Mavis Staples, the woman to whom a young Bob Dylan proposed marriage when they met at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival and whose voice he has described as his “favourite voice”. Mavis Staples, who announced her retirement in 2023 and then realised she still had “work” to do, even after more than 75 years on the road.
During a false start to “Billy Don’t Fall”, on Sunday night at Birmingham’s iconic Town Hall, Sananda Maitreya took the opportunity to address the packed house before him. He noted that there’s now a King on the throne of England, an American Pope and that “all the white ladies have got big lips and big asses – so, it’s a long time since we were here last.”
The first words are spoken after “Worldwide Epiphany,” the 20th song. “Thank you” is all Todd Rundgren says. With this, the set ends.
It wasn’t that he was inscrutable or failing to acknowledge the audience during the previous hour and 50 minutes. A couple of lower-level sections like a catwalk parallel the stage before the front row of the stalls. Rundgren often paced this space, breaching the barrier between those who were there to see him and the performance. But, still, there are no introductions, no badinage.
We are in – it needs to be shouted from the rooftops every day – a golden age of British soul and jazz. It isn’t just about a few quality artists, either, but a movement. Londoner Yazmin Lacey is key within that: in the past year, she’s featured on stupendous albums by both Ezra Collective and that band’s keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones.
Over 1965 to 1968 Brooklyn's Evie Sands issued a string of singles with classic top sides. Amongst them were “Take Me For a Little While,” “I Can't Let Go,” “Picture me Gone” and “Angel of the Morning.” For reasons which are tackled in the essay coming with I Can’t Let Go – the first-ever collection of Sands’ seven-inch A- and B-sides – all either charted low, or not at all.
One of the great moments of Private Eye magazine’s fustiness in recent years was putting Mariah Carey in Pseud’s Corner, for the quote about how she deals with the ageing process: “I do not acknowledge time.” That quip is of course in no way pseudo-intellectual, and in every way fabulous, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of Carey or pop culture would grasp immediately.
The remarkable The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967 represents the first-ever release of a previously unheard recording of a 26 March 1967 Sly and the Family Stone live show. It is the earliest document of Sly and Co. to surface.
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Black Lips Season of the Peach (Fire)
The long, hot summer of 2025 has been something else, right? Hate rallies, creeping authoritarianism, a weird reluctance to discuss the extremity of the weather even as everyone scrambles to buy air conditioners...
But also a slightly delirious sense of fun as people get out and about in the sun – exemplified by the eruptions of joy of DJ AG’s spontaneous pavement sets featuring unknowns and megastars, broadcast online as a super-democratic antidote to all those videos of DJs alone or surrounded by too-cool-for-school party people.
This second album from London-based septet Kokoroko welcomes you into its warm embrace with the gorgeous, beatific vocal harmonies of “Never Lost” anchored by drummer Ayo Salawu's pulsating backbeat.