In the era of star-making TV progs and here-today-gone-tomorrow musicians, just how wonderful is it to have a new album from a man who marked his 80th birthday three years ago by signing a new contract with Eric Corne’s Forty Below Records?
It’s a been a good year for the Stones as they play into their sixth decade – a free festival audience in Havana in March, preceded by an adulatory South American trek that saw some of the band’s best performances in recent times – down at the crunchy bottom end of Keef and Ronnie’s two-guitar dynamic, heard best on the new Havana Moon set, where the Cuban audience of one million warm-blooded souls see the Stones raise their game to make Havana their best live outing on record since the Love You Live set from the Seventies.
It’s as if the over-produced, over-choreographed big tours of the Nineties, when the band became a brand in the fullest sense, has given way to the core four being a real live band again. If further proof of returning to basic principles were needed, then Blue & Lonesome is it – the result of a three-day gathering at Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios in West London to work on as yet unfinished new songs, but reverting instead to the reverberating repertoire of their club days, the same songs a teenage Keith noted in his tiny diaries (recently on show at the Saatchi Gallery). That is, the Chicago Blues.
The best of these cuts are as sharp as blades
As any good barman knows, there’s a time to clear the taps, and that’s what Blue & Lonesome seems to have done for the Stones. At times, Jagger’s vocals sound as fresh and uninflected as they do on their first three albums and EPs. The Ronnie and Keith shadow play on guitars is crunchier and punkier than any time since those 1977 Pathe-Marconi sessions – the sound of a room in Paris – and the live and electric feel of Blue & Lonesome sees the band energetically testing the sound of a room some 29 years later, the excitement and impulsion palpable not only on the cuts themselves but in the off-mic shouts and cries you can hear at the front and back of the juiciest performances.
Being wholly covers, it is more annex than central part of the canon, but rewarding and essential if you’re a Stones fan, and a lot of fun if you’re a more casual listener. The tunes they chose to light upon are pretty deep and wild ones – Howlin’ Wolf's inexorable “Commit a Crime”, the outrageous down-home imagery of Johnny Taylor's “Everyone Knows About my Good Thing” (with guest Eric Clapton playing a strong slow blues), Jagger’s howling harp on Lightnin’ Slim’s “Hoo Doo Blues” peeling away from the meat and bones of song like a rotten undervest.
The best of these cuts are as sharp as blades, with very little fat left untrimmed. The Stones may be the last of the breed when it comes to extant classic rock bands from an era now so far from our dystopian own it feels like a distant Byzantium, and with the Chicago Blues in their pocket, they still know how to roll, and no one else will ever roll it quite like them.
Overleaf: watch 'Hate to See You Go' from Blue & Lonesome and 'Brown Sugar' from Havana Moon
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.
The day after Trump won the US presidential election was always going to be an interesting day for a concert by Billy Bragg and his American cohort Joe Henry.
Until The Hunter is the third solo album by Mazzy Star singer, Hope Sandoval, and the long awaited follow-up to 2009’s Through the Devil Softly. It’s safe to say that the intervening time hasn’t encouraged any great stylistic leaps but to say that it’s been worth the wait, would be an understatement.
Fantastic Negrito, aka Xavier Dphrepaulezz, is a singer from Oakland, California. His music is steeped in the raw and urgent spirituality of the early blues, especially Robert Johnson. Yet he refuses to be pigeonholed as a blues performer, disdaining all talk of genre, and infusing his compositions with the grit and anger of punk, hip-hop and hard rock as well as the mournfulness of the blues, not to mention political protest that’s bang up-to-date.
Madeleine Peyroux made her name channeling Billie Holiday. White stars have never ceased to model themselves on African-American genius – Mick Jagger on Don Covay, Rod Stewart on Sam Cooke and Joe Cocker on Ray Charles. The resemblance is often uncanny, and yet there is always something missing - call it authenticity, roughness or soul. Peyroux has grown away from Lady Day, and found her own voice, but the jazz and blues that characterize most of the covers she sings with great skill and feeling, don’t quite have the edge of the originals.
If last night made anything clear it's that some things are still some way beyond the reach of hipster reappropriation. The audience in Hyde Park for Carole King was 99% white and middle-aged, with the very few younger people scattered about appearing to be teenagers there with their parents.
Pictured above is the label of an exceptionally important Pink Floyd record issued last November. Only a thousand people bought a copy. That was the amount that hit shops. Pink Floyd 1965: Their First Recordings was a double seven-inch set with a historic importance inversely proportionate to its availability. It was the first ever outing for the earliest recordings by the band and, as such, the earliest compositions for them by its prime songwriter Syd Barrett.
The Janis Joplin bio-doc has been a long time coming. The rock star’s family were notoriously cautious about exposure: who wouldn’t be, with a career so tragic and brief?
As it happens, their collaboration made possible the inclusion of the rock star’s poignant letters home, which the documentary uses to great effect throughout, revealing something of the singer’s inner life and vulnerability, in contrast with her careful self-presentation as a mixture of bad girl, sex bomb and Etta James impersonator.