Music news

• Gaz Beadle Left Embarrassed After Being Caught Skinny-Dipping By His Grandad

  05-02-2017 18:47
  
  Gaz was left blushing when his older relative Raymond caught him emerging from the waves while filming Spring Break with Grandad
  
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• Amy Willerton Fears Someone Could Actually Die On The Jump

  05-02-2017 18:28
  
  The model is fearing for her life on the Channel 4 reality show
  
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• Britten Sinfonia/Esfahani review – driving momentum and casual brilliance

  05-02-2017 15:39
  
  Milton Court, London
  In an all-Spanish programme, soloist Mahan Esfahani negotiated the mood swings and disruptive rhythms of Francisco Coll’s new harpsichord concertoFrancisco Coll’s new harpsichord concerto was written for Mahan Esfahani. With a solo part that’s hyperactive in the outer movements, dark and inward in the central Lento, which is linked to the finale by the briefest of retrospective cadenzas, it has all the characteristics we’ve come to associate with Coll
  
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• Shirley Collins review – a five-star foray into the darker depths of folk

  05-02-2017 14:48
  
  City Halls, Glasgow
  In an atmosphere charged with excitement, the secret treasure of English folk music delivered a performance of unwavering and revelatory intimacyFor decades Shirley Collins was the lost icon, the secret treasure of English folk whose own story was as tragic as the ballads she used to sing. In the 70s she lost her voice through heartbreak and dysphonia and eventually stopped performing. Her early recordings were coveted for their ultra-direct pathos: in an age of divas, here w
  
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• Scarlett Johansson Goes Full Badass In New SuperBowl Teaser For Ghost In The Shell

  05-02-2017 14:45
  
  This looks amazing.
  
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• Kesha Calls On Fans To Help Her End Online Bullying With Hack Harassment Campaign

  05-02-2017 14:38
  
  The We R Who We R singer is taking a stand against online trolls
  
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• Kim Woodburn Feared Fellow Celebrity Big Brother Contestant Nicola McLean Would Stab Her

  05-02-2017 14:22
  
  The (washing up) gloves have come off in an explosive post CBB interview with the How Clean Is Your House star
  
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• Selena Gomez Creates Frantic Excitement As She Teases Brand New Music

  05-02-2017 13:56
  
  Fans think the new music - teased on Instagram - could be her collaboration with Kygo
  
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• Busted review – all grown up and not so much fun

  05-02-2017 13:46
  
  Hammersmith Apollo, London
  Wall-to-wall screaming greets the trio’s return, but 13 years on their infectiously exuberant punk-pop has been replaced by cloying, synth-heavy soft rockIt’s difficult to overstate the scale of Busted’s success at the start of the millennium. The effervescent pop-punk trio knocked out two triple-platinum albums in a little over 12 months and sold out 11 nights at Wembley Arena in 2004 before singer Charlie Simpson broke hundreds of thousands of adole
  
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• Lady Gaga Offers Last Minute Update Ahead Of Her Epic Super Bowl Half-Time Show

  05-02-2017 13:27
  
  The Bad Romance singer gave fans a behind-the-scenes look at her dress rehearsal
  
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• Celebrity Big Brother Star Bianca Gascoigne Hits Back At 'Heartbroken' Ex Saying He's Cashing In On Fame

  05-02-2017 13:02
  
  The CBB finalist is unimpressed that CJ Meeks told the press about their love lives
  
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• Perrie Edwards Shuts Down Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain Break Up Rumours With Passionate Instagram Post

  05-02-2017 12:41
  
  The Little Mix star shared a snap of herself kissing the footballer in Paris
  
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• Sampha: Process review – the next Mercury prize-winner?

  05-02-2017 10:00
  
  (Young Turks)
  The eagerly awaited debut of the south London singer-producer is restless, action-packed and full of innovationThere is no such thing as a shoo-in for the Mercury prize, an award whose breadth of reference is admirably erratic. But you can’t help but feel that the debut album by Sampha Sisay, Process, might be the record to beat this year.Distinctly British, sonically restless and emotionally action-packed, Process starts with a bleep and a squawk, and ends with Sampha beatin
  
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• Drake review – the view is great from here

  05-02-2017 10:00
  
  The O2, London
  Despite his fractious lyrics, Canadian rapper Drake shows his roots as a born entertainer during his eight-night stint in GreenwichYou could say that night three of Drake’s eight-night stint at the O2 passes off uneventfully, given the drama thus far. The previous evening, guest Travis Scott fell through a trap door, damaging a giant inflatable. Drake offered to refund everyone. (No official word as yet as to how this might happen.)On the Boy Meets World tour&rsquo
  
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• Tinariwen: Elwan review – different deserts, same hypnotic groove

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (Wedge)With their Saharan homeland now a conflict zone threatened by Salafist insurgents, the Tuareg band recorded this seventh album partly in California’s Joshua Tree national park and partly camped at an oasis in southern Morocco. Its moods are correspondingly distinct. Tracks such as Tiwayyen come in a blaze of psych guitars to remind us why early on the group were compared to the Grateful Dead: a Saharan rock’n’roll band. Then there are songs like Ténér&eacut
  
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• Ten Fé: Hit the Light review – sparkling songcraft

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (Some Kinda Love/Pias)Krautrock, synthpop, gaseous MOR: common enough influences, but London duo Ten Fé rise above the throng by virtue of a strong voice (here, the two strong voices of Ben Moorhouse and Leo Duncan, dual singer-songwriters) and sparkling songcraft. With the aid of M83 and the Rapture producer Ewan Pearson, their debut album embraces a variety of styles within its consistent aesthetic: Make Me Better has an urgent rock pomp, complete with Zeppy strings, while Turn indulges
  
