogged by incredibly bad fortune. In 1968 he was returning to London from Hastings with his fiancee Molly when the train carriage they were in came off the rails just outside Catford. The Hither Green train disaster killed 49 people. The desolate Really and Sincerely ("My mind is open wide/ I'm on the other side") was the first song Robin wrote after the crash.

Robin and Molly married a few months later. Honeymooning in the Alps, in a tiny cabin, they were snowed in by an avalanche and weren't discovered until four days later. From this point on, he was always more likely to write an elegy – like 1970's Sincere Relation – than Jive Talking.

At least Robin's perceived second-billing was subtly avenged over time – Barry never had a sizeable solo hit, but Robin had a huge European hit with the Dickensian angst of Saved by the Bell (a UK No 2 in 1969) during a brief split from his brothers. In the early 80s, when the Bee Gees brand was almost unmarketable in a post-disco world, he pulled it off again with Juliet, a melancholy slice of upbeat electropop that again hit top 10s everywhere in Europe apart from Britain, reaching No 1 in Germany.

While Barry has always kept the Gibb family unit tight, with brothers, spouses and parents all living within walking distance of each other in Miami, Robin has always rebelled. So when Barry and Maurice were making the hapless TV comedy Cucumber Castle in 1969, Robin set out to show he was the group's renaissance man. He may have seemed a delicate flower on stage but he didn't lack for ambition. That summer the NME reported that he had "completed a book called On the Other Hand which is to be published soon … I'm a great admirer of Dickens." In the few weeks between leaving the Bee Gees and hitting the chart with Saved by the Bell he wrote more than 100 songs.

"I'm also doing the musical score for a film called Henry the Eighth," he told Fabulous, "and I'm making my own film called Family Tree. It involves a man, John Family, whose grandfather is caught trying to blow up Trafalgar Square with a homemade bomb wrapped in underwear." In July 1969
the NME announced Robin was "fronting a 97-piece orchestra and a 60-piece choir in a recording of his latest composition To Heaven and Back, which was inspired by the Apollo 11 moonshot. It is an entirely instrumental piece, with the choir being used for 'astral effects'." Robin Gibb was still only 19 years old.

He was also obsessed with British history. In 1984 he bought a 12th century house called The Prebendal in Thame, Oxfordshire; while Barry and Maurice seemed more at home sunning themselves in Miami, their brother was proud to tell visitors that Elizabeth I and Henry VIII had both strolled around his dark, oak-lined home.

Age barely mellowed his eccentricity. In the 90s he left his brothers speechless when, during an interview with all three of them on Howard Stern's show, he announced his wife Dwina was bisexual and they enjoyed threesomes. He quickly said it was a joke, then changed his mind again a week later. With their cocooned, peripatetic upbringing (Isle Of Man, Manchester, Australia), the Gibbs never had an instinct for cool pop moves. And Robin Gibb's music - untutored and isolated (I can picture most of it being written on a harpsichord in a dimly lit 12th century living room) – has come out without any of the usual dulling rock'n'roll filters. Who else could have written Odessa (City on the Black Sea) about a man stranded on an iceberg, writing a letter to his wife who loves "that vicar more than words can say"? Frankly, no one.

'We need more oestrogen-based thinking'

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:35 GMT

As Antony Hegarty prepares to curate this year's Meltdown event in London, he talks about the artists who have had the greatest influence on his life and career – and why 'future feminism' will make the world a better place

When you arrange to meet Antony Hegarty, you don't have to worry about questions like "How will I recognise you?" The singer is in London visiting his parents' home near Kingston upon Thames, so we've agreed to get together at a place on the river. At 11 in the morning, I'm standing outside the designated cafe – which is closed – among the inevitable joggers and retired couples on their constitutional and toddlers feeding the swans, when Hegarty comes striding along the boardwalk. He is well over 6ft tall, his bulky frame dressed in indeterminate numbers of layers of black, his moon-pale face and soft features and smile partly covered by strands of long, straight black hair. As a younger man he used to walk the streets of New York wearing a sheer silk slip and military boots with the words "fuck off" inked on his forehead. He's lost the stare-rejecting attire, if not quite all of the sentiment.

In search of coffee we head to the nearby Rose theatre foyer, which is full of latte-loving young mothers encouraging their offspring to let off some steam. When he was invited to edit the Guardian's music website a couple of years ago, Hegarty suggested that what humanity urgently needed in order to survive was "a seismic shift toward the feminine in our empathetic systems of perceiving and interacting with the world". When he was making this claim I'm not sure that what he had in mind was the fecund yummy mummies of the royal borough of Kingston, but it seems appropriate anyhow, in the hour or so that follows, that his thoughts on the future feminisation of the planet should occasionally be threatened to be overwhelmed by women talking over voluble babies.

While he is in London, Hegarty is finalising some of his plans for the forthcoming Meltdown festival, which he is curating, down river at the Southbank Centre. He has been dividing his time of late between his home in New York and a base in Madrid (where he has been working on a theatre project with the cultish performance artist Marina Abramovic), but southern England, where he lived until the age of 10, remains a formative grid reference. Though he has been an important figure in the New York avant garde for 20 years, Hegarty grew up in Chichester, west Sussex. He is 41 now, but he is so curiously boyish in manner that you can well imagine him still as the awkward British chorister, developing a bit faster, and a bit more unconventionally than his fellow descants; he still looks both at home and not at home in these suburbs, a big man who has got used to projecting his inner hermaphrodite quite comfortably.

Hegarty's spoken voice, a warm conspiratorial whisper, only occasionally hints at the uniquely powerful and vulnerable sound that he is capable of making on stage and in recordings. When the range of that soul-charged tenor first fully unfolded with his band Antony and the Johnsons in 2005, you had the sense of it coming out of nowhere, emerging, as the title of his breakthrough Mercury prize-winning album I Am a Bird Now suggested, as if from another, more aery, species entirely.

Hegarty himself doesn't quite see it that way. The creation of his androgynous persona, and the discovery of the possibilities of his voice, was a mix-and-match of influence and experiment conducted over many years. Meltdown works best when the curator approaches it as a kind of musical autobiography, and certainly that is Hegarty's intention this year. His first forays into art were collages and cut-ups of magazines, which he still makes and exhibits from time to time, cultural references spliced together to form vivid and unsettling wholes. He takes the approach into other areas of his life, too, he suggests. "I like arranging all my friends as constellations, and I do love the process of curation, so this is perfect for me." To prove the point he sets his smartphone on his knee and starts scrolling excitedly through the acts he has lined up.

First up in an eclectic list – "mainly ecstatic female voices with a few queens thrown in" – is Marc Almond, whom Hegarty has persuaded to appear in his Marc and the Mambas incarnation, the side project of his Soft Cell years. Almond has become a friend, but in his teens Hegarty was the obsessive fan. "Marc pretty much singlehandedly determined my future as a musician and the style of music I would pursue," he recalls. "I was about 13 when I heard him. I was living in America, a suburb in California and getting those records by land mail was really hard work. You would hear rumours about records in magazines which themselves were pretty hard to get hold of. But for all those reasons Marc and the Mambas were really important to me. I lived on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. And those records arriving through the door were really my lifeline."

Hegarty moved out to California in 1981. The family were following his father's work as an engineer; they had gone first to Amsterdam, before ending up on the west coast of the US. Hegarty is not keen on public psychoanalysis and pretty wary of sharing even the facts of his life, preferring mystery, but he hints that the abrupt shift across the Atlantic was not an especially happy one for him. In Chichester he had enjoyed singing with the choir but that opportunity was not available to him at school in the US, where singing was considered "effeminate" and "shameful" among the boys. As he reached puberty and his ambiguous gender identity became more defined, he suggests he wasn't bullied so much as left to his own devices. His reaction was, he has said elsewhere, to confront his identity head on: 'I started wearing more makeup. That's the honest truth. I started probably about 12… 13."

As he applied his eyeliner, Marc Almond made him feel as though he was not alone. Previously his only musical crush, inevitably, had been on Kate Bush. But he looked on Almond as something like a cross between a role model and a guardian angel. "I always felt he had kind of left a trail of breadcrumbs for me, to follow him into music," he says. "You know I would collect quotes and references that he mentioned in interviews, pore over them. He laid out the land for me. And I really learned to sing listening to him singing. Him and Nina Simone. As Nina would say in the studio, 'Don't put nothing in unless you really feel it. Let's do it again from the top please.'"

Hegarty likes his singers to embody different kinds of courage, "people who deliver a vision of the world they totally believe in". In his live performances he is a master of that kind of conviction: his most recent show, at Radio City Music Hall in New York, a staging of his latest album Swanlights, saw him bathed in the green glow of lasers, accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra while keening rapturously about a vision of "being dead, underwater and filled with crystals of light". It was described in the New York Times as an evening of "wonderment" with "cries from the heart, crashing like waves".

Hegarty has always been drawn to voices that self-consciously channel female mythic power. His South Bank lineup will include not only the return to a mainstream stage of the ethereal Scots vocals of Liz Fraser, once of the Cocteau Twins, but also the "Edith Piaf of Turkey", Selda Ba˘gcan, who took up the people's cause against the generals of Istanbul armed only with a guitar, and Buffy Sainte Marie, who invigorated electronic and folk music with Native American wisdom in the 1960s and 70s.

Hegarty's father used to play tapes of Sainte-Marie in his car, and those songs retain an eerie nostalgia for Hegarty himself. "Little Wheel Spin and Spin was so haunting and so frightening to me as a child," he says. "Buffy was very clear about what she saw as the crisis and very keen to spit it out, almost like a witch. I like singing that is not far short of a hex. Nina Simone did the same thing around race and the civil rights movement. All of that taught me how you can participate in culture as an artist."

In his own engagement with that "crisis", he defines it as "a crisis of spiritual issues, but also a practical crisis of ecology". Hegarty is an avid reader of the Guardian's environment pages and our conversation is salted with quotes from articles he has recently clipped. ("They said last month in the US it was 8.7 degrees hotter than it should have been… Every taxi driver knows something weird is happening with the weather. And everyone is waiting in vain for the institutions that are supposed to have our best interests at heart to come up with some solution…")

Some of the lyrics on his last two albums suggest a kind of transcendent Wordsworthian relationship with the natural world. I wonder if this was established in Hegarty as a child.

"Well," he says, "I think it was but in just in a very typical south of England way. I was raised walking around on the South Downs at weekends on my father's shoulders. And with a sense that nature was for ever. The critical shift that has happened in our lifetimes is the idea that we are actually undermining that whole belief. Can you imagine the burden on the psyche of our species that has involved? How can we possibly process that without massive global summits on what we should be doing? Instead we are being divided and conquered by this terrorism scaremongering and half the world, including most of America, is tied up in patriarchal religions that believes apocalypse is the climax of what we are waiting for."

Once he is into his stride on this theme, there is no stopping him. Hegarty was an ardent Christopher Hitchens fan, slayer of "sky god religions that destroy our connection with the natural world and promote the idea that paradise lies elsewhere". As a transgender person – and he has no wish to define the "meat and potatoes" of his sexuality any more precisely – he sees himself as having a small headstart on most of the rest of civilisation in his intimate understanding of the need for feminine power structures to restore imbalances created by "patriarchal religion, patriarchal economies and patriachal government". In this way he has moved from the deeply personal emotional conflicts and epiphanies of his earlier songs to what he sees as a more political message. In this vision the drag queens and trannies that he came of age among in New York are not only defiantly transgressive but also prophetic.

"There was another article I was reading in the Guardian," he says, with a grin, "about a year ago that declared there was no fundamental difference between men and women. I mean, are you off your rocker? The whole problem is this difference between men and women and our lack of self-knowledge about it. Our bodies are like computers with two different operating systems. One is called testosterone, one is called oestrogen. The same body, different software. And within the transgender community you see this very clearly. You watch people take oestrogen or testosterone and you see them change not just physically, but their whole way of thinking, their whole approach."

Has he ever experimented with that process himself?

"No, but I have seen it very intimately, and the changes are not subtle, they are fundamental…" Hegarty has perhaps always been aware that he has the capacity to shift between these two operating systems, to try them both on for size and communicate in his highly allusive way how it feels. "The future," he declares in his stagey whisper, "is bringing more understanding of how we make the decisions we make on a biological level, and then to step back from that and see what is going on. We need more oestrogen-based thinking, basically."

If Marc Almond helped him to understand this calling, it was watching the film Mondo New York, about the lives of Manhattan performance artists, when he was 17, that allowed Hegarty to see where he had to go to be himself. One star of that film, Joey Arias, "is my New York hero really," he says. "In the film I saw this queen dressed as Billie Holiday, singing in the voice of Billie Holiday A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles. It was like seeing a black swan made out of razor blades or something. So elusive, so threatening, so androgynous, so sexual. I was still living in California, but I knew I had to go and see Joey."

