When is a new Prefab’s album not a new Prefab’s album? When it was written and recorded in 1992-93, and isn’t played on by anyone other than Paddy McAloon. And therein, perhaps, lies the problem. McAloon is incapable of writing a bad song. He also has that touch of the truly great songwriter in that […]
Music
Manic Street Preachers, Venue Cymru Llandudno, 26 May 09
One of the great things about living in Manchester is its closeness to contrasting day-trip destinations. So when the trend for big bands to tour less obvious, often seaside, locations offered the option of The Manic Street Preachers plus afternoon tea in genteel Llandudno, I didn’t take much convincing. Arriving just as the band took the […]
June Tabor – RNCM, 20/11/2008
Yeats supposed that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others; but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. When I first started listening to folk music, it was Irish and very much concerned with the quarrel with others. It was dedicated to the wronged and with the search for finding some way of […]
Herbie Hancock at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
Herbie Hancock, unlike Miles, has never been afraid to revisit his back catalogue and this Sunday’s concert in Manchester was a trip down memory lane. However, as we know, revisiting is usually rather more than revamping. This evening’s concert started with ‘Actual Proof’ from Hancock’s second Headhunters’ album, Thrust, And for a while in […]
Tell Tale Signs – Bob Dylan
The devout would be forgiven for feeling the Cult of Dylan has lost some exclusivity in recent years. The release of two very hip, very high profile films (plus another, only slightly Masked and Anonymous mess) have been only one face of an accessible coolness also marked by the first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles and his […]
‘6 minutes’: Robert Forster, Manchester Sept 21 ’08
At the Royal Northern College for Music, a small crowd gathers at around 7:30. Mostly men, many of them look like they are meeting up for the first time in years, or the first time since the last Go-Betweens concert. With their lattes and bottled beers, they talk animatedly about, from what I hear, Man […]