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• Pete Oxley and Nicolas Meier: The Colours of Time review – near perfect guitar duet

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (MGP)Not being a guitarist, I probably miss some of the finer points, but when it comes to empathy this duet of guitar virtuosi comes close to perfection. Their roots lie in jazz, but they cover a whole bunch of genres in the course of this double album – Latin, Middle Eastern, English pastoral and their own brand of simply music. I can hear, too, a bewildering variety of guitars, both electric and acoustic, although I couldn’t name them all. On the second disc the guitars are j
  
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• Elbow: Little Fictions review – the sound of Guy Garvey in love

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (Polydor)The upturn in Guy Garvey’s romantic fortunes, alluded to on his 2015 solo debut Courting the Squall, proved to be his relationship with the actor Rachael Stirling. Having married her last year, the mood on his band’s first album in three years is even more explicitly joyful. The gorgeous Trust the Sun, in particular, is the sound of a man hopelessly in love (“You’re my reason for breathing”), and an air of unconfined happiness permeates several other songs
  
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• Duke Garwood: Garden of Ashes review – a heady desert heat haze

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (Heavenly)Duke Garwood’s last album, 2015’s trippy Heavy Love, saw him break out of the shadows and into limited acclaim: a British Mark Lanegan soundalike whose own gravelly tone and gravitas were actually equal to Lanegan’s. Garden of Ashes is less heavy on the guitars, but still simmers eloquently with the heat haze of Garwood’s opiated take on the blues – the blues of the California desert, specifically, given the debt to Lanegan and Queens of the Stone Age
  
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• Dark side of hedonism: a rock journalist’s battle with drug addiction

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  As a young journalist, Barney Hoskyns mingled with rock ’n’ roll’s brightest stars. Then heroin got the better of him. But it was finally confronting his all-consuming addiction that gave him the biggest high of allTo this day I don’t know why I said yes – why I rolled up my sleeve and told my old friend: “Do it.” I can’t say it was peer pressure. I harboured no secret longing to be a junkie. You’d think that, having just graduated with a fir
  
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• Allison Crutchfield: Tourist in This Town review – a rollercoaster of a debut

  05-02-2017 09:00
  
  (Merge)Here’s a welcome addition to the crowded canon of breakup albums. Allison Crutchfield, luminary of the Philadelphia DIY music scene, has described her debut as a “feminist” kiss off. That’s not feminist as in “angry” or “self-pitying”, the response of the Hornby-esque subject of Mile Away, who locks himself away to wallow in Springsteen’s Nebraska. Crutchfield’s heartache emerges in bittersweet postcards from life on tour with he
  
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• Rigoletto; Philip Glass at 80 – review

  05-02-2017 08:30
  
  Coliseum; Barbican, London
  ENO returns to Jonathan Miller’s classic production. Plus, wall-to-wall GlassThe jukebox is back. And with it the lonely bar, the trench coats, brogues, pocket squares and pinky rings. Jonathan Miller’s 1982 “mafioso” staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto, thought dead but merely sleeping, has returned to open English National Opera’s 2017 season. Richard Armstrong conducts a new cast, staged by revival director Elaine Tyler-Hall. Miller was
  
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• Vaughan Williams: Piano Music CD review – intriguing little-known works

  05-02-2017 08:25
  
  Mark Bebbington, Rebecca Omordia (pianos)
  (Somm)
  Among Vaughan Williams’s compositional outpourings, only one piece readily comes to mind with a prominent piano part: the song cycle On Wenlock Edge. Thanks to this intriguing disc we realise there was more, the best of it for two players. Arrangements of his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Fantasia on Greensleeves sound a pleasure to play in the dedicated hands of Mark Bebbington and Rebecca Omordia. The first recording of the two-
  
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• Queen Mary’s Big Belly CD review – 1555 and all that

  05-02-2017 08:20
  
  Gallicantus/Crouch
  (Signum)This entertainingly titled disc tells the story of the phantom pregnancy of Queen Mary in April 1555, when excitement was high that a male heir to the Catholic throne had been born. It turned out to be a false hope, but in drawing together a selection of relevant sacred and secular music, the harmonious voices of Gallicantus create a strong narrative. Court songs from the Mulliner Book, motets for liturgical feast days, a long, newly reconstructed litany and two settin
  
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• Haydn: Symphonies 8 & 84, Violin Concerto in A major CD – review

  05-02-2017 08:15
  
  Aisslinn Nosky (violin), Handel and Haydn Society/Christophers
  (Coro)This is the third in the Boston-based Handel and Haydn’s Society’s live recordings of Haydn symphonies for Coro. Symphony No 8, Le Soir, joins their earlier recordings of Le Matin and Le Midi to complete the Esterházy trilogy of 1761. It follows the others in its concerto grosso pattern, with some fine solo work from all parts of the orchestra (and lovely, though uncredited, theorbo playing). Aisslinn No
  
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• ‘Spine-tingling’ lost Bob Marley tapes restored after 40 years in a cellar

  05-02-2017 01:05
  
  London concert recordings from 1970s were water damagedA cache of lost Bob Marley recordings has been discovered after lying for more than 40 years in a damp London hotel basement.The 13 reel-to-reel, analogue master tapes were discovered in cardboard box files in a run-down hotel in Kensal Rise, north-west London, the modest lodgings where Bob Marley and the Wailers stayed during their European tours in the mid-1970s. Continue reading...
  
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