Not long after he arrived in Arias's New York, Hegarty formed the Blacklips Performance Cult, a drag theatre troupe with whom he put on weekly shows at Mother, a club in the Meatpacking District frequented by drag punks and "gender mutants". The Blacklips performed a surreal burlesque during which Hegarty rehearsed his spellbinding laments, in a show that also occasionally involved throwing offal and buckets of blood at the audience. The Johnsons (the name a tribute to Marsha P Johnson, a transgender activist and leader in the Stonewall Riots, whose body was discovered in the Hudson river after a gay pride march in 1992) followed on from the Blacklips. The band was always a shifting group of collaborators for Hegarty's voice, and though the first Antony and the Johnsons album was released in 1998, it was not until 2003, when an EP called I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy (the cover of which shows Hegarty lying in supplication before a naked Japanese hermaphrodite) caught the attention of Hal Willner, the music director for Saturday Night Live, that he received any wider attention. Willner passed the record on to Lou Reed, who insisted: "When I heard Antony, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel." Reed invited Hegarty to join him as a backup vocalist on his Animal Serenade tour, and the pair have been friends and occasional collaborators ever since (Hegarty is hoping that Reed and his partner Laurie Anderson, of O Superman fame, will both return the compliment and appear at Meltdown).

If for any reason they don't make it, there will be no shortage of friends from Hegarty's meat-chucking Blacklips days. He has, he says, of late helped to form a sort of political group called the Future Feminist Foundation, which has meetings in New York from time to time. They have been working on a manifesto, but it's not the most organised of groups, so they haven't quite drafted all of it yet. The basics are pretty clear though. "It's not a group that thinks women should just crawl towards economic equality in the way we have been engaged in since the 60s," Hegarty says. "That can't be the climax of feminism. It's like gay rights, as if gay marriage is the end point, as if we just want to be included in these business-as-usual institutions. That's not the point of being queer, just as mitigated reproductive rights aren't the point of being a woman. We want to move this forward. Do something great… overturn all these failed male structures of thinking, all this aggression in decision-making…" he pauses in his impromptu stump speech to the mother's union of Kingston upon Thames to laugh a little. "Sorry if I sound nuts," he says.

The unofficial leader of the Future Feminist Foundation, or at least the woman that Hegarty "would follow anywhere", is Kembra Pfahler. She fronts a glam-punk band called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. "Kembra," Hegarty says, with a certain amount of jealous awe, is "the most hardcore future feminist really."

How so?

"Well, for example she does this one performance piece called Wall of Vagina, which is like seven girls spray-painted different colours and naked and they just pile up on top of each other and open their legs wide and create this wall on stage or in a gallery, this wall of vaginas, and you may not pass through the wall."

That does sound quite a hard act to follow, I say.

Pfahler will be coming to London to perform for Meltdown, though regrettably not with her painted fellow travellers. "I've asked her to do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA Afro-American drag punk…"

Of course. You get half a sense that Hegarty sees Meltdown as a delicious opportunity to close the circle of his life, to bring his New York extremes back home to the norms of his childhood in a spirit of mischief as well as political commitment. He has learned a lot, he says, from Marina Abramovic, the self-harming godmother of performance art, about the possibilities of theatre. He has asked Abramovic to do a lecture that will only be open to women, part of his current project of finding ways to have men "understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman's space". This is the first step in what he sees as the necessary transfer of power between the sexes in order to save the species. "Many men," he believes, with wild optimism, "will be hugely relieved by that shift."

There is not a vast amount of evidence for that assertion at the moment, I suggest. Where does he look for hope?

"Well," he says with a laugh, "they are letting us do this festival. It's a start!" With that battle cry he heads out into the streets of Kingston, a man with a mission, which in the short term involves buying a loaf of bread to go and feed the swans.

Antony's Meltdown, 1-12 August, is part of the Southbank Centre's Festival of the World with MasterCard; www.southbankcentre.co.uk/meltdown. The Observer is media partner

MUSICAL HEROES: Antony on some of his Meltdown highlights

MARC ALMOND

"The work that Marc did was totally off the mark. It was so ambitious. He is very well loved, and he is interesting, because he did it the wrong way round as it were. He went from mainstream pop into subculture. Usually things go the other way." 9 August

LIZ FRASER

"In my later teens I became intensely preoccupied with the work of Liz Fraser and the Cocteau Twins. Liz is the secret jewel of Britain. I would cry to those songs a lot, more than sing them. There is something so maternal in her voice. It's not just a melodic but a phonetic approach to singing which is totally intuitive, and which she invented herself. I get chills just thinking about it. She hasn't performed for a long time, so for her to sing is a centrepiece of the festival." 6 and 7 August

DIAMANDA GALÁS

"Diamanda is the other great singer in the group. Just her ferocity as a singer – no one does what she does. She is the Maria Callas of art music. Again that ecstatic range and extraordinary courage." 1 August

SELDA BAĞCAN

"Selda is like the Edith Piaf of Turkey, a tremendous political voice, a folk musician in the broadest sense. She has this tone in her voice that makes me cry my eyes out even though I don't understand the language, or really the tradition. I've probably listened to her more than anyone in the last two years." 2 August

LAURIE ANDERSON

"My mother listened to Laurie Anderson; one of the records we brought with us from WH Smith out to America was O Superman. My mum was a photographer – and Laurie is someone who names what she sees in bold language. She is also one of very few artists who will write about the future, which surprisingly few musicians do." 3 August

COCOROSIE

"CocoRosie are a very inspired band of young women from New York, part of our Future Feminist Foundation group. They honestly don't give a shit what anybody thinks about them. They taught me so much about magical space. And it is amazing to be taught by people who are younger than you." 4 August

BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE

"Buffy is on another frontier, for the way that she merged folk music and indigenous music with new technologies. She was using electronic instruments in the early 70s. She had a certain moral authority on the basis of her indigenous identity. A real spiritual clarity." 7 August

KEMBRA PFALER

"Kembra, from the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, is one of the most important artists in New York. She is a true pioneer of avant-garde urban theatre. She just creates these art movements, availabilism, which is all about working with what you have. She is going do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA afro American drag punk." 10 August

JOEY ARIAS

"Joey is going to come and do his Strange Fruit. A whole night as Billie Holliday. It's the highest art punk has to offer. What Joey does is not female impersonation, it's as if he channels Billie. It's punk really in the way that Leigh Bowery was punk." 8 August

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

"Marina recently did this huge piece at Moma, New York where she sat in the gallery for 700 hours and people queued up to sit one to one and look at her. I have asked her to do a lecture only for women. She said she would never have suggested that of her own volition but she has agreed to do it. I think it is very important, very golden that men understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman's space." 5 August

Jay-Z and Kanye go head to head in London

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:24:58 GMT

O2 Arena, London

Jay-Z and Kanye West are hip-hop's current two main players, and they are pathologically keen to celebrate the fact. Late last year, the pair of multimillionaire American rappers released a joint album, Watch the Throne, whose basic premise was that no upstart rival should attempt even to think about challenging their musical and lyrical magnificence.

The record's commercial performance justified its creators' hype, grabbing a Grammy, topping the US Billboard chart and breaking the iTunes store's one-week sales record. This live tour has proved similarly lucrative, packing arenas around the globe, including five nights in London at the O2.

It may be a self-aggrandising concept, but Watch the Throne is a surprisingly minimalist production. With the exception of a pair of spectacular hydraulic-powered cubes from which the duo sporadically trade rhymes, the night essentially consists of the black-clad Jay-Z and West, side by side on stage, standing or falling on the strength of their verbal dexterity and charisma.

It's the dynamic between these two very different artists that makes the evening so fascinating. Jay-Z, the reformed gangster turned music-industry mogul, has long been a model of ruthless efficiency at turning his linguistic genius into dollars. West is the more gifted producer and musical auteur, yet his tantrums have led even President Obama to bestow on him the less flattering description of a "jackass".

These personae transfer to the stage, where the swaggering Jay-Z, inscrutable and ice-cool behind shades and a baseball cap, appears very much the senior partner. It doesn't help the diminutive West that he has taken the decision to dress head-to-toe in leather: he spends the evening caked in a film of sweat.

Both rappers routinely pen intricate, multilayered rhymes that retain their visceral impact. Who Gon Stop Me finds West comparing the fate of poverty-dwelling black Americans to "the holocaust: millions of our people lost", as Jay-Z settles for braggadocio: "So many watches, I need eight arms."

Both have familiar hits to spare, with West's All of the Lights and Jay-Z's 99 Problems being thrillingly uplifting. But they are best when they come together for Watch the Throne material. On New Day, over a Nina Simone sample, they sit and touchingly worry over the fates that may await their offspring: Jay-Z fears his newborn daughter is fair game for the paparazzi; West hopes any future son escapes his father's public ridicule.

The audacious No Church in the Wild finds Jay-Z casually mulling philosophical delineations between Socrates and Plato, before he and West close with this unique tour's usual coda of five consecutive runs through Niggas in Paris. There have been few lulls in a two-and-a-half-hour set: in a hip-hop world where their nearest challengers are the relatively tame Rick Ross and Drake, Jay-Z and Kanye West are not about to surrender their throne any time soon.

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Rating: 4/5

This much I know

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:24 GMT

The Scissor Sisters' singer on music, being a witch and why America terrifies her

Discovering Duran Duran made me want to be a performance artist. The Eurythmics and Culture Club were a huge influence, too.

I'm an excellent typist. My mother said: "Have a real-world skill so you won't ever have to wait tables", and she was right – I worked part-time in a law firm when I was starting out.

The Trannyshack in San Francisco shaped me. I worked there for three years and it didn't matter who or what you were – as long as you were fierce and could deliver, you were in.

I feel like people "get us" [the Scissor Sisters] here better than anywhere else. Music is really important to UK culture in a way that it's not in the US. Over there it's either background noise or people identify so strongly with one genre that they can't see anything else.

If I want to disappear, I will. I'm not into celebrity culture and I rarely get recognised. I've been to Glastonbury as a punter – I wear a wig and do whatever I want.

Women are always judged first on the way they look and second on everything else. When Lady Gaga arrived, the first thing people said was: "But she's not pretty", and when Hilary Clinton was running for president, the first thing that was commented about was how she looked. It has got to change.

I'm the queen of procrastination. The knock-knock of the IRS is always at my door. I had to postpone my latest trip to the UK because I'd put off doing my taxes.

Being a child of divorce affected my view on marriage. I never wanted to marry until I met Seth. We've been together for nine years and getting married three years ago added a layer of trust and commitment that I never expected.

Losing people who are close to me scares me. My dad and I weren't that close – my sister and I would visit him and his boyfriend in San Francisco four times a year. He died of Aids when I was 15, and that same year I lost my grandmother, too. It was a difficult time, but death is inevitable.

I'd describe myself as a witch. I surf the ethereal. I read Tarot cards and I'm superstitious. I never allow anyone to take a ring off my finger because it's bad luck. It's a southern thing – my mum and grandmother were both the same.

Right now, America terrifies me. "Conservative" in the US means something completely different to what it does in the UK. David Cameron and his crew are nowhere near as freaky and bizarre as folk over in the States.

I don't want to mess with my face. I love the way people look as they get older and I enjoy the wisdom I've gained as I've matured. Sadly, I am at the point where I need to say goodbye to metallic eye shadow because it's not a good look on older eyelids.

The Scissor Sisters' new album, Magic Hour, is out on 28 May

Jon Savage on How I Feel Love changed pop

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:35:09 GMT

Pop critic Jon Savage and producer Ewan Pearson on the majesty of Donna Summer's finest 3 minutes and 47 seconds

Pop critic Jon Savage

A cinematic drone comes in fast from silence, quickly overtaken by two synthesised rhythm tracks that will go in and out of phase for the next lifetime. On top, Donna Summer soars and swoops as she tackles the minimal lyric: "It's so good [x five], "Heaven knows" [x five], "I feel love" [x five]. The words are so functional that her voice becomes another instrument, almost another machine, but then there is the real heart of the song: "Fallin' free, fallin' free, fallin' free …"

I Feel Love was and remains an astonishing achievement: a futuristic record that still sounds fantastic 35 years on. Within its modulations and pulses, it achieves the perfect state of grace that is the ambition of every dance record: it obliterates the tyranny of the clock – the everyday world of work, responsibility, money – and creates its own time, a moment of pleasure, ecstasy and motion that seems infinitely expandable, if not eternal.

Back in 1977, I Feel Love was a radical breakthrough, and was designed as such. It was started as a cut for I Remember Yesterday, an album that producer Giorgio Moroder originally planned as a mini-tour through dance music history: a Dixieland number here, a Tamla number there. To complete the project, he needed what NME called a "next-disco sound".

"I had already had experience with the original Moog synthesisers," Moroder told NME in December 1978, "so I contacted this guy who owned one of the large early models. It was all quite natural and normal for me. I simply instructed him about what programmings I needed. I didn't even think to notice that for the large audience this was perhaps a very new sound."

