"How terribly strange to be 70", sang Simon and Garfunkel in "Old Friends", back in 1968. Paul Simon will be 70 in October, so this isn't a bad time for him to be taking a panoramic look at life, love, loss and the universe in this latest set of songs (it's his first since 2006's Surprise).
America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.
As a world music critic one gets used to the stream of superlatives that generally arrive in the wake of whatever big new act is being plugged. World music promoters have a particularly hard job because they don’t just want to preach to the converted; they also want to try to get some new listeners to widen their musical horizons a little. So even before I’d heard a note of the Creole Choir of Cuba I knew that they’d gone down a storm at the Edinburgh Festival, that Jools Holland’s producer wanted them for Later..., and that they were booked to do various BBC radio sessions.
Question: which American star had their third wedding in the Griffith Stadium, Washington in front of more than 25,000 paying fans and recorded the whole thing for release as an album? If you’re wondering how you could have missed hearing about such a quintessential 21st-century publicity stunt it might be because, firstly, this extraordinary event occurred in 1951, and secondly, because the guitar-strumming bisexual bride (who hadn’t even found a groom when the event was arranged) has almost disappeared from the history books.
When Mavis Staples opens her mouth, remarkable things happen. She hollers, she sobs, she moans, she swoops, she rasps, she croons, she shudders. Not since I last saw Al Green have I seen such a bravura display of vocal prowess. On a rainy night in London, the 71-year-old singer of gospel, soul and R&B was in town for a one-off gig (and also for a Jools Holland appearance) to promote her new album, You Are Not Alone.