If lockdown had an official soundtrack, it would be the bedroom drum and bass of PinkPantheress. Her lo-fi singing over garage and jungle tunes was ubiquitous on TikTok at the time – it was as if her brief and sweet songs were just as moreish as the videos on the app.
Margaret Calvert's creations are never far. She set the rules for the design of Britain’s road signs, as well as drafting typography and graphics for national, regional and local rail signage. Back to the Swamp’s fifth track “Margaret Calvert Drives Out” features the lyrics “maximum information conveyed by minimum means, triangles for warning, circles for limits, blue for instructions, green for directions.”
Cat Power, aka singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, is releasing her first live album – a recording of the faithful recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous gig of 1966, played in November 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall.
Bony Biyake, whose vocals grace this delicious soup of ancient and modern sounds, from Europe and the Congo, once sang in a soukous band, and then made his name in collaborations with the French musical magician, the late Hector Zazou. Their most famous collaboration was a 1983 album, Noir et Blanc, which still sounds ahead of its time today.
It’s always encouraging to a have a musical rallying call in times of political strife. A song for a better future to encourage those on the right side of history not just to march but to dance as well.
Not all Scorsese films are behemoths; Killers of the Flower Moon may last over three hours but After Hours, a low-budget black comedy released in 1983, packs an incredible amount into just 93 minutes.
Los Angeles is a collaboration from ex-Cure man Lol Tolhurst, former Banshee, Creature and Slits’ drummer, Budgie and producer Jacknife Lee, as well as an army of musical mates from Bobby Gillespie and The Edge to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and Starcrawler’s Arrow de Wilde. So, it could easily have descended into a supergroup exercise of backslapping and excessive self-regard by a load of rock stars who haven’t been in the limelight for a while.
The story has often been told of how GW Pabst cast the American starlet Louise Brooks in his Berlin-made Pandora’s Box (1929) and fashioned his version of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu plays” around her transfixing performance as the helpless pan-sexual temptress – a projection of primarily male paranoia – who unintentionally destroys her would-be possessors. So, too, the story of the film’s role in the rediscovery and reinvention of its reclusive star as a writer and retired love goddess in the 1950s.
Atmospherically and musically, the debut album from Lebanon’s Mayssa Jallad swiftly makes its case. It opens with a drifting, elegiac voice singing a wandering melody over a sound-bed including what sounds like a koto and a droning cello. The language employed is Arabic. On the next track, the meditative spell is punctured by the crack of distant gunfire.