I Feel Love was quickly remixed and, extended to eight minutes on a 12in, made an immediate impact. As Vince Aletti wrote in his 13 August 1977 column for Record World, "perhaps the most significant development in disco sound this year is the success of totally synthesised music. Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express was the breakthrough record." Name-checking Space (whose all-synth Magic Fly was a huge UK hit in late summer 1977), Aletti observed that Kraftwerk's "impact was immediately underlined by Donna Summer's I Feel Love, which took the synthesiser rhythm and compressed and intensified it so it was both more physically exciting – like stepping into a tangle of high-voltage wires – and more commercial".

I Feel Love went to No 1 in the UK during the high summer of 1977, and stayed there for four weeks – filling dance floors everywhere, because it's so good so good to dance to. Like David Bowie's Low and Heroes, and Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, it was also the secret vice of those punks who were already tiring of sped-up pub rock, and it sowed the seeds for the next generation of UK electronica.

It didn't chart as high in the States – No 6 – but it became an all-time gay classic, a totem of the pre-Aids era ("Fallin free, fallin' free, fallin' free"). That iconic status was reaffirmed by (Sylvester producer) Patrick Cowley's monumental 15-and-three-quarter-minute remix, which really does go on for ever and ever without trashing – even enhancing – the concept of the original.

I'm guessing many of you will have heard I Feel Love pumped out loud, will have felt moved to dance, and will have felt time stop, the instant prolonged. Something of that feeling attaches itself to the record wherever it's heard, and it never gets dulled by repetition – or endless imitation. I must have heard I Feel Love a thousand times and it still takes my breath away: it's one of the great records of the 20th century, and the name on the label is Donna Summer.

Record producer and DJ Ewan Pearson

I was only a child when Donna Summer released I Feel Love, that gargantuan behemoth of a record. But the sound of I Feel Love – that motorik, arpeggiated bassline – was the sound of my favourite dance records before dance music became Dance Music, and lots of my remixes have gone back to that kind of bassline.

Donna Summer was there at the start of Euro disco, and it's a familiar story to us in dance music: American artist becomes famous in Europe before it happens at home. She's an example of that weird connection between continents that dance music makes – she was a fluent German speaker. And she's remembered because, unlike a lot of the people who sang on the big Euro disco records, she looked like a star and she became a star in her own right: she was a star in a field that's often accused of not having any. And she was creative in her own right, too: she wrote the lyric to Love to Love You Baby, and gave it to Giorgio Moroder to turn into a full disco song.

She had a huge number of influential dance records – Love to Love You Baby, Our Love, Last Dance. Of course, I Feel Love overshadows everything. The Patrick Cowley megamix might be the greatest remix of all time: JD Twitch of Optimo says it's a record that has got him out of all sorts of trouble, though we didn't know if anyone had ever dared play the full 15 minutes of it. It's easy to underestimate it now; it's like Blade Runner – whenever you show that to someone younger, they're not impressed because it looks so familiar. Well, yes – that's because Blade Runner invented our idea of the future. It's the same with I Feel Love.

I've bemoaned many times that whenever guitar bands get popular again there's a sigh of relief, as if we're back to the way things should be. But dance music is ubiquitous, and I Feel Love is a reminder of its heritage. It's one of the greatest records ever and it will be always be remembered.

'Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a titanic figure'

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:58:00 GMT

The tenor pays tribute to the legendary baritone, who died on Friday aged 86

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a titanic figure and a mirror of his age. Hearing of his death today at the age of 86 it was the singing I thought of, of course, and the little of it I managed to hear live. Recitals on the Southbank in the 80s – a Meeresstille (Becalmed at Sea) of Schubert, so whispered that every member of the audience leant imperceptibly forward to catch the thread of sound he so miraculously spun. The most terrifying Erlkönig I have ever heard or, indeed, seen. A War Requiem that called to mind the circumstances of its premiere in Coventry when he struggled with the weight of his memories at the end of the piece, barely able to move.

He lived the 20th century in all its bleakness – a brother murdered by the Nazis, his first Winterreise performed as an American prisoner of war in Italy. His singing of the whole body of German song – from Mozart to Henze via his touchstone, Schubert – showed the world a new Germany, as significant in its way as the Wirtschaftswunder. He was profiled several times in Time magazine ("by all odds the world's finest lieder singer") and was one of the first German artists to sing in Israel. Personal memories abound, and his affectionate warmth will linger with me, he was never the grandee. But so too will the recordings I listened to again and again as a teenager, and still listen to today.

He was a great opera singer of course – a brilliant but atypical Iago, a seminal Wozzeck, never routine, ever surprising. He inspired a wealth of new music – Auden's monstrous creation, Mittenhofer, in Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers, Reimann's King Lear.

But now I have in my mind's ear Goethe's magical - but almost untranslatable - poem Grenzen der Menschheit, set to music by Hugo Wolf, and incomparably brought to life in all its grandeur and mysterious humility by Fischer-Dieskau and his companion on so many journeys, the pianist Gerald Moore:

Ein kleiner Ring
Begränzt unser Leben
Und viele Geschlechter
Reihen sich dauernd
An ihres Daseins
Unendliche Kette.

(A small ring
Is the boundary of our life,
And many generations
Form a constant procession
In the endless chain of being.)

'If we made marijuana legal, we'd save lives'

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:45:00 GMT

The veteran musician on God, politics, his favourite singer and why weed should be decriminalised

What were the songs that made you realise you wanted to be a musician?

When I first started out, I sang a lot in church. Amazing Grace was the first song that I can remember ever singing. Gospel was probably the main kind of music I was into. Then I got into Bob Wills (1) and Hank Williams and Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, all those great singers. Ray Charles came along – I loved him. Ray Price. The greatest singer there is, I think, is Ray Price (2).

Sinatra was a big hero of yours, of course.

Yes, he was. Still is. He is my favourite singer. And I read somewhere that I was his favourite singer, so that really made me happy.

There's no better compliment than that …

That was the big one.

What did you love about his singing so much?

I loved his voice, I loved his phrasing, I loved his acting, I loved his attitude. Everything about Sinatra was good. He had the ability to pick great songs and once Sinatra had sung them, that pretty much was it. He pretty much put his stamp on everything.

The early 50s seemed like a golden age, with people building popular music brick by brick, didn't it?

For me it was. It's where my music came from. I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.

When you started out as a songwriter, how far did your ambitions extend? Did you always want to become a singer as well?

Honestly, when I was growing up I had no idea that I would succeed to this extent. I would have been very happy – I was a big Gene Autry and Roy Rogers fan, and I liked to ride my horse and throw my rope and shoot my gun and I loved all that kind of music – to be another singing cowboy. The fact that I got to do songs like Stardust and sing with Ray Charles and do a lot of things with other singers – Frank Sinatra and I did a couple of things together – that was beyond anything I could have dreamed of.

Is it hard to stay interested in songs you wrote 60 years ago, but which you know your audience still wants to hear?

I really enjoy singing those songs, and I have yet to get tired of them. When I do get tired of one I replace it with another one, cos there's a jillion songs out there I can do. The band has no idea what I'm going to do next, cos I have no idea. I just play it off the top of my head.

You don't feel the urge to do a Bob Dylan and keep your best-loved songs fresh by making them unrecognisable?

That probably works for him, and I'm sure my take on them each night is a little bit different. But basically I do 'em the traditional way. I enjoy being out here and I enjoy playing the music, and as long as the people show up I hope to be out here – we haven't slowed down any, we do 150 shows a year. I try to split it up so I can spend time around the house with the family, the horses and the things I love doing when I'm off. It seems to be working pretty good. I work a few days and I'm off a few days.

Was Nashville's audience as conservative as the Nashville industry when you headed off to Texas to play "outlaw" country in the 70s?

When I left Nashville I went to Texas because that's where I came from, and because I was playing in Texas a lot in different places. And I saw hippies and rednecks drinking beer together and smoking dope together and having a good time together and I knew it was possible to get all groups of people together – long hair, short hair, no hair – and music would bring them together. I called Waylon Jennings and I said: "Waylon, you need to get down to Austin because it's really happening here. There are people here with hair dragging the ground that will love your music." He laughed a little bit, then he came down and found out I was telling the truth.

Did the breakthrough you made with Red Headed Stranger in 1975 surprise you?

I didn't really realise how large it was gonna get. I had nothing to compare it to. As it was happening, it was a slow thing, so I sort of went along with it. I was just feeling grateful that the night before I woulda had a bunch of hippies and rednecks in together having a good time. I didn't know how big it could get. Today, as I look back on it, I mighta been a little bit shocked about how big it was gonna go.

You've never been afraid to take risks – is that what separates an artist from a pop singer?

I don't know. But I do know that if you're with a record company and you're with them for four to eight years and you're under their control, and their producers produce you the way they think you should sound, that may be OK for some people, but for me it was not a good idea. In Nashville, the songs that I was singing and playing and the styles they were in were not the direction I needed to go. But in Texas there was a lot of people who liked the kind of music I was playing. They liked the country – the real solid hardcore steel guitars and fiddles – they still do. They like the real country music – not that there's anything wrong if you put strings and horns on, but for me it waters it down. Personally, I want to hear country music with a steel guitar and a fiddle; I want to hear Stardust with strings. That's just me.

You have been politically active on the left for a long time, but as a young man you volunteered to be a jet pilot in the Korean war. Did you look at the world very differently then?

Well, I'm not necessarily a warmonger, but I'm not necessarily someone who would want to sit around while we were getting the shit beat out of us either. I'm a second-degree black belt in taekwondo and also kung fu, so I'm a martial artist and I'm not afraid of trouble. I just don't like to look for it.

You fell out with the church in the 50s – unlike artists such as Elvis and Jerry Lee who kept trying to balance the devil's music with the love of God. What happened?

I was teaching Sunday school and playing clubs, but there were a lot of members of church who didn't think that was a good idea. They felt if I was going to teach Sunday school I should quit my job at the club. I was playing music on Saturday night at the Nite Owl to a lot of the people I saw in church on the Sunday morning. I wasn't the only one going to both places. (3)

Did starting to smoke weed (4) make a difference to the way you thought about the world and your political interests?

When I was out in the bars drinking and fighting I was a little bit less of a peacemaker than I would be if I'd had a coupla hits of a joint and gone and laid down somewhere. I'd have less bumps on my head, that's for sure.

Won't it be too hard for Congress to decriminalise weed?

Well, Connecticut just became the 17th state to legalise or decriminalise marijuana (5). It's coming. It has to, because economically we need the money – why give it to criminals? Most people realise it's not a deadly drug like cocaine or cigarettes. Cigarettes killed my mother, my dad, half my family, so don't tell me about health when you're talking about legalising marijuana because it's not dangerous healthwise. I'm the canary in the mine, and I'm still healthy. Had I stayed with alcohol I would have been dead or in prison or somewhere today. (6)

Do you think the policy-makers in Washington might one day realise the war on drugs has been lost?

I do know, again, there's a lot of money in prisons and there's a lot of money in lawyers, and down on the borders there's a lot of money in guns that come back and forth because of the drug laws. If we made everything legal we would save a whole lotta money, a whole lotta lives. If we taxed and regulated the drugs the way they do in other parts of the world, we would be far better off, I think.

Have you been disappointed with the Obama administration

When he was running for office and he had a lot of aspirations, I had a few doubts about whether he was going to be able to do it or not. I don't think the president has as much power as we think he does, and he can say what he wants to while he's running for office, but once he gets in there, there are four or five guys who take him into a small room, sit him round a small table and say: "Look, cowboy, here's the way it is." I don't believe he can do everything he said he would.

Is songwriting a gift or craft?

It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience. That's why I also believe in reincarnation, that we were put here with ideas to pass around. Somebody sent me here to write Crazy (7) and gave me the talent to do it. I can't take credit for any of that.

Footnotes

(1) One of the first great country musicians, as founder of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in the 30s.

(2) One of the other great country singers, nicknamed the Cherokee Cowboy.

(3) Willie maintains a relationship with God, via a portfolio kind of spirtuality.

(4) Nelson is a proud and inveterate weed smoker. As recently as November 2010 he was arrested for possession, but the prosecutor agreed such a small amount for personal use merited only a fine. The small amount in question was 6oz.

(5) Connecticut actually decriminalised marijuana in June 2011. Maybe he meant New Hampshire, which did so in March 2012.

(6) It would be fair to say this is the subect on which he was most effusive during the course of our interview.

(7) Sung by Patsy Cline, and reputedly the most popular jukebox song in history.

• Willie Nelson's new album, Heroes, is out now on Legacy.

Beach House and the curse of the big time

Fri, 18 May 2012 23:01:00 GMT

Teen Dream took the Baltimore duo to indie stardom but new album Bloom is a dark, intense affair

Victoria Legrand is sitting on a vintage chair in the basement of an east London bric-a-brac shop. A disco ball spins above her head casting tiny lights on tablecloths your nan would dismiss as a being a bit fussy. We're talking about her band, Beach House, and their acclaimed last album, 2010's Teen Dream, when suddenly, in between sips of tea, there's an awkward silence. "I don't know why it was successful," she shrugs. "Maybe you could tell me."

