Robyn Hitchcock – Live - February 2009 The Sunday TImes - February 15th, 2009

Islington’s Union Chapel is a foreboding venue for rock musicians. Its vaulted Victorian interior amplifies and supports the unplugged guitar or the naked human voice, but electrify the proceedings and indecipherable white noise bounces round the buttresses. Sometimes the holy formality of the space adds a magical, crispy frosting to an event, but sometimes it…

Jukebox - December 2008 The Sunday Times - December 7th, 2008

I bought my jukebox, a 1974 Wurlitzer Americana 3800, in the Spring of 1999. She holds 200 7” singles, gives off the purple glow of a fading radioactive sunset, hums like a fifties refrigerator, and reminds you what records were supposed to sound like, – not thin and compressed into machine computer code, but vast,…

Vandermark / Guy / Sanders & Brötzmann / Wermueller / Pliakas - November 2008 The Sunday Times - November 16th, 2008

The booker at Dalston’s doughty Vortex club introduces the opening night of London Jazz Festival sponsored events defensively; “ It’s business as usual here at the Vortex”. The club crowns the bend in an underground river of London jazz venues, that once surfaced in the back room of the Red Rose in Finsbury park, but…

Tom Waits – Live - July 2008 The Sunday TImes - July 27th, 2008

The Tom Waits of 2008 has ventured far from the conventional balladry his career began with in the early Seventies, and deep into the forest of weird, faux-experimental fairground music. Tonight he appears as a dishevelled hobo, complete with Tourettes spasms and ticks, standing in a circus ring. Birds have eaten his breadcrumb trail. There’s…

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live - May 2008 The Sunday Times - May 8th, 2008

Promoting the uncharacteristically accessible Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! album, Nick Cave’s back with The Bad Seeds. The elegantly dishevelled interncontinental post-punk supergroup assembled a quarter century ago after the collapse of Cave’s breakthrough Melbourne group, The Birthday Party. Tonight the septet’s fifty year old front man valiantly defeats the onset of middle-age by adopting a look…

R.E.M. Live - March 2008 The Sunday Times - March 16th, 2008

On the basis of their album launch show at The Royal Albert Hall, it would be hard to explain to a teenager why R.E.M. were once so important. But today, everything from Emo to Alternative Country sounds as it does because of the Athens, Georgia band’s 80’s records, and when Radiohead and Coldplay graduated from…