To recap, Beach House formed in 2004 when French-born Victoria, a theatre graduate, vocalist and organist, finished her studies and moved to Baltimore to pursue a music project with an old friend. Instead she met guitarist and keyboard player Alex Scally (if Mattel made bookishly hot band-geek Ken dolls, he could be the inspiration), and after practising in a basement together, they released their debut album Beach House on Carpark records in 2006. Devotion, another noise-saturated album, followed in 2008, and a year later she collaborated with US folk-indie band Grizzly Bear on Slow Life, a track from the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. That album reached No 1 on the Billboard chart.

Teen Dream, however, eclipsed everything they had done before. But why? Firstly, the songs were just … better. Keen indie fans had been hot on Beach House's output for years, but none of it sounded like it could make people, say, cry. "Man, I bawl like a baby every time I listen to this song," writes one YouTube commenter of the track Walk In The Park. Another describes the album's Norway as "a reason to fall in love with music all over again <3", and the opening Zebra is declared "the most chill song ever". Victoria modestly suggests it may have been because the songs were "verse, chorus, verse, chorus".

And then there was the timing. Just as Britney wouldn't have popped without Justin and Christina, Beach House found themselves among a crop of other US bands – Vampire Weekend, Fleet Foxes, Beirut – who were also having a good couple of years. Their tour with Grizzly Bear at the end of 2009 put them in front of audiences far larger than they would have managed alone and Beyoncé and Jay-Z turned up at their 2010 Coachella performance (one of that year's "Tupac hologram" moments). When fan/satire site Hipster Runoff started to obsess over their outfits ("Victoria Legrand wears her sexi blazer + grandma shoulder pads on stage [sic]," reads one sample post) it was clear that Beach House had attained a kind of star appeal.

"It just blew up," says Victoria, "especially in Europe. It went from nothing and then it was like …" She waves her hand above her head. "But we're still very much alive! The last album was not some peak for us and there were a lot of things that we let slide." Does she think there are bigger expectations now? "We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. I don't think people think, 'Oh, they're going down!' And if they do, I don't care. Yes, the third album was a success but we've worked so hard on this one."

'We are a loud band. OK, so it's not abrasive, but it's not soft. I don't wear dresses and flowers in my hair and float around!'

By "this one" she means Bloom. Recorded straight after they finished touring Teen Dream, both Victoria and Alex, who will be joining us shortly, seem determined it won't be overshadowed by what's already happened. "With this album we definitely wanted to create something beautiful," she says. "I said in one interview that the album was about death, but there isn't just one thing, it's many colours, just a little more dark than before." Bloom is mainly about the experience of living, she insists, "and I can't think of a single art form that doesn't touch on love and death. As you get older you realise that nothing lasts forever. It's not depressing, but it does make moments more intense."

That intensity should mark a change in how Beach House are usually portrayed. They've been described as wafty, wavy, floaty, gauzy, wispy, glittering, sparkly, dreamy (and – for the thesaurus buffs – diaphanous, pellucid). Does she worry they're thought of as not being very substantial?

"I think people who use those ideas are lazy," she says. "We are a loud band. OK, so it's not abrasive, but it's definitely all-encompassing and it's not soft. I don't wear dresses and flowers in my hair and float around!"

While Bloom isn't for people who hate epic oooohhhs and breathy ahhhs, it oozes menace with lines like Wild's "The past is what will catch you", while New Year's "we keep these promises" echoes all the disappointment of broken resolutions. The Enya-summoning Lazali is one of the brightest songs – but even that has a dark past. "It took the longest," she explains, "and almost killed us several times but finally, we had a breakthrough. The whole feeling of the record came together. It was a great moment."

Unfortunately, that moment of triumph didn't last long. Beach House have loyal fans, but sometimes those fans just can't wait, and in February 2012 – three months before its release – Bloom was leaked on the internet. "Every one of our albums has," Victoria sighs, staring into her cup as if she'd quite like to throw it at the wall. Take music fan forum Kanyetothe, which filled with goggly eyed emoticons the day that Bloom was unofficially and rudely announced. Users with avatars of Victoria's face or names like MasterofNone internet-squealed, "SHIT, I'm already in love with these songs."

'I meet some bands, I won't name names, who last put out a record and toured in 2009. I think: What the hell did you do all year?'

"It's a bit of a rampage," she muses. "There's that mentality of wanting to be first. I hate to use the word greedy, because I don't want to offend anyone, but it's grabby. It's like, 'Gimme all the presents now! I want the presents now, Mommy!' Part of it is a strange form of flattery, but I can't help but feel a little slighted."

The main reason she seems upset is that Beach House really care about their listeners. Victoria is a mega-fan herself and speaks passionately about her love for the Cure, the Cocteau Twins, Gene Clark and the joy of albums that are best heard over and over and over again (coincidentally, this is just the kind of LP that Bloom is). "I want people to get excited – to get the vinyl, to hold it in their hands, read the lyrics," she says. "Those are the things I did when I was 14 that you can't seem to do any more. That's why live shows are so important. You can't leak a show."

Alex comes over to join us. "Is being together almost like being alone now?" he asks Legrand. "It's like we've fused into one person ..."

"No," replies Victoria, curtly.

What they do agree on, though, is where Beach House are going. They love writing and love touring, whether they're stuck in the Nevada desert (Vic's voice had disappeared) or venues without decent loos (Alex confesses to making use of some unsanitary places). "If you don't enjoy it, stop the band," he says. "We just want to do it while we're young. I meet some bands, I won't name names, who last put out a record and toured in 2009. I think, 'What the hell did you do all year?' It's a weird mentality."

As proof of their passion, the band played 180 gigs to support Teen Dream and look likely to do similar with Bloom. How do they keep the party going? "At the end you hate the songs," admits Alex. "Right now we're enchanted with it, but … talk to us after another year. The idea of new things is a big impetus."

"We heard some of the Devotion on a jukebox the other day and didn't even recognise it!" Victoria laughs. "We were in a bar, a little drunk and we had the same thought, 'Oh great, some band is ripping us off'. I actually went, 'What is this thick woman sound?'" This is a band who certainly don't want to dwell on past glories. "You are young, you have energy, you have desire to create," she says. "We don't even have to think about it."

Revealed: types and quantities of drugs seized by police at UK music festivals

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act provide a unique insight into changing patterns of drug use at British music festivals

On the Isle of Wight it's been largely about cocaine and ecstasy, at Glastonbury the hauls of Ketamine have been creeping up, while the drug of choice for heavy metal fans would seem to be Jack Daniels and other booze.

As a tens of thousands of young (and not so young) music fans await another festival season, new figures based on police activities at 10 major festivals over the past four years provide an insight into the range and scale of drugs seized.

They show that seizures of popular drugs such as cannabis and ecastasy have been in decline, possibly due factors such as changing behaviour, demographics and policing priorities.

Cocaine seizures have been in sharp decline since the onset of the economic hard times, and there is some evidence to back up suggestions that recreational drug users have been turning to relatively cheaper drugs like Ketamine, the horse tranquilliser dubbed the 'new ecstasy'.

Individual events also meanwhile display particular characteristics when it comes to the type of drugs seized.

The lion's share of cocaine seizures last year took place at the Isle of Wight festival and the island's other big musical event, Bestival, where 50,000 people enjoyed an eclectic mix of rock, folk and dance.

The two festivals also stood out from the others in terms of ecstasy seizures, accounting for nearly half of the value of all drugs seized at Bestival last year.

By contrast, drug seizures were almost non-existant at the Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance), often regarded as the festival of choice for a stereotypically Guardian-reading, older music fan. Last year, the only drugs confiscated in swoops by Wiltshire Police was cannabis with a street value of £151.

Expectations that rock fans meanwhile might be prone to emulating some of their harder living idols are also somewhat confounded. Seizures were comparatively low at the two festivals catering for them - the Download festival in Leicestershire and Sonisphere at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire.

At Sonisphere, where 190,000 fans last year moshed along to bands including Motorhead and Slipknot, just over £400 of drugs was seized across the weekend. It was mostly cannabis, with cocaine making up the balance. Ecstasy and amphetamines were absent.

At the country's best known gathering of music lovers, where Glastonbury organisor Michael Eavis last year said that the drug culture "had changed beyond belief" and that it was "a cheek to even suggest there's a problem", more than £200,000 worth of drugs has been seized by police over the past four years.

Last year's haul of more than £44,000 was a rise of 12% on the previous year although, like other festivals where larger quanties of drugs have been confiscated, seizures are considerably down on 2009's relative high.

Across all ten festivals - Glastonbury, V, the Isle of Wight, Bestival, Download, Sonisphere, Leeds, Reading, Womad and Wireless- there has been a sharp decline since that year in the value both of cocaine and cannabis seized, according to the figures obtained through a series of Freedom of Information requests by Request Initiative, a nonprofit that makes requests for charities and NGOs.

The graphics below show total street values of drugs seized in 2011, with figures broken down by substance and festival.

Just over £21,000 worth of cocaine was seized last year, compared to £88,000 in 2009, while the street value of confiscated cannabis last year was also down more than 75%.

The biggest proportional increase saw confiscations of piperazine, or BZP, increase in value tenfold over the same period, though last year's total still amounted to less than half of those for each of cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy.

Other potential trends include the emergence of Ketamine, identified in the past as the fastest growing "party drug" among 16-24 year olds. The festival where the largest amount's worth of the drug (£8,277) was confiscated last year was Glastonbury, where the amounts have been creeping up.

The figures are low for the Wireless festival, where drug confiscations were conducted by private security and police present did not collect data relating to confiscations.

Drug charities cautioned against using the figures as an indicator about general drug use, suggesting that seizures depend on many other variables, ranging from police priorities to the weather.

However, Rupert George of the drugs charity Release, said the figures seemed to reflect the changing demographics of festival goers and the shift to an older crowd less likely to be taking drugs.

"Festivals have tended to become more expensive, corporate and mainstream with older more middle class crowds that probably attract far less intensive policing. The policing of drug possession tends to be disproportionately targeted at the young, the poor and people from ethnic minorities. Festival crowds probably no longer fit this profile."

David Raynes of National Drug Prevention Alliance said cultural changes had brought about a situation where people are prepared to put almost anything into their bodies.

Adding that the drugs supply at festivals was not predictable, he said: "I am not sure that Policing generally makes the effort it once did, say 40 years ago, to detect drug dealers at festivals. I have never heard it spoken of as a priority. They will of course expect to come across drugs and as I recall there have been some high profile deaths."

Raynes also referred to the ageing profile of festival goers, adding that may not have entirely given up on past habits and may well be much more more likely to use drugs than the wider population.

Brendan Montague, executive director of Request Initiative said: "This is the first major research project providing empirical evidence showing the extent and nature of drug taking at national music festivals in the UK and shows that Class A drugs including cocaine and MDMA are still very popular among music fans."

"There has also been a significant shift from cocaine which is expensive to the cheaper drug Ketamine as the country has been in and out of recession."

For more information on how the information obtained and to explore the data in full, see our explanatory Datablog post.

Drugs seized at UK music festivals, 2008-2011: get the data

Sun, 20 May 2012 23:00:00 GMT

After peaking in 2009, seizures of drugs at UK music festivals have fallen rapidly. Find out where the figures came from and explore the data in full.
• Get the data
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Quantities of drugs seized at music festivals across the UK have declined significantly over the last three years, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The data, which covers festivals taking place over four years - from 2008 to 2011 - shows drug confiscations peaking in 2009 but falling away rapidly in the years since.

Between 2009 and 2011 seizures of cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy all fell by over 65% and the total for all substances dropped by a similar margin - from £288,420 to £101682.

The chart below shows trends in the total street values of all drugs seized at each festival. It is worth noting that the Leeds and Wireless festivals were privately stewarded.

The second chart shows annual totals broken down by substance rather than festival. Data was only plotted for the eight most seized drugs in order to show the trend for each substance as clearly as possible.

The different trends and possible reasons behind them are covered in greater detail in our accompanying news story, which you can find here.

The figures behind the headline were calculated using data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, via the Request Initiative, a nonprofit organisation that makes requests for charities and NGOs.

Raw data for the quantities of each drug seized came in a variety of units including grams, tablets and wraps. Where available, street values for the various different substances and units came either from police forces or the drug advice website talktofrank.com.

In rare cases where such information was not available, analysts at the Requests Initiative used informed estimates, having contacted the Home Office, the Department of Health and various drug rehabilitation centres.

Where figures for one festival were described simply as "Class A" or "Class B", for example, total street values were calculated using a conversion rate of £50 per gram and £7 per gram respectively. Similarly, "unknown" pills and grams were priced at £7 and £10 each.

As well as the data summary below, you can find and explore the full spreadsheet here. In addition to quantities of drugs, you will also find figures for police presences and last year's festival attendances.

Data summary

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• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

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Robin Gibb obituary

Sun, 20 May 2012 22:54:00 GMT

One of the three brothers who hit the high notes in disco hits as the Bee Gees

Robin Gibb, who has died aged 62, was one of the three brothers who made up the international chart-topping group the Bee Gees. They were best known for their disco hits of the 1970s, which included Stayin' Alive, Night Fever and Jive Talkin', but enjoyed success in every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. Robin also charted intermittently as a solo artist. He released six solo albums between 1970 and 2006, and scored a British No 1 single as recently as 2009 with a new version of the Bee Gees' song Islands in the Stream, for Comic Relief.

He was born on the Isle of Man, twin brother of Maurice, and son of Barbara, a former singer, and Hugh Gibb, a bandleader. The family moved to Chorlton, Manchester, in the 1950s. Robin, Maurice and their older brother, Barry, took to music early and made their first appearances onstage as a between-shows act at cinemas, in Manchester, in 1955. In 1958 the family moved to Brisbane, Australia, where the trio performed as the Brothers Gibb. They were given their own local TV show and changed their name to the BGs, which later became Bee Gees, and in 1962 signed to Festival records.

"We wanted to make music all our lives and it evolved to a point where the only people who could understand that were the three of us," Robin said. "We didn't feel comfortable with anybody but ourselves. The three of us were like one person."They had begun writing their own material, but suffered a string of flops before finally achieving a modest hit with Wine and Women. In late 1966, well aware of the pop-music boom happening in Britain, they moved back to their original homeland. Ironically, their song Spicks and Specks then topped the Australian charts. Meanwhile, they impressed Robert Stigwood, a pop entrepreneur who had become a partner in the Beatles manager Brian Epstein's Nems organisation. Stigwood became their manager, and, in 1967, the trio scored their first international hit with New York Mining Disaster 1941, which made No 12 in the UK and No 4 in the US.

This launched a string of memorable pop ballads, including To Love Somebody, Massachusetts (their first UK chart-topper) and Words. They made their debut album, Bee Gees 1st, in 1967, followed by Horizontal and Idea, which they also produced.

Not long after returning to England, Robin met Molly Hullis, who worked at Nems, and became his first wife. Both of them were involved in the Hither Green train crash in south-east London in November 1967. "I just wanted to escape," said Robin. "At the same time I made a mental decision that it wasn't going to affect my life, so I shut it out."

The Bee Gees made rapid commercial progress, but this was suddenly halted during the making of their 1969 double-LP, Odessa. There had already been rivalry between Robin and Barry over which of them was lead vocalist. Now, after an argument over whether Robin's Lamplight or Barry's First of May should become the A-side of their next single, Robin walked out on his brothers and set about recording the solo album Robin's Reign, on which he wrote, produced and sang all the material. It resulted in the 1969 hit Saved By the Bell. Meanwhile, the other two singers made the next Bee Gees album, Cucumber Castle, before following Robin into solo work. The influence of fame, drugs and money had had a corrosive effect on fraternal harmony.

In 1970, the brothers realised that they were stronger together and reformed the Bee Gees, even though Robin had almost completed a second album, Sing Slowly Sisters. The reunited trio released the hit singles Lonely Days and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (the latter a US No 1), but failed to gain much commercial traction with a string of albums. They began to find a new direction with Mr Natural (1974), produced by the illustrious Arif Mardin and leaning towards an American R&B sound.

The follow-up, Main Course (1975), featured ingredients that would soon make the Bee Gees one of the world's biggest acts – dance rhythms, high harmonies, and Barry's remarkable falsetto singing. They achieved another American No 1 with Jive Talkin', then more success with Nights on Broadway and the album Children of the World.

In 1977, Stigwood asked the trio for some songs for the soundtrack of a movie he was producing about the disco scene in Brooklyn, Saturday Night Fever. The project gave the Bee Gees three monster hits with Stayin' Alive, Night Fever and How Deep Is Your Love, while the parent album sold 30m copies. Robin consequently appeared on the Sesame Street Fever album (1978), in which the popular television puppets parodied the disco hits successfully enough to earn a gold disc.

Though the Bee Gees scored another platinum album with Spirits Having Flown (1979), and also fared well with the soundtrack to the limp Saturday Night Fever sequel, Stayin' Alive, a post-Fever hangover set in as disco reached saturation point. The Bee Gees filed a $200m lawsuit against Stigwood for alleged mismanagement that was settled out of court. Barry pursued side projects with Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick, while the three brothers wrote Islands in the Stream (1983) for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, and Chain Reaction (1985) for Diana Ross – both were huge successes.

The Bee Gees would bounce back in the late 80s with the albums ESP and One, but meanwhile Robin stepped up his solo work, releasing the albums How Old Are You? (1983), Secret Agent (1984)and Walls Have Eyes (1985). He enjoyed moderate chart success with Secret Agent in Europe but made little impact in the UK or the US, with the exception of the 1984 single Boys Do Fall in Love, which made the US top 40.

He did not release another album until Magnet in January 2003, which, by bleak coincidence, appeared in the same week that Maurice died (their younger brother Andy, also a huge pop star in the US, had died of myocarditis aged 30 in 1988). After Maurice's death, Barry and Robin disbanded the Bee Gees.

In 2004, Robin released two versions of the 1997 Bee Gees song My Lover's Prayer as a double A-sided single, which reached No 5 in the UK. A year later, Robin and Barry appeared together as part of the One World Project to record Grief Never Grows Old, a charity single for Asian tsunami relief. In 2005, Robin appeared on stage at the Albert Hall in London with X Factor runners-up G4 and sang the Bee Gees song First of May. 

In 2006, he released Robin Gibb – My Favourite Carols, which included a new composition by him called Mother of Love, inspired by Maurice. In 2008, he appeared in a 30th-anniversary stage presentation of Saturday Night Fever at the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse in north London. His collaboration with Ruth Jones, Rob Brydon and Tom Jones on the Comic Relief version of Islands in the Stream took him back to the top of the charts in 2009.

In 2010, he underwent surgery for a blocked intestine, and continuing health problems forced him to cancel several concerts and a tour of Brazil. In November 2011, it was revealed that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

He was made a CBE in 2002. Robin Gibb is survived by his second wife, Dwina, whom he married in 1985, and their son Robin-John; by his children Spencer and Melissa from his first marriage; by his daughter Snow Robin, by Claire Yang; and by Barry.

Robin Hugh Gibb, singer, born 22 December 1949; died 20 May 2012

This week's cultural highlights: The Raid and Bath festival jazz weekend

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:00:09 GMT

Our critics' picks of this week's openings, plus your last chance to see and what to book now

• Which cultural events are in your diary this week? Tell us in the comments below

Opening this week

Theatre

Wah! Wah! Girls
British musical meets Bollywood in new love-against-the-odds show set in the East End of London with a cast of 14, almost all British Asians and a Polish handyman. Peacock,London, Thursday to 23 June.

Posh
Laura Wade has updated her Royal Court hit to point the spotlight once again on the Oxbridge dining clubs that spawned the posh boys currently in power. Duke of Yorks theatre, London, until 4 August.

Betrayal
John Simm stars in Harold Pinter's semi-autobiographical play about an adulterous love affair. The power of the piece is that it works backwards from its bitter end to the moment the affair first sparked. Crucible, Sheffield, until 9 June.

Film

The Raid (dir. Gareth Evans)
Brilliant martial arts bulletfest from Indonesia that puts western action movies to shame. Welsh director Evans orchestrates nail-biting sequences. Out now.

Dance

The Royal Ballet Ballo Della Regina and La Sylphide
Romantic illusion and virtuosity combine in this double bill of works by George Balanchine and August Bournonville. Royal Opera House, London, in rep from Monday until 15 June.

Emio Greco/PC: Rocco
Dance is reconfigured as a boxing match in this new work from Emio Greco and Pieter C Scholten, inspired by Visconti's film Rocco and His Brothers, about a prostitute who brings trouble to the siblings. Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London , Tuesday and Wednesday.

Classical

Caligula
The British premiere of Detlev Glanert's 2005 opera based upon the play by Albert Camus. Peter Coleman-Wright is the crazed Roman emperor in Benedict Andrews's production for ENO, with Ryan Wigglesworth conducting. Coliseum, London, Friday until 14 June.

Philip Glass at 75
The latest instalment of Glasgow survey of minimalism pays a birthday tribute to one of its founding fathers, including the British premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Kronos Quartet playing his film score to Bela Lugosi's Dracula, and the man himself giving a solo piano recital. Royal Concert Hall and City Halls, Glasgow (0141-353 8000), Thursday to Saturday.

Jazz

Arve Henriksen/Trio Mediaeval
Norwegian trumpeter Henriksen has taken the ambiguous, muted sound of Miles Davis as adapted by his fellow-countryman Nils Petter Molvaer, and given it a unique contemporary spin with the help of ingenious electronics, and a world-music perspective that includes study of the ethereal Japanese shakuhachi flute. He lends his inimitable variations to the early-music vocals and plainsong of Trio Mediaeval. Sage, Gateshead, Monday. Then touring.

Visual art

The Historical Box
Dissident American art created in the aftermath of Vietnam, 1960s performance and the feminist revolution – mangled things and angry things, from a time when art thought it could make a difference. Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly, London, Wednesday to 28 July.

Pop

Japandroids
The euphoric rock duo preview forthcoming album Celebration Rock up and down the UK. Cooler, Bristol, tonight. Then touring until 29 May.

Jay-Z and Kanye West
Superstar rappers bring their Watch the Throne collaboration to London as a forerunner for gigs in Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield next month. 02, London, tonight and tomorrow.

Last chance to see

Theatre

Making Noise Quietly
Robert Holman's exquisite triptych of mini-dramas that explores what it means to be human in a violent world. Just beautiful. Donmar, London, until Saturday.

Film

Breathing (dir. Karl Markovics)
A tremendous social-realist drama from Austria directed by actor-turned-director Markovics. An orphaned teenage criminal tries to discover his mother's identity.

Classical

The Flying Dutchman
The end of the first run of ENO's new production, much praised for Edward Gardner's conducting, and for performances by James Cresswell, Orla Boylan and Stuart Skelton. Coliseum, London , until Wednesday.

Jazz

Lynne Arriale/Benny Golson
Arriale, a quietly forceful Bill Evans-influenced American pianist with a knack for unusual interpretation and evocative composing invites legendary saxist/composer Golson (the bluesy acid-jazz favourite Killer Joe is his) into her regular Convergence Quartet. Ronnie Scott's, London, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Art

Elizabeth Price
Fetishised objects, great music, scenes in galleries – and in a drowned container ship. These are digital video installations with a hardcore hi-tech sheen from the 2012 Turner prize contender. Baltic, Gateshead, until Sunday.

Pop

The Horrors
Southend-on-Sea's post-punkers conclude the UK leg of their seemingly endless world tour. Brixton Academy, Friday.

Book now

Theatre

Fuerza Bruta
Return of the rave show from the people who brought us the legendary De La Guarda. This isn't in the same league, but if you're looking for excitement and sensation, this shouldn't disappoint.Roundhouse, London, 27 December to 26 January.

Ben Hur
An impossible feat: a stage version of the epic novel featuring sea battles, Roman orgies and chariot-racing, all on a stage the size of a postage stamp. A cast of four play 12,059 characters! Should be fun. Watermill, Newbury (01635 46044), 22 June to 28 July

Dance

Flawless and English National Ballet: Time Is of the Essence
Ballet, street dance and acrobatics test out their mutual chemistry in this new collaboration choreographed by Marlon Wallen and Jenna Lee. HMV Hammersmith Apollo, London, , 1-2 JuneThen touring.

Classical

Spitalfields summer festival
This year's associate artists are the Gabrieli Consort and Players, cellist Matthew Barley and composer Talvin Singh; plus there's a wide range of choral music, from the renaissance to the present day, with new works from Alec Roth, Huw Watkins and Nicola LeFanu. Various venues, London, 8-23 June.

Jazz

Bath festival jazz weekend
This festival always features a wide-ranging jazz weekend: this year's includes saxophonist Jason Yarde's subtle duo with pianist Andrew McCormack, Courtney Pine's genre-bending Europa, pianists Stan Tracey, Tord Gustavsen, Gwilym Simcock and Zoe Rahman, along with Manchester's acclaimed young Beats & Pieces big band. Various venues, Bath, 2-4 June.

Art

Wide Open School
A hundred artists lead courses, lectures and demonstrations open to the public. Get down and dirty with the Gelitin group, take a course in queer home economics, cook offal with Yto Barrada, learn about energy not quality with Thomas Hirschhorn. Hayward, London , 11 June-11 July.

Pop

Richard Hawley
The bequiffed son of Sheffield takes his latest album, Standing at the Sky's Edge, out for an autumn jaunt. Tour begins at Holmfirth Picture House, West Yorkshire, 16 September.

Musical therapy

Sun, 20 May 2012 20:00:03 GMT

A song-and-dance show about obesity and mental illness? Epidemic could pull in big audiences – and improve their health

In a chilly, high-windowed room, a young man is being pursued by four black dogs. They circle him, ready to pounce; he runs among them, attaching leads to them and strains to pull them to heel. Eventually, the dogs manage to get away; the man watches them go, stumbling, exhausted. The room echoes with the sound of applause.

Welcome to the world of Epidemic – a community musical produced by Old Vic New Voices, the education and outreach arm of London's Old Vic Theatre. In each of the past three years the company has put together a major new show, performed and stage-managed entirely by volunteers from across London, and written to reflect concerns raised by the local community.

If that sounds rather worthy, it isn't. Epidemic has bravely taken two key public health issues as its central themes – obesity and mental health – weaving them into a Technicolor tale that is both serious and exuberantly over-the-top.

The main character is Marlon Huxley, whose psychotic depression is giving him disturbing hallucinations (the black dogs, played by dancers). When he hijacks a mobility bus, he makes unlikely allies of Iris, an elderly woman trying to avoid being put in a home; and Lawrence, a morbidly obese man fed up with being nannied by his carers. As the trio make their bid for freedom, sensationalist newspaper headlines and tweets (#busnutter) track their every move.

Joey Ellis – a 24-year-old drama-school graduate, and one of just a handful of professional actors in the cast – plays Marlon. Taking part in the production has, he tells me during a break in rehearsals, been a real eye-opener. "Before, I was completely ignorant about mental health. Now, I've learned something about what it's like to have a mental illness – and it certainly isn't easy."

The show's writers, Suzy Davies and Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, and producers have been scrupulous about their research: health professionals have been consulted, and the show has the backing of the Wellcome Trust. But they actually arrived at the show's public health theme quite by accident.

"We spent a year talking to people, going from pensioners' rice-and-peas mornings to Zumba classes," says Steve Winter, director of Old Vic New Voices. "I started out with an idea about the 'epidemic of opinion': that every day my email inbox is filled with opinions on things people don't necessarily know much about. From there, overwhelmingly, our discussions turned to health, and obesity and mental health in particular. There was a perception that these two issues have reached epidemic proportions."

Dr Thomas Kabir, a research coordinator at the Institute of Psychiatry, addressed a debate organised by Old Vic New Voices at the Wellcome Trust during the show's gestation period. He believes this perception of an epidemic is rooted in fact. "There's a lot of evidence," he says, "that in the current economic climate, more and more people are experiencing mental health problems, and often they're going untreated. A show like this, which allows people to confront the issue face-to-face rather than just reading or hearing about it, can have a big role to play in addressing the problem."

Public information is a key aim of the show, and operates on two levels: by encouraging audiences to think about these health issues; and by enhancing the cast and crew's own understanding of their health, through workshops and discussions. Nutritionist Jo Lewin ran a healthy-eating seminar during rehearsals, and participants are encouraged to share their own experiences of mental illness and obesity.

Becky Brown, a 25-year-old bio-ethics PhD student and volunteer stage manager, thinks Epidemic is succeeding on both fronts. "At first, a musical about health seemed really bonkers," she says. "But there's only so much that people take away from the usual public health campaigns. I'm not saying this is a completely accurate portrayal of what it's like to live with mental-health issues or obesity, but it's a humanising one."

None of this comes, however, at the expense of hard work, commitment and, above all, fun: the rehearsal I watch, if still wobbly in places, is pretty slick, and the show's big numbers (covering everything from unhelpful media sensationalism in reporting mental health, to an Italian-style ballad about Lawrence's love affair with fattening food) are performed with infectious enthusiasm.

For Winter, if the show encourages just one person to confront health problems that they were previously too afraid to tackle, then all the hard work and enthusiasm will have paid off.

"During rehearsals, we've been talking about wellbeing," he says. "A lot of people said they hadn't thought about it much before. We want people taking part to feel healthier; to have greater self-esteem. As for audiences – if they do recognise any of the health problems they see on stage, I hope they will be inspired to go and seek help."

• Epidemic is at the Old Vic Tunnels, London SE1, until 27 May. Tickets are free, but must be booked at oldvictunnels.com

Magdalena Kožená/Mitsuko Uchida – review

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:31:07 GMT

Wigmore Hall, London

Now in her late 30s, the Czech mezzo Magdalena Kožená's voice is changing, growing in size and power, though losing some of its surface beauty in the process. In this lengthy and varied programme encompassing Mahler, Debussy and Messiaen, there were recurring problems higher up, with her tone hardening and occasionally developing a strident quality, though her middle register retained its freshness and warmth.

But Kožená was not always able to manage her increased sound without sacrificing subtleties along the way. The intimacy of Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis and Ariettes Oubliées, with their admissions of love and remembrances of evanescent emotion, was too often inundated with tone, extinguishing the delicacy of their texts and their minutely observed feelings. Messiaen's second book of Poèmes pour Mi went better, the individual songs' self-dramatised rhetoric more suited to Kožená's broad-brush-stroke approach.

The evening's real musical distinction belonged to the pianist, Mitsuko Uchida. Ironically, much of her material – the Messiaen group, the two songs sampled from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and all but one of his Five Rückert Lieder – is better known in its respective composers' own orchestrations. (Max Puttmann orchestrated Mahler's Liebst du um Schönheit.) Performing these songs on the piano often involves the near-impossible task of bringing out colours more fully explored in their orchestral versions; Mahler's own piano writing can sound ineffective.

Yet Uchida made it sound surprisingly idiomatic. Her infinitesimal attention to nuanced colours and textures in the Debussy was even more special – though admittedly his piano writing works, however difficult it may be to realise. Throughout she was fully supportive of her vocal partner, and seemed considerably more relaxed.

Rating: 3/5

Bow Down – review

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:22:36 GMT

Old Municipal Market, Brighton

Bow Down remains one of Harrison Birtwistle's best kept secrets. It was conceived with the poet and playwright Tony Harrison , at the National theatre in 1977, for a small company of actors and instrumentalists. Based upon the traditional ballad of the Two Sisters, its spare fusion of music, text and ritual defies categorisation. But it perhaps comes closer to Birtwistle's idea of what music theatre in its broadest, rawest sense can be than any of his better-known large-scale operas.

The gruesome ballad exists in various forms across Europe and North America. Elements of many of them are woven into the rhyming couplets of Harrison's text, interspersed with snatches of folksong, and punctuated by piercing drones and dissonances from a flute and oboe, or underpinned with the regular pulses of claves or drums. Roles are shared and swapped, and the actors also combine in a chanting chorus, as the powerful story emerges piece by piece.

That Bow Down is so hard to pigeonhole explains, perhaps, why it has been rarely seen over the last three decades. But Frederic Wake-Walker has chosen it for his debut as Opera Group's artistic director. Flexibility appears to be an essential part of Harrison Birtwistle's concept – the work was originally devised in rehearsal – but the score is surprisingly prescriptive, and Wake-Walker's accomplished production turns out to be very similar to previous British stagings, if, in some respects, less ritualised than before. How it will fare in different venues remains to be seen, but the words might come across more clearly in some than they did in the boomy market acoustic in Brighton, where traffic noise, cooing pigeons and squawking gulls proved more distracting than atmospheric.

Rating: 3/5

Elvis Costello – review

Sun, 20 May 2012 18:21:39 GMT

City Hall, Newcastle

With a back catalogue as labyrinthine as Costello's, the act of choosing a set list must be arduous and baffling. Hence the "Spinning Songbook", whereby a fairground-style wheel containing the names of 40 songs is spun by members of the audience, who then dance to their chance selections in a cage, occasionally alongside a red-booted go-go dancer.

Any suspicions the wheel may be rigged are banished after it throws up Harry Worth, from 2008's Momofuku album. Costello explains how it traces the fortunes of a couple whose wedding he attended by accident while staying at a hotel in Bradford, and who visited him at gigs for years until they were suddenly no longer speaking to each other. And the next selection? Harry Worth again. "This is about a couple I met in … " begins the chuckling singer, before suggesting another spin.

In a tight-fitting suit, the skinny 57-year old looks eerily like his punk-era incarnation. Any signs of the ageing process are craftily hidden under a straw boater, and he is clearly revelling in a less familiar role as fairground-style compere. During a dub Watching the Detectives, he emerges on the balcony to drag down a spinner/victim and doesn't miss the opportunity to quip that the cane he brandishes is "a scale model of Rupert Murdoch's head on a pike".

But the wheel allows him to explore the full panoply of his songbook and every emotion, from country-style regret (Good Year for the Roses to uncomfortable home-truths (Deep Dark Thoughtful Mirror). A four-song "jackpot" of time-themed songs peaks with a beautifully sung Man Out of Time.

They are all superb songs, beautifully sung, although Costello realizes that a whole set at random could be uneven and hurls in unlisted selections. The songs range from breakneck punk (Radio Radio, Pump It Up) to "rock'n'roll as it was in the 1920s", from recent album National Ransom.

Most rewarding is the return of his political fire. After a beautifully eerie Shipbuilding, he explains that he has revived the anti-Thatcher Tramp the Dirt Down ("a song I never thought I'd sing again") owing to the return of right-wing conservatism, and sings it with brutally unrestrained venom.

Then it's back to Oliver's Army and the rest: a three-hour, 30-song-plus rollercoaster with a human jukebox.

Rating: 4/5

Mick Jagger hip-thrusts and flounces his way through SNL finale | Maura Johnston

Sun, 20 May 2012 17:00:04 GMT

The Rolling Stones frontman vamped, preened and mimicked Steven Tyler as Arcade Fire and the Foo Fighters got in on the act

Mick Jagger's career has been studded with collaborations, from the stuttery electrofunk track State Of Shock, which he recorded with the Jacksons, to the excruciating robot-pop will.i.am song THE, during which the Rolling Stones frontman choked out a rap studded with exhortations to "go hard or … go home."

Nevertheless, the announcement that Jagger would be hosting the season finale of Saturday Night Live and performing with the Canadian arena-shamble outfit Arcade Fire and Dave Grohl's rock standard-bearers the Foo Fighters raised some eyebrows. Would the two backing bands transform into a singular unit, a rock 'n roll Voltron where Pat Smear gave Régine Chassagne's accordion a spin or two?

As it turned out, the performances were much more straightforward – Jagger vamped and preened, while the bands served as Stones surrogates. Arcade Fire backed Jagger ably on a version of The Last Time, adding a bit of ramshackle charm (and some stabbing violins that leapt out of the mix). The Foo Fighters, meanwhile, blazed through 19th Nervous Breakdown and It's Only Rock And Roll (But I Like It) – the latter being something of a no-brainer pick, considering that Dave Grohl's post-Nirvana band has become the most prominent band still putting out the kind of driving and fun, chorus-heavy, fist-pumping capital-r Rock that nearly went extinct in the morose, self-loathing post-grunge era.

During their performances, all the members of the younger guard let big silly grins slip across their faces at least once; catching them was something of a treat, a moment of unguarded intimacy where you could see the thought: "I can't believe this is happening to me" flicker across their brainspace, giving a bit of humility to a rock spectacle that seemed to be as much about baby boomers asserting cultural superiority as it did about grabbing headlines from the easily shocked music press.

Jagger's last proper musical performance, a seemingly hastily composed blues song about the 2012 election called Tea Party that featured licks from Jeff Beck and the assertion that neither of the people currently campaigning to lead the United States is going to want the job in six months, made this idea even more plain. "I love the blues because in any era, the blues talk about what's on people's mind," he said at the song's outset, but the mess of references to the election seemed to be defined to not offend anyone, like a cruise ship comedian afraid of being tossed overboard.

Since he served as host, Jagger performed in a couple of skits as well – his monologue was a riff on inane questions asked him by journalists, and later in the show he played Steven Tyler, although his imitation was hardly as unhinged as the Aerosmith frontman's recent turn on American Idol.

But the most telling skit was one set in a karaoke bar, where Jagger, playing a wall-flowery insurance rep with a suspiciously healthy knowledge of the Rolling Stones frontman's stage affectations, fumed his way through people merely imitating the band's classic songs – and, more importantly, Jagger's exaggerated flounces and hip-thrusts.

The contrast between the Jagger impersonations, particularly the one lobbed by Fred Armisen, and Jagger's actual performances was stark; there were certain points during It's Only Rock And Roll, in particular, where you could have blinked and thought you were watching a very capable Stones tribute band that was having the gig of its life.

The karaoke skit ended with Jagger being left at the bar by his co-workers, and finally his character let loose with his mastery of the Stones back catalogue, turning Satisfaction into a morose testament to his social ineptitude as the camera got closer and closer to his face. It was supposed to be funny, but more importantly it was a window into how Jagger achieved his standing.

He may not be an actor per se, but the rock-star fabulousness of his life, so chronicled that it's been permanently etched into the pop-cultural firmament, crumbled away in that moment. And that happened because by singing the lyrics he co-wrote decades ago, stripped of any stadium-rock pomposity and underscored with a bit of (comic, but relatable) sadness, he made the palpable anxiety of an always-out-of-reach dream life all too real.

World's youngest conductor? Boy, 14, to direct Venezuelan orchestra

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:59:16 GMT

José Ángel Salazar, part of the country's successful El Sistema music programme, is not old enough to earn a wage

For a professional conductor, José Ángel Salazar has a fresh-faced, youthful demeanour: he is quite short, with disproportionately large hands for his narrow frame and a face framed by a mass of dark curls. But if Salazar looks boyish then it's because he is in fact a boy. At 14, and recently appointed to direct a Venezuelan youth orchestra, he may well be the youngest conductor in the world.

"I am not sure I am the youngest. I don't know who said that," he told the Guardian. "Maybe there is a younger conductor in some small town somewhere else," he said, trying to brush aside a claim that has brought him more fame than he seems ready to handle.

Salazar has between 70 and 80 musicians in the Youth Orchestra of Nueva Esparta at his command, of whom more than half are older than he is.

"I've been invited to conduct other orchestras that are made up of adults and it's easier," he said. The shift in role, from friend and peer to leader, is a challenge Salazar must overcome not only for his own sake, but for that of the orchestra. Good conducting, he says, is in great part down to how the orchestra works as a whole, and a lot of the learning is through example.

"Conducting is a wordless language. I have to convey confidence to the musicians in order to get a confident performance back from them … I have to co-ordinate my body's movements with the music", he said. "I let the internal chanting that one as a director hones guide me, and that's what I try to transmit to the musicians."

But despite articulating feelings with a maturity that seems well beyond his years, Salazar can find his job daunting. "It's hard because I have to find the way to communicate, or sometimes tell off kids who are much older than me," he said. "I guess they are forcing me to be better".

The post is so recent, only a week old, that details are still being fine-tuned. Salazar is too young to earn a wage under Venezuelan law, so a scholarship or grant may be needed.

Along with Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel and Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician to join the Berlin Philharmonic, Salazar is one of the success stories to come out of the Venezuelan orchestra system known as El Sistema.

Salazar was eight when he joined. The son of schoolteachers living in a house along with his grandparents, neither he nor anyone in his family had much exposure to classical music, let alone formal music training.

"I went to a brass concert with my dad and grandfather and I cried three times," he said. While most children his age would have wept from boredom, Salazar said he felt enraptured, as though he needed to be a part of what was going on. He dropped karate lessons and started learning the flute.

After the flute came the violin and thus his first encounter with Schubert, his favourite. "Certain pieces make me feel like I must surrender … I get goosebumps from just hearing the first three notes of Schubert's 5th."

Music has also swept Salazar's friends and family along. "My father now talks to me about symphonies and variations, something he knew nothing about four years ago," Salazar says. For him, the next big challenge is language. "I'll probably get a master's or doctorate in music but I'd also like to study languages. I don't want to go on tour and have to use a translator. Or if I am interpreting Mahler there are certain criteria, or feelings, that I'd have a better grasp of if I spoke German."

El Sistema

El Sistema was masterminded 37 years ago by José Antonio Abreu, a retired economist and politician who was also a conductor and pianist. Today he is know simply as Maestro and there are more than 285 child and youth orchestras in the country and an ambitious programme where more than 400 children are studying to become conductors. "Music has to be recognised as an agent of social development in the highest sense because it transmits the highest values of solidarity, harmony and mutual compassion," says Abreu. "I've sought to take music, which is usually a luxury item, and turn it into cultural patrimony accessible to all".

Cannes 2012: day five - in pictures

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:57:48 GMT

Rock'n'roll invades the Croisette, courtesy of Pete Doherty and Nick Cave. Plus one or two films were on too

Scissor Sisters; Gossip – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:08:04 GMT

Shepherd's Bush Empire, London; XOYO, London

Launching their fourth album, Magic Hour, Scissor Sisters singer Jake Shears is dressed in black and yellow stripes, like a drone bee sprung from borstal, and is working his glutes like a podium dancer who's long since replaced the oxygen in his red blood cells with amyl. Since their arrival nearly a decade ago, touting an inspired remake of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, Scissor Sisters have carved out a niche as an outré pop outfit capable of playing to gay and straight alike. Lady Gaga certainly owes them a debt.

Beside Shears is co-star Ana Matronic, a statuesque mermaid channelling Joan from Mad Men, equal parts vintage bombshell and transvestite homage. London, Ana Matronic points out, is their "home away from homo". They're so local they have even been roped into the Olympics. Between songs she salutes the denizens of "Shepherd's Minge" and recommends a local Nepalese curry house. Soppier than she looks, by the end Ana is letting a (very straight) super-fan called Steve propose to his girlfriend Melanie onstage. Steve eventually reveals that he has the faces of all the Scissor Sisters tattooed on his back. How on earth did he feel when latest drummer Randy Real replaced Paddy Boom in 2008?

Tonight the hi-NRG Scissors beat their slower, straighter sister-tunes hands down. They play a storming Invisible Light, the best track from their last album, Night Work, which took its inspiration from the Berlin club scene and featured a man's taut buttocks on the cover. They play Mary, the Radio 2-friendly ballad from their first album. It has not improved with age. Pacing is a tiny issue. Why get everyone on their feet for Take Your Mama if you're just going to drop them with a ponderous new song called Year of Living Dangerously?

The other new songs, meanwhile, range freely from promising to prosaic. To prove they're still relevant in 2012, Scissor Sisters teamed up with cunnilingual activist-rapper Azealia Banks on a song called Shady Love, which finds Shears rapping. It really isn't remotely embarrassing.

Gayer in all senses of the word is the sassy Let's Have a Kiki, which comes with a voguing dance routine. What is "a kiki"? A girlie night in, allegedly – although the Urban Dictionary provides some alternatives (tranny sex; non-aligned dykey-ness). By contrast, Only the Horses, a single released last week, is a more craven bid for the chart success that eluded them last album around. Po-faced and bombastic in the encore, it sounds nothing like Scissor Sisters, as though some songwriting committee coloured in the notes on a chart hit template and gave it to Calvin Harris to produce. Hey presto – it looks like it might go top 10 today.

Gossip, purveyors of 2006's righteous anthem Standing in the Way of Control, also call their London gig a "home-away-from-home-town show". As with Scissor Sisters, some of their best bits happen between the songs, when their charismatic frontwomen are in full flow. Beth Ditto teases their DJ. "Is that all you do?" she inquires repeatedly, like a mum not au fait with nightlife.

After one solid but hit-lacking follow-up album with Yoda-like producer Rick Rubin (2009's Music For Men), Gossip's latest effort, A Joyful Noise, attempts to hitch Ditto's irrepressible star power to the out-and-out pop vehicles of UK hit factory Xenomania (Girls Aloud, Sugababes, etc). It makes sense. The Gossip may have started out as a punk band fronted by a southern soul diva, but Ditto in particular has always loved pop, R&B and hip-hop. She closes tonight's gig with an inspirational, unscripted a cappella of The Greatest Love of All.

She really, really likes rapper Lil Wayne too. Their new single, Melody Emergency, is dedicated to him. "Can you hook me up? Seriously?" she asks the crowd. Tonight the single sounds way better than on record, with carnivorous bass and growling keyboards.

The truth is, the once mighty Xenomania have seemingly lost it, and the material on A Joyful Noise, while pretty and jewel-like in parts, lacks the naked flashing pound-sign ambition of, say, Scissor Sisters's Only the Horses. It's down to Gossip to make it all work in the flesh. Largely they do, with guitarist Nathan Howdeshell combining with keyboard player Katy Davidson to inject life where the album flatlines. Get a Job stands out – a righteous paean to hard work, directed at a partying slacker who's hit their 30s. It's not quite as political as Standing in the Way of Control, but even now, few pop thrills can match being told what's what by Beth Ditto. "We believe in the goodness of people," she concludes. "Love always wins."

Christians and Muslims unite in new bid to silence Lady Gaga

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:47 GMT

Fans defend singer's freedom of speech as Philippines protests threaten star's concerts

Christian groups in the Philippines have called for a ban on Lady Gaga's Manila concerts, alleging that her song Judas is an offensive mockery of Jesus Christ.

Youths gathered at a rally outside the mayor's office, chanting "Stop the Lady Gaga concerts", while members of the Biblemode Youth Philippines group called her videos religiously offensive.

In the song, she calls herself a "holy fool" who is "still in love with Judas", singing: "Jesus is my virtue/And Judas is the demon I cling to." In the video, Gaga plays a biker chick riding behind a man wearing a crown of thorns, while longing for another biker with "Judas" emblazoned across his leather jacket.

The singer is due to play the 20,000-seat Mall of Asia tomorrow and on Tuesday, and James Imbong, a lawyer filing a petition to ban the concerts, said Christian groups would not accept a compromise as organisers in South Korea did when Seoul authorities agreed to forbid under-12s from attending instead of cancelling the concert.

"She has a song that suggests that she wants to have sex with Judas and performs it with a dance," Imbong told the news website PhilStar. "Of course, it would be accompanied by a costume that has pornographic elements."

Manila's mayor has issued a statement ordering Gaga not to "exhibit any nudity or lewd conduct which may be offensive to morals and good custom", with the stark reminder that the penal code in the primarily Roman Catholic country of 93 million can convict anyone up to six years for offending race or religion.

Tens of thousands of Gaga fans, from Seoul to Jakarta, are campaigning for the singer's right to freedom of expression, after numerous attempts by Christian and Muslim groups to ban shows during her Born This Way Ball Asia tour, calling her music, persona and style the "work of Satan", "dangerous to youth" and "spreading unhealthy sexual culture".

Indonesian activists called the cancellation of a gig in Jakarta a sign of the country's "Talibanisation" after authorities withdrew permission for her concert on 3 June, making her the first foreign artist to be banned despite selling out a 52,000-seat venue.

The 26-year-old has received an outpouring of support on Twitter, where she has 24 million followers, since the trouble over the tour began last month.

Indonesian human rights activist Andreas Harsono has said the concert ban represents "the Talibanisation [of] Indonesia", while sociologist Ida Ruwaida said it was up to the government to "facilitate different interests without allowing the cultural hegemony of one group over another".

Police denied the singer a concert permit amid claims from hardline Islamic groups that the suggestive nature of her show and lyrics would sabotage the country's moral codes of conduct. "During her concerts, Lady Gaga looks like a devil worshipper," said Suryadharma Ali, the religion affairs minister of the nation of 240 million people, mainly Muslims.

The ministry of tourism added that foreign performers should dress modestly on stage, and the government warned music promoters to consider cultural traditions when planning concerts. The hardline Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI) threatened to send 30,000 members to the airport to stop Lady Gaga from getting off her plane. It warned that if she tried to perform, Indonesia "should be prepared for chaos in Jakarta". It said: "We are ready to be thrown in jail and be killed – we will do anything to stop [the show]."

Human rights activists and academics have questioned the government's continued defence of Islamic militants' threats – which have resulted in calls to parliament to ban miniskirts, the banning of beauty pageants and Valentine's Day in some provinces, and the persecution of religious minorities.

Representatives of the country's tens of thousands of Gaga fans have argued that the government's defence of Indonesia's "moral fibre" is dubious given the nation's obsession with dangdut, a form of music known for its provocative dancing and scantily clad singers.

Fans have also questioned the government's worry over Lady Gaga's supposed promotion of homosexuality. "Nothing can stop me from meeting my queen," says Ali, a 26-year-old openly gay banker in Bandung, West Java, adding that the ban would have no impact on homosexuality in Indonesia, because it "will not make gay people turn straight".

The Gaga saga started in April in Seoul, the first stop on her 17-date tour. Calling Lady Gaga's music "the work of Satan", Christian groups held prayer meetings dedicated to banning the concert. Ju-Hyun, a prayer organiser, said the meetings were organised "so that homosexuality and pornography [would] not spread around the country".

Tickets sold to children were eventually refunded after the government rated the concert unsuitable and the Korean Association of Church Communication vowed to take "concerted action to stop young people from being infected with homosexuality and pornography".

It would be a dramatic turn of events if Lady Gaga ended up in jail in Manila this week, but, to quote the lady herself: "In the most biblical sense, I am beyond repentance."

L'Olympiade: the Opera – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:27 GMT

Venice Baroque Orchestra/Chryssicos
(Naive)

You might mistake this for a recording of Vivaldi's opera L'Olimpiade (The Olympic Games) which, after long neglect, and as a nod towards London 2012, is suddenly back enjoying UK premiere performances: on stage at Garsington next month and in concert at the Lufthansa festival last night. Instead, this is a "pasticcio", with music by 16 composers set to the same libretto by Metastasio in which, yes, the winner gets the girl. Vivaldi is represented by only one aria (Mentre dormi). The familiarity of the other names will depend on your passion for (mainly) Italian composers from the 1730s to 1800: Galuppi, Caldara, Jommelli, Cherubini and Piccini among them. Sung and played with freshness and spirit by the Venice Baroque and six youthful soloists, this disc – full of showpiece da capo arias and gleeful coloratura – may up your game on the obscure opera front.

Falstaff; Tallis Scholars – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:20 GMT

Royal Opera House; Cadogan Hall, London

The boos came as a surprise. They were aimed at the production team who lolloped onstage awkwardly for their bow, as production teams invariably do, after a smart, well-choreographed company curtain call which seemed all the more crisp and stylish in comparison. Those forlorn catcalls, loud but isolated, left barely a dent in the wall of cheers which greeted cast, chorus and conductor Daniele Gatti in a new staging of Verdi's Falstaff at the Royal Opera House.

Had you warned me I might enjoy this latest project by the Canadian-born director Robert Carsen, I would have raised an eyebrow, being fairly neutral towards Carsen's work and even – avert your eyes, blasphemy ahead – to Verdi's last masterpiece. Written in old age with a final flourish of inspiration, the score bristles with complex counterpoint, rapid madrigal patter, wild humour and explosive, trill-laden orchestration. Yet this musical brilliance far outstrips the uncomfortable amalgam of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV Parts I and II, out of which Boito constructed a libretto.

All goes at a cracking pace until fat, preening Sir John Falstaff is tossed into the Thames by the merrily cruel wives, on this occasion causing a delayed tidal wave to pour through the window into the 1950s-style dream home of Mr and Mrs Ford. The problem is the sagging third act. Since few directors manage to maintain the pace here, it must in part – more sacrilege – be a weakness of the work itself. Sir John, outstandingly sung and acted by the in all respects enormous Italian baritone Ambrogio Maestri, mourns human wickedness in a long outpouring, never helped by having to stand in dripping long johns, a figure of folly and water-logged pathos.

The unravelling of the wives' deception takes place at midnight in Windsor Great Park, an interminable scene in which Falstaff is bullied and pinched black and blue by grown-ups pretending to be fairies or ghostly Herne huntsmen, here wearing identical antlers presumably borrowed, handily, from over their own fireplaces. Despite this treachery, Falstaff redeems the world from its universal cruelty by offering himself as the source of humour: witty, as well as "the cause of wit in others", but the moment is brief, the taste bitter.

Hunting was a key visual gag in Paul Steinberg's minutely detailed designs, all encased within huge, multi-purpose wooden walls – not so much Herne's oak as Herne's oak-panelling. Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes delight in tweeds, twinsets, hat pins, ruched gloves, pinched waists and big skirts. Yes, this will sound familiar to anyone who saw Richard Jones's matchless, similarly updated Glyndebourne staging, which immersed itself more in the suburban mock-Tudor of Joan Hunter Dunn than the stuffy shires of John Bull. At Covent Garden the opera opens with Sir John in bed in somewhere like the Connaught and ends at a hunt ball ripe for Jennifer's Diary.

The wives, in the score's most delicious, feather-light music, plot their duping in a smart hotel dining room: stiff napery, chandeliers and synchronised tureens. Alice Ford, sung with glee and esprit by Ana María Martínez, resembles the young Princess Margaret. Kai Rüütel's silver-voiced Meg Page is more muted, while Mistress Quickly, fearlessly and comically overplayed by Marie-Nicole Lemieux with fruity voice and un-shy cleavage, steals the show. No one else would get away with it. The Fords' shiny, well-equipped kitchen is the breezy setting for the linen-basket scene. Everything that can nest – spoons, ladles, saucepans, tumblers, tables, chairs – does nest. All this order is turned to chaos by a silent movie-style crowd of men in trilbies hunting the hard-to-hide knight. It's silly and well done.

Gatti coaxed superb colour from the orchestra, especially the ever-busy woodwind, and kept textures transparent to support the ensembles as they divided and reshaped in various contrapuntal patterns. With the exception of Maestri and Lemieux, no single singer stood out but mostly the ensemble was secure. The tenor Joel Prieto as Fenton and soprano Amanda Forsythe as Nannetta, the innocent young lovebird, were charming rather than exceptional, as was the Slovakian baritone Dalibor Jenis, whose Ford was under- or, if you prefer, over-characterised: he was dressed as an American cowboy. Despite these reservations, this was a buoyant and vivacious production, though given the mixed critical response some will regard it as a concept too far.

There was one misjudged distraction: the horse. A stuffed animal would have done just as well. Coming so soon after Ann Widdecombe's debut in La Fille du régiment, this quest for non-musical novelty begins to feel like clutching at straws. Bit between my teeth I rang the horse-hire company to check the price. Evidently business was brisk: there was no answer. I emailed the Royal Opera: how much was the horse? The official reply came: "It is our policy never to reveal the fees for artists." Artist? They obviously know their Catcher in the Rye. ("I'd rather have a goddam horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake.") Taking a lead from the opera's own gesture of honour, the ROH should now donate the equivalent of this 15-year-old animal's fee, plus Maestri's single riding lesson, to the Musicians' Benevolent Fund.

The dying Falstaff, according to Shakespeare, though beyond the action of Verdi's drama, babbled "of green fields" on his death bed. Not so many years later, Henry VIII of England met Francis I of France on a more elevated pasture near Calais: the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a lavish prototype for the jamboree Euro-summits of today. A notable difference, apart from some 2,200 sheep being consumed, was the presence of at least two composers: Jean Mouton (1459-1522) in the French camp, William Cornysh (1465-1523) in the English. 

As part of the Choral at Cadogan series, the formidable Tallis Scholars gave a thoughtfully constructed programme of works by these composers, including an Ave Maria from both and culminating in Cornysh's five-part Magnificat, one of the glories of the era. These a cappella meditations, interweaving plainchant and polyphony, sober canon and rhythmic surprise, take the listener as near extraterrestrial as you can get sitting in a concert hall. British musicians have cornered this area of repertoire.

Last week alone, as well as the Tallis singers you could hear Stile Antico (broadcast live from Oxford on Radio 3) on Monday or the Cardinall's Musick at Wigmore Hall on Thursday – three generations of vocal ensembles who excel in Renaissance music.

This style of singing may not attract the shouting headlines of opera stars but their virtuosity is equally exciting, their impact magical. If they want to whip up more interest with, say, a few onstage equine quadropeds, I could let them have the number of a reputable hire company who offer, as their promotional material says, the "complete package to suit the client", including anything from Tudor-style jousting to a rearing horse on set. At the risk of flogging a dead one, I'll stop there.

Saint-Saëns, Loevendie, Ravel: Piano Trios – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:06:14 GMT

Van Baerle Trio
(Etcetera)

The Van Baerle Trio met by chance as students in Amsterdam. Eight years on and having won last year's Lyons International Chamber Music competition, pianist Hannes Minnaar, cellist Gideon den Herder and violinist Maria Milstein – all still in their 20s – have harnessed their diverse talents into a highly expressive unit, assisted by some tutoring from Menachem Presler, pianist of the fabled Beaux Arts Trio. This vital information helps explain the quality and insight of their playing in two hefty French works – the Saint-Saëns and that classic of the piano trio repertoire, the Ravel – and, as a novelty, the short, atmospheric Ackermusik by Dutch composer Theo Loevendie (b 1930). Worth discovering.

Tom Jones: Spirit in the Room – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:30 GMT

(Island)

Before TV viewers ask, there is, thankfully, no version of U2's Beautiful Day on Tom Jones's latest record. Like its successful predecessor, 2010's God-fearing Praise & Blame, Spirit in the Room is an album of covers. It does not feature Jones's most recent venture into other artists' material, however, in which the massed ranks (and we use the word "rank" advisedly) of Jones and his fellow judges on BBC1's The Voice performed cruel and unusual punishments upon Beautiful Day the other week. You almost felt for the Irish rock titans as the remains of their Day lay bleeding on to the set. On the other hand, neither does this album feature Jones's blistering cover of Howlin' Wolf's Evil, or his extraordinary take on Jezebel, recorded with Jack White in the manner of a satanic Delilah.

Jones's covers, then, can run the gamut from devilish to defibrillated; showbiz was always thus. Having made his peace with his maker on the previous record, he now salutes some of the 20th century's all-powerful writer-performers. There is some intriguing late material here from the two Pauls – McCartney and Simon – plus Leonard Cohen with a classic, and some songs from writers whose royalties aren't quite as stratospheric as all that, one of whom is Madonna's brother-in-law.

At the helm is Ethan Johns, most famous for his work with the Kings of Leon. His tendency is to pit Jones's lusty, gutsy voice against low-key arrangements in which the guitars come in from afar; a pretty transparent signifier of thoughtfulness.

It opens with a good gag though. When Leonard Cohen sang: "I was born with the gift of a golden voice" in a racked rumble on Tower of Song, it was self-deprecating. But Jones really was, giving the line quite a different resonance. Angels have tied him to "the stage", not a table. You hope these nuances will continue to develop further down the tracklisting.

But the levels of detail don't quite sustain. Jones (or possibly Johns) gets points for choosing McCartney's Home and Simon's Love and Blessings, rather than more famous works by their younger selves. Seventy-two next month, Jones is keen not to be cast opposite any age-inappropriate lovelies. There is one incursion of what you might call young people's music in the form of Charlie Darwin by the Low Anthem. It sounds pretty good with Ben Knox Miller's falsetto swapped for Jones's vibrato.

Ultimately, you conclude, Jones's golden voice was built for hooting, hollering and hubba-hubba-ing at the ladies, not mulling things over. While it's great to find Richard and Linda Thompson's The Dimming of the Day on any tracklisting, Jones sounds most at home on Odetta's Hit or Miss and Blind Willie Johnson's Soul of a Man. Tom Waits fans may roll their eyes at the prospect of an inveterate showbiz pro like Jones covering his recent Bad As Me, but you can't deny that Jones, a former philanderer with an enduringly mean set of lungs, has got the voice for it.

Rating: 3/5

Why we're watching: Delilah

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:05:26 GMT

The 21-year-old musician on her debut album, being on the phone to Prince and why you should think twice before going on tour with 12 men

Good topknot, excellent shorts. Who is she and what does she do? She's Delilah, aka Paloma Stoecker, the latest star in the making on planet pop.

Oh yeah. What's her sound? She files herself under trip-hop. Remember that? From the 90s? Massive Attack, Portishead… those were the days. Anyway, Delilah was signed to Atlantic Records at 17 before joining Chase & Status on tour as a support vocalist for two years, which she says was a lot of fun but "no one teaches you how to share a tour bus with 12 men, so it was hard at times".

On tour with Chase & Status. I've heard of them. So is she a bit drum'n'bass? Not a jot. Delilah's music is best described as dark, brooding pop. Pop that's in a crabby mood.

Interesting. What's she doing now? She's just put the finishing touches on her debut album. And, like, a week ago, she was personally asked to join Prince on tour. The musical demi-god. He rang her, actually pressed the buttons on the phone and called her. So she's off to Australia with him, the lucky possum.

She says: "Now that the album is done, it feels like a huge weight has lifted. I'm so excited about this year."

We say: If she's good enough for the Purple One, she's certainly good enough for us.

Delilah's latest single, "Breathe", is out now. Her album From the Roots Up is released on 30 July

Allegri: Missa in lectulo meo; Missa Christus resurgens; Miserere; Motets – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:38 GMT

Choir of King's College London/Trendell
(Delphian)

Best known for a piece he didn't really write – the famous Miserere is a decorated version of a chant setting which Mozart later wrote down from memory – Gregorio Allegri's other music is not much heard. The rich sonorities of the two eight-part masses, recorded here for the first time, place Allegri (1582-1652) directly in the Palestrina line of counter-reformation composers, and the word-setting is direct and expressive, rising to a wonderful climax at Et homo factus est in the credo of the first mass. The Easter mass is more concentrated, with some dancing triple-time sections: David Trendell's fine choir glows with warmth and commitment.

Loose Tubes: Säd Afrika – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:31 GMT

(Lost Marble)

There were 23 of them and they managed to reduce the conventional idea of "big band jazz" to smoking rubble. On first acquaintance, Loose Tubes seemed so anarchic that audiences just sat gawping in shock, but by the end of the performance they'd be cheering.

This recaptures the farewell show of that deliciously organised chaos, at Ronnie Scott's in September 1990. It's not the cheeky, unruly side that comes over most strongly now, though. It's the rich profusion of sounds and ideas. Many of them – Django Bates, Mark Lockheart, John Parricelli etc – went on to become heavyweight names.

Rating: 4/5

Smoke Fairies: Blood Speaks – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:30 GMT

(V2)

By the time Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire received the publicity boost of a Jack White endorsement in 2009, they'd already been refining their sound together for a decade, hence the tight parameters of their 2010 debut – a vintage folk and blues furrow ploughed rather well. They speak of having broadened their influences since then but Blood Speaks deals in familiar virtues: subtle, minor key laments on which their voices twine elegantly around brooding guitars. The mood of gathering gloom occasionally drifts rather close to torpor, but Feel It Coming Near and the sublime Awake usher the darkness in beautifully.

Fun: Some Nights – review

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:04:29 GMT

(Warner Brothers)

It's an apt name, but only in that this New York trio's second album is a reminder that many things commonly regarded as fun are in fact not only not fun, but actively depressing. Lyrically vapid, auto-tuned and stadium-aspiring choruses like these, with their hands-in-the-air, mugging-with-your-mates quality, are so lacking in imagination that they make "feel-good" feel really, really bad. Singer Nate Ruess does an impeccable Freddie Mercury impression but when, on the title track, he asks: "What do I stand for? What do I stand for?" I can't help but think the answer is: "Not much."

Rating: